Quietly and with little fanfare (1924-2024)
What more can one say about President Jimmy Carter? I lack the words. Let me borrow a few from Jonathan Alter, biographer of “a formidable, complex man” writing at Washington Monthly:
He was the first American president since Thomas Jefferson who could reasonably claim to be a Renaissance Man or at least a world-class autodidact. At various times in his life, he acquired the skills of a farmer, naval officer, electrician, sonar technologist, nuclear engineer, businessman, equipment designer, agronomist, master woodworker, Sunday School teacher, land-use planner, legislator, door-to-door missionary, governor, long-shot presidential candidate, U.S. president, diplomat, fly-fisherman, bird dog trainer, arrowhead collector, home builder, painter, professor, memoirist, poet, novelist, and children’s book author—an incomplete list, as he would be happy to point out.
That’s when Carter wasn’t defending democracy around the world or working to eradicate the Guinea worm and river blindness, Brian Klaas reminds us:
The Carter Center, the NGO that he founded in 1982, has been a crucial force for good, known primarily for its work on successfully promoting democracy and providing high-quality election monitoring across the globe. It deserves that reputation.
I’ll spare you the description of infection by the parasite. But Carter’s success at eradicating infections were dramatic:
Before Carter got involved, Guinea Worm was prevalent in 21 countries, infecting at least 3.5 million people per year. Today, that figure is down to just 13 cases per year. It’s a reduction of 99.99% in just a few decades, making it one of the most successful public health interventions in history.
[…]
Similarly, the Carter Center has done tremendous work at tackling onchocerciasis, or river blindness. That disease comes from black fly bites, and it’s prevalent in 31 countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Again, it’s a largely neglected disease, despite the fact that just shy of 20 million people are currently infected, with about a million of them having lost their vision due to the infection.
The Carter Center has provided hundreds of millions of rounds of treatment for river blindness, drastically alleviating avoidable suffering. It doesn’t generate headlines, nor is it usually mentioned as a core part of Carter’s reputation in American political discourse, but had Jimmy Carter not decided to devote his efforts to these programs, millions more people would have been needlessly blinded by a devastating parasite.
I’ve bristled for years when conservatives sneered at Carter and his legacy in office. Those sneers speak volumes about their values and little about Carter. He was a lucky man but an unlucky president, his accomplishments obscured by what might have been, writes James Fallows, a veteran of the Carter White House:
Probably only a country as near-impossible to lead as the United States of that time could have given someone like Jimmy Carter a chance to lead it.
Despite it all, Carter had broader support during his first year in office than almost any of his successors, except briefly the two Bushes in wartime emergencies. Despite it all, most reckonings have suggested that Carter might well have beaten Ronald Reagan, and held on for a second term, if one more helicopter had been sent on the “Desert One” rescue mission in Iran, or if fewer of the helicopters that were sent had failed. Or if, before that, Teddy Kennedy had not challenged Carter in the Democratic primary. Or if John Anderson had not run as an independent in the general election. What if the ayatollah’s Iranian government had not stonewalled on negotiations to free its U.S. hostages until after Carter had been defeated? What if, what if.
Carter claimed for years that he came within one broken helicopter of reelection. It’s plausible. We’ll never know.
But perhaps one lesson from the Carter presidency Democrats (and Joe Biden today) have yet to learn is that humility is a negative on the national and world stages. Bluster draws eyeballs and inpsires undeserved confidence. Competence and caring? Not so much.
