JIMMY CARTER TURNS 100

Carter’s greatest challenges were primarily connected to the Middle East. In 2006, he wrote a book with the telling title Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, where he criticized Israel's policies, focusing on his core concern of human rights. This led some historians to accuse him of Holocaust denial, while his fellow Democrats distanced themselves from his views. It's worth noting that Carter played a crucial role in the signing of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978, personally overseeing the negotiations.

When Carter launched his presidential campaign in 1975, he was relatively unknown outside of his home state of Georgia, leading his rivals to dub him ‘Jimmy Who?’. However, his outsider status worked to his advantage. After surviving the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the 1973 oil crisis, American voters were deeply disillusioned and eager for a new type of politician. A devout peanut farmer with the demeanor of a compassionate pastor, Carter was seen as the perfect candidate for president. As people wrote at the time, Carter was needed to save the country, not govern it.

Despite his humble image, Carter had a military background, partially continuing the tradition of presidents like Ulysses Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy, held the rank of midshipman, and served on a submarine—it's hard to imagine, for example, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama in a torpedo room.

Carter emerged on the political stage as both a populist and a moralist. He connected with the public in everyday settings—stores, rodeos, and bus stops. He loved talking with voters over the phone and even spent nights in the homes of ordinary Americans (a far cry from Boris Yeltsin’s occasional trolleybus rides). Carter walked to his own inauguration rather than riding in a limousine, and he also introduced the name ‘Jimmy’ into the official lexicon. Before him, presidents were addressed with far less familiarity.

Carter’s speeches often resembled sermons, frequently using words like ‘love’, ‘faith’, ‘purity’, and ‘honesty’. He spoke about the need for the government to stop lying to the people, claiming this would be the key to reuniting a divided nation. At times, though, his moralism bordered on the absurd. For example, in an interview with Playboy, when he was asked if he had ever been unfaithful to his wife, Carter said he hadn’t, but since he sometimes looked at other women with lust, he had, sadly, been unfaithful in his heart. People could mock his missionary mannerisms as much as they wanted, but it was Carter who introduced the category of morality into American politics and made human rights a central issue—at least in his rhetoric.

‘We are a purely idealistic nation, but let no one confuse our idealism with weakness,’ Carter declared in his inaugural address, where he also quoted his schoolteacher and the biblical prophet Micah.

However, that is precisely what happened—by the end of his presidency, Carter was widely seen as a weak politician. His emphasis on moral values didn’t mesh well with harsh political realities. The embassy hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the American failure in Nicaragua, where the pro-Soviet Sandinista National Liberation Front took power, were foreign policy setbacks that couldn’t be dismissed as easily as the ‘killer rabbit’ incident. Ronald Reagan later accused Carter of financing America’s enemies. Even the establishment of diplomatic relations with China in 1979 was later seen more as a liability than a success.

Carter’s presidency saw a huge number of cultural landmarks: Saturday Night Fever and the first Star Wars film were released, Elvis Presley died, Studio 54 opened, the iconic TV series Dallas premiered, the golden age of video games began, and Stephen King wrote The Shining (Carter even makes an appearance in one of King’s novels). But as the 1970s drew to a close, so did the era of hedonism, with the looming threats of AIDS, yuppie financiers, and Reagan’s real-life ‘Star Wars’ program on the horizon. In retrospect, Carter is often viewed as the last emblem of a more innocent era.

One symbol of his ambiguous presidency could be the rise and fall of disco. Under Carter, disco reached its peak, but it also experienced its most tragic moment in May 1979, when a riot broke out at a stadium in Chicago. A crowd of 50,000 people chanting ‘Disco sucks!’ set fire to a massive box of records.

Another infamous event during his presidency occurred on the night of 13–14 July 1977 in New York City, when a citywide blackout led to mass looting, with over 1,000 stores being ransacked as chaos erupted.

Despite Carter's Baptist idealism and his self-proclaimed love for the people, he cut funding for social programs, froze workers' wages, and suppressed strikes. He negotiated disarmament while simultaneously deploying new weapons systems. He fought against drugs, supported sexual minorities, and advocated for the death penalty (though this was during his time as governor and not as president). In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (in addition to his three Grammys for narrating his own audiobooks—though, to be fair, Bill Clinton has a couple as well). In his Nobel Prize speech, Carter spoke about Leo Tolstoy, and now, as the former president turns 100, it seems fitting to recall Tolstoy's words: ‘Remember that the old man spoke kindness to you.’

Carter didn’t always act on that kindness—but he did speak of it sincerely.