Jimmy Carter’s presidency was a political accident. It took place under extraordinary circumstances, probably unrepeatable. But the 44 years after his presidency, radiated more power and added more dignity to the American presidency than the years of any president’s retirement. He was said to be the ‘greatest ex-president’ of the USA.
Ironically, the years after his presidency brought his influence to its peak. He is the only American president who received a Nobel Peace Prize for what he did after leaving the White House.
Israelis will remember him with mixed feelings: his presidency gave Israel the greatest strategic achievement in its history, peace with Egypt; His post-presidency inflicted on Israel the greatest psychological blow in the history of its diplomacy, its identification with apartheid, which, although it preceded Carter, reached its peak under Carter’s inspiration.
This is just one example of the extent to which the 39th president of the United States expressed contradictions and contained contradictions. In his death, he makes it difficult for us to summarize, but such difficulty is required from the life of a man who reached the age of one hundred, and lived longer than any American president before him.
A ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus
He was an evangelical Christian, of the theological variety known as “born again” – that is, someone who came back and got to know Jesus Christ, and established a ‘personal relationship’ with him. Until Carter’s time, this category was known to very few secular, or semi-secular, Americans; And to the extent that it was known, it provoked ridicule, or at least embarrassment. Carter got her into the lounges of America.
There was quite a bit of irony in this phenomenon, because Carter’s entry through the left door of politics occurred just as masses of evangelical Christians like him began using the right door for the first time. His presidency fell apart four years later, when evangelical voters (and not just them) carried Ronald Reagan to the White House on their shoulders.
Carter presented a new model of politics, a combination of kindness and piety. His religious faith guided him to try to help others; His political needs led him to try and preach morality to Americans in the tone of a southern church preacher.
He came from the state of Georgia, in what is known as the ‘Deep South’ of the USA. He entered politics in the mid-1960s, when Georgia was reluctantly dragged into an era of racial equality. The party The Democratic Party of the Southern States was until then the standard bearer of institutionalized racism. He joined it just as the change of shifts began, and the Democrats became the advocates of honesty of a new liberal order, which was Too radical in the eyes of most southerners.
Carter was destined to be a walking dissonance for two: the devout Christian, who heads a secular liberal party; The southerner, the fighter for equal rights at home and for human rights abroad. In that sense, he was foreign and strange. His public speeches caused discomfort, and sometimes ridicule. Even his accent was foreign to most American ears.
Jimmy who?
He was almost completely unknown when he presented his candidacy for the presidency, in 1974, while election campaigns were still relatively short. His long election campaign broke many conventions. He had an incredible success due to the circumstances: it was precisely at the time when the souls of Americans were torn from their politicians: the days of the Watergate affair and the shameful resignation of President Richard Nixon. Carter stuck with the nickname ‘Jimmy Who?’ (?Jimmy Who), but he turned his anonymity into something to dig into. He beat all the giants of his party in the primaries.
The first cabinet meeting of his presidency he allowed the television networks to record in its entirety, in the belief of an expression for the new times, in which Americans will only hear the truth from the mouths of their leaders.
On the second day of his presidency, in January 1977, during a harsh winter, in the midst of a global energy crisis, Carter ordered the temperature in the White House to be reduced to 18 degrees, and called on Americans to follow suit. He even advised them to consider wearing woolen underwear.
The 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, in the White House, 1977 / Photo: Reuters, Reuters
He placed radical energy legislation at the center of his domestic policy, warning Americans that if they did not change their consumption habits, within ten years each of them would be paying $2,500 for imported fuel. He was right. The energy crisis worsened and produced a severe recession, along with the highest inflation in American history.
Although his party controlled both houses of Congress, his legislative initiative failed. It was a hint of things to come. The Democratic president was not a president of the Democrats. He did not speak to their hearts, and did not speak from their hearts.
Human rights designed by dictators
Domestic failures always encourage American presidents to try their hand at foreign policy. Those were the days of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Carter was not suspected of sympathizing with communism, but he ended up saying to change priorities.
In the fourth month of his presidency, he gave a historic speech, in which he announced that the US would no longer automatically support any government or ruler, just because they described themselves as anti-communist. America’s new mission would be to promote human rights. It was a real diplomatic revolution, which aroused admiration and irritation.
The irritation came from regimes that resented the authority that the US assumed to intervene in ‘internal affairs’. Washington began to demand from its allies in the Third World (Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America) to prove their seriousness in promoting human rights.
One of them was the Shah of Iran, whose record up to that time was dubious and tarnished. Later, Carter would be blamed for his pressure weakening the Shah, and enabling the Islamic Revolution. The accusation was wrong. In truth, it can be argued that the downfall of the Shah was precisely related to Carter’s avoidance of pressuring him.
Be that as it may, the Iranian revolution ultimately sealed Carter’s own fate: the kidnapping of American diplomats in Tehran in the fall of 1979 exposed America’s weakness and short-sightedness. Historians are confident that she played a major role in Carter’s defeat in the 1980 election. His opponents on the right described him as weak and naive.
He also misunderstood the behavior of the Soviet Union. He tried to thaw relations with her, among other things, with a famous public kiss on the cheek of the Soviet leader Brezhnev, in 1979.
Jimmy Carter kisses the leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, during the signing of the SAIL-2 agreement, in 1979 / photo: ap
Six months later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The humiliated Carter ordered the freezing of relations, sanctions, the boycott of the Olympics in Moscow and massive aid to the Muslim insurgents in Afghanistan. Later, that aid produced Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The diplomat president
Against his chilling failures, stood his historic success in establishing peace between Israel and Egypt. He devoted more time and effort to reconciling these two bitter enemies than any American president has devoted to any international conflict.
Carter, who was not good at delegating authority in any matter (he would set the schedule for the use of the tennis court at the White House himself), conducted a hopping trip between Cairo and Jerusalem when the process came close to collapsing, in early 1979. He was the first diplomat president ever.
It is possible to state without any hesitation that without him the peace agreements would not have been signed. They were the introduction to the next 40 years. Without them, Abraham’s agreements would not have been signed later. Without them, the moderates in the Arab world would disappear, or be pushed to the distant margins. Without them, the possibility of another all-out war between Israel and the Arabs was almost inevitable.
Jimmy Carter receives the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2002 / Photo: Reuters, Reuters
But Carter paid increasing attention to the fate of the Palestinians. Arguably, he put them on the map of American politics. A cover of the weekly ‘Time’, two months before Anwar al-Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, in 1977, quoted Carter as saying that “the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people must be recognized”.
In the 40 years since his presidency, Carter has shown a growing interest in the Palestinians. In 2006, Israel’s anger burned in her to corrupt, when Carter published a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict under the name “Peace, Not Apartheid”. The use of this language by a former American president had extraordinary weight. We see its results to this very day. It can be argued that he opened the door to the wholesale comparison of Israel with the white racial discrimination regime in South Africa. In 2008, he met the leader of Hamas in those days, Khaled Mashal, in Damascus. When he came to Israel, the prime minister at the time, Ehud Olmert, refused to meet him.
Carter then tried to dull the sting. He said, “This is not Israel. The book has nothing to do with what is happening inside Israel, which is a wonderful democracy, where equal rights are guaranteed to all… I have never accused that the framework of apartheid exists inside Israel, and what exists in the West Bank is based on an attempt to take the Palestinian lands , and not about racism.”
But the cover of the book was seen in every store in the US at the time. It continues to occupy one of the first four places on the sales list of books about the Middle East on the Amazon website. Although one can certainly believe Carter’s explanation, that book caused enormous damage to Israel’s cause and its good name.
It is doubtful that there will be presidents like Carter anytime soon. Some of his successors tried from time to time to imitate him, and his emphasis on human rights did indeed change the direction of American foreign policy – but none of them did so with the same messianic devotion and sincerity.
Perhaps Providence did a favor with Carter, who ended his life three weeks before Donald Trump entered the White House. There is and cannot be a more stark contrast between these two presidents.