Jimmy Carter: From Plains to Washington, D.C. After the First Three Years of the Cold War, What Do You Want Your Legacy to Be?

“Mr. President, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, what do you want your legacy to be?” When Jimmy Carter was sworn in as the president of the United States in 1977, the nation was still reeling from a period of political upheaval. “I came along at a time when Americans still remembered painfully the lies told and the debacle of Watergate. The mistakes that had been made in those previous years weren’t stigmatized because I was outside of Washington. “It’s a long way from Plains, Ga., to Washington, D.C.” “And I brought a fresh face of a peanut farmer, a working man who swore never to tell a lie or make a misleading statement. Jimmy Carter is from Georgia. I hope to be your next president.” “The president and his family surprise and delight everyone by walking the parade route down Pennsylvania Ave. The stand is in front of the White House. But winning the White House at the height of the Cold War carried extraordinary responsibility. The system is survivable. It’s verifiable.” A peanut farmer from Plains had a finger on the button to start the war. It is a frightening thought. I would respond if the soviets launched a missile attack, because we had 26 minutes before the missile hit New York or Washington. I knew I would have to respond, which could lead to a holocaust. So I went out of my way to understand the problems of Brezhnev. I used to sit by a globe and turn it to Moscow, and try to imagine how it looked out on the rest of the world with a formidable military force in NATO and tremendous challenge from China. And what would happen if the Soviets became convinced that they were in danger. Well, I tried to avoid all that, but it was a very, very terrible responsibility. To protect our nation and ourselves. Carter took pains to keep the peace and to broker a nuclear arms deal. He boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow after the soviets invaded Afghanistan, trying to arm the Afghan resistance fighters. “With Soviet invading forces in Afghanistan, neither the American people nor I will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow.” The goal was to get the Soviets to reform. “I wanted to change their system of government, but I also wanted to bring the Soviet Union into the international forum. The Soviet Union had, in effect, promised to honor human rights, and they had failed. But over a period of time, I think that may or may not have had an impact on Mikhail Gorbachev when he decided on glasnost and perestroika, and that in effect, resulted in the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, and also resulted in the withdrawal of Soviet invading troops from Afghanistan.” Carter forged major accomplishments in foreign policy despite his struggles with the Soviets, including establishing diplomatic relations with China, pushing through a Panama Canal treaty and brokering a historic Middle East peace deal. There are tensions on the Egyptian-Israeli border. “I recognized before I was president the importance of the Mideast crisis between Israel and Egypt because there had been four major wars in the previous 25 years. I took Sadat and Begin to Camp David, and we had a successful 13 days there. The Camp David Accords lead to a treaty between Israel and Egypt six months later. Not a word of which has ever been violated since.” But the watershed agreement did not fix the problems dogging Carter’s presidency: runaway inflation. “We must face a time of national austerity.” The energy crisis is not over. “All of us must learn to waste less energy.” Americans find a management style that is boring and pessimistic. “It is a crisis of confidence.” Carter lost his re-election in November 1979. “Good evening. Iranian students have occupied the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. In Iran, more than 50 Americans were taken hostage and held for the final days of Carter’s presidency. If we’d gotten warnings about the threat to our embassy, we’d have done something like strengthen the security there or remove our personnel. Polls predicted a close race, but in the end, Carter won in just five states and Washington, D.C. Tonight, the country is almost solidly in the Reagan colors. Jimmy Carter reinvented himself after leaving the White House. And redefined the role of a former president, finding his new purpose and esteem as a freelance statesman. [speaking Spanish] Carter says even political rivals asked for his diplomatic help. “Ronald Reagan didn’t take an active interest in the Mideast. He called me on the phone and asked if I would help write a speech that he would deliver, after he repudiated many of the things that I had done. I responded quickly. He sent his national security adviser or his speechwriter to my house, and we drafted the rest of his speech in the front room. “With respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we’ve embraced the Camp David framework as the only way to proceed.” “When George Bush senior came into the White House, they were interested in Latin America. They specifically asked me to help hold an election that would replace the Sandinistas peacefully and end the war. The Contra problem for Nicaragua will be solved by an honest election.” Carter’s diplomatic skills really got put to the test in 1994, when tensions between President Clinton and Kim Il Sung over North Korea’s nuclear program put the two countries on a collision course. “Kim Il Sung was giving me constant requests that I come to Pyongyang and help him resolve the impasse. I wrote President Clinton a letter and said, I have decided to go to North Korea. Al Gore, the vice president, was in the White House and he intercepted my letter and he said, ‘Mr. President, if you’ll change your letter to say I’m strongly inclined to go to North Korea instead of I’m going to North Korea, I’ll try to get President Clinton to agree to approve.’” Carter finally got the green light from the White House, or so he thought. “They didn’t think I had any chance to succeed. Good morning. I was successful. CNN camera crews broadcasted the historic negotiations. I am a nuclear engineer after training. I knew the intimacies of their nuclear power plant. I talked to their nuclear specialists and also directed to Kim Il Sung. And he and I agreed that he would not proceed with his nuclear program. The proposal was that there would be an immediate assurance that the I.A.E.A. inspectors would stay on site. When I got back to Seoul, though, I was told by the White House that they were dissatisfied. Al Gore was on the speakerphone. I want to come to Washington and explain what I did. And he told me, ‘Mr. President, you are not wanted in Washington. Our suggestion is you go directly back to Plains.’ Well, I was angry, put it mildly. I thought I had prevented a war. I thought I had worked out a satisfactory agreement for the future.” The press was filled with stories about how Carter turned what was supposed to be a private visit into a televised summit, as he touched down in the U.S. There was a story in The New York Times about me being too strict with myself and that I had made false claims regarding Kim’s acquiescence. That I was naive and ignorant and so forth. So I sent Kim Il Sung an urgent letter, and asked him to confirm to Clinton, not to me, all the agreements he had reached. I think there were at least 12 of them. The Clinton administration adopted it as their policy. The policy helped avert war. Jimmy Carter and President Clinton were wrong to appease a rogue nation like North Korea, which would later develop a nuclear arsenal, according to critics. Carter travelled the world with his Carter Center to fight disease and monitor elections in emerging democracies. “We believe that all of our questions have been answered.” Work that earned the former president a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, just as he was forging a very public campaign opposing the coming American invasion of Iraq. An emphasis on peace is what has to be met by global challenges. When we talked with President Carter in 2006, he laid out his vision of America’s role in the future, and his concerns about the post-9/11 world. “The announcement and practice of preemptive war, the complete abandonment of all the nuclear arms control agreements that were reached, the claim, in effect, that prisoners could be mistreated or tortured or deprived of habeas corpus, these are some of the things that I think has caused a deterioration in our country’s basic stature and integrity. I would like to see our country be the champion of human rights. The American Embassy looked upon people who suffer from human rights abuses as a haven. I want our nation to be the most generous in the world. These goals will not be my accomplishments, but they will affirm our nation’s moral strength and our belief in the American dream.

Much of the celebration of Mr. Carter’s legacy has centered on his groundbreaking postpresidential work. Understandably so: Beyond his tireless volunteering, working to build affordable homes with Habitat for Humanity well into his 90s, the Carter Center — his passion for the past 42 years — has worked with U.S.A.I.D. and others to nearly eliminate river blindness in the Western Hemisphere and to decrease the number of reported Guinea worm cases from more than three million per year in the mid-1980s to just 14 in 2023. In the last 50 years, Mr. Carter has changed the understanding of what a fair and free election requires by sending teams of impartial observers to monitor 125 elections in 40 countries. And after leaving office in 1981, he lent his mediation services to successive administrations, defusing tensions in such places as Guyana, Liberia and Sudan.

His foreign policy legacy was consequential when he was president. It includes the negotiation of the Camp David Accords, which brought about an enduring peace between Israel and Egypt, and the establishment of diplomatic relations with China (after the rapprochement begun under President Richard Nixon). The Panama Canal treaties were pushed through the Senate by Mr. Carter, a sign that the United States would be willing to deal fairly with smaller nations.

The former president’s regard for human rights was an outgrowth of his Christian faith — a faith so animating that he continued to teach Sunday school while president. He often quoted biblical passages in explaining why America had a responsibility to stand up for those being persecuted elsewhere. He quoted Jesus from Matthew 25:40: “Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”