Jimmy Carter Remembered as a President Who Was Ahead of His Time
President Jimmy Carter with First Lady Rosalynn Carter after addressing the 118th annual National Education Association (NEA) Convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center July 3, 1980, as part of his failed re-election campaign. AP Photo/NewsBase
Jimmy Carter Remembered as a President Who Was Ahead of His Time
A trio of Boston University experts on history, political science, and international relations shared their assessments of America’s 39th president, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who died on Sunday, December 29, at the age of 100
Jimmy Carter, the former Georgia governor and peanut farmer who became the 39th president of the United States, died on Sunday, December 29, at his home in Plains, Ga., at age 100, according to a statement released by his son, James E. Carter III. He was the oldest living US president of all time and also a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
“The world needs more decent and humble politicians like Jimmy Carter,” says Timothy Longman, a professor of political science at Boston University’s College of Arts & Sciences and a professor of international relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. “It was true back when he was in office and is even more true today.”
Carter served a single term as president, from 1977 to 1981, defeating President Gerald Ford in 1976 to bring a new perspective to the White House after Watergate, but lost to Ronald Reagan by a landslide in 1980 in the shadow of the 444-day Iran Hostage Crisis. His greatest achievement as president was likely shepherding Israel and Egypt to sign the Camp David peace accords.
Long after his time in the White House, Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for establishing the Carter Center, whose motto, Waging peace, Fighting disease, Building hope, is emblematic of his life. He drove the effort to eliminate Guinea worm disease, which once afflicted millions, served as an election monitor around the world, and built houses with Habitat for Humanity well into his 90s.
He was known for his deep religious faith and his love for Rosalynn, his wife since 1946, who was one of his closest advisers during his White House years. Rosalynn Carter died November 19, 2023, at their home after opting for hospice care. She was 96.
While Carter was living in hospice care, Longman and two other BU experts—a political scientist and a historian—discussed his legacy. Virginia Sapiro is a College of Arts & Sciences professor emerita of political science and dean emerita of Arts & Sciences. Andrew David (CAS’05, GRS’18) is a lecturer in social science at the College of General Studies and an expert on the modern presidency.
Sapiro met Carter more than once, including in the mid-1990s when she was the former president’s host at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a member of the faculty and administration.
“When he got off the plane,” Sapiro recalls, “he looked tired and old. But as soon as he was around people, especially the students for whom he gave a closed-door seminar, he perked up, was lively, jovial, engaged, truly responsive.
“As we waited in the green room for his speech later in the day,” she says, “I found him deeply smart, wickedly funny, generous, and easy to talk with. He made it clear he would not cut off the questions; it was my job, when he gave me a little look, to say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President.'”
Q&A
with Timothy Longman, Andrew David, and Virginia Sapiro
BU Today: Carter’s presidency has been criticized almost since it began. Fair or not? And how have opinions evolved over time?
Longman: The conventional wisdom, even among political scientists, has been that Carter’s presidency was a failure, because he lost reelection overwhelmingly and left with high unfavorability. But I believe his failings were mostly due to his being a poor communicator. He faced some tough circumstances, like high inflation and high unemployment and the Iran hostage crisis, but was unable to build public confidence in his responses.
In terms of policy, though, he was ahead of his time. He pushed for energy conservation decades before concern for the environment became widespread. He was the first president to make human rights part of his foreign policy, something I particularly appreciate as a scholar of human rights. And, of course, the Camp David Accords were an important effort to promote peace in the Middle East.
David: Carter gets a lot of flak for things that he did in office. While his reputation has undergone (and is undergoing) a significant reassessment, the fact is that he made mistakes. He wasn’t great at managing people, in many cases. The time he fired half his cabinet in 1979 is an example. He did this to show he meant business: he’d clear out underperforming cabinet officials and bring in folks who could do the job. Instead of this being seen as a decisive moment of strength, many Americans were confused about why people Carter himself had hired were now labeled as so detrimental.
Yet he also had successes we forget. He brought new ideas to Washington that didn’t always work as he wanted, but were quite farsighted. He worked to shift America’s dependence away from fossil fuels, signing into law legislation on improving vehicle fuel efficiency and addressing the impact of toxic waste on the American environment. He even put solar panels on the White House—soon to be taken down by Ronald Reagan. Carter also wasn’t afraid to talk about difficult issues. His “Crisis of Confidence” speech, popularly but incorrectly called the “Malaise Speech,” polled quite well in its aftermath and was ultimately a speech about the strength of the American character and how Americans could live better lives.
Carter came into office promoting the idea of a foreign policy focused on human rights and doing the morally “correct” thing on the world stage. This was controversial at the time and, we can argue, had mixed results at best. But few political figures have done so much to really wrestle with America’s role on the world stage in terms of having a foreign policy that lives up to American ideals
“The world needs more decent and humble politicians like Carter. It was true back when he was in office and is even more true today.”
BU Today: His postpresidential life, on the other hand, was remarkable. What strikes you about that chapter in his life?
Sapiro: After a brief period of postelection depression, Carter launched a unique postpresidential career firmly based in his lifelong passions for problem-solving, peace, and justice. In 1983 he founded the Carter Center, a nonpartisan organization with a “fundamental commitment to human rights and the alleviation of human suffering.” His personal role has involved considerable hands-on work marked distinctively by a deep modesty and avoidance of the limelight and microphones.
What is unique about this work is his quiet dedication to the values and goals enunciated in the Carter Center mission, all grounded, as usual, in a personal commitment to a form of Christianity quite unlike the hard, exclusionary, gun-toting, performative version that characterizes much of the Christian right today.
Longman: He distinguished himself with work promoting democracy and helping prevent illnesses like river blindness and guinea worm and providing housing for the poor. But in reality, these are the sorts of priorities that he embraced as president, and his work since leaving office is a continuation of what he did in office.
As someone who studies religion and politics, I appreciate Carter as a person who demonstrated his religious faith with actions more than words. There are so many politicians today who wear their religion on their sleeves but treat others with so little compassion that it’s hard to understand what their faith stands for. But with Carter, he showed compassion for the poor in the United States and abroad. He displayed such humility and decency.
BU Today: What do his life and conduct tell us about today’s political environment?
Longman: We often think that nasty politics is something new, but Carter’s experience in office reminds us that politics has always been a dirty game. Ronald Reagan was a great communicator and a better politician. Jimmy Carter was a more visionary leader who promoted policies far ahead of his time, but he was bad at messaging. He was aggressively attacked, and members of his own party, like Massachusetts’ own Tip O’Neill [longtime Speaker of the House] and Ted Kennedy [Hon.’70], undercut him.
David: Whether they admit it or not, Carter put a stamp on Democratic politics. The idea of the humble “Washington outsider” who embraces (in part) their faith wasn’t created by him, but he was the first person who campaigned on those ideas and got elected. Bill Clinton ran on a similar set of ideas in 1992, and John Edwards tried to do the same in 2004 and 2008. Even Barack Obama ran on a version of this idea. Second, I think his downfall underscored an evolution in the presidency. Presidents who are successful electorally and politically have to be able to play to the cameras in a way that Carter struggled with. I think he often believed that the strength of his ideas would be self-evident to the public.
Sapiro: I prefer the more historical question: what are the impacts of Jimmy Carter and the Carter presidency on politics today? He was dedicated to an engineer’s view of political work framed by his deep values. Stick to your values, pursue deep research and analysis, and be willing to take risks and fail.
The widespread impression that he was weak and a failure has served as a cautionary tale: to succeed one must go with the flow, be tactical rather than strategic, talk a lot, and be performative. His vice president, Walter Mondale, apparently said, “The worst thing you could say to Carter if you wanted him to do something was that it was politically the best thing to do.” That does not sound like many politicians.
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