Letters from an American - December 29, 2024

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

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December 29th, 2024. Former President Jimmy Carter died today, December 29th, 2024, at age 100 after a life characterized by a dedication to human rights. His wife of 77 years, Rosalyn Carter, died on November 19, 2023. She was 96 years old. James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924 in Plains in southwestern Georgia, about half an hour from the site of the infamous Andersonville Prison, where United States soldiers died of disease and hunger during the Civil War only 60 years earlier. He was the first US president to be born in a

hospital. Carter's south was impoverished. He grew up on a dirt road about three miles from Plains in the tiny majority black village of Archery where his father owned a farm and the family grew corn, cotton, peanuts, and sugarcane. The young Carters and the children of the village's black share croppers grew up together as the depression that crashed down in 1929 drained away what little prosperity there was in archery. After undergraduate coursework at Georgia Southwestern College and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carter completed his College and at the Georgia Institute of Technology,

Carter completed his undergraduate degree at the U.S. Naval Academy. In the Navy, he rose to the rank of lieutenant, serving on submarines, including early nuclear submarines, in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. In 1946, Carter married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister's, who grew up in Plains. When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and took his family back to the

Carter's Georgia farm, where he and Rosalyn operated both the farm and a seed and supply company. Arriving back in Georgia just a year before the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown versus Board of Education decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Carter quickly became involved in local politics. In 1962 he challenged a fraudulent election for a Georgia State Senate seat and in the runoff voters elected him. The Carters became supporters of Democratic President John F. Kennedy in a state whose dominant Democratic Party was in turmoil as white supremacists clashed with Georgians eager to leave their past behind. Kennedy had sent troops to desegregate the University of Mississippi.

Carter ran for governor in 1966, the year after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. He lost the primary, coming in third behind another liberal Democrat and a staunch segregationist Democrat, Lester Maddox, who won it and went on to win the governorship. When Carter ran again in 1970, he emphasized his populism rather than Black rights, appealing to racist whites. He won the Democratic primary with 60 percent of the vote and in a state that was still Democrat dominated, easily won the governorship. But when Carter took office in 1971, he abandoned his concessions to white racists and took a stand for new race relations in the United States. I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,

he told Georgians in his inaugural speech. No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice. His predecessor, Maddox, had refused to let state workers take the day off to attend services for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral. Carter pointedly hung a portrait of King, as well as portraits of

educator Lucy Kraft Laney and Georgia politician and minister Henry McNeil Turner in the state Capitol. Carter brought to office a focus not only on civil rights but also on cleaning up and streamlining the state's government. He consolidated more than 200 government offices into 20 and backed austerity measures to save money while also supporting new social programs including equalizing aid to poor and wealthy schools, prison reform and early childhood development programs, and community centers for mentally disabled children. At the time, the state constitution prohibited Carter from re-election, so he built recognition

in the National Democratic Party and turned his sights on the presidency. In the wake of the scandals that brought down both President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, as well as many of their staff, when it seemed to many Americans that all of Washington was corrupt, voters welcomed the newcomer Carter as an outsider who would work for the people. He seemed a new kind of Democrat,

one who could usher in a new multicultural democracy now that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had brought black and brown voters into the American polity. Like many of the other civil rights coalitions in the early 20th century, Carter's supporters shared music reinforced their politics, and Carter's deep knowledge of blues, R&B, folk, and especially the gospel music of his youth helped him appeal to that era's crucially important youth vote.

Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Nile Rogers, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, as well as the Allman Brothers, all backed Carter, who later said, I was practically a non-entity, but everyone knew the Allman Brothers. When they endorsed me, all the young people said, well, if the Allman brothers like him, we can vote for him. Elected by just over 50% of American voters over Republican candidate Gerald R. Ford's count of about 48%, Carter's outsider status and

determination to govern based on the will of the people sparked opposition from within Washington, including in the Democratic Party, and stories that he was buffeted about by the breezes of polls. But Carter's domestic policy advisor, Stuart Eisenstadt, once said that Carter believed an elected president should park politics at the Oval Office door

and try to win reelection by doing the right thing. He took pride in ignoring political interests, a stance that would hurt his ability to get things done in Washington, D.C. Carter began by trying to make the government more representative of the American people. Eisenstadt recalled that Carter appointed more women, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans

to official positions and judgeships than all 38 of his predecessors combined. Carter instituted ethics reform to reclaim the honor of the presidency after Nixon's behavior had tarnished it. He put independent inspectors in every department and established that corporations could not bribe foreign officials to get contracts. He expanded education programs, establishing the Department of Education, and tried to relieve the country from reliance on foreign oil

by establishing the Department of Energy. Concerned that the new regulatory agencies that Congress had created since the mid-1960s might be captured by industries, and that they were causing prices to rise, Carter began the deregulation movement to increase competition. He began with the airlines and moved to the trucking industry, railroad lines, and long-distance phone service. He also deregulated beer production. His legalization

of home brewing sparked today's craft brewing industry. But Carter inherited slow economic growth and the inflation that had plagued presidents since Nixon. And the 1979 drop in oil production after the Iranian Revolution exacerbated both. While more than 10 million jobs were added to the US economy during his term, almost twice the number Reagan added in his first term, and more than five times the number George H.W. Bush

added in his, inflation hit 14% in 1980. To combat that inflation, Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve, knowing he would combat inflation with high interest rates, a policy that brought down inflation during the first term of his successor, Ronald Reagan. Carter also focused on protecting the environment. He was the first president to undertake the federal cleanup

of a hazardous waste site, declaring a federal emergency in the New York neighborhood of Love Canal and using federal disaster money to remediate the chemicals that had been stored underground there. Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as a national monument, saying, these areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic, and cultural value and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world. He said in 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help

heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Coming after Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia and support for Chile's right-wing dictator, Augusto Pinochet, whose government has systematically tortured and executed his political opponents, Carter's foreign policy emphasized human rights. Carter echoed the 1948 Universal Declaration

of Human Rights established by the United Nations, promising he would promote human freedom while protecting the individual from the arbitrary power of the state. He was best known for the Camp David Accords that achieved peace between Israel and Egypt after they had fought a series of wars. Those accords, negotiated with Anwar Sadat of Egypt

and Menachem Begin of Israel, paved the way for others. Carter credited the religious faith of the three men for making the agreement possible. Carter also built on his predecessor Nixon's outreach to China, normalizing relations and affording diplomatic recognition of China, enabling the two countries to develop a bilateral relationship. While commenters often credit President Reagan with pressuring the Soviet Union enough to

bring about its dissolution, in fact it was Carter who negotiated the nuclear arms treaty that Reagan honored and who, along with his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as a major breach in international relations. He cut off grain sales to the USSR, ordered a massive defense buildup, and persuaded European leaders to accept nuclear missiles stationed in their countries, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said was a significant factor in the dissolution of the USSR. To Carter also fell the Iran hostage crisis, in which Muslim fundamentalists overran the

American embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran, seizing 66 Americans and holding them hostage for 444 days in return for a promise that the American-backed Mohammed Riza Shah Pahlavi, whom Carter had admitted to the U.S. for cancer treatment, be returned to Iran for trial. Carter immediately froze Iranian assets and began secret negotiations while Americans watched on TV as Iranian mobs chanted, death to America. A secret mission to rescue the hostages failed when one of the eight helicopters dispatched to rescue the hostages crashed, killing eight soldiers.

Before he left office, Carter successfully negotiated for the hostages return. They were released the day of Reagan's inauguration. Carter left office in January 1981 and the following year in partnership with Emory University, he and Rosalynn established the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based, non-governmental, not-for-profit organization to advance peace, health, and human rights around the world. The Carter Center has supervised elections in more than 100 countries, has helped farmers in 15 African countries to double or triple grain production, and has worked to prevent

disease in Latin America and Africa. In 1986, when the Carter Center began a program to eradicate infections of the meter long guinea worm that emerges painfully from sufferer's skin and incapacitates them for long periods, 3.5 million people a year in Africa and Asia were infected. In 2022, there were only 13 known infections. In 2023, there were 14. So far in 2024, there have been seven,

but those will not be officially confirmed until spring 2025. In a 2015 interview, Carter said he hoped to outlive the last case. President Carter said, "'When I was in the White House, "'I thought of human rights primarily primarily in terms of political rights, such as rights to free speech and freedom from torture or unjust imprisonment.

As I traveled around the world since I was president, I learned there was no way to separate the crucial rights to live in peace, to have adequate food and health care, and to have a voice in choosing one's political leaders. These human needs and rights are inextricably linked. In 2002, Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.

When journalist Katie Couric of the Today Show asked him if the Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, Carter answered, when Rosalind said she'd marry me, I think that's the most exciting thing. In his farewell address on January 14th, 1981, President Jimmy Carter worried about the direction of the country. He noted that the American people had begun to lose faith in the government's ability to deal with problems, and were turning to single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens, our own personal views and our own private interests are protected. This focus on individualism, he warned, distorts the nation's purpose because the national interest

is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility. Carter urged Americans to protect our most precious possessions, the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us, and to advance the basic human rights that had, after all, invented America. Our common vision of a free and just society, he said, is our greatest source of cohesion

at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.