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Jimmy Carter, the self-effacing peanut farmer, humanitarian and former Navy lieutenant who helped Canada avoid a nuclear catastrophe before ascending to the highest political office in the United States, died Sunday at his home in Georgia.
Jimmy Carter, the self-effacing peanut farmer, humanitarian and former Navy lieutenant who helped Canada avoid a nuclear catastrophe before ascending to the highest political office in the United States, died Sunday at his home in Georgia.
He was 100, making him the longest-living American president in American history.
Concerns about Carter’s health had become a recurring theme in recent years. He was successfully treated for brain cancer in 2015 and subsequently fell several times, including one in 2019, resulting in a broken hip.
However, alarm sounded in February 2023, when the Carter Center — the philanthropic organization he and his wife Rosalynn founded in 1982 — announced he would enter hospice care in his modest three-bedroom home in Plains, Georgia.
Rosalynn Carter, a mental health advocate whose role as presidential spouse helped define the modern first lady, died before her husband in November 2023 — a death at age 96 that spawned a memory that could be his to match.
“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I have ever accomplished,” the former president said in a statement after her death.
“As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew someone loved and supported me.”
Conventional wisdom viewed his one term in the White House as mediocre. But Carter’s altruistic work ethic, his religious benevolence and his famous disdain for the financial trappings of high office only endeared him for generations after he left politics in 1981.
“The hackneyed expression was, ‘Jimmy Carter has been the greatest former president in the history of the United States,’” said Gordon Giffin, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada and member of the Carter Center’s board of trustees.
“That was annoying to him because it distinguished his service as president from his service — and I mean literally service — as a former president.”
His relentless advocacy for human rights, a term Carter popularized long before it became part of the political lexicon, included helping build homes for the poor in the U.S. and in fourteen other countries, including Canada, well into the nineties.
He dedicated the Carter Center’s resources to combating the Guinea worm, a parasite that affected an estimated 3.5 million people in the developing world in the early 1980s and is today virtually eradicated, with only 13 reported cases in 2022.
And he was a tireless advocate for ending armed conflict and promoting democratic elections in the aftermath of the Cold War, with his center monitoring 113 such votes in 39 different countries – and offering expertise in conflict resolution as democracy withdrew.
Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, almost a quarter century after his groundbreaking work on the Camp David Accords paved the way for a 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, the first of its kind.
“His presidency was too quickly sidelined in the historical evaluation, and now people are looking at it again,” Giffin said. “I think his position in history as president will grow.”
U.S. President Joe Biden lamented the loss of Carter, saying in a White House statement that the world has lost an “extraordinary leader, statesmen and humanitarian.”
“With his compassion and moral clarity, he worked to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil and human rights, promote free and fair elections, house the homeless, and always stand up for the least among us. He saved, uplifted and changed the lives of people around the world,” Biden wrote.
“To all the young people in this country and to all who are searching for what it means to live a life full of purpose and meaning – the good life – study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith and humility. He showed that we are a great nation because we are a good people – decent and honorable, courageous and compassionate, humble and strong.”
Biden said he is ordering an official state funeral for Carter in Washington, DC
Carter was a lifelong democrat who never officially visited Canada as president, but was nonetheless something of a pioneer when it came to Canada-US relations and a close friend of the two Canadian prime ministers he served alongside.
One of them, former Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark, once called Carter a “pretty good Canadian” — a testament to the former commander-in-chief’s authenticity and center-left politics, which have always resonated north of the Canada-U.S. border USA
Clark said Sunday that he had been “privileged” to work closely with Carter.
“Through the Carter Center, Jimmy Carter led far more than his subsequent country,” Clark said in a statement on X. “He led a selfless and transformative contribution to people and societies ravaged by disease, poverty and disorder.”
The pair reunited in 2017 at a panel discussion in Atlanta hosted by the Canadian American Business Council, and seemed to enjoy teasing the host as she described Clark as a “conservative” and Carter as a “progressive.”
“I’m a progressive conservative – that’s very important,” Clark corrected her. Carter said, “I am a conservative progressive.”
In 2012, the Carters visited Kingston, Ontario, to receive an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University. Instead of a fancy hotel, they stayed with Arthur Milnes, a former speechwriter, journalist and political scientist who had long become a close friend.
“He became my hero, believe it or not, probably when I was about 12,” said Milnes, whose parents came of age during the Cold War and lived in constant fear of the ever-present nuclear threat until Carter de Witte took over. House from 1977.
“My mother never talked about politics, with one exception – and that was when Jimmy Carter was in the White House. She said, ‘Art, Jimmy Carter is a good and decent man,’” Milnes recalls.
“They both always said that for the first time since the 1950s, they felt safe knowing that it was this special man from rural Georgia, Jimmy Carter, who had his finger on the proverbial button.”
While Richard Nixon and Pierre Trudeau seemed to share a mutual antipathy during their shared terms in office, Carter got along well with the prime minister.
Indeed, it was at the Trudeau family’s express request that Carter attended the former prime minister’s funeral in 2000, Giffin said.
“The message I got back was that the family would appreciate it if Jimmy Carter could come,” said Giffin, then the U.S. envoy in Ottawa.
‘So he did come. He was at Trudeau’s funeral. And to me, that said a lot about not only the relationship he had with Trudeau, but the relationship he had in the Canada-American dynamic.”
It was at that funeral in Montreal that Carter — “to my frustration,” Giffin admitted — spent more than two hours in a waiting room with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a meeting that led to Carter visiting Cuba in 2002, the first former president. to do that.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement after Carter’s death that he remembers his father “who spoke highly of President Carter as a man of deep faith, strong morals and firm principles.”
“I had the honor of meeting him a few times over the decades, and he was always kind and thoughtful, and generous with his advice to me on public service matters,” the prime minister’s statement said.
“His life embodied the American Dream, rising from humble roots in Plains, Georgia, to become leader of the United States of America,” Trudeau wrote.
But it was long before Carter ever entered politics that he forged a permanent bond with Canada — a bond forged in the radioactive aftermath of what could otherwise be the country’s worst nuclear disaster.
In 1952, Carter was a 28-year-old lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, a submariner with a burgeoning expertise in nuclear energy, when he and his crew were dispatched to help manage a partial meltdown at the experimental Chalk River Laboratories at northwest of Ottawa.
In his 2016 book “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety,” Carter described working in teams of three, first practicing on a mock-up of the reactor and then on the real thing, in short 90-second bursts to avoid more than 90 seconds were absorbed. the maximum permitted radiation dose.
“The radiation absorption limit in the early 1950s was about a thousand times higher than it would be sixty years later,” he wrote.
“There were many jokes about the effects of radioactivity, especially the prospect of being sterilized, and we had to monitor our urine until all our bodies returned to normal.”
Which, Carter would later admit in interviews, took him about six months.
Carter and Clark were both in office during the so-called “Canadian Caper,” a top-secret operation to expel a group of American diplomats from Iran after the fall of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979. in which the group was presented as a Canadian science fiction film crew, was documented in the 2012 Oscar-winning Ben Affleck film “Argo.”
Carter didn’t think the film was that important.
“The movie that was made, ‘Argo,’ was very distorted. They barely mentioned the Canadian role in this very heroic, courageous event,” he said at the CABC event.
He described the true events of that escapade as “one of the greatest examples of a personal application of national friendship that I have ever known.”
Ultimately, Carter was a naturally modest and understated man, Giffin said — a rarity in any world leader, let alone one from the United States.
“People underestimate who Jimmy Carter is because he leads with his humanity,” he said.
“I recently read a report that said the Secret Service vehicles parked in front of his house are worth more than the house. How many former presidents have done that?”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 29, 2024.
James McCarten, The Canadian Press