Former US President Jimmy Carter | Global News Avenue

Jimmy Carter, who has died aged 100, came into power promising never to lie to the American people.

In the wake of the turmoil of Watergate, the former peanut grower from Georgia pardoned Vietnamese deserters and became the first U.S. leader to take climate change seriously.

On the international stage, he helped broker a historic peace deal between Egypt and Israel, but he struggled to deal with the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

At the end of his term, he won just six states in the 1980 election before being ousted by Ronald Reagan.

After leaving the White House, Carter did much to restore his reputation: becoming a tireless worker for peace, the environment and human rights, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

As the longest-lived president in U.S. history, he celebrated his 100th birthday in October 2024. He underwent cancer treatment and spent the past 19 months in hospice care.

James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in the small town of Plains, Georgia, the eldest of four children.

His segregated father founded the family peanut business, and his mother, Lillian, was a registered nurse.

Carter’s experience of the Great Depression and strong Baptist faith underpinned his political philosophy.

He was a star basketball player in high school and later served in the U.S. Navy for seven years, during which time he married his sister’s friend Rosalyn and became a submarine officer. But after his father died in 1953, he returned to run the struggling family farm.

The harvest failed the first year due to drought, but Carter turned the business around and made himself wealthy in the process.

He entered politics from the bottom, being elected to a series of local school and library boards before running for the Georgia Senate.

American politics is abuzz after the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools.

Since Carter was a farmer from the Southern states, he might have opposed reform, but he had different views than his father.

During his two terms in the state Senate, he avoided conflict with segregationists, including many in the Democratic Party.

But after becoming governor of Georgia in 1970, he became more openly supportive of civil rights.

In his inaugural address, he declared: “I tell you frankly, the era of racial discrimination is over.”

He hung a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall of the Capitol, and the Ku Klux Klan displayed it outside.

He ensured that African Americans were appointed to public office.

However, he found it difficult to balance his strong Christian faith with his liberal instincts when it came to abortion laws.

Although he supports a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, he has refused to increase funding to achieve this goal.

When Carter launched his presidential campaign in 1974, the United States was still reeling from the Watergate scandal.

He casts himself as a simple peanut farmer, untainted by the questionable ethics of career politicians on Capitol Hill.

His timing is excellent. Americans wanted an outsider, and Carter fit the bill.

People were surprised when he admitted (in an interview with Playboy magazine) that he had “committed adultery in his heart many times.” But it turns out there are no skeletons in his closet.

Initially, polls showed he had support from only about 4% of Democrats.

However, just nine months later, he unseated the current president, Republican Gerald Ford.

On his first day in office, he pardoned hundreds of thousands of men who had evaded service in Vietnam—either by fleeing abroad or failing to register with local draft boards.

One Republican commentator, Senator Barry Goldwater, described the decision as “the most disgraceful thing a president has ever done.”

Carter admitted it was the toughest decision he has made during his tenure.

He appointed women to key positions in the government and encouraged Rosalyn to maintain her national profile as first lady.

He supported (unsuccessfully) the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which promised legal protection against discrimination on the basis of sex.

Carter was one of the first international leaders to take climate change seriously, wearing jeans and a sweater at the White House and turning down the heat to save energy.

He installed solar panels on rooftops that were later removed by President Ronald Reagan and passed laws protecting millions of acres of untouched land in Alaska from development.

His televised “fireside chats” were consciously relaxed, but as the questions piled up, the approach became too informal.

As the U.S. economy fell into recession, Carter’s approval ratings began to decline.

He tried to persuade the country to accept drastic measures to deal with the energy crisis – including gasoline rationing – but faced strong opposition from Congress.

Plans to introduce a universal health care system also failed in the legislature, and unemployment and interest rates both soared.

His Middle East policy was successful with the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978 by Egyptian President Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Begin.

But success abroad was short-lived.

The Iranian revolution, which led to the taking of American hostages, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were severe tests.

Carter severed diplomatic ties with Tehran and imposed trade sanctions in a desperate attempt to free Americans.

An attempt to rescue them by force was a disaster, resulting in the deaths of eight U.S. service members.

The incident will almost certainly end any hopes of re-election.

Carter defeated a serious challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination and received 41% of the popular vote in the subsequent election.

But it wasn’t enough to defeat his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan.

The former actor won the White House in an Electoral College landslide.

On his final day as president, Carter announced the successful completion of negotiations to release the hostages.

Iran delayed their departure until after President Reagan was sworn in.

When he left office, Carter had one of the lowest approval ratings of any U.S. president. But in the years that followed, he did a lot to restore his reputation.

He represented the U.S. government on a peace mission to North Korea that culminated in the Agreed Framework, an early effort to reach an agreement to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.

His library, the Carter Presidential Center, became a clearinghouse for influential ideas and projects aimed at addressing international issues and crises.

In 2002, Carter became the third U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize, following Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and the only president to win the prize for his work after leaving office.

“The most serious and pervasive problem is the growing gulf between the richest and the poorest people on earth,” he said in his Nobel Prize speech.

With Nelson Mandela, he co-founded The Elders, a group of global leaders committed to the cause of peace and human rights.

After retiring, Carter chose a simple lifestyle.

He eschewed lucrative speaking engagements and corporate board seats to live a simple life with Rosalyn in Plains, Georgia, where both were born.

Carter doesn’t want to make money from his time in the Oval Office.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that; I don’t blame other people for doing that,” he told The Washington Post. “It was never my ambition to be rich.”

He is the only modern president to return full-time to the house he lived in before entering politics, a one-story, two-bedroom house.

According to the Washington Post, the Carters’ home is worth $167,000, less than the Secret Service vehicle parked outside to protect them.

In 2015, he announced that he was undergoing treatment for cancer, the disease that killed his parents and three sisters.

A few months after surgery for a broken hip, he returned to work as a volunteer builder with Habitat for Humanity.

The former president and his wife began working with the charity in 1984 and have helped restore more than 4,000 homes in the years since.

He continued to teach a Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, sometimes welcoming Democratic presidential candidates into his class.

In November 2023, Rosalynn Carter passed away. In his tribute, the former president said his wife of 77 years “was an equal partner in everything I accomplished.”

Celebrating his centennial a year later, Carter proved he still had the political antennae.

“I just want to vote for Kamala Harris in the November election,” he said.

He did manage to cast his vote for her, even though his home state of Georgia ultimately voted for Donald Trump.

Carter’s political philosophy incorporated the sometimes conflicting elements of his conservative small-town upbringing, as well as his innate liberal instincts.

But it was his deep-seated religious beliefs that truly propelled him to a life of public service.

“You can’t separate religious belief and public service,” he said.

“I have never seen any conflict between the will of God and my political obligations. If you violate one, you violate the other.”