Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America, died at the age of 100
Jimmy Carter: From Plains to Moscow, and back again: Bringing the Soviet Union into the White House in the era of World War III
What do you want your legacy to be 50 years from now and 100 years from now? When Jimmy Carter was sworn in as the president of the United States in 1977, the nation was still reeling from a period of political upheaval. When Americans still remembered the lies told and Watergate, I came along. The mistakes made during those previous years didn’t stigmatized me outside of Washington. “It’s a long way from Plains, Ga., to Washington, D.C.” “And I brought a fresh face of a peanut farmer, a working man who swore never to tell a lie or make a misleading statement. Jimmy Carter was from Georgia. I hope to be your next president.” The parade route was unexpectedly walked down by the president and his family. The presidential review stand is in front of the White House. But winning the White House at the height of the Cold War carried extraordinary responsibility. “The system is survivable. It’s verifiable.” The peanut farmer from Plains suddenly had his finger on the button to start World War III. “It’s a horrifying thought. We only had 26 minutes before the missile hit New York or Washington to respond if the Soviets launched a missile attack. And so I knew what — that I would have to respond, which may result in a holocaust. I wanted to understand the issues of Brezhnev. I used to sit by a globe and turn it to Moscow, and try to imagine how it looked out on the rest of the world with a formidable military force in NATO and tremendous challenge from China. And what would happen if the Soviets became convinced that they were in danger. I tried to avoid that, but it was a terrible responsibility. We should give our own and nation’s security. Carter tried to broker a nuclear arms deal, and kept the peace. He had a covert mission to help the Afghan resistance in 1979 and then announced a boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980. “With Soviet invading forces in Afghanistan, neither the American people nor I will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow.” He claims the goal was to get the Soviets to reform. “I wanted to change their system of government, but I also wanted to bring the Soviet Union into the international forum. The Soviet Union had, in effect, promised to honor human rights, and they had failed. I believe that the decision of glasnost and perestroika to dismantle the soviet Union resulted in the withdrawal of Soviet troops, which may or may not have had an impact on Mikhail Gorbachev. Carter forged major accomplishments in foreign policy, including opening diplomatic relations with China and pushing through the Panama Canal treaty, despite ongoing battles with the Soviets. There is tension on the Egyptian-Israeli border. “I recognized before I was president the importance of the Mideast crisis between Israel and Egypt because there had been four major wars in the previous 25 years. I had brought Sadat and Begin to Camp David for 13 days and it was a great success. The Camp David Accords were signed six months later, leading to a treaty between Israel and Egypt. Not a word of which has ever been violated since.” Runaway inflation was not fixed by the watershed agreement. “We must face a time of national austerity.” The problem of energy. “All of us must learn to waste less energy.” A management style that Americans found boring. It’s a crisis of confidence. The final blow for Carter’s re-election came in November 1979. Thank you for good evening. The U.S. Embassy in Tehran was occupied by Iranian students. More than 50 Americans were taken hostage in Iran and held for 444 days until the final hours of Carter’s presidency. We had an adequate warning of the threat to our embassy, but we didn’t strengthen our security or remove our personnel, because we were warned that there was a threat. Carter won the election in just five states and Washington D.C., despite polls predicting a close race. And this country is very much in the Reagan colors tonight. After leaving the White House, Jimmy Carter reinvented himself. The role of a former president was redefined as a diplomat who was free of interference. Speaking in Spanish. Carter said political rivals asked for his help. “Ronald Reagan didn’t take an active interest in the Mideast. To my surprise he called me and asked if I would help draft a speech he wanted to give on the subject, after he disowned many of the things that I had done. And I responded eagerly. He had his national security adviser come to my home and the speech writer came to the front room of my house, where we drafted a portion of his speech. The Camp David framework is the only way to proceed with regards to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The White House was interested in Latin America when George Bush senior was in office. They specifically asked me to get involved in holding an election that replaced the Sandinistas peacefully instead of by war, and ended the war. The Contra problem for Nicaragua will be solved by an honest election.” In 1994, Carter was put to the test of his diplomatic skills, when Clinton and Kim Il Sung were at odds over the North Korean nuclear program. “Kim Il Sung was giving me constant requests that I come to Pyongyang and help him resolve the impasse. I wrote President Clinton and told him I would be going to North Korea. Al Gore, the vice president, was in the White House and he intercepted my letter and he said, ‘Mr. President, if you’ll change your letter to say I’m strongly inclined to go to North Korea instead of I’m going to North Korea, I’ll try to get President Clinton to agree to approve.’” Carter thought he had gotten the green light from the White House. They didn’t think I had a chance to succeed. Good morning. I did it. CNN camera crews were able to broadcast the historic negotiations. “I’m a nuclear engineer by training. I knew the intimacies of their nuclear power plant. I talked to their nuclear specialists and also directed to Kim Il Sung. And he and I agreed that he would not proceed with his nuclear program. The proposal was that the I.A.E.A inspectors would stay on site and not leave. The White House told me that they were dissatisfied after I returned to South Korea. Al Gore was on the speakerphone. I said, I want to come to Washington and explain what I’ve done. Mr. President, you are not wanted in Washington, he told me. Our suggestion is you go directly back to Plains.’ I put it mildly, I was angry. I thought that I had prevented a war. I believed I had worked out an agreement that was satisfactory for the future. The press was filled with stories about how Carter had turned what should have been a private visit into a televised summit when he arrived in the US. There were terrible stories about me written in The New York Times. I was ignorant and naive. I wrote Kim Il Sung a letter and asked him to confirm all the agreements he had made with Clinton. I believe there were 12 of them. And so that was adopted by the Clinton administration as their policy.” That policy did help to avert war. Critics say that President Clinton and Jimmy Carter were wrong to appease a nation like North Korea which later develop a nuclear arsenal in violation of the agreement he helped broker. In his later years, Carter traveled the globe to fight disease and watch elections in emerging democracies. “We believe that all of our questions have been answered.” The former president earned a medal for his work in 2002 when he was campaigning against the invasion of Iraq. “Global challenges must be met by an emphasis on peace.” When we talked to President Carter in 2006 he shared his vision for America’s role in the future and concerns about the post-9/11 world. “The announcement and practice of preemptive war, the complete abandonment of all the nuclear arms control agreements that were reached, the claim, in effect, that prisoners could be mistreated or tortured or deprived of habeas corpus, these are some of the things that I think has caused a deterioration in our country’s basic stature and integrity. I would like to see our country be the champion of human rights. The American Embassy looked after those who suffered from human rights abuse. Our country must be the most generous on the planet. These goals and accomplishments will not be my accomplishments, but they are anAffirmation of our nation’s continued moral strength and belief in an undiminished, ever expanding American dream.
There has been a lot of celebration of Mr Carter’s postpresidential work. Understandably so: Beyond his tireless volunteering, working to build affordable homes with Habitat for Humanity well into his 90s, the Carter Center — his passion for the past 42 years — has worked with U.S.A.I.D. and others to nearly eliminate river blindness in the Western Hemisphere and to decrease the number of reported Guinea worm cases from more than three million per year in the mid-1980s to just 14 in 2023. Mr. Carter also changed the global understanding of what a free and fair election requires by pioneering the dispatch of diverse teams of impartial observers, which have monitored 125 elections in 40 countries. And after leaving office in 1981, he lent his mediation services to successive administrations, defusing tensions in such places as Guyana, Liberia and Sudan.
As president, his foreign policy legacy was also consequential. It includes the negotiation of the Camp David Accords, which brought about an enduring peace between Israel and Egypt, and the establishment of diplomatic relations with China (after the rapprochement begun under President Richard Nixon). The United States would deal with smaller countries fairly, and Mr. Carter said he would do that when he negotiated the Panama Canal treaties.
The former president continued to teach Sunday school and serve as president while his Christian faith continued to grow, because he saw a connection to human rights. He often quoted biblical passages in explaining why America had a responsibility to stand up for those being persecuted elsewhere. He quoted Jesus from Matthew 25:40: “Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”
Ex-US President Jimmy Carter has said that the Mideast conflict between Israel and Egypt will be solved “by an honest election”. “After leaving the White House, Jimmy Carter reinvented himself. The Contra problem for Nicaragua will be solved by an honest election,” he added. “I recognised before I was President the importance of… Mideast crisis between Israel and Egypt,” he further said.