[On November 2nd, 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected President. Perhaps the most delightfully straightforward person ever to hold the office nonetheless connects to a number of compelling contexts, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them. Leading up to a special weekend post on thi year’s midterm election results (which I don’t know when I’m scheduling the rest of the series)!]
On post-presidency achievements, reassessments of a presidency, and a secret third thing.
I don’t imagine I have to convince too many readers of this blog that no American President to date has had a more impressive post-presidency life than did Jimmy Carter. Much of that was under the aegis of the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing human rights and alleviating suffering around the world; it was primarily for his work with that organization, both on peace initiatives and on global health, that Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. But to my mind, at least as impressive was Carter and his wife Rosalynn’s consistent work with Habitat for Humanity; up until the very end of his life, Carter could most consistently be found on a Habitat site, building homes for those in need. No one of those efforts was more inspiring than any other, but I was especially moved when he did so in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
All those and other post-presidency achievements led the British newspaper The Independent to write in 2009, “Carter is widely considered a better man than he was a president.” I have to believe he would have been very, very okay with that hierarchy, so it’s not much of a critique. But I also don’t entirely agree with the implied latter part of the sentiment. As I wrote yesterday, there are certainly genuine failures from the Carter administration to highlight and analyze; but one of the most prominent of them (the energy crisis) really wasn’t Carter’s doing, and another (the Iran hostage crisis) seems to have been made significantly worse by his 1980 electoral opponent Ronald Reagan. Moreover, those were external and immediate events that didn’t necessarily leave lasting legacies; whereas an internal presidential action like Carter’s 1978 protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which in one fell swoop doubled the amount of public land set aside for such federal protections, has been far more long-lasting. I’m not suggesting that Carter’s was the most successful administration in our history by any stretch, just that we’ve seen—and are seeing right now—far, far worse.
Those are the main ways to think about Carter’s lasting legacies, but I want to end this post and this weeklong series by highlighting something I didn’t know about until researching the series: the legal brief that Carter filed in 2022, supporting conservation groups in their efforts to preserve part of that federally protected land in Alaska. I encourage you to read that hyperlinked New York Times story (no subscription required as it’s on the Wayback Machine) to learn the details and successful effects of those efforts, which Carter argued “may be the most significant domestic achievement of my political life.” I can’t imagine there have been any other presidents, or elected officials of any kind for that matter, who could reasonably make that case for something that took place more than four decades after they left office. By which I mean to say: Jimmy Carter’s most lasting legacy is that there’ll never be another like him.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
PPS. Also thanks to Jason Lee Guthrie for sharing his podcast on Carter!
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