In Gratitude for Jimmy Carter

It was in March of last year that I started drafting this article. I had just heard that ex-President Carter had gone into hospice care. I was preparing to post an article about him as soon as possible after his passing—but he is still alive and has recently said he has to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris! So, I am posting this on the day before his 100^th birthday. 

Jimmy Carter in 2021

James Earl Carter, Jr., who “everybody” knows as Jimmy, is the only U.S. President I have shaken hands with—and on two separate occasions. Although not agreeing with him on everything, I have highly admired him for many decades now and am grateful for his long life and meritorious work.

Although I have mentioned Jimmy in several blog posts, the most I wrote about him was in the article posted on the day before his 90^th birthday, on September 30, 2014 (see here). Now near the end of his long, productive life, I am writing mainly regarding two important emphases he made as POTUS.

Part of what I have included in this post is based on Randall Balmer’s 2014 book Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter. While having great respect for the author, I did not particularly like the title of that book: I thought the term redeemer applied most aptly to Jesus Christ.

Recently, though, I read “Redeemer President,” the fifth chapter of Balmer’s book and was quite favorably impressed with what he wrote there—and I understood what he meant by Jimmy being a “redeemer.”

As Balmer explains, it is hard to imagine Carter being elected president “had it not been for Richard Nixon.” As the new president took the oath of office in January 1977, he “represented a clean break with the recent past, an opportunity to redeem the nation” (pp. 76, 77).

Early in 1977, Carter called the nation’s attention to the energy crisis. That was particularly in his April 18 “Address to the Nation on Energy” (see here). It was in that speech that he declared, [“”]

Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war."

His early recognition of the growing ecological problem was noted in what I called “the most important book you’ve never read” in this March 2023 blog post).

William Cotton, the author of that book, Overshoot (1980), mentions Carter favorably several times in his powerful book and writes most about Carter’s speech in July 1979. The title of that address was “Crisis of Confidence,” but it became known as his “malaise speech.” (Click here to read the transcript.)

That 1979 talk was an important one—and was basically correct. But it was not well received and was detrimental to Carter politically—and it was one of several reasons why he was soundly defeated in the 1980 election.

In a perceptive February 2023 article, though, David French wrote “The Wisdom and Prophecy of Carter’s Malaise Speech” (see here). The eminent NYTimes columnist averred that “Carter’s greatest speech was delivered four decades too soon.”

Carter’s emphasis on human rights was another key element of his presidency. Balmer wrote that “Carter sought to nudge the United States away from the reactive anticommunism of the Cold War and toward a policy that was more collaborative, less interventionist, and sensitive above all to human rights” (p. 79).

That emphasis was grounded in Carter’s Christian faith. “Jimmy Carter’s religious values were never far from his presidency or his policy” is the title of a March 2023 post on ReligionNews.com, and “human rights” is the first topic of several mentioned in that perceptive article.**

World peace is the second topic given in the above piece. Carter is quoted as saying, “There’s no doubt in my mind that the greatest violator of human rights that we know is armed conflict.” Consequently, “Carter’s presidency made the biblical concept of shalom seem less of a distant dream.”

These are just some of the reasons I have deep gratitude for Jimmy Carter and honor him on this day before his 100^th birthday. My double hope is that he will still be alive on January 20 and lucid enough to enjoy fully VP Harris’s inauguration as the 47^th POTUS.

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**That article (found here) was written by Lovett H. Weems, Jr., who for 18 years was president of Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City before moving to a faculty position at Wesley Seminary in Washington, D.C., in 2003.

Note: I learned from Heather Cox Richardson’s September 27 newsletter that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which has provided invaluable help before, during, and following last week’s landfall of Hurricane Helene, was initially created under President Jimmy Carter in 1979. In that piece, Richardson also writes that Project 2025, calls for slashing FEMA’s budget and returning disaster responses to states and localities.