When former President Jimmy Carter died on Dec. 29, remembrances and tributes began pouring in, mostly related to his accomplishments after leaving the White House. Carter, whose death at age 100 makes him the longest-living president in American history, rose from beginnings as a Georgia peanut farmer to become the leader of the free world, but it was his efforts post-presidency that have endeared him to subsequent generations.
While his decades after the presidency were defined by numerous humanitarian efforts, including massive advancements for Habitat for Humanity and the near-eradication of the deadly Guinea worm disease, most historians consider his actual presidency a failure. This is largely due to his botched handling of the Iranian hostage crisis and a series of economic issues that confounded his four years in office.
Carter’s life is now set to be remembered in the history books, and political analysts and those who knew him seem to be reconsidering the Carter administration and its consensus as a “failure.” While his post-presidency will always be what he is remembered for the most, a reevaluation of his presidency itself may also be needed.
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Conventional history “holds that Jimmy Carter was a failure as a president, redeemed only by his philanthropy and efforts to promote democracy in his post-presidential years,” but this is “palpably wrong,” Stuart E. Eizenstat, Carter’s chief White House domestic policy adviser, said at The Washington Post. Rather, what Carter achieved both domestically and foreign policy-wise was “more extensive and longer lasting than those of almost all modern presidents.” Carter also “helped restore trust in the presidency through ethics reforms more relevant today than ever before” in the years after the Watergate scandal fell on Washington, D.C.
So while Carter left office with disastrously low approval ratings, he “should also be remembered as a consequential president whose single term produced lasting accomplishments,” Eizenstat said at The Wall Street Journal. His “success rate at passing major legislation was among the highest of modern presidents,” and he also “respected the institutions of government and the free press, no matter how brutal its coverage.” But “many major successes remain unappreciated.”
This is why viewing Carter as a failed president “doesn’t bear scrutiny: He was not a weak president,” said Jonathan Alter at the Post. While Carter dealt with several crises during his administration, they were “largely beyond his control,” including the “seizure of 52 American hostages in Iran and the failed rescue mission to free them.” And while Carter is blamed for the poor American economy during his tenure, this “resulted largely from disruptions in Middle Eastern oil supplies.”
Carter will “face history’s judgment in determining whether” his presidency “resulted from sheer misfortune or Carter’s miscalculations,” said Barbara A. Perry at Newsweek. But judicially, his “commitment to egalitarianism on matters of race and gender manifested itself in his approach to federal court nominations,” and his attempts to “balance the representative characteristics of appointees, especially in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, gave him an influential role in shaping the national judiciary.”
If “you’re president and you’re defeated for a second term — that, in our system, is the definition of failure,” Les Francis, a strategist who worked for Carter, said to the Los Angeles Times. But Carter “also had a self-righteousness that could present as starchy and sanctimonious, a trait he exhibited even in his good works once he left the White House” but hindered him while in office, Mark Z. Barabak said at the Times.
What next?
Carter’s state funeral will take place on Jan. 9, which President Joe Biden also declared a National Day of Mourning. The president will deliver a eulogy at Carter’s memorial service, reportedly at the behest of Carter himself; there was a “unique relationship Biden developed with Carter early on in his political career,” NPR said.
The 39th president is set to be buried in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, where he was born and died. He will be laid to rest alongside his wife, Rosalynn Carter, who died in November 2023 at the age of 96.
