The Unluckiness of Jimmy Carter

The conventional wisdom about Jimmy Carter, who died yesterday at the age of 100, is that he had a lousy presidency and a model post-presidency. There is some truth to that. During his four years in the White House, which began in 1977, inflation roared like it hadn’t in decades. In 1979, Iran took 53 American diplomats and citizens hostage—and when Carter tried a daring rescue mission, one of the helicopters crashed, killing eight American servicemen. During the final 1980 presidential debate, Ronald Reagan closed his arguments by asking, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan won the election by a landslide.

Yet even Carter’s harshest critics had to admire how he spent his years out of office: He worked with the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity to build badly-needed housing. He started a center that worked to eradicate disease and promote democracy—for which he won a Nobel Prize in 2002. And every Sunday he taught Bible study in Plains, Georgia, where he lived for much of his life.

What the conventional wisdom forgets is that while the country’s economic woes did Carter in, he also brokered peace between Egypt and Israel, and was the first president to emphasize “human rights.” And with his presidency coming just a few years after the Watergate scandal, his integrity was something the country badly needed to see. James Fallows, who had been his chief speechwriter for the first two years of his presidency, wrote in this fine 2023 reminiscence that, in many ways, Carter was simply unlucky. Having lived through his presidency, that strikes me as right. So does Fallows’s summation of the man: “disciplined, funny, enormously intelligent, and deeply spiritual.”