Up First from NPR - In Memoriam: Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024

Episode Date: December 29, 2024

Former President Jimmy Carter has died at his home in Plains, Georgia. He was 100 years old, a modest man with an unforgettable ear-to-ear grin. Carter was the country's 39th president, serving only one term from 1977 to 1981. His years in the White House were difficult. He faced enormous problems at home and abroad and struggled to prove that he was a strong and capable leader. But once he left office, Carter became an almost unstoppable force for peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts. In this special episode of Up First, we consider the legacy of the man widely called "America's greatest former president."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Former President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. Carter served one term in the White House from 1977 to 1981. It was a troubled time when the nation faced high inflation and energy shortages. And Carter struggled over his four years to portray himself as an effective leader. But perhaps his greatest contributions came after he left office. In fact, Jimmy Carter has been praised as the nation's greatest former president. I'm Rachel Martin, and you're listening to a special edition of Up First. Today we're remembering the life of former President Jimmy Carter and here to talk through Carter's legacy is NPR senior political correspondent

Don Gagne. Hey Don. Hi there. So let's begin our conversation way back in 1976. These were the last few months of the presidential campaign season. America was celebrating, right? It was the bicentennial, although the country was still reeling from the Vietnam War. You had these countervailing things, right? All the positive nature of the bicentennial, but the Vietnam War had just wound down literally in the previous year. On top of all of that, the country was in the midst of an energy crisis. There was lots of cynicism among the American people. To take you back to those days, President Gerald Ford was an incumbent running for a full term in office.

Recall that he'd inherited the presidency two years earlier in 1974 when a disgraced Richard Nixon resigned from office as the Watergate scandal just closed in around him. Right and then amid all of that there's this Southerner running on the Democratic ticket which in and of itself was a big deal Jimmy Carter. Where did he come from? What was his political genesis? Boy it's an understatement to say he was a relative unknown, right? He was from Plains, Georgia, population 236 back in the 1970s. He had been a state senator.

He had been recently governor of Georgia. He was a former peanut farmer. So I've found this great tape from December of 1973 when I was working on an obit about Carter. And the tape kind of highlights how unknown he really was. Here I am introducing that tape in that obit. He was hardly a household name. In fact, as his time in the State House wound down, he popped up on the TV game show, What's My Line? Would our first challenger enter and sign in, please?

On the show, a panel of celebrities tries to guess the profession of the mystery person sitting right in front of them. So there's Governor Carter on the set, smiling that famous Jimmy Carter smile, and the panelists have no idea who he is. And let's begin the questioning with Arlene Francis. Is it a service that has to do with the women?

Yes, it certainly does. Not enough. So what you hear, Rachel, are these celebrity panelists asking Jimmy Carter what he does for a living and trying to figure out. And they go on and on with different questions to him trying to figure out what his profession is. Again, they had no clue who this guy was. Which is sort of interesting because Jimmy Carter's humility was something that also

just kind of set him apart. But he had to get traction as a candidate, right? Like he had to get out there and sell himself. How did he do that? Right, and he did kind of use that humility. He directly confronted the cynicism that a lot of Americans were feeling at the time. He was modest, and that sounds like a strange thing to say.

This is a modest person seeking the White House, but he did portray a certain modesty as a candidate. He promised the people, again, this is in the wake of Watergate, he promised the people he would never lie to them. He promised to restore basic trust in the nation's institutions. It all sounds so old fashioned, right?

And again, it's also important to note that he ran a real grassroots campaign. He kind of embraced the fact that nobody knew him. Listen to this quote, it's from Steve Hockman. He is from the Carter Center, and he was one of Carter's longtime assistants back then. And he told NPR in an interview that Carter worked hard at that basic retail campaigning.

He would campaign on the street corners, go to radio stations. Nobody knew who he was, except that he was running for president. And he had friends from Georgia, they were called the Peanut Brigade, that went out and did this person-to-person type of campaigning for him. And the Peanut Brigade helped pull it out, right? It worked. Absolutely.

Carter won a narrow victory against Ford. ABC News presents Political Spirit of 76. And that does it. Carter is the winner with 272 electoral votes. So that's election night. Months later he takes the oath of office and he made his values clear right from the earliest moments of his presidency. In fact, he began his inaugural address by acknowledging the man that he had just defeated,

Gerald Ford. For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land. And then on the very next day, his first full day in office, January 21st, 1977, Carter did something else. He issued a mass pardon for all Vietnam War draft evaders. He had a lot of challenges though, right?

From the get-go, he inherited this very troubled economy, the high inflation and interest rates and energy prices all at historic highs. And there were all these fuel shortages and quadrupling of oil prices and the long lines at gas stations. Those are very tough political realities for a president. It was not an easy time. And these are all difficult things for a new president to inherit. And as he promised he would do, Carter spoke directly about these things and honestly to the nation. He didn't sugarcoat it. And specifically, he told the public something that presidents

don't often tell the public that they need to sacrifice. In this case he said they need to conserve energy. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us but it will if we do not act quickly. It's a problem that we will not be able to solve in the next few years and it's likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. So Carter did not lack self-confidence. That's something also worth noting here. And to that end, politically, he did stuff presidents

didn't often do. And sometimes it was to his own detriment, politically, right? One prominent example, again, this deals with the energy crisis. As president, he tried to get Americans to wear sweaters. It sounds almost comical now, but he literally encouraged people to wear sweaters so they could turn down the thermostat and save energy.

And he did that in the White House, turning down the heat of the executive mansion and wearing a sweater and being seen on television wearing a cardigan sweater. But here's the catch, Americans didn't necessarily want to hear this, right? They wanted him to fix things. They didn't want him to tell them what they needed to do. And I think because he was advising conservation rather than a clear set of policy principles that would offer a solution, people maybe began to think of him as not as strong of a leader as

he needed to be. And some of them even saw him as kind of a scold, telling them how they needed to go about their daily lives. So he had to overcome that, but he did have some political successes as president, right? Oh, he absolutely did. Let's just tick off a few of them. He created the Department of Energy and was the first president to really lay out a national energy policy. He signed on foreign policy the SALT II nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union. And he mediated one of the most difficult political crises of the time by bringing together

Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He brought them to Camp David. He got these two leaders in the Middle East to sign a peace accord that led to Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and the establishment of diplomatic relations between these two countries that had long been at odds at war in conflict. So that was a very big deal. Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States of America, the president of the Arab Republic of Egypt, and the prime minister of Israel.

The dedication and determination of these two world statesmen have borne fruit. Peace has come to Israel and to Egypt. So while President Carter is, you know, negotiating this hugely important peace deal on the international stage, he's also dealing with a complication in his own family, right? Tell me about his brother. Yeah, and we don't want to take too big of a detour here, but it's worth noting his younger brother, his youngest sibling, Billy, was a Southern good old boy who had a habit of leveraging his connection to his brother to make a buck.

He endorsed a beer bearing his own name, Billy Beer, and that was during Carter's presidential campaign. So it started right away. It seemed like he was always in the news for the wrong reasons and the White House had to deal with it. Billy did create one major headache though when he became an agent of the government of Libya. And Muammar Gaddafi was in power then.

And after multiple trips, he was paid hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he became the center of this kind of swirling storm of allegations about influence peddling and and you know if all of that wasn't enough in the midst of all this Billy Carter even kind of responded to all of that by using his Libya connections to sell ice cream. When I got $200,000 from Libya a lot of people thought it was because of my brother. It's just not true. I was giving them

advice. Whether you believe me or not, I'm going to give you some advice. Try eat his grand light. Wait what? And that kind of sums it up, you know. It's, he was stubborn and the scandal did create some problems for President Carter who, you know, at one point was in the midst of a difficult campaign, both for renomination and for reelection. So let's fast forward a bit to July, 1979. Carter gave a now very famous speech. It became known as his malaise speech. Yeah, and for the record here, Jimmy Carter never used the word malaise in this speech, but he was talking about kind of a malaise that the country was in, a funk that the country was in, right? And again, we keep coming back to the energy crisis that's what this speech was meant to address and it was it was aimed at uh... instilling some urgency on the issue

carter ultimately said he got stuck on this question he said why have we not been able to get together as and nation to resolve are serious energy problems. So he's raising big things there. It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realized more than ever

that as president, I need your help. Hmm. Ultimately, he said that he believed the problem was that the country was facing a crisis of confidence, right? Right, and the public again did not want to hear that and they kind of saw a lack of confidence in him as well as part of that. The latest ABC news, Lewis Harris Poll, shows that Mr. Carter has now hit not merely a new but an all-time low in popular support. The rating 73% negative, 25% positive, makes him the worst regarded president in modern political history.

And then it got worse for Carter, the Iran hostage crisis. This was November 4th, 1979. This was probably the defining moment in the public's eyes, right, of the Carter presidency. On November 4th, 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and detained more than 50 Americans on staff there. The Iranians held the American diplomats and staff hostage for 444 days. The Iran Crisis. America Held Hostage. The U.S. Embassy in Tehran has been invaded and occupied by Iranian students. The Americans inside have been taken prisoner. And again, this spilled over into an American election year, 1980.

Diplomatic relations to end the standoff failed. So Carter tried something. He ordered the U.S. military to attempt a rescue mission. That mission failed, and it resulted in the accidental deaths of eight Americans, American service personnel in the desert after one of the helicopters crashed into another transport aircraft. And political analysts really did cite that standoff and that moment as a major factor in the ongoing decline and downfall of Carter's presidency.

And it happened. He lost November 1980. He did indeed. He lost election to a former Hollywood actor and a former California governor, Ronald Reagan. It was a landslide win. Carter left office though, I have to say, as graciously as he began his term. You know that defeat really, really affected him. But here he is in his farewell speech. The love of liberty is a common blood that flows in our American veins. Again, from the bottom of my heart,

I want to express to you the gratitude I feel. Thank you fellow citizens and farewell. When we come back, a look at Jimmy Carter's life after the presidency, a life many say made him the nation's greatest former president. I'm Rachel Martin, and you're listening to a special edition of Up First. So a year after leaving the White House, now former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn founded the Carter Presidential Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The center is devoted to issues relating to democracy and human rights. And Don, it really did launch Carter's career as a sort of roving peacemaker.

It absolutely did. And he was involved in the subsequent years in mediating disputes between the US State Department and some of the most volatile foreign leaders, including Kim Il-sung of North Korea and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. In 1994, he assisted the US government and helped settle a tension-filled nuclear weapons dispute with North Korea. And Carter, along with his wife, Rosalynn, and she was very much a part of every single bit of this. The two of them regularly monitored election results around the globe to promote democracy.

And so much of that work, their work on democracy and human rights, had a lot to do with their Christian faith. I mean, Jimmy Carter was a deeply religious man until very late in his life. I love this detail. He was still teaching Sunday school at his church in Georgia and people would sign up like on a waiting list. And Don, I just have to share with you that I had the opportunity to talk to President Carter in 2014. I interviewed him for a book that he had just written. It was called A Call to Action, Women, Religion, Violence and Power. And we talked about his faith and he argued in this book that religious texts often are used to justify the oppression of women. Let's listen.

I teach Bible lessons in my church every Sunday, about 35 or 40 times a year. And I've been teaching Bible lessons since I was just 18 years old. So I'm fairly familiar with the entire Bible. You can pick out individual verses throughout the Bible that shows that the verse favors your particular preference. So does that mean that there are in some way limits to how definitive religious texts, and in particular the Bible, can be when trying to sort right from wrong? Well in the book throughout it, I showed that you could interpret the Bible either way. And in modern society, we need to look on the, I'd say, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a basis for how to treat women and girls. And when this was issued, the church leaders didn't

speak out at that time, although throughout the Declaration of Human Rights, it prescribed absolute equality between men and women. And Rachel, if I can jump in here, Carter always said his values were instilled in him when he was a child. His mom, Ms. Lillian, she was a nurse by training. She set an example for her son by defying lines of segregation in 1920s Georgia to counsel poor African American women on matters of health care. Then another organization Carter worked tirelessly for right up until recently was Habitat for Humanity International, an organization that works worldwide to provide housing for underprivileged

people. In 2019, NPR spoke with Linda Fuller Daigleman. She founded Habitat for Humanity with her husband, Millard. They convinced the Carters to do a work week with them and Daigleman has a wonderful story of that first work trip. The first Carter work project was to the Lower East Side of New York City. And there were about 20 people that boarded the bus with the Carters, and we went overnight in the bus to arrive in New York City. I remember it was about five o'clock in the morning,

we were going through Washington, D.C., and we stopped at McDonald's for breakfast and when he and Rosen stepped off the bus you know people did a double-take. He said yeah I used to live here on Pennsylvania Avenue But we had a phenomenal week up there. We had bunk beds and the Carters, they were just willing to sleep on bunk beds just like all the other volunteers and share bathrooms. I guess we could just go on and on with what he accomplished in his post-presidential life. I mean, this is a man who tackled Guinea worm.

Exactly. Just to fill people in, Guinea worm is a parasite that infects people who drink contaminated water. So Carter took up the cause, meeting with government officials, health officials, aid groups around the world, fighting for clean water in developing countries. And under his leadership, this parasite, which infected millions in the 1980s, is today almost, almost eradicated. In an interview with NPR before his death, the legendary global health worker, Paul Farmer, he's co-founder of Partners in Health, he spoke about the impact that Carter has had. In the case of Carter, not that many people were talking about guinea worm or other neglected diseases

of poverty and you know he managed to not only turn attention to these problems that were indeed like all disease problems of poor people neglected, he managed to turn attention to them, but also to make a huge hit in the burden of disease. Indeed, if Guinea worm becomes the second human disease to be eradicated, first parasitic disease, you know, Carter's going to have played the primary role. So, I mean, Carter's presidency may have been complicated and seen as less than

successful in those four years, but I mean, he got all kinds of international acclaim for his life after the presidency. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And I wanted to play a little bit of his acceptance speech, which he gave in Oslo in December of that year, because it really does sum up who he was not just as a leader, but as a human being. Ladies and gentlemen, war may sometimes be a necessary evil, but no matter how necessary, it is always evil. Never a good.

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children. The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us a capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes.

And we must. Thank you. Jimmy Carter once said the best thing he ever did was to marry his wife, Rosalyn. She died in November. Carter will be buried at home by the willow tree right next to Rosalyn in his beloved town of Plains, Georgia. Thank you so much to NPR's Don Gagne for helping us remember Jimmy Carter's legacy. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Dan Gurma and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Thanks to the NPR News team for sharing audio for this episode. Our supervising producer is Leanna Simstrom and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Rachel Martin. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your

week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Up First sponsor free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Up First Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.