When I was a teenager, before I grew into political consciousness, there was one president who somehow entered my world. Not Barack Obama; he would come later, in the critical year of 2007, when the railway of my life split in two opposing directions. 

This was the mid-2000s and everywhere I turned, I saw the same book, by a man called Jimmy Carter, a former president my father told me. There were only two living former Democratic presidents at the time, and Carter was one of them.

Even his name sounded unusual for a former president—Jimmy, like it was casual, unpretentious. And what President Carter was saying in 2006 made everyone sit up and pay attention. Some branded him an extremist, a radical. Unlike all the other former presidents during their lives—Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Obama—there was a constant disrespect and disparaging of Carter, even when he left office. Democrats distanced themselves from him. Republicans treated his very name like political cyanide.

During the 2008 Democratic National Convention, it is even rumored that Jimmy Carter’s speaking slot was cut—a rare slight against a former president. When President George W. Bush invited the living former presidents and the new president-elect to the Oval Office, just days before President Obama’s inauguration, the photograph afterwards spoke volumes—there were the four other presidents, and then Jimmy Carter, off to the side, awkwardly.

With the news that America’s oldest former president, is now in hospice care, it is important to reflect on just who Jimmy Carter was and what his legacy means. It’s time to set straight the record on President Carter—as I prefer to call him—before the obituaries, before his personal enemies come out of the woodworks to opine in the New York Times about what a great statesman President Carter was, before the historical record is whitewashed of the vitriol, ad hominem, and invective directed at President Carter during his lifetime, done in bad faith, and which he handled with enormous grace. 

The Carter Presidency, from 1977 to 1981, was monumentally important for the United States and the world—and still shapes our own era. President Carter was not only a good president; he was a great one, and his accomplishments in foreign policy alone distinguish him among all of his twentieth century peers. 

But let’s begin at home. Carter was a peanut farmer from the small town of Plains, Georgia, elected governor of his beloved state in 1970. He was later elected the 39th president of the United States in 1976, winning 50.1% of the vote and defeating the incumbent. Carter remains the most recent Democrat to win a majority of the South. After the scandals and crimes of the Nixon-Ford era, which included burglary and cover-ups, the Carter Presidency marked a new moment in American political life. 

From the start, Carter was different. He was a Baptist Christian and a man of genuine faith before faith became weaponized by the religious right. He promised to put human rights at the forefront of American foreign policy, after the various war crimes and duplicities of the Nixon-Kissinger era, which included the secret carpet bombings of Laos and the break-ins at Watergate. 

On President Carter’s first day in office, he announced—to the surprise of many—that peace in the Middle East would be a top priority for his administration. People wondered: What did a peanut farmer from Georgia know about the Holy Land? 

During his four years in office, Carter achieved multiple victories. On his second day Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders—a long overdue moment of healing after that disastrous war. Carter established the Department of Energy. He de-regulated airlines. He de-regulated trucking. And it is President Carter we can thank for the great American revolution in craft brewing, for Carter de-regulated the home brew industry in 1978 and opened the door to craft breweries across the country.

Subscribed

If the first distinguisher of a great president is their character, Carter was already unique. Carter was a family man, a farmer, a man of reflection. He seems almost quaint in our era of mendacity and nihilism, but just compare Carter to what came before and after. He was neither a crook like Nixon, nor a salesman and actor like Reagan. In fact, nothing Carter did during his four years even touches the disgrace of the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Ronald Reagan’s administration secretly sold arms to Iran to fund right-wing guerrillas in Nicaragua. Carter was neither womanizer, nor sleaze, nor the privileged son of a former president. He had a rare form of integrity and authenticity—which many mistook for naïveté. 

Carter inherited a recession when he took office. In 1977, he signed a $30 billion program of tax cuts and stimulus programs. The problem was more structural than administration-specific: inflation was persistent, growth was sluggish. The 1973 OAPEC embargo, followed later by the 1979 energy crisis, sent shockwaves through the U.S. economy. Carter’s appointment of Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve Chairman would help change things, eventually, but it would be too late. Carter was hamstrung by events far outside his control.

Yet it was in foreign policy where Carter really left his mark. It was Carter who began funding the mujahideen in Afghanistan, inducing the Soviet Union to invade and thereby take the first step in the crumbling of their empire. It was President Carter who, in 1980, announced the Carter Doctrine, declaring the Persian Gulf region a “vital interest” of the United States—meaning no major power could establish dominance in the region. To this day, the Carter Doctrine is the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, upheld by presidents of both parties, for good or ill.

So why was President Carter not given his due?

He lost the 1980 election and the losers of presidential elections are often forgotten in the American memory. But the outcome of that election had almost nothing to do with Carter. The major issue then was whether the Iranian ayatollahs, who had come to power in 1979, would release the 52 American hostages who were taken after the storming of the U.S. Embassy. The hostages were eventually released—after 444 days of being held by the Iranian leadership, while the American public watched.

The date and time they were released just happened to coincide with the moment that Ronald Reagan took the oath of office: January 20, 1981.

For years there have been allegations that the Reagan campaign struck a secret deal with the Iranian ayatollahs to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election. It’s an explosive claim, and has often been dismissed as conspiracy theory. Could the Reagan campaign really have conspired with a hostile, enemy regime that was holding American citizens hostage, just to get an edge over Carter?

As the New York Times reported in March 2023, after 43 years of secrecy, the Reagan campaign did exactly that.

What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally [Former Texas Governor], he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.

In other words, the Reagan campaign deliberately sabotaged negotiations and prevented the release of American hostages. Why? Because if Iran had released the hostages, it would help the president. Perhaps if Carter had sunk to such lows he could have easily won re-election.

But my case for Carter’s greatness does not hinge upon the 1980 election, or any of his other foreign policy decisions. There was a reason Carter was maligned and targeted after he left the presidency, and as I grew up, I learned that the issue that Carter helped to solve was the one they said could not be solved.

In 2006, Carter published a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book struck many as too radical, and Carter was criticized relentlessly. I recently re-read the book; it is a gentle introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict, even-handed and almost too optimistic by today’s standards. The book, read today, is a sort of Israel-Palestine 101. When it was published, Carter was condemned—and some even insinuated that he was an anti-semite.

The maligning of Jimmy Carter is not only tragedy but farce, because, to this day, Jimmy Carter is the only American president to actually achieve peace in the Middle East.

In September 1978, President Carter announced the Camp David Accords, signed by Egypt and Israel, normalizing relations between the two nations formerly at war. The Accords came about because of Carter’s own personal diplomacy. He invited Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David for talks. Begin was a hardline Israeli leader. Sadat was a staunch nationalist. The odds were long.

But after thirteen days of President Carter’s cajoling, prodding, pushing, listening, and negotiating, a peace deal was achieved. It was a historic moment. The Camp David Accords are still the foundation of all U.S. policies in the region. Signed by both Israel and Egypt, ratified by both governments, the Camp David Accords prohibit the acquisition of land by force. They mention the “Palestinian” people by name and put the Palestinian issue on the international stage. They are the starting point for all later attempts to achieve a just and lasting peace.

Let us repeat: President Carter is the only American president to actually achieve peace in the Middle East. And every clause of the Camp David Accords has been upheld by Carter’s successors. In 1982, Ronald Reagan reaffirmed the Camp David agreement. The peace overtures during the Bush, Clinton, and Obama years also built upon the Camp David Accords. And any future peace agreement—remote as it seems now—will also be based on President Carter’s work.

At a time of such great polarization and hatred, one wonders if it is not the spirit of the man who now enters his final hours that we need the most. Generosity. Integrity. Compassion. After he left the presidency, Carter went to work solving urgent public health problems in Africa, ridding the world of guinea worm. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich,” Carter once said. He had come to serve, and long into his life, serve he did. America, and the world, are better for it. All thanks to Jimmy.