Forty-four years ago this autumn Ronald Reagan campaigned against Jimmy Carter, asking Americans about the economy: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
President Jimmy Carter marks his centennial on Tuesday, the first former president to celebrate his 100th birthday. Americans surveying the character of their presidential candidates may well ask themselves, “Are we better off than we were 44 years ago?” The question answers itself.
A very infirm Jimmy Carter, who entered hospice care more than a year ago, poignantly and silently attended the funeral of his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, last November. Wheeled in, kept warm under a blanket, it seemed that the end was near. Yet Carter will now mark another birthday, and it is a pleasing thing that a good man bears the title of oldest living former president.
Carter has lived a life marked by service. The astonishing length of his post-presidency — he has spent more than half of his adult life as a former president — has put public service into the proper context. There is more to service than politics.
Carter’s century-long life moved through four phases of service — military, family, in political office and then elder (and very elderly!) statesman.
He grew up in rural Georgia, his father a peanut farmer and warehouse owner with his own political interests; Earl Carter had served in the state legislature. Jimmy entered the Naval Academy during World War II, graduating in 1946. He served seven years in the navy, five of them on a submarine. While other former presidents have aircraft carriers named after them, the USS Jimmy Carter is a submarine, in honour of the only president to have been a submariner.
He was preparing for deployment as an engineering officer on the Seawolf in 1953 when his father died. Carter resigned from the navy in order to return home and manage the family peanut farm. Thus began his service to the family business, the world of 1950s peanut farming far from the adventures and excitement of the navy. It was difficult at first, with the Carters living a short while in public housing. Carter persevered and made the family farm successful.
His political career began as humbly as possible, on the local board of education. He ran successfully for the state senate in 1962 and, not untouched by ambition, ran for governor in 1966. He would lose the primary to Lester Maddox, a fellow Democrat at a time when Georgia was a one-party state.
It was the blessing of good timing. Maddox, a staunch segregationist, proved intransigent — including denying Martin Luther King the honour of lying in state in the state capitol — at the height of the civil rights movement. He had closed his own restaurant rather than desegregate it.
Carter ran and won the gubernatorial election in 1970, in a campaign not untouched by pandering to racists. Yet after the arch-racist Maddox, it was easier to pursue a path of moderation, embracing racial equality. In his 1971 inaugural address as governor, Carter said flatly that “the time of racial discrimination is over.” He would not have been able to declare as much four years earlier.
The earnest, plain-spoken, somewhat dull Sunday school teacher from Plains, Ga., was no one’s idea of a presidential candidate when he declared his bid in 1975. But timing again was on his side. After the national nightmare of Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation, he campaigned on the somewhat minimalist promise of, “I will never lie to you.” That low bar seems impossibly high today.
It was enough in 1976, and Carter narrowly defeated Gerald Ford. His presidency was not a great success, save for the diplomatic triumph of the peace between Egypt and Israel, midwifed by Carter at Camp David. But his four years as president were less time than he had spent on a submarine or in the governor’s mansion. His life would not be defined by the White House years.
Then began his fourth phase of service, the 44-year post-presidency. In a way, being president was important because it enabled Carter to live long as a noble former president. The Carter Center in Atlanta became an international hub for peace-making and election-monitoring. Carter himself would undertake diplomatic missions. And he went back to teaching Sunday school.
Forty years ago, as Reagan was cruising to re-election, Carter joined his first Habitat for Humanity work project, where he, Rosalynn and a team of volunteers renovated an apartment building in New York City to create affordable housing for the poor. That gave rise to the annual Carter Work Project, raising the profile of Habitat for Humanity all over the world. The 40th Carter work project begins this Sunday in Minnesota.
Carter’s post-presidency taught the limits to politics, that no matter how noble elected service can be, it is in the resources of civil society, faith communities and volunteer associations that contributions to the common good are enduringly made. When George H.W. Bush spoke about “a thousand points of light,” he was describing the life that Carter was then living.
Carter had a religious conversion in the late 1960s and remained a devout Christian the rest of his life, even as he struggled with being a liberal in a conservative denomination.
He remains a reminder of the time — both in Canada and the United States — where the political left made room for religious voices. As much as Carter worried about the religious right — the Moral Majority rose to prominence during his presidency — the secular fundamentalism of the left was alien to his political vision.
The 100th birthday celebrations will be muted in the hospice. But a long life, well lived, is worthy of public celebration. And a reminder that all that is public is not political, even for a former president.
National Post