Remembering Jimmy Carter

America’s oldest ex-president has died. Nearly three months after his 100th birthday, Jimmy Carter expired on Sunday. The 39th president of the United States, who held the office from 1977 to 1981, was preceded in death a year ago by his beloved wife of 77 years, Rosalynn.

Carter is generally regarded as having had a failed presidency, followed by a noble and flourishing ex-presidency. This view is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete. Like all presidents, Carter was a complex amalgam of virtue and vice, statesmanship and incompetence, wisdom and naïveté.

Winning the presidency in the traumatic aftermath of America’s lost war in Vietnam, Carter at first heralded a new approach of putting moral concerns at the center of national security and extending a conciliatory hand toward the Soviet Union. In his first major foreign policy address at the University of Notre Dame in 1977, Carter heralded “a new world that calls for a new American foreign policy” based on human rights and moral principles. He proclaimed, “We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism” that had purportedly constrained previous presidents.

Such lofty ambitions clashed with world realities. Carter proved eager to hector America’s anti-communist authoritarian partners over human rights abuses while downplaying the much worse depredations of communist regimes. He reduced the U.S. military budget and seemed to blame the United States for Cold War tensions. The Soviet Union exploited Carter’s weakness by accelerating its own military buildup and supporting communist insurgencies and regimes across the Global South.

Thus, Carter seemed to watch helplessly as the annus horribilis of 1979 unfolded, with the geopolitical triple shocks of Nicaragua’s takeover by Sandinista communists, the Iranian revolution and subsequent seizure of 52 American hostages by Islamic radicals, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When these woes were added to America’s economic recession and energy crisis, the United States appeared to the world as weak, demoralized, and preyed upon by our adversaries.

In 1979, international relations scholar Jeane Kirkpatrick, at the time a Democrat who soon enough broke with her party and later served as President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, excoriated Carter’s feckless approach in a lacerating essay for Commentary magazine titled “Dictatorships & Double Standards” that stands as one of the most significant essays of the Cold War.

Yet, Carter’s record had its strengths. His most notable achievement in office still endures a half-century later. In the Camp David Accords, he successfully midwifed a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, following their three decades of conflict. This process showed Carter at his best. Bringing Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David for almost two weeks, Carter combined deep personal involvement, tenacity, creativity, and spiritual appeals to the Jewish Begin and the Muslim Sadat based on their Abrahamic faiths to produce a landmark agreement that remains a bedrock of the Middle East.

Though a theological liberal, Carter possessed a sincere Christian faith that shaped his foreign policy. As just one example, in 1979, during a private meeting with South Korean leader Park Chung Hee, Carter took time to share the gospel with the befuddled military dictator. This earned him a scolding editorial from The New York Times but speaks to Carter’s genuine piety. He similarly spoke of his faith to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping while urging the communist nation to allow Bibles, open churches, and welcome missionaries.

During the Cold War, Carter showed an ability to learn from his mistakes. Seeing the folly of his earlier soft policies, he executed a sharp turn in his final year in office. While world conditions forced his hand, he nonetheless deserves applause for steps like increasing the defense budget, launching covert support programs for anti-communist forces, taking a harder line against the Kremlin, and announcing the “Carter Doctrine” of resisting Soviet expansion in the Middle East.

These turnabouts were too little, too late to save his presidency, and Carter lost his reelection bid in a landslide to Ronald Reagan in 1980. Leaving office physically healthy but emotionally embittered, Carter soon reinvented himself as a global humanitarian. Much of this was laudatory, including his extensive volunteer work building homes with Habitat for Humanity, his founding of The Carter Center to advocate for human rights and fair elections around the world, and his efforts at peacemaking in troubled conflict zones.

His almost half-century post-presidency was not without flaws. Carter turned into a serial violator of the principle that the United States has only one president at a time. He regularly injected himself into delicate negotiations with despots around the world. Malefactors such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and Palestinian terrorist Yasir Arafat all exploited Carter’s vanity and freelance diplomacy. His foreign policy meddling vexed every single one of his presidential successors from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden.

Yet, there is another aspect of Carter’s post-presidency that merits appreciation. A genuine common man, he always lived in his modest home, resisted the temptation to exploit his office for personal gain, and taught an adult Sunday school class at his local Baptist church into his final years. A friend of mine tells a touching story of visiting the Carters a few years ago at their church, followed by a simple lunch at the Carter home, where the former president made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for his guest. In this way, Carter never forgot that the office of the presidency belongs to the American people and is a trust to be cherished but not grasped.