Yesterday, Tuesday, 1st October, James Earl Carter Jr., – Jimmy Carter to the world – the 39th President of the United States of America, celebrated his 100th birthday, the first former American President to hit the milestone. Its significance, (perhaps justifiably), will be brushed aside in several quarters as just another landmark in the long line achieved by the former Head of State. However, most importantly – albeit rather briefly – it catapults President Jimmy Carter back on to the centre stage at a critical time in the history of the USA, as the ticking clock displays thirty-four days until the 2024 USA Presidential elections.
Jimmy Carter’s single term in office – 20th January, 1977 to 20th January, 1981 – is often, wrongly or rightly, attributed to the fall out from the Republican President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. (This column is neither the forum nor has the space to review Carter’s presidency). Carter has been unfairly labelled by the Washington political press corps – he was an outsider from the southern state of Georgia – as a “mediocre president, great ex – president”, despite several significant accomplishments during his time in the White House. Carter signed more legislation than any post – World War II president except Lyndon Johnson (who had six years in office and the Civil Rights Movement), delivered more positive change to the Middle East than any president in the decades before or since, warned of the dangers of climate change even before the threat had a name, while his overlooked human rights policy played a largely uncredited role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Jimmy Carter’s attainments in the Oval Office were built on the toils of long days, when he often arose by 5:30, arriving at his desk an hour later, for the commencement of twelve hour days, where on a daily basis he pored over 200 to 300 hundred pages of memos, keeping abreast on the latest legislative and diplomatic developments. Carter’s assimilated knowledge of issues of the day and keen attention to detail were essential to the Camp David Accords (Egypt /Israel Peace Agreement), the Panama Canal Treaties, the Alaska Land bills, and a national energy policy.
Carter’s reelection bid, which ended in a landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan, came on the back of several factors including stagflation (high interest rates and high unemployment) and the Iranian hostage crisis. It was a bitter pill to swallow for the 39th US President, who as a former Governor of Georgia, a virtually unknown among the savvy Washington politically connected crowd, had emerged from the shadows to capture the Democrat nomination. It was the first election since 1932 that an elected incumbent president was defeated, the first occasion since 1888 in which an incumbent Democrat president had suffered a loss, and the only instance when a Republican nominee had beaten an incumbent Democrat in both the popular vote and the electoral college.
Carter’s presidential legacy has been somewhat overshadowed by the humanitarian work he has performed with the Carter Center, which was founded in 1982 at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In the forty odd years of the Center’s existence, the former peanut farmer from the tiny enclave of Plains, Georgia, has served the world on several platforms. The Carter Center has spearheaded programmes aimed at disease eradication in Africa, improvement in grain production in fifteen African countries, observing free and fair elections all over the globe – we remember well his role here in October 1992 and his May 2015 trip [the Carter Center’s 100th election observation exercise] – and international peace negotiations. Carter also was deeply involved with the Habitat for Humanity NGO. In 2002, President Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for a lifetime of peacemaking and humanitarian work, much of it through the Carter Center.
The former president, a brain cancer survivor, who has been in hospice care for the past nineteen months, has shown a remarkable revival in the last few months. His astonishing resilience continues to baffle his family, friends and admirers, who didn’t think he would last too long after losing his wife of seventy–seven years, the former First Lady, Rosalynn Carter, last year. Jimmy, a keen wood worker in his time, has one more major project to finish. He has declared that his birthday wish is to vote for Kamala Harris, the Democrat nominee on the 5th November. Jason Carter, one of the former president’s grandsons, and current board chairman of the Carter Center, in an interview with the New York Times stated that Harris’s opponent, former president Trump has “a meanness and a darkness” that the family views as the antithesis of their grandfather’s philosophy.
Mildly put to say the least. Carter is everything that Trump, no doubt, privately wishes he could become. Scandal free. Nation before self. Respected. Admired. Loyal. Family oriented. How was does one account for unknown former peanut farmer, who once live in subsidized government housing, going from “Jimmy who?” in less than a year to becoming the President of the United States of America? Just ask the Peanut Brigade, his 500 friends from Georgia, who volunteered to canvass during the 1976 Primary campaigns, knocking on doors and vouching for him in person, from snow- bound New Hampshire to New Mexico. Quiet fortitude. Once again, almost fifty years later, James Earl Carter II leads the way.
Happy 100th Birthday Jimmy Carter.
