Among the maize, yam and groundnut farms of Savelugu-Nanton, a remote district in northern Ghana, is the legacy of Jimmy Carter is less complicated than in the homeland of the former US president.
Thanks to the work of his charity The Carter Center, locals are spared the misery these days Guinea worm disease – a parasite that reproduces in the human stomach and slips through the skin before laying its larvae in stagnant pools to wait for the next victim.
Carter’s work fighting the virus and tracking votes in poor countries won it In 2002 he received the Nobel Peace Prize. This was followed by a presidency that achieved a groundbreaking peace deal in the Middle East but was hamstrung by economic problems and the hostage crisis in Iran.
He died on Sunday at the age of 100, the Carter Center said. He had entered Hospice care in February 2023 and decided to stay home after a series of short hospital stays. The former president was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 but had responded well to treatment. At 100 years old, he was the longest-living president of the United States.
Throughout six decades of politics, relief work and diplomacy, Carter was “committed to ideals such as human rights, peace and the improvement of human life,” Steven Hochman, research director at the Carter Center, told Al Jazeera.
“He didn’t just want to talk, he wanted action,” Hochman said. “Whether it be by observing elections in Latin America or by observing the terrible suffering of Guinea worm disease in Asia and Africa and working to eradicate it.”
Southern Peanuts
Carter grew up on the red clay soil of rural Georgia during the Great Depression. He sold boiled peanuts on the streets of his hometown of Plains and plowed the land with his family. His father, James “Earl” Carter, was a peanut farmer and warehouseman; his mother Lillian was a nurse.
He married Rosalynn Smith, a family friend, in 1946. The couple celebrated their 76th wedding anniversary in July 2022, a year before the former first lady died in November 2023.
After a seven-year career in the U.S. Navy, Carter returned to his home state of Georgia, where as Democratic governor he gained national attention for his prudent management and won a spot on the cover of Time magazine as a symbol of the “New South”.
Carter ran for president describing himself as an outsider to Washington politics tainted by the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. His “Peanut Brigade,” a group of friends from Georgia, traveled across the United States trumpeting their candidate as a no-nonsense, principled man.
“Carter’s election in 1976 promised to redeem the nation from the sins of Vietnam and Watergate,” Randall Balmer, a historian and author, told Al Jazeera. “He wanted to restore trust in government, but the betrayal of the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon years had already given way to cynicism.”
In the White House, Carter’s typical outspokenness did not always lead to policy victories. Many of his progressive social and economic plans failed in Congress; The inability to translate ideals into legislative reality diminished his popularity.
The United States was mired in the stagflation problems of low economic growth, unemployment, and high inflation caused by an energy crisis in the early 1970s. Carter’s solution, the US’s dependence on foreign oil through taxes and green energywas repealed in the Senate.
Better abroad
Carter fared better abroad. He concluded treaties that provided for the Panama Canal to be brought under local control. establishing comprehensive diplomatic relations with China; and made a deal with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to limit nuclear weapons.
His masterpiece was inviting Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to his presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, in 1978 and brokering a peace agreement between the enemies in 13 tense days.
“He had credibility as a peace negotiator because he listened to both sides. He could think spontaneously; and speak on his feet,” Hochman said. “He was a skilled negotiator who developed and tested ideas for resolving conflicts. He took risks even if it meant he might fail.”
The Camp David Accords established extensive diplomatic and economic relations between the neighbors on the condition that Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. They did not resolve the Palestinian issue, but they spared the region a repeat of the Arab-Israeli multi-state wars of 1948 and 1948 1967.
“When Carter was considering the summit and even after he announced it, almost every foreign policy guru, including Henry Kissinger, advised against it,” Gerald Rafshoon, the White House communications director under Carter, told Al Jazeera.
“The Sages warned that a head of state should never enter into negotiations without knowing the outcome in advance. “Carter rejected that advice—and did more for Israel’s security than any U.S. president before or since.”
Turmoil in the Middle East
The Middle East brought Carter a diplomatic victory but also brought his downfall. In 1979, Iranian students stormed the city US Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage – triggering a 444-day crisis that only ended when Carter was kicked out of the White House.
Carter’s efforts to secure the release of prisoners through the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were a political liability that was discussed nightly on the US television news. A botched U.S. rescue mission in April 1980 was the epitome of Carter’s misfortune.
Later that year, Americans gave Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, a former actor and governor of California, a landslide victory over Carter. Carter’s talk of a “crisis of mind” in the United States and a national “malaise” may have been true, but it was not an election winner.
“People say they want honest leaders, but when you give them that, they say that’s not what a leader should do,” Gary Sick, a White House official under Carter and other presidents, told Al Jazeera. “They expect their leaders to be a little sneaky and make things sound better than they actually are.
“Jimmy Carter called a spade a spade, and people weren’t prepared for that honesty.”
Although Carter lost office, his diplomatic skills remained in demand. He mediated in Nicaragua, Panama and Ethiopia, helped broker a transfer of power in Haiti and took action against North Korea’s nuclear weapons plans. He wrote several books, mostly on Middle East peace.
He also maintained the openness that earned him political opponents as president. He said the 2003 invasion Iraq was “unjust”; and that the US is in league with the Israelis “to the detriment” of the Palestinians. As a Protestant Christian, he also criticized abortion.
In 2006, Carter published the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. In a 2007 interview with US broadcaster NPR, he defended the use of the word apartheid, calling it “an accurate description of what was happening in the West Bank.”
He also said he hoped the book would alert Americans to “the terrible oppression and persecution of the Palestinian people” and spark substantive debate on these issues for the first time.
More than a decade later, major human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch And Amnesty Internationalwould support his assessment and accuse Israel of imposing apartheid on the Palestinians.
Philanthropy: The Carter Center
Founded in 1982 by the former president and his wife, the Carter Center has monitored 113 elections in 39 countries and combated diseases such as river blindness, trachoma and malaria, often by sending doctors to less populated, less trafficked areas.
When Carter declared war on the meter-long parasites in 1986, there were 3.5 million cases of Guinea worm disease in 21 African and Asian countries. The Savelugu-Nanton district and the rest of Ghana were declared free of the disease in 2015 and have remained virtually wiped out elsewhere.
Into old age, the former president continued to volunteer with the housing organization Habitat for Humanity, hosting an annual event that attracted thousands of volunteers in the United States and abroad.
Carter’s supporters say history will judge his presidency more favorably than American voters did in 1980.
Outside the White House legacy of the father of four and grandfather of 22 is secured.
In his own words: “I cannot deny that I am a better ex-president than I was president.”
