Jimmy Carter, 39th president, remembered for his integrity and devotion to humanity

Jimmy Carter, the country’s 39th president, has died at the age of 100. He served only one term as president, but he will also be remembered for his decades of humanitarian work.

Those who knew him, opponents and supporters alike, described him as a man of integrity, whatever his flaws as president.

“When we look at the entire axis of Jimmy Carter’s life, it’s an incredible American story,” Douglas Brinkley, author of The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White Househe told Fox News Digital.

“He grew up without electricity, went to work in the… Navy. He became president of the United States at the height of cold war and won the Nobel Prize for his post-presidency,” Brinkley said. “All the while, his ambitious humanity was directed at trying to make sure that everyone he came in contact with had a better and fairer life.”

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A peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia, Carter overcame the odds and was elected president in 1977.

“Nobody thought Carter could get the Democratic nomination. But Carter had a unique amount of bulldog tenacity (and) perseverance,” Brinkley said.

His campaign puzzled Democrats, as Carter was deeply religious and ran to the right of his Republican opponent, Gerald Ford, on some social issues. As an outsider from Washington, Carter’s farming background and accent endeared him to the Deep South.

He took office at a time when Watergate, the Vietnam War, and stagflation had left the country in a bad mood. In Washington, his populist campaign inevitably clashed with establishment Democrats who never fully embraced Carter.

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“He never had full control of his own Democratic Party. Ted Kennedy’s liberals didn’t like Carter, and Scoop Jackson’s Cold War hawks didn’t like him,” Brinkley said. “So he was sort of an island unto himself as president.”

Carter’s foreign policy victories included brokering peace in the Middle East by keeping Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the negotiating table for nearly two weeks in 1978. At home, Carter partially deregulated the airline, railroad, and trucking industries and established the Departments of Education and Energy and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Carter designated millions of acres in Alaska as national parks or wildlife refuges and appointed a record number of women and nonwhites to federal positions. It also built on Nixon’s opening to China and pushed Latin America from dictatorships to democracy.

However, his presidency was also marked by double-digit inflation, long gas lines and the 444-day hostage crisis. crisis in Iran. His darkest hour came when eight Americans died in a failed hostage rescue in April 1980, helping to ensure his defeat.

Carter was also hamstrung by his, as Brinkley put it, “lack of communication.” Oratory, Brinkley said, was not his forte.

In 1979, Carter delivered his famous “Crisis of Confidence” speech in which he lamented that America, once a nation “proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God” had descended to “oneself”. -indulgence and consumption”.

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“Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we have discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,” Carter said. “We’ve learned that accumulating material possessions cannot fill the void of lives that lack confidence and purpose.”

Craig Shirley, Reagan’s biographer and historian, recalled seeing the speech while working for a senator on Capitol Hill.

“I remember watching him that Sunday night and feeling, for the first time in my life, that I felt scared as an American. The speech was so bleak. It was so depressing,” Shirley said. “A president is supposed to tell the truth to the American people, but also appeal to the hopes and aspirations of the American people and not to their worst feelings or wishes.”

Carter eventually served only one tumultuous term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

But whatever the flaws of his presidency, Carter will perhaps be remembered most fondly for the decades he spent after the presidency advocating for democracy, public health and human rights through the Carter Center.

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The Center, which Carter opened with his wife, Rosalynn, in 1982, has been a pioneer in election observation, monitoring at least 113 elections in Africa, Latin America and Asia since 1989. In its public health effort perhaps most acclaimed, the Center The organization recently announced that only 14 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in all of 2021, the result of years of health campaigns public to improve access. to drinking water in Africa. Carter’s work with the Center won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

For his humanitarian work, Shirley argued, Carter will be remembered as “one of the best former presidents of the 20th century.”

“Carter really wasn’t into PR stunts. He was really into his charitable works and did that for many years,” Shirley said.

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“He will be fondly remembered. He was a fantastic former president with what he did with the Carter Center and the various initiatives around the country. His book writing highlights (as does) his charitable work. So, come down. in his history as an extraordinarily good former president.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.