Carter, Dead at 100, Joins Select Group in Achieving Post-Presidential Redemption

President Carter is being eulogized for his humanitarian work, the four-years he spent in the Oval Office only part of his century-long life. By having the longest post-presidency in history, his story can be written with a broader focus that few one-termers enjoy.On Truth, President-elect Trump said Carter “did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans” and “we all owe him a debt of gratitude.” The president-elect called his predecessor “a truly good man” who was “very consequential, far more than most presidents, after he left the Oval Office.”A statement on X attributed to President Biden and the first lady said that, “America and the world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman, and humanitarian.” The statement said the president is ordering an “official state funeral” for the “favorite son of Plains, Georgia, who gave his full life in service to God and country.”When Carter pledged after Watergate, “I will never lie to you,” it seemed like a promise from a neighbor, not a politician. He was one of the “common people” who, as President Lincoln said, “God must love … because he has made so many of them.”President Reagan (front, left) and Presidents Carter (front, right), Nixon (back, right) and Ford (back, left) are pictured leaving the White House as the former presidents prepare to attend the funeral of Egyptian President Sadat at Washington DC in October 1981. Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesOne contribution Carter made to the hoi polloi was signing the 1978 bill lifting Prohibition-era regulations and taxes on homebrewed beer. The changes helped craft brands explode in popularity. “Billy Beer,” brewed by the president’s brother, is the suds of legend.On his 70th birthday in 1994, Barbara Walters asked Carter to reflect. He’d been a naval officer, farmer, governor, and president. Which was “the best of all”? Carter replied, “By far, my best years are those I’m enjoying now, since Rosalynn and I left the White House.”This tracked the conventional wisdom: Carter was a good man, but his presidency was far less so. His surrender of the Panama Canal and implementation of the One China Policy are infamous. Americans, though, made peace with the Carter years because the 39th president accepted their assessment.Carter became “the model ex-president” by writing new stories with every nail he hammered at Habitat for Humanity and cause he championed through the Carter Center. Americans liked that a man who had given his all and been told, “It’s not good enough,” was giving even more.Presidents Carter and Reagan debate each other from separate podiums on October 31, 1980, prior to the 1980 presidential election. LiaisonPresident Truman was Carter’s post-presidential model, and both refused to cash in on their office. Carter stuck to this even after finding his peanut farm — held in a blind trust during his presidency — mismanaged and a million dollars in the red.“The people have spoken,” Mayor Koch said after New York City rejected him in 1989, “and they must be punished.” Carter, by contrast, told Playboy that he had “lust in his heart,” but he had no room in there for that sort of bitterness.The American people came to admire how Carter carried himself. His good deeds helped obscure blunders such as addressing a letter to the Ayatollah Khomeini, “From one man of God to another,” misreading the cleric and exacerbating the Iran Hostage Crisis.Idealism, often dangerous, is something Americans treat with bemusement as well as scorn. In “The Unfinished Presidency,” Douglas Brinkley wrote, “There was no world leader Jimmy Carter was more eager to know than Yasir Arafat.” Could Carter really be so naïve, wear such rose-colored glasses? Yes, he could.Statues of President Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter are seen at a Nationalization Ceremony hosted by the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park on October 1, 2024 at Plains, Georgia. Megan Varner/Getty ImagesWhen Carter likened Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Arabs to “apartheid” and said, “the intifada exposed the injustice Palestinians suffered, just like Bull Connor’s mad dogs in Birmingham,” most Americans recoiled. Today it’s boilerplate rhetoric on the left.In 1994, when Carter flew to Pyongyang, North Korea, to meet its dictator, Kim Il Sung, that might have caused outrage, too. Yet these gambits, while they rankled incumbent presidents, helped Carter reshape his image into that of a peacemaking idealist.President Adams, the first president to be defeated for reelection, left office embittered. Like Carter, he had a long post-presidency to appeal his case to the public. Settling in on his farm with his wife, Abigail, Adams served where he could in local government.Adams achieved redemption when his son, John Quincy Adams, was elected president. The younger Adams fell short of a second term, too. He returned to Washington as a congressman. For 17 years, “Old Man Eloquent” raised his voice against slavery in the House.President Carter sits with President Reagan in the back of a limousine en route to Mr. Reagan’s Presidential Inauguration Ceremony at Washington. Ronald Reagan Library/Getty ImagesA shining moment for the elder Adams was making peace with President Jefferson, the man who had defeated him and who sent a letter of condolence upon Abigail’s death. The two corresponded until dying just hours apart on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.The string of one-termers preceding Lincoln fell into various degrees of obscurity. President Benjamin Harrison was content when he lost the presidency to the man he’d defeated, President Cleveland. President Taft became chief justice of the United States, which was his dream job.“I don’t remember,” Taft said later, “that I ever was president.” President Hoover, once known as “the Great Humanitarian,” for saving post-World War I Europe from starvation, couldn’t forget his White House tenure or the Great Depression that began with it.For the next century, Democrats subjected Hoover’s name to ridicule and debasement; Hollywood posted his picture on the office walls of villains. Yet a long post-presidency helped him regain his stature, too. Like Carter, the Adamses and Hoover became elder statesmen out of office with service yet to give.A giant bust of President Carter stands at the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum February 23, 2023 at Atlanta, Georgia. Win McNamee/Getty ImagesAlthough Carter never suffered the indignities of Hoover, the word “malaise,” applied to a speech where he never used the term, endures as a slur. Plus, like Hoover preceding President Franklin Roosevelt, Carter had the misfortune of losing to a transformative and charismatic president.Carter didn’t despair at Reagan’s success or try to undermine it. He accepted being a common man who didn’t have the stuff of good presidents and set out to be a good ex-president instead. Today, we raise a beer to his memory — and pick up the hammer to get on with the work of building a more perfect union.

Carter, Dead at 100, Joins Select Group in Achieving Post-Presidential Redemption

Carter, Dead at 100, Joins Select Group in Achieving Post-Presidential Redemption

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