WASHINGTON — Jimmy Carter ended his one-term presidency in defeat. For years he was derided as a weak leader.
But over time a fundamental shift took place in how Carter was regarded, fueled by his decades of post-presidential good works and the enduring power of his White House achievements.
Perhaps more than any single post-World War II president, Carter changed the way many saw the U.S. by attempting to inject American values of altruism, democracy and human rights into foreign policy.
Sometimes he succeeded, oftentimes not. But his effort left an indelible mark on nearly two generations of diplomats, public officials and global activists.
Carter is to be remembered Thursday at a state funeral inside the cavernous Washington National Cathedral. President Biden will deliver the eulogy and all four living former presidents are expected to attend, including one inspired by him — President Obama — and one who routinely attacks him — President-elect Donald Trump. No major foreign leader is expected — at age 100, Carter outlived all those he interacted with.
Keith Mines, a 32-year veteran of the departments of State and Defense, working from Mexico to the Middle East, recalled being stationed at Ft. Benning, Ga., with a military officer from Burkina Faso. During downtime, Mines suggested they check out Georgia’s beaches, mountains or the hopping city of Atlanta.
“I want to go to one place,” Mines recalled the African officer saying. “I want to go to Plains, Ga. I want to see the … place that produced this remarkable man, Jimmy Carter.”
Carter’s legacy is mixed. His administration succeeded in building key security platforms that endure to this day, while also promoting a broader global and domestic social agenda. As president, he officially made human rights the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, with particular impact in Latin America.
And he set a precedent for former presidents by continuing his public service, and charitable and human rights work, after leaving office.
Carter attempted to change the way the world viewed America at a particularly fraught time.
The 1950s and ‘60s were characterized by U.S.-sponsored coups that overthrew governments that rulers in Washington didn’t like; then came the torturous Vietnam War and the scandalous tenure of Richard Nixon.
Carter rose from nowhere, and became a president who spoke more about peacemaking than foreign conquest, about humanity over self-interest.
He was willing to wield hard power when necessary but also saw the value of soft power, what he would call after his presidency the combination of “enticement, persuasion and influence,” which he often thought was even more effective in winning hearts and changing minds.
“I’ve seen the foundational nature of Carter’s contributions to U.S. foreign policy … in advancing U.S. interests in the Middle East, China, Russia … but it does not end there,” Thomas Donilon, a former national security advisor under Obama and senior State Department official under President Clinton, said in an essay for Foreign Affairs.
His stewardship led to the first peace treaty between Israel and a warring neighbor, Egypt, which stands today as the most important such accord. Although tensions on the Middle East have ebbed and flowed, the successful Camp David negotiation won acclaim among Israelis and Arabs alike, who praised it as an evenhanded approach from the U.S.
Carter was a peacemaker but not a pacifist, and saw the need for military strength. In 1980, in response to the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he declared the Carter Doctrine, which committed the U.S. to protecting oil production in the Persian Gulf and laid the basis for security infrastructure in that part of the world for Democratic and Republican administrations that followed for decades.
In the waning weeks of his presidency, Carter approved the creation of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, a group of elite military from all branches that would train and plan top-secret reconnaissance missions and other clandestine deadly attacks.
Carter saw its need after the failed attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran. It remained in place, expanded through the years and eventually became involved in numerous controversial operations from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Carter seemed most proud of his work on human rights and democracy building.
His decision in 1977 to return the Panama Canal — long regarded regionally as a symbol of U.S. imperialism — to the government of Panama was widely praised in Latin America. It was a move initiated by Nixon at the urging of the U.S. military, which said operating it and the American military colony around it was expensive and unsustainable.
In the first years of his government, Carter also looked south and saw brutal military dictatorships controlling Argentina, Chile and other nations. He drastically reduced U.S. military aid to those countries and blocked their access to some international loans. Many of these steps, historians believe, were the first dominoes in toppling dictatorships and ushering in democracy to the region.
He “challenged the assumption that security assistance to repressive regimes furthered Cold War aims, and instead adopted the view that … U.S. support for these regimes had damaged its global leadership and made the U.S. complicit in human rights abuses,” Enrique Roig, a deputy assistant secretary of State, said in a recent forum at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
The son of Chilean parents, Roig credited Carter as a “beacon of hope” that showed him the United States could be a champion for democracy and human rights.
In June 1979, when the U.S. still supported the dynastic Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, Carter was horrified to see television footage of Somoza’s troops shooting dead an American reporter, ABC’s Bill Stewart, his hands raised at a military checkpoint.
Carter immediately broke with the Somoza government, which collapsed within weeks and gave rise to the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a revolutionary and eventually anti-American group. It launched social programs and was initially welcomed by a long-abused population — as was Carter’s perceived intervention.
But within two years, Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, worked to undo his reforms and soon launched wars in both Nicaragua, to oust the Sandinistas; and neighboring El Salvador, to support its right-wing military government. Neither turned out as Reagan intended.
Fast-forward to 1990. Carter, a decade out of office, was in Nicaragua to monitor what were supposed to be the country’s first democratic elections. Sandinista President Daniel Ortega had agreed to allow the election — but was refusing to accept the results when it appeared he was losing to his matronly opponent, Violeta Chamorro, owner of the country’s leading opposition newspaper.
Carter sat up all of one night with Ortega, trying to persuade him to accept the results. “I know what it’s like to lose,” Carter told Ortega. Eventually, Ortega relented and allowed a peaceful transition to democracy.
Such post-presidency missions to bolster foreign elections, fight disease and build homes for the poor made the increasingly elderly but always engaged and gracious Carter a hero to many abroad. His picture would hang in activists’ homes; crowds would greet him in the streets in cities in Latin America and Africa.
“Luck broke against him in many ways during his time in office,” Carter’s former speechwriter, James Fallows, said this week on CNN. “But he then had the luck to bring out the best in himself, the best in fellow citizens, the best in what he hoped to bring to the world.”
