Remembering Jimmy Carter

I think Jimmy Carter was a pretty good president. He was seen as a political outsider, the Governor of Georgia without a lot of political connections in Washington. But that was just what the country wanted after the scandal of Watergate. 

As we saw in "Peace In The Middle East", August 2024, Carter resolved what was the first of three successive challenges to peace. This was the wars between nations, and he resolved it by bringing Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat (who would be assassinated because of it) together. The second stage was the wars between Israel and organizations, rather than nations, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This was resolved by Bill Clinton, by bringing together Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin (who would also be assassinated because of it). We are now in the third stage, the proxies of Iran against Israel.

Jimmy Carter was smart. I can't remember how many of his books I read. 

I didn't agree with everything that Jimmy Carter did. Boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan just made sure that there would be a boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. It wasn't fair to the athletes.

He never should have gotten talked into the rescue mission for the hostages in Iran, in April 1980. The mission was way too complicated and everything they did had to work perfectly. There was virtually no margin of error, and we know that missions like that hardly ever go exactly according to plan. The hostages weren't even all in the same place, some were in the U.S. Embassy and others in the Foreign Ministry building. Israel had conducted a hostage rescue mission four years before but Entebbe was an isolated airfield while these hostages were in the middle of a big city.

Generals almost always want to take military action because that's what they do. It's the president's job to make the best decision. Harry Truman fired Douglas Macarthur because he kept overstepping his authority and pressing to escalate the Korean War. John F. Kennedy declined when Curtis LeMay wanted to bomb Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Jimmy Carter's popularity was fading toward the end of his term. He almost didn't even represent the Democrats in the 1980 Election but Edward Kennedy was derailed by a 1969 incident in which he was driving a car that went into water and a female passenger drowned. Kennedy had managed to get out of the car but allegedly didn't notify authorities about the crash for hours.

Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 Election in a landslide, and that was the end of his political career. But his real public life was only just beginning.

For the rest of his life, a president has the status of being an ex-president. No president in U.S. history has made better use of that status, to do good for the world, than Jimmy Carter. He has traveled the world promoting peace and trying to mediate conflicts. He has written some excellent books and has done a lot of construction work building houses with Habitat for Humanity.

If you put Jimmy Carter's presidency and post-presidency together, he was definitely one of the greatest of them all.