He received palliative care at home after a series of hospital admissions
CARLOS EDUARDO LINS DA SILVA
SÃO PAULO, SP (FOLHAPRESS) – Former US president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter died this Sunday (29), aged 100. He died at his home in Plains, Georgia, according to a statement from the Carter Center, the institute that bears his name.
The Democrat received palliative care at his home after a series of hospital admissions. His wife and partner of 77 years, Rosalynn, was also under the same home care and died on November 19 last year, aged 96. In his last public appearance, Carter attended his wife’s funeral, and, in October, he voted for Kamala Harris by mail.
In his penultimate book, published in 2015, Carter recalled that he had spent only four of his then almost one hundred years in the White House and that they were not what dominated his memories. The Democrat had the longest post-presidency in US history, and it was in the period after leaving office that he became famous worldwide.
For a traditional politician, becoming known as “the best ex-president” in history, in a clear allusion to the failure of his performance in power, is probably very little comforting. But for James Earl Carter Jr., who never used his pompous name in full, having been a solitary promoter of good causes and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize may have been worth more than having been leader of the USA.
Carter has always tried to differentiate himself through simplicity. At his inauguration as the 39th American president, he wore a plain suit, and walked, hand in hand with Rosalynn and his daughter, Amy, the 2.4 km path between Congress and the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue.
In his inaugural speech, he used concepts and words that are rare on these occasions, such as “humility, mercy and justice” instead of grandiloquent salutes to the economic and military power of the United States. Unlike previous and subsequent presidents with school-age children, he enrolled Amy in a public school. Throughout his government, he taught children Sunday classes in a Baptist church.
This way of emphasizing simplicity may have just been a successful marketing ploy. But it placed Carter on a different, perhaps unique, level among his colleagues in office.
He was born on October 1, 1924, in the small farming town of Plains. His childhood home did not have electricity or running water, but the family was one of the most prosperous in the region.
His father was a farmer; the mother, a nurse, was responsible for Rosalynn’s birth. Days later, Carter, two years old at the time, was taken by his mother to “peek into the crib and see the newest baby on our street”, as the former president himself said in his autobiography. He referred to his wife as an “almost equal extension” of himself.
With the Second World War, Carter entered the Naval Academy, where he graduated as an engineering officer in 1946.
The same year, he married Rosalynn Smith, also of Plains. Without leaving the Navy, he completed postgraduate studies in nuclear physics and worked on atomic submarines until 1953, when his father died, and he returned to Georgia to take care of the family’s peanut farm.
His father had been a state deputy, and his son decided to replace him. He was re-elected, ran for governor in 1966 and lost to the ultra-conservative Lester Maddox. In 1970, he tried again and won.
The American political environment in the early 1970s was greatly clouded by the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon and was ripe for a leader far from Washington’s schemes and with moralistic language, like Governor Carter.
Young man – he was 52 years old –, without ever having held federal public positions, with an almost naive manner (“My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President; I’m a farmer, mechanic, businessman, scientist and Christian”, he always repeated when introducing himself to voters), Carter won the 1976 election with 51% of the popular vote and 297 of the 538 Electoral College delegates.
The first national politician to endorse his presidential claim was then-senator Joe Biden. The two maintained a friendly relationship that lasted until the end of Carter’s life. This proximity was often remembered for the problems, especially economic ones, faced by the current president, partially similar to those of almost 50 years ago.
In August, a grandson of Carter said his grandfather was eager to vote for Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election.
The victory over Gerald Ford, Nixon’s vice president, was above all the result of the wear and tear caused by Watergate. But Carter’s religiosity played an important role — it helped him recruit contingents of evangelicals who had previously been distant from the electoral debate.
Carter was a progressive, but his success at the polls helped fire up the religious right, which over the next 40 years became a fundamental factor in American politics.
His government was complicated from the beginning, and one of his biggest problems was energy: the harsh winter of 1977 worsened the still severe effects of the oil shock of 1973 and 1974.
Carter decided to act in an unpopular way: energy containment and taxes on waste. And he said what Americans didn’t want to hear: their country, with 5% of the world’s population, could not continue to consume a third of the planet’s energy.
Economic problems tormented him throughout his term, and he was unable to resolve them. In 1980, inflation was at 12%, unemployment at 7.5% and the annual interest rate at 20%, intolerable numbers for the USA. Faced with these setbacks, his achievements as president shrank in the face of public opinion, although they were not few.
Carter carried out a major administrative reform in the federal government, expanded the national park system, appointed more blacks, women and Hispanics to senior positions than any predecessor, deregulated civil aviation, emphasized education and the environment.
In the international field, the achievements were even greater: an unprecedented agreement was reached between Egypt and Israel after mediating negotiations between Anwar El Sadat and Menachem Begin for 13 days at Camp David; established full diplomatic relations between the US and China; returned control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians; arrived at
important Salt II nuclear weapons limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, promoted the cause of human rights throughout the world, including in Brazil, where he made a tense visit to President Ernesto Geisel in 1978.
But an international defeat put an end to his Presidency. On November 4, 1979, 52 Americans were taken hostage at their country’s embassy in Tehran. For 444 days they were trapped. The Carter administration attempted to free them in April 1980 through bold military action, which ended in a demoralizing incident: eight soldiers died after a clash between helicopters before they had engaged in any combat with enemies.
In another unusual move for politicians and typical of him, he went on TV to take personal responsibility for the fiasco.
The Iranian government released the hostages on the day that Carter handed over the presidency to Ronald Reagan, who in the 1980 presidential campaign had exploited the hostage issue to the fullest.
Carter’s defeat was crushing: he received only 41% of the popular vote and 49 of the 538 delegates. He won in only six of the 50 states.
Outside the White House, after a period of retreat, Carter achieved successes. He began to travel the world in isolated peace initiatives and to promote the defense of human rights and organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, a pan-Christian entity dedicated to building houses for the poor.
Only in 1994 did he manage to obtain a nuclear agreement between the two Koreas, the end of the military dictatorship in Haiti with the return to power of President Jean-Baptiste Aristide, and a ceasefire in Bosnia.
Before and after that, Carter visited several countries in crisis — Liberia, Venezuela, Cuba — to monitor elections or defend the rights of dissidents. Obtained the release of American citizens imprisoned by hostile regimes. He was in the Palestinian territories several times — he had been, in 1977, the first US head of government to defend the creation of a Palestinian state.
Its Carter Center, in Atlanta, is an important and active entity in debates on international issues, both through the studies and practices it sponsors.
Going against political tradition, as always, he was a former president who spared no criticism of his successors, such as George W. Bush, whom he attacked for human rights violations during his administration, and even Bill Clinton, his party ally, the who criticized the handling of the Haiti crisis.
The 2002 Nobel Peace Prize crowned Carter’s work in favor of peace and human rights, to which millions of people and dozens of countries, including Brazil, are debtors.
In his speech at the ceremony in which he received the distinction, he said: “The bonds of our common humanity are greater than the divisions of our fears and prejudices. God gave us the ability to choose. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes – and we must.”
