‘Decades ahead of his time’: history catches up with visionary Jimmy Carter
When I reach Jimmy Carter’s grandson by Zoom, he answers wearing a Raphael Warnock campaign T-shirt. Jason Carter is a lawyer and politician himself, mid-40s, animated and well-read, with blue eyes reminiscent of his grandfather’s. He’s just got off the phone with his 93-yearold grandmother, Rosalynn. It’s a special day; Joe Biden is on his way to the Carter house in Plains, Georgia.
“My grandfather has met nearly everyone in the world he might want to,” Jason Carter says. “Right now, he’s meeting with the president of the United States. But the person he’d say he learned the most from was Rachel Clark, an illiterate sharecropper who lived on his family’s farm.
“He didn’t pity her,” Carter says. “He saw her power. My grandfather believes in the power of a single human and a small community. Protect people’s freedoms, he says, and they can do great things. It all comes back to an enormous respect for human beings.”
Carter is openly moved speaking about his grandfather, though it’s also clear he does so often. A spate of recent biographies and documentaries shows not just a renewed interest in the former president, but a willingness to update the public narrative surrounding his time in office. Recent biographer Jonathan Alter calls Carter “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history”.
Carter, who lost his bid for re-election in a so-called landslide to Reagan in 1980, is often painted as a “failed president” – a hapless peanut farmer who did not understand how to get things done in Washington, and whose administration was marked by inflation, an energy crisis and the Iran hostage disaster.
Subsequent presidents, especially fellow southern Democrat Bill Clinton, kept a distance – assumably not wanting to be seen as part of a political narrative that emphasized piety over getting things done. Even Obama was apparently wary of being associated with the sort of soft-hearted ineffectuality ascribed to Carter.
But was Carter actually so ineffectual?
In his 2020 biography of Carter, Alter speaks to a more nuanced interpretation of Carter, calling him “a surprisingly consequential president – a political and stylistic failure, but a substantive and far-sighted success”. It is, perhaps, the far-sighted nature of Carter’s ambitions, particularly around energy, that allows us to appreciate him more four decades after his term concluded.
Born in 1924, Carter is now 96. Americans must process his mortality and the onset of climate change, which
Carter explicitly warned the nation about 40 years ago.
Carterland, a just released documentary, offers a particularly sharp focus on Carter’s extensive work on conservation, climate and justice.
“Here’s what people get wrong about Carter,” Will Pattiz, one of the film’s directors tells me. “He was not in over his head or ineffective, weak or indecisive – he was a visionary leader, decades ahead of his time trying to pull the country toward renewable energy, climate solutions, social justice for women and minorities, equitable treatment for all nations of the world. He faced nearly impossible economic problems – and at the end of the day came so very close to changing the trajectory of this nation.”
Will’s brother, Jim, agrees. “A question folks should be asking themselves is: what catastrophes would have befallen this country had anyone other than Jimmy Carter been at the helm during that critical time in the late 1970s?”
Those late 1970s were defined by inflation, the cold war, long lines at gas pumps, and a shift in cultural mores. Carter himself showed a willingness to grow. Although Carter served in the navy himself, he pardoned Vietnam draft-dodgers. Though from a segregated and racist background in Georgia, Carter pushed for affirmative action and prioritized diversity among judicial nominees, including the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Amalya Lyle Kearse. He employed Mary Prince, a Black woman wrongly accused of murder, as his daughter Amy’s nanny, a move criticized by some contemporary thinkers as perpetuating domestic servitude.
What was radical in the 1970s can appear backwards decades later; the public narrative works in both directions. Carter is, in some respects, difficult to narrativize because he could be both startlingly conservative – financially, or in his appeal to the deep south’s evangelicals – and progressive, particularly on human rights and climate. He seemed to act from his personal compass, rather than a political one.
He startled the globe by personally brokering the critical Middle East peace treaty between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David. He ceded access to the Panama canal, angering conservatives who thought he was giving away an American asset. Through the Alaska Natural Interests Lands Conservation Act, he doubled the national park system and conserved over 100m acres of land – the most sweeping expansion of conserved land in American history.
He was not afraid to make unpopular moves, or ask for personal sacrifice. He was old-fashioned and a futurist, and nowhere did his futurism matter more, or seem more prescient, than on climate and conservation. He risked speaking directly to the American public, and asking them to do a difficult thing – focus on renewable energy and reduce reliance on oil.
He paid the price for this frank ask, and so did we.
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In advance of his trip to Plains, Georgia, Biden participated in a video tribute to Carter, joining an all-star cast of Georgia politicians, the familiar faces of Senator Jon Ossoff, Senator Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams serving as an affirming nod to Georgia’s return to political importance.
The messages address the substance of the film, but also serve as a heartfelt thank you to a former president who has only recently begun to look prescient on climate, and singular in his moral bearing.
“He has always lived his values,” Abrams says in the video.
“Our world cries out for moral and ethical leadership,” Warnock offers. “Few have embodied it as clearly and consistently as Carter.”
“He showed us what it means to be a public servant, with an emphasis on servant,” Biden says.
Many Americans can’t help but spot a link between Carter and Biden – who became the first elected official out