Jimmy Carter's century: Plains, but not simple

The President who never quit trying to change the world dies at 100.

Only four of Jimmy Carter’s 100 years on earth were spent in the White House. There’s a lot of faculty-lounge debate on whether those years were productive and fruitful, but the fact that he carried only six states in his re-election try is the thing that stuck to him, along with his failure to recover our hostages in Iran before that vote.

What should resonate is the way he lived his other 96 years, especially the 44 that followed his Presidential term. He helped cure diseases, helped make elections work, got on roofs and hammered and nailed, lived a 77-year marriage with Rosalynn that ended with her death in 2023 and taught a Sunday school class in Plains, Ga. That life ended close to where it began, on a Sunday afternoon, at the age of 100. His inexorable determination took him that far because, he said, he wanted to make sure to vote for Kamala Harris. His work on earth was done, but that’s not hard to accept when you’re sure your best days are ahead.

There was a certain snideness to the references to Carter as “our best ex-President.” For one thing, you’re entitled to do anything you want, including nothing, once you’ve escaped 1600 Pennsylvania. For another, it implies that his Presidential days were, in his mind, his defining moments. Indeed, being President often takes the worst parts of your soul and magnifies them. No one connected Joe Biden with egomania until he capsized his party by insisting on running again, yet he’ll take that to his own grave. No one thought George W. Bush made poor decisions, or listened to the wrong people, until Katrina and Iraq. By contrast, a candidate who is accustomed to destructive language and character assassination suffers no credibility blows when he calls his learned and accomplished opponent “dumb as a rock.” Donald Trump doesn’t surprise his audience, the way he might if he put solar panels on the White House, decades before their time.

Carter was mocked and savaged by the D.C. press, and much of the Democratic party, for the Georgia Gang he brought to Washington. But his worst mistake came when he listened to foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a key member of what Ben Rhodes calls the Washington “blob.” Brzezinski told him that he should allow the Shah of Iran to come to the United States for medical treatment, even though the Iranian people had run the vicious dictator of the country, and an amorphous band of Shiite clerics were in charge. Carter agreed, reluctantly, and suddenly the Embassy was under attack, and 53 Americans were detained for 444 days. We know this because Ted Koppel launched a new late-news show, counting them down. America was being dangled at the end of a mullah’s sword, helpless on the world stage. The buck stopped with Carter.

His priority was bringing the hostages home alive. He did, but only after Iran embarrassed him while waiting until Ronald Reagan, who beat Carter in the 1980 election, was inaugurated. Carter ignored the banshee cries to nuke Iran and every other Muslim nation, or to have the Shah killed, but he did give his blessing to a rescue plan, which fizzled in the desert because not enough of the helicopters were operational. In poor visibility, a helicopter ran into a C-130, and the explosion killed eight American soldiers and, as a result, Carter’s re-election campaign, although the quixotic Democratic challenge from Sen. Ted Kennedy also brought damage. Carter won six states against Reagan — not New York or California, but West Virginia was among them — and the Democrats lost 20 Senate seats.

Some things haven’t changed. Gas prices and long lines at the pumps wounded Carter too. His accomplishments were linked to a future that most voters couldn’t see. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty that he pursued monomaniacally is still holding today. His many de-regulations brought down the price of air travel and freed up natural gas reserves, among many other things. His high interest rates, dictated by Fed chief Paul Volcker, turned around inflation, but not until halfway through Reagan’s first term. And he appointed a federal judge named Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who became a Supreme Court justice and a legal superstar long after Carter had returned to Plains.

The fact that Carter was ever in this position was a political miracle. He was governor of Georgia, only regionally prominent. When his mother, Miss Lillian, was told Carter was running for President, she replied, “For what?” But he ran as a Southerner who forswore racism and who would bring honesty and clean hands to a White House tarred by Watergate. He was one of the first “outsiders” to win such a campaign, long before it became almost a prerequisite. But he wasn’t immune to political gymnastics. In running for governor Carter straddled racial issues, was friendly with Alabama governor George Wallace, and then shocked his inaugural audience with: “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.”

The political class has trouble with contradictory (i.e., human) behavior. Carter was a peanut farmer who embraced rock stars and folk singers. When he met Bob Dylan he quoted Dylan’s lyrics back to him. He had a ne’er-do-well brother, Billy, who tried to get rich off Carter’s presidency, and a sister Ruth who was an evangelist, and a sister Gloria who rode with motorcycle gangs and had “She rides in Harley heaven” on her tombstone. He had no problem meeting strangers, and those who made the pilgrimage to his church always got a photo with him.

Leaving Washington was liberating. Carter may have antagonized Bill Clinton and Barack Obama with foreign-policy freelancing, but he was proudest of his fights against disease. One can imagine how MAGA types would ridicule someone today who wants money to fight the Guinea worm in Africa, but it was a continental scourge. As Brian Klaas describes it:

In the mid-1980s, nearly four million people were infected by Guinea Worm each year. Caused by the parasitic roundworm Dracunculus medinensis, it’s certainly a disease you wouldn’t want to experience. The infections come from stagnant water, in which the worms lay their larvae, but the worms mature inside the human body. Over the course of a year, an infected person eventually plays host to a worm that grows to become one meter (3.3 feet) long.

Once fully grown, the worm creates a lesion on the skin and then escapes from the body, usually producing agonizing pain in the process. Most of the time, these worms exit through the legs or the feet, and you can imagine it’s not a pleasant experience to have a three foot-long worm crawling out of you.

Fully removing the worm can take days or weeks. It’s extremely painful, and often leads to secondary infections. Most people who get sick are debilitated for weeks or months, and some develop permanently disabling joint pain. It is a nasty parasite.

Three and a half million Africans were affected, hospitalized or killed by the Guinea worm in 1987. By 2023 there were 15 cases, total. Carter called it the most rewarding accomplishment of his life, and so was his work to minimize river blindness. He always found affairs of the soil more rewarding than pavement.

Carter also lived long enough to watch the South lurch back toward the Republicans in a way that appears irretrievable. But when he made his run in 1976, he was a regional inspiration. Back then, hardly anyone on TV had a Southern accent, and with the exception of Sheriff Andy Taylor, those who drawled were clowns and morons, on the order of Jethro Bodine. This was before Southern cuisine, country music, SEC football and NASCAR escaped their regional boxes, and before certain parts of the South developed their own economic motors. Unintentionally, Carter had much to do with “country chic.” He reminded you of people you knew in your own small town, people who could fix anything and kept their families close, people who didn’t need to be told to bring their bereaved neighbors a chicken dinner. You didn’t have to be a Democrat to cheer him on.

If he hadn’t been President he wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to change the parts of the world that seemed changeable. And if he hadn’t been President, the rest of us wouldn’t have known his essential decency and grit. His is a story of meritocracy, faith and a sort of beatific arrogance that ruled out the possibility that anything was beyond his grasp. You understand why so many say Jimmy Carter will be missed, but then he already has been.