Former President Jimmy Carter has died at his home in Plains, Georgia. He was 100 years old, a modest man with an unforgettable ear-to-ear grin. Carter was the country's 39th president, serving only one term from 1977 to 1981. His years in the White House were difficult. He faced enormous problems at home and abroad and struggled to prove that he was a strong and capable leader. But once he left office, Carter became an almost unstoppable force for peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts. In this special episode of Up First, we consider the legacy of the man widely called "America's greatest former president."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What led to Jimmy Carter's presidency?
In fact, Jimmy Carter has been praised as the nation's greatest former president. I'm Rachel Martin, and you're listening to a special edition of Up First. Today, we're remembering the life of former President Jimmy Carter. And here to talk through Carter's legacy is NPR senior political correspondent Don Gagne. Hey, Don. Hi there. So let's begin our conversation way back in 1976.
These were the last few months of the presidential campaign season. America was celebrating, right? It was the bicentennial, although the country was still reeling from the Vietnam War.
You had these countervailing things, right? All the positive nature of the Bicentennial, but the Vietnam War had just wound down literally in the previous year. On top of all of that, the country was in the midst of an energy crisis. There was lots of cynicism among the American people. To take you back to those days, President Gerald Ford was an incumbent president
running for a full term in office. Recall that he'd inherited the presidency two years earlier in 1974 when a disgraced Richard Nixon resigned from office as the Watergate scandal just closed in around him.
Right. And then amid all of that, there's this Southerner running on the Democratic ticket, which in and of itself was a big deal, Jimmy Carter. Where did he come from? What was his political genesis?
Boy, it's an understatement to say he was a relative unknown, right? He was from Plains, Georgia, population 236 back in the 1970s. He had been a state senator. He had been recently governor of Georgia. He was a former peanut farmer. So I found this great tape from December of 1973 when I was working on an obit about Carter and And the tape kind of highlights how unknown he really was.
Here I am introducing that tape in that obit. He was hardly a household name. In fact, as his time in the statehouse wound down, he popped up on the TV game show, What's My Line?
Would our first challenger enter and sign in, please?
On the show, a panel of celebrities tries to guess the profession of the mystery person sitting right in front of them. So there's Governor Carter on the set, smiling that famous Jimmy Carter smile, and the panelists have no idea who he is.
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Chapter 2: What challenges did Carter face during his presidency?
So Carter did not lack self-confidence. That's something also worth noting here. And To that end, politically, he did stuff presidents didn't often do. And sometimes it was to his own detriment politically, right? One prominent example, again, this deals with the energy crisis. As president, he tried to get Americans to wear sweaters.
It sounds almost comical now, but he literally encouraged people to wear sweaters so they could turn down the thermostat and save energy. Wow. did that in the White House, turning down the heat of the executive mansion and wearing a sweater and being seen on television wearing a cardigan sweater. But here's the catch. Americans didn't necessarily want to hear this, right?
They wanted him to fix things. They didn't want him to tell them what they needed to do. And I think because he was advising conservation rather than a clear set of policy principles that would offer a solution, people maybe began to think of him as not as strong of a leader as he needed to be.
And some of them even saw him as kind of a scold, telling them how they needed to go about their daily lives.
So he had to overcome that, but he did have some political successes as president, right?
Oh, he absolutely did. Let's just tick off a few of them. He created the Department of Energy and was the first president to really lay out a national energy policy. He signed on foreign policy the SALT II Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union, and he mediated one of the most difficult
political crises of the time by bringing together Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He brought them to Camp David. He got these two leaders in the Middle East to sign a peace accord that led to Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula
and the establishment of diplomatic relations between these two countries that had long been at odds, at war, in conflict. So that was a very big deal.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America, the President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, and the Prime Minister of Israel.
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Chapter 3: How did Jimmy Carter's leadership style differ?
It seemed like he was always in the news for the wrong reasons, and the White House had to deal with it. Billy did create one major headache, though, when He became an agent of the government of Libya. And Muammar Gaddafi was in power then. And after multiple trips, he was paid hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And he became the center of this kind of swirling storm of allegations about influence peddling. And if all of that wasn't enough in the midst of all this, Billy Carter even kind of responded to all of that by using his Libya connections to sell ice cream.
When I got $200,000 from Libya, a lot of people thought it was because of my brother. It's just not true. I was giving them advice. Whether you believe me or not, I'm going to give you some advice. Try Edie's grand light.
Wait, what? And that kind of sums it up. He was stubborn, and the scandal did create some problems for President Carter, who at one point was in the midst of a difficult campaign, both for renomination and for re-election.
So let's fast forward a bit to July 1979. Carter gave a now very famous speech. It became known as his malaise speech.
Yeah. And for the record here, Jimmy Carter never used the word malaise in this speech, but he was talking about kind of a malaise that the country was in, a funk that the country was in, right? And again, we keep coming back to the energy crisis. That's what this speech was meant to address. And it was... It was aimed at instilling some urgency on the issue.
But Carter ultimately said he got stuck on this question. He said, why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problems? So he's raising big things there.
It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper than deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realized more than ever that as president, I need your help.
Ultimately, he said that he believed the problem was that the country was facing a crisis of confidence, right?
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Chapter 4: What were some of Carter's significant accomplishments?
And then it got worse for Carter, the Iran hostage crisis. This was November 4th, 1979.
This was probably the defining moment in the public's eyes, right, of the Carter presidency. Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and detained more than 50 Americans on staff there. The Iranians held the American diplomats and staff hostage for 444 days.
The Iran crisis. America held hostage. The U.S. Embassy in Tehran has been invaded and occupied by Iranian students. The Americans inside have been taken prisoner.
And again, this spilled over into an American election year, 1980. Diplomatic relations to end the standoff failed. So Carter tried something. He ordered the U.S. military to attempt a rescue mission. That mission failed. and it resulted in the accidental deaths of eight Americans, American service personnel, in the desert after one of the helicopters crashed into another transport aircraft.
And political analysts really did cite that standoff and that moment as a major factor in the ongoing decline and downfall of Carter's presidency.
And it happened. He lost, November 1980.
He did indeed. He lost election to a former Hollywood actor and a former California governor, Ronald Reagan. It was a landslide win. Carter left office, though, I have to say, as graciously as he began his term. You know that defeat really, really affected him. But here he is in his farewell speech. The love of liberty.
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Chapter 5: How did personal issues affect Carter's presidency?
is a common blood that flows in our American veins. Again, from the bottom of my heart, I want to express to you the gratitude I feel. Thank you, fellow citizens, and farewell.
When we come back, a look at Jimmy Carter's life after the presidency, a life many say made him the nation's greatest former president.
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I'm Rachel Martin, and you're listening to a special edition of Up First. So a year after leaving the White House, now former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn, founded the Carter Presidential Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The center is devoted to issues relating to democracy and human rights.
And Dawn, it really did launch Carter's career as a sort of roving peacemaker.
It absolutely did. And he was involved in the subsequent years in mediating disputes between the U.S. State Department and some of the most volatile foreign leaders, including Kim Il-sung of North Korea and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. In 1994, he assisted the U.S. government and helped settle a tension-filled nuclear weapons dispute with North Korea.
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of Carter's malaise speech?
The first Carter work project was to the Lower East Side of New York City. And there were about 20 people that boarded the bus with the Carters. And we went overnight in the bus to arrive in New York City. I remember... It was about 5 o'clock in the morning. We were going through Washington, D.C., and we stopped at McDonald's for breakfast.
And when he and Rosalyn stepped off the bus, you know, people did a double take. They said, yeah, I used to live here on Pennsylvania Avenue. But we had a phenomenal week up there. We had bunk beds And the Carters, they were just willing to sleep on bunk beds just like all the other volunteers and share bathrooms.
I guess we could just go on and on with what he accomplished in his post-presidential life. I mean, this is a man who tackled guinea worm.
Exactly. Just to fill people in, the guinea worm is a parasite that infects people who drink contaminated water. So Carter took up the cause, meeting with government officials, health officials, aid groups around the world, fighting for clean water in developing countries. And under his leadership, this parasite, which infected millions in the 1980s, is today almost, almost eradicated.
In an interview with NPR before his death, the legendary global health worker, Paul Farmer, he's co-founder of Partners in Health, he spoke about the impact that Carter has had.
In the case of Carter, not that many people were talking about guinea worm or other neglected animals. diseases of poverty, and he managed to not only turn attention to these problems that were indeed, like all disease problems of poor people, neglected, he managed to turn attention to them, but also to make a huge hit in the burden of disease.
Indeed, if guinea worm becomes the second human disease to be eradicated, the first parasitic disease Carter's going to have played the primary role.
So, I mean, Carter's presidency may have been complicated and seen as less than successful in those four years. But, I mean, he got all kinds of international acclaim for his life after the presidency. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
And I wanted to play a little bit of his acceptance speech, which he gave in Oslo in December of that year, because it really does sum up who he was not just as a leader, but as a human being.
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