Monday, December 30, 2024

Yesterday, former president Jimmy Carter died at age 100. Formally, it should be stated that James Earl Carter Jr., the 39th President of the United States, died at his home in Plains, Georgia after a long illness. And of course, it was after a very eventful life. And furthermore, it was, at the end, a life that defied the odds in terms of the fact that more than a year ago, Jimmy Carter had entered hospice care. It was announced then that he was expected not to live long, but, and Jimmy Carter’s relatives shared this with the public, the former president really did want to be the first president to reach 100 years of age, which he did back in October of just this year in 2024.

The man born in Plains, Georgia in 1924, died a century later where he had been born, at least in the same small town in Georgia where he had been born. Between 1924 and 2024, an extremely eventful life. And as we should remind ourselves, a life that represents so much of world history and American history during those very crucial decades of his life.

You go back to 1924, and America is now fully on the world stage, most importantly because of the Allied victory in World War I, the indispensable nature of the United States and its military to the successful conclusion of that event. Now, just remember that war was called the War to End All Wars. How’s that for a form of hubris that is disguised as optimism?

But going back to 1924, America was being transformed, and it’s also interesting that as Jimmy Carter became the man who survived longer than any other president in terms of his age and lived longer and served longer than any other president once leaving the Oval Office, President of the United States to have been born in a hospital. Now, it tells you a lot about the changes in American life that had taken place by the time he was born in 1924.

But here’s something else to consider. When you look at those very few individuals across, say, the landscape of American public life, those fewer than 50 individuals who have been elected presidents of the United States or have sat at the Oval Office at the President’s desk, the reality is that very few of them likely would’ve been seen as future presidents in the crib, and that was certainly true for Jimmy Carter, and it was true of the very humble circumstances into which he was born because when you look at the year 1924, it is clear that even as on the horizon is a resurgent south in American political, economic, and cultural life, that was not fully in view in 1924. To look into a crib in that small Georgia town of Plains, Georgia, to look in that crib and see a future President of the United States would’ve seemed very unrealistic. And yet, by the time Jimmy Carter died, the majority of Americans hadn’t even been alive at the time he served as President of the United States.

Now, we talked about Jimmy Carter back in October when he reached that milestone of turning 100 years old, and we talked about Jimmy Carter in historical legacy then. We come back to it now precisely because the death of a president or a former President of the United States is one of those historic events that simply demands our attention, and frankly of Christians, demands a Christian thinking about the issues, the life, the consequence, the times, and the office of the presidency, how all of these things come together, personal character, political policy, convictions, worldview, timing, events, all of these things come together, some of them under a president’s control, but in a way that should humble us all, many of them outside any human control.

It is also interesting to note that there will be a change of tone, and this is something Christians should understand. There’s a change of tone, in most cases, the vast majority of cases, when an individual of historic stature dies, there’s a marked tendency towards a very generous historical analysis, and that’s understandable. That doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong, it is understandable at the time, but it’s also very important that we not just look at the political conversation or the conversation among the talking heads and the media elite in 2024 looking back at the presidency of Jimmy Carter, but rather that would take a longer view and understand these things in a way that might miss or be missed in a lot of the national conversation.

So let’s look at the fact that Jimmy Carter was born to a peanut farmer, basically proverbially in Plains, Georgia in 1924. As a young man, he had aspirations, and those aspirations were largely directed at the United States Navy and specifically at the United States Naval Academy. He didn’t win the appointment he hoped for at first, but he eventually did gain admission to that illustrious institution, the Naval Academy, at Annapolis. He graduated, and upon graduation, he entered the service of the Nuclear Submarine Corps under the famed Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover. Rickover was a famous Titanic figure, not only in the history of the United States Navy, but particularly when it came to his advocacy for nuclear power and for the power and the strategic importance of a submarine fleet. Rickover was very convincing, and the naval policy and general war policy in the United States was increasingly seen to turn in the direction of the strategic capability of the submarines themselves.

That even as Jimmy Carter was serving in that Officer Corps and was serving on a submarine, the reality is he didn’t serve for long, and when there was trouble in the family business back in Plains, Jimmy and his wife, Rosalynn, went back to Georgia. Rosalynn Carter later said that she had been very disappointed about that decision because she had enjoyed that life escaping the parochialism of that little Georgia town life as a Navy officer’s wife, and now she was going back to Plains, and not only that, she was going back at least for a time to live with her mother-in-law as Jimmy and Rosalynn moved in with Lillian Carter there in Plains, Georgia.

But after helping the business to achieve some stability, it was very clear that Jimmy Carter was looking at a political future. That political future was not first of all aimed at the White House, but it was aimed high. And very soon in that political trajectory, Jimmy Carter set his eyes on being elected the governor of the state of Georgia. He was elected Georgia’s governor in 1970 in a very divisive and controversial race. And by the way, at that point in Georgia politics, the controversial and divisive dynamic was not really between the two political parties, it was rather the race for the nomination of the Democratic Party because at that time, Georgia was still pretty much a one party state, and that one party was the Democratic Party. As you know, that was soon to change, but it was in 1970 that Jimmy Carter was elected governor of Georgia.

Now here’s something very interesting. When Jimmy Carter was running for that Democratic nomination, his main competitor was a former governor of Georgia, Carl Sanders. And it is really interesting that when Carter was running in that race, he depicted his opponent as being too liberal on racial issues. And frankly, Jimmy Carter even identified himself politically with a very controversial character, and that would be the Alabama governor, George Wallace.

And so he ran basically against liberalism on racial lines. And yet, as soon as he gave his inaugural address, and once he began to speak as Georgia’s governor in 1971, he shifted towards a very liberal, indeed very progressivist mode in terms of a Southern Democratic politician. In other words, he ran on one platform. It is now understood to have been very much an example of political coding, that is using encoded messaging in one’s political messages and political speeches and advertisements in such a way as to wink at the voters about a certain position. Jimmy Carter would of course famously run as president on the pledge, “I will never lie to you.” But in a very real sense, he began his major role in democratic politics when he won the Democratic nomination in 1970 there in the race for Georgia governor, he basically won that race on the basis of a, let’s just say, misrepresentation encoded.

But the years that Jimmy Carter spent as governor of Georgia were spent also at the very same time that the Democratic Party was learning of a very important new constituency. These were the new Democrats in what was defined as the New South. Now, in historical terms, this was a newer New South. This was a brand of moderate to progressivist democratic governors. They included Reuben Askew in Florida as well as Jimmy Carter in Georgia, others in neighboring states. They were presented as a potential future for the Democratic Party in a time when the American electorate was shifting remarkably.

The most remarkable shift came in 1968 when Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States because that was largely seen as the result of democratic failure and in particular, the political collapse of the Johnson Administration in the years 1966 through 1968. There was clearly a new coalition that was emerging, and what was really important to recognize is that many, for example, blue collar white workers were shifting in their allegiance to the Democratic Party, to the Republican Party.

At the same time, some of these more progressivist democratic figures in the South were presenting themselves on the national stage as representatives of a more progressivist vision for the Democratic Party, which is to say the Democratic Party, we would use the language today moving to the left. But when Jimmy Carter, who was by the way at that time term limited to one term of four years as the governor of Georgia, it was very clear that he wasn’t satisfied with being the governor of Georgia. He set his sights on the White House.

Now, in order to put that into historical context, you need to recognize that no figure, no democratic figure, no figure of any kind of national stature had emerged really from the South during that period, certainly to get all the way to the White House. And so with the exception you might say of LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had been Kennedy’s vice president, and then upon President Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson of course became President of the United States. Then in 1964, LBJ was reelected at a very big election, but his administration very quickly took a turn, basically hitting an iceberg, and that iceberg was named Vietnam.

There were other issues including social unrest in the United States, particularly on college and university campuses also unrest in major cities across the United States. All of this led to the collapse of the Johnson Administration, which eventually led to Democratic defeat in the 1968 presidential race. That realignment was something that a lot of people recognized, and it wasn’t only people on the Republican side who recognized opportunity, it was also some figures on the Democratic side. And among those who were watching the Democratic Party, the most interesting characters to watch in terms of, say, the 1970s was this group of southern Democratic governors. Jimmy Carter put himself at the top of that list. And here’s the thing, Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976 would’ve been incomprehensible except for the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard Nixon, just as a matter of say 1972 to 1974.

And then you had Nixon’s chosen vice president in an unusual circumstance, Gerald Ford, who had been the Republican leader in the House. He became Nixon’s successor, he became President of the United States. He had not been elected either president or vice president when he took office, and at that time, Gerald Ford was a very weak candidate, but he also had a certain stability when it came to the fact that at least he was in the White House.

People really didn’t know Jimmy Carter, but Jimmy Carter was indefatigable as a candidate. He was absolutely relentless in his race for the Democratic nomination. He won that Democratic nomination in 1976, beating all odds, and frankly, the hopes of the Democratic Party all of a sudden fell on Jimmy Carter, and Jimmy Carter narrowly won the 1976 election against Gerald Ford. It was a nail biter down to the last minute. Had Gerald Ford not made one strategic mistake, and that was speaking of Poland, he said not being under communist domination, he said he was misunderstood. That’s almost assuredly true, but that kind of misstatement is fatal or potentially fatal for a presidency, certainly in the midst of an election like 1976.

Gerald Ford lost. Jimmy Carter won. And when Jimmy Carter won, he entered the White House with what he acted as if was a giant mandate. But in reality, it turned out that Jimmy Carter was, in retrospect, a far better campaigner than he was executive in office. To be sure, Jimmy Carter faced some very daunting circumstances. Economically, there was continued inflation, and of course there was also what became known as the Arab oil crisis. And in that situation, a constriction of oil due to Arab nations in what was then understood to be a very clear cartel known as OPEC. The Arab nations, given US support for Israel in particular, closed off the source of oil, oil prices, gasoline prices hit the roof. Heating prices also followed. It became an era of energy shortage.

Jimmy Carter said the way to deal with this is to basically turn down the thermostat. He and Rosalynn were famously energy efficient, turning out lights there in the White House, as if that’s what American citizens wanted. Jimmy Carter spoke to the American people. He basically preached at them that they were expecting too much and told them they should turn the thermostats down. He famously wore a cardigan sweater, but it turns out that Americans really don’t want a president wearing a sweater. They want a power figure wearing a suit, showing up, making executive decisions, and telling the nation, “Here’s how we’re going to solve the problem.”

Jimmy Carter can claim big success in foreign policy, and that was the Egypt and Israel Peace Treaty known as the Camp David Accords, at least in terms of the most crucial negotiation, and that took place with a lot of personal intervention, very personal intervention, when it came to Carter’s work among, between, and sometimes with Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, then the President of Egypt. And those peace accords have basically held, at least in terms of military action between Israel and Egypt, and furthermore, it has also led to a different security situation for Israel. That’s something we’ll discuss at greater length, of course, in days and weeks ahead, crucial decisions to be made, especially in light of the incoming Trump Administration. And yet, as you look at the situation when Jimmy Carter was president, you have to give him credit for the fact that he really did put his presidency on the line for the cause of this peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

On the other hand, you also have to say that years later, former president Jimmy Carter, as he was then, wrote a book in which he infamously basically accused Israel in terms of its efforts to maintain its own security as running something of a terrorist state. The arguments Carter made in that book basically argue for a form of moral equivalence, which quite honestly is not going to be accepted by any American administration, weak as it may be towards Israel, but there were other dynamics as well.

Jimmy Carter was speaking of the promise of improved relationships with the Soviet Union complaining that previous administrations have been too negative towards the Soviet Union and its leadership. Very shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union infamously invaded Afghanistan, and that made the American president not look only as one who’s misunderstood the situation, it made America look weak. Jimmy Carter’s response was a political action against the Soviet Union that did have some effect, but the bottom line is that in terms of international prestige, the United States was not seen as a strong player, particularly when it came to the Commander-in-Chief and the White House. And all of that, however, was dwarfed by what happened in 1979 in wake of the Iranian Islamic Revolution when student forces aligned with the revolution took over 60 hostages in the US Embassy there in Tehran and held them as political leverage against the United States.

And then bad went to worse when President Carter authorized a military attempt to rescue the hostages that led to absolute disaster there in the sands of the Middle East in what can only be described as a humiliation for the United States of America. The bottom line is that Jimmy Carter lost his effort to be re-elected president in the 1980 election, and he lost in a massive landslide of then former California Governor Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate. The rest, as they say, is history. Jimmy Carter never got over the 1980 election, and quite honestly in an unprecedented way, he began to involve himself in American foreign policy in ways that may well have been illegal, but certainly broke precedent in terms of his open criticism of his successors in the Oval Office, particularly in terms of foreign policy.

But I want to leave that for a moment and then go to two dimensions that demand our attention. One of them is Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency. And so even as you had many people say, look, he wasn’t that great a president, okay, he may even have been a failed president, but he had a very successful post-presidency.

That period of time after Jimmy Carter left office, and remember, he left office in January of 1981, so we’re talking about looking now at more than 40 years ago when Jimmy Carter left office soon to be near 50 years ago. Jimmy Carter lived for a long time, and he and his wife, Rosalynn, were deeply involved in humanitarian and charitable work. They led efforts against, for example, Guinea worm disease, which is a very real threat, and basically they led to international effort. They were catalysts for that international effort that has largely eradicated Guinea worm disease as a problem throughout much of what is known as the Third World. It is also true that he was involved with groups such as Habitat for Humanity and a lot of humanitarian effort building, renovating, improving a lot of houses, and he did that as an example of volunteerism in the United States, all that to the good in terms of the humanitarian work.

But it’s also true that Jimmy Carter still wanted to play a role in American foreign policy. He still wanted to play a role in global affairs. It was largely a self-appointed role, and it was one that often put him at odds with the incumbent in the White House. And by the way, here’s a little footnote that was true whether the incumbent who followed him in the White House was a Democrat or a Republican. His relationship, for example, with his Democratic successor in office, Bill Clinton, former Governor of Arkansas, that was notoriously a stormy relationship.

But Carter also made very ill-advised statements in the international context against President George W. Bush in terms of the American effort in response to the attacks of 9/11. Without going into a lot of detail here, it’s just important to say that once leaving office, it was clear that Jimmy Carter did not intend to conclude his involvement in foreign affairs, but the United States legally has only one person in the White House at a time, and that person is responsible for American foreign policy. And at that point, Jimmy Carter, by the way, there is no office of former president, Jimmy Carter was a private citizen, and it’s really beyond question that he broke the law in terms of his involvement in these international incidents, at least in some of them, and in his public criticism of the foreign policy of the United States also is dealing with foreign leaders. And Jimmy Carter was probably the first, and he probably won’t be the last former president to be involved in such situations, but he was involved at a stature and at a level that was unprecedented in American history.

And of course it was in 2002 that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And by the way, that doesn’t come out of a political vacuum. That’s a political act in itself by the Nobel Committee. And at that point, it was, in essence, the European elite saying, we like Jimmy Carter, particularly when compared to the president at the time, and that will be President George W. Bush. That’s the way a lot of these international awards actually play out. It’s as much about politics as about anything else, but still, Jimmy Carter became one of the very few individuals to be presented with the Nobel Peace Prize after being one of the very few individuals to have been elected President of the United States. That means that he is an individual with a very significant role to play on the world stage. You add it all together, and it is really clear that Jimmy Carter’s place in history, you can say, is secured by the fact that he will be known as the 39th President of the United States.

An event that took place rather late in his administration was to have begun as the White House Conference on the family. It became the White House Conference on families. It was infamously, basically, an abdication to more liberal and progressivist reorientations of family. And honestly, the co-opting of the word family in which the White House became complicit. The opposition to Jimmy Carter among Evangelicals in 1980 came not because Evangelicals misunderstood Jimmy Carter, but precisely because we understood him.

In conclusion, you can count on piles and piles, miles and miles and hours and hours of commentary on Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, upon his death at age 100 just yesterday. And it’s important that there be that kind of conversation. The volume and quantity of that conversation, by the way, has to be put in the context of the natural media response to a major figure who has died. That tends to be a far more positive response than would’ve been true before that death announcement, or frankly, even later.

But it’s also true that most of the people right now working in the media were either born after or certainly went into the profession long after Jimmy Carter had left the White House, and so there’s an issue of distance there. But the most important thing I think we need to understand is the historians are going to debate the rankings of presidents. They’re going to do this. And by the way, most in that particular profession and in academia are pretty liberal to begin with. Jimmy Carter, of course, a one-term president, losing his race for the second term in a landslide is not going to go down as a political winner in American history. Although his milestone in winning the presidency itself in 1976 is historic.

But the reality is that when you look at the verdict of history, that’s a verdict that is continually being renegotiated depending upon who are the historians who are making the verdict, or for that matter what is even the spirit of the age at the time. Jimmy Carter lived one of the strategic lives of our times, and he was after all, which remember elected President of the United States, so there are political arguments to be had, and there are political debates that are going to go on and on. But Christians understand that the final verdict and the only verdict that really matters is before the throne of God where all of us one day will stand. Sadly, you’re not likely to hear that truth or that context in the national ceremonies soon to come, but they are soon to come, and that’s a part of our national life. Let’s seek to understand these things as Christians.