Humanity: How Jimmy Carter Lost an Election and Transformed the Post-Presidency (Kindle Single) by Jordan Michael Smith

Author:Jordan Michael Smith [Smith, Jordan Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2016-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN CARTER RETURNED to Washington, he was hailed as a hero. Even his Republican critics praised his courage and fairness. The conservative Washington Times complimented his bravery. And all of a sudden, all of Carter’s good works, all he had done since he had left Washington as a national disgrace more than eight years earlier, became noticed and admired inside the Beltway. “If scholars get around to evaluating presidential retirements, Carter’s will rank at the top,” declared the Washington Post. “In debt when he left the White House, eschewing a lecture agent and accepting only an occasional paid speech, he conducts himself as if his presidency was a priceless heirloom: sacred to him because it is sacred to the people.”

“As recently as last year’s election, Mr. Carter’s presidency was used as a foil by Mr. Bush and other Republican politicians,” the New York Times observed. “[But now] Mr. Carter is increasingly involved with programs dealing with world hunger, human rights and conflict resolution.” A different piece in the Times noted, “Jimmy Carter the man is emerging as the best former president.”

His return to Panama was recognized as a masterpiece of guerrilla diplomacy. Declared the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Mr. Carter, as he has been demonstrating quietly for years and has just demonstrated spectacularly in Panama, is the class of the field—the most imaginative, the most exemplary, and the most useful to his country; in short, the most presidential of the ex-presidents.” Time joined in, calling him “our best ex-president.” Yet another Washington Post article said he was “experiencing a kind of renaissance.”

Although his confrontation with Noriega didn’t stop the fraudulent election—President Bush launched a war to remove the Panamanian strongman, and Carter publicly opposed it, to Bush’s annoyance—his efforts to establish democracy in a troubled nation were lauded around the world.

As gushing as the praise was, none of it could encapsulate the magnitude of Carter’s actions as ex-president, because none of his many newfound admirers could foresee the ongoing importance he would have on the world stage.

Carter’s efforts in Panama were followed with similar diplomatic adventures in Nicaragua, Haiti, and North Korea. The same pattern repeated itself in all cases: Carter was tapped to do a job nobody else could do, and with his stubbornness and freelancing he often irritated the very presidents who had called upon him.

Sometimes this determination to achieve peace has gone too far. He flirted with treason in 1990 when he wrote a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council asking them to oppose President George H.W. Bush’s moves toward war with Iraq. When the New York Times reported on the correspondence, even Carter’s best friends criticized him. But he refused to apologize, saying only that “[it] was inappropriate perhaps.” In fact, the Logan Act prohibits any U.S. citizen—even a former president—from engaging in private diplomacy with foreign governments.

The flip side of this narrow-mindedness is an unceasing quest to improve international health. His mission to defeat Guinea worm in Africa and Asia has proved so successful that

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