01/14/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 01/14/2025 12:17
Former US President Jimmy Carter
I should start by saying that I wrote much of this obituary in early 2023 when Jimmy Carter entered hospice care. Usually people go to hospices in the final months/weeks or even hours or their lives. However, Carter ended up being there for over eighteen months until eventually dying on 29 December 2024 aged 100. He lived the longest of any US President in history and six years longer than the second in the list, George H. W. Bush (1989 - 1993) who died in 2018 aged 94.
There is an interesting quirk in American politics. That, if a president does not achieve a second term in office, then they are deemed a failure, weak and/or an ineffective leader, and subsequently marginalised within the country's history. Jimmy Carter was one such President. Indeed, usually when I tell someone of a certain age that I have a research interest in Jimmy Carter, I get the same questioning and somewhat puzzled response: "the peanut farmer?"
Jimmy Carter - both the President and the man - is much more interesting than his agricultural profession though. As Joe Biden prepares to leave office and hand over to Donald Trump, Carter's death has also brought into sharper focus the requirement of a political leader to offer moral leadership to their country, not just the practice of administration. Carter was viewed as a man of good ethical character - both during his Presidency and in the years after. This is juxtaposed against the concerns about Trump, e.g. his encouragement of the January 6 2021 riots, his refusal to accept his defeat in the November 2020 Presidential election, hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels. And about Biden, e.g. pardoning his son Hunter for his crimes, when others convicted of the same offence do not receive such privilege.
Carter's four-year single-term at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue between January 1977 - January 1981 was sandwiched between those of Richard Nixon (1969 - 1974) and Ronald Reagan (1981 - 1989). Both much bigger and more controversial characters in modern US history. Carter's presidency was not a stop-gap between the two though. It sits at the watershed of several pivots or intensifications within US politics and capitalist ideology. The heightened focus on aesthetics that had emerged around the time of John F. Kennedy's presidency (1961 - 1963) intensified further with advances in media communications technology during the 1970s. The US was moving from a mainly industrial to a post-industrial economy as the development of global supply chains encouraged heavy industry to move overseas. These two factors were key to the emergence of what we now call neoliberalism. Indeed, it is usually Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, who is credited with being the US's first neoliberal president, but many of the fiscal adjustments were in fact made under Carter.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on 1October 1924 in Plains, Georgia. After a seven-year stint in the US Navy between 1946 - 1953 where he worked within the submarine fleet, specifically on its emerging nuclear capability, he returned to Georgia upon the death of his father where he would build a successful peanut farming business. He had married Rosalynn Smith in 1946 and she would be by his side until her death on 19 November 2023.
Carter's father - James Earl Snr. - briefly served as a Democrat member of the Georgia House of Representatives before his death in 1953. He was a staunch anti-segregationist: a controversial position in the politics of the American South for much of the twentieth century, but particularly during the 1950s. These liberal values and a keen sense of what amounted to injustice made a considerable impact upon James Jr, and so did his father's sense of the importance of trying to do something about it.
Carter acknowledges his parents' influence upon his political career in his book 'An Hour before Daylight' (2001). However, it was his Southern Baptist faith that would most define him. Carter certainly did not take the Bible literally. He understood that it was a document reflective of the prejudices and superstitions of its time and he took a progressive view to Christianity.
This should not be mistaken for a lack of true belief or depth to his faith though. White House staffers remarked on his praying in the Oval House and his insistence upon prayer at the start of meetings when in discussion with fellow Christians. In his published 'White House Diary' (2010) he notes with pride how he tried to convince Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to relent upon strict control of Christian propaganda in the country.
"I told him I was a Christian, and that as a child I had given five cents a week to help build hospitals and schools for Chinese children. Baptist missionaries to China were our ultimate heroes. I realized that religious freedom was not guaranteed in China, Bibles could not be distributed, and foreign missionaries were prevented from entering the country. I asked that he consider changing these policies. He seemed surprised, laughed, and said he would reply the next day." (pp284)
Carter's presidency was defined by foreign policy concerns. The negotiation and signing of the Panama Canal Treaties (1977). The normalisation of diplomatic relations with China and de-recognition of Taiwan (1978). The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua (and what then to do about it) (1979). The Islamic revolution in Iran and subsequent hostage crisis (1978 to the end of his presidency). The Camp David Accords (1978) signed between Egypt and Israel. And the negotiation and signing of the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty II (SALT II) with the Soviet Union (1979).
When it came to foreign policy, Carter's team were divided into two clear camps. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzezinksi saw competition with, and ultimately the defeat of, the Soviet Union as the fundamental of US foreign policy and the filter through which all other international decision-making should pass. Whereas his Secretaries of State, Cyrus Vance (1977 - 1980) and then Edmund Muskie (1980 - 1981), thought that each pressing issues in international affairs deserved to be considered more on its own merits vis-à-vis US interests. Opinion leaders of that time tended to support the Vance position and the mainstream news media also tended to support that simplistic and somewhat fear-based narrative.
Perhaps the best way to offer reflection upon Carter's role within these international matters, and some of the others that defined his term in office, is to focus on his keen sense of morality and moralising. Carter could quote several passages from the theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr's (1932) book 'Moral Man and Immoral Society' from memory. Carter adored Neibuhr's work, which, among other things, examined the role of privilege in society and the methods through which elites manufacture and secure their status and encourage inequality. Carter was particularly fond of this sentence.
Differences in [cognitive] faculty and function do indeed help to originate inequality of privilege but they never justify the degree of inequality created, and they are frequently not even relevant to the type of inequality perpetuated in a social system. (pp70)
Herein lies the key debate about Carter and his Presidency. Was he a man trying to do what he thought was right or was he a man trying to manufacture the appearance of a man doing what he thought was right [as part of an electioneering strategy]?
Carter won the US Presidential election in 1976 on a narrative that the country had lost its way. Its involvement in the Vietnam War had become a rupture to the country's sense of self, its exceptionalism, and the egotistical assumption that it ought to be a global role model. The Pentagon Papers published in 1971 had exposed the extent to which the US government and military had lied to the American people about Vietnam. Richard Nixon had left the White House in 1974 in disgrace following the Watergate Scandal. Into this breach, Hamilton Jordan, Carter's communications advisor and then Chief of Staff once elected, choreographed Carter's as a man of faith, humbleness and decency - the ideal candidate to help return the country to the perceived moral path as a God-graced nation.
To this end, the accusation from his critics is that this exaggeration of moral goodness for personal gain has a repugnance to it. Much in the same way as a celebrity engaging in charity work as part of efforts to further their wider career. Ronald Kessler, who has profiled several US Presidents, accuses Carter of essentially playing the part of a humble man for public appearances. He points in particular to Carter sometimes carrying his own suitcases aboard a plane to encourage the perception of his modesty. However, according to Kessler, this was all for show and the bags were actually empty.
Similar questions revolve around his policy decisions. In relinquishing control of the Panama Canal, Carter propagated that he made the decision because it was the right thing to do as an act of decolonisation. This pivot in US hemispheric relations formed a key part of what became known as the 'good neighbour' policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean. However, my research into the Carter administration revealed the extent to which the negotiations with Panama was more about the establishment of Panama as a tax haven - with billions of dollars flowing into the country as US banks set-up offices in Panama City after 1978. On the US side, the negotiations were headed by Sol Linowitz, who was close to Wall Street executives like David Rockefeller.
Carter's 'good neighbour' policy, his criticisms of some of the authoritarian leaders that previous US administrations had been more eager to support, and his use of US foreign aid as a bargaining tool for improved respect for human rights by Latin American regimes, contributed to civil unrest on the continent as those disenfranchised by the international system saw greater opportunity to rebel. In July 1979 a left-wing group known as the Sandinistas finally overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua. US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933 - 1945) had famously said of Somoza's father, President Anastasio Somoza Garcia (1937 - 1956), "he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." However, Carter's administration was less willing to support the dictatorship, and this indirectly led to an increased sense of opportunity among some Nicaraguans that a post-Somoza future might be possible.
Interestingly, Carter's administration, in leveraging foreign aid for political ends, exposed the extent to which it is not the act of global philanthropy that wealthy nations around the world propagate it to be, but primarily motivated by self-interest and control of weaker states. More personal though, for a man of Christian faith like Carter, such a conditional approach to supposed humanitarianism was not in keeping with the teachings of Christ that compassion ought to be front and centre when helping the poor.
In only carrying the votes from 6 of the US's 50 states, Carter lost the 1980 Presidential election to Ronald Reagan in one of the country's biggest political landslides. By 1980 it was clear that the mood of the nation had changed. They no longer wanted Carter's moralising about turning the thermostat down in winter and up in summer or driving smaller cars to help the energy crisis. The US public ultimately determined that the country's penance for poor governance and militarism during the 1970s had been paid and Carter was dismissed for a man wanting to 'Make America Great Again'. Ronald Reagan - and his so-called Reaganomics - would come to be viewed as the first neoliberal US President. However, many of the structures and narratives surrounding the primacy of the markets and the reduced role of government in society were made under Carter. Alongside his work on the Panama Canal treaties and his administration's diplomatic recognition of China, Carter's neoliberal affinity sat front and centre of his State of the Union addresses each year. Here then are two quotations from his January 1979 speech where he makes his affinity abundantly clear.
"Government cannot solve our problems… It cannot eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy, or reduce inflation, or save our cities, or cure illiteracy, or provide energy." "America has the greatest economic system in the world. Let's reduce government interference and give it a chance to work." (January 1979)
Dr Colin Alexander is an expert in political communications from the School of Arts and Humanities