At 100 years old, former President Jimmy Carter’s legacy is reassessed

When he returned to Plains, Georgia, in 1981, President Jimmy Carter defeated him: voters rejected him in a landslide against Republican Ronald Reagan. The torrential rain at Carter’s welcome reception reflected his somber mood, also reflecting that of the country.

“In office, he was a political failure. He lost overwhelmingly to Ronald Reagan. But he was a substantial and visionary success,” says author and historian Jonathan Alter, who recognizes the facet in which many remember the former president today: humanitarian work. with his Carter Center, “dealing with peace, fighting disease and generating hope” around the world which led to Jimmy Carter receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

“He has done an extraordinary job overseeing elections in more than 100 countries. But former presidents do not have as much power as presidents, not nearly as much, and the list of his achievements as president that were ignored, downplayed or forgotten entirely was very long,” Alter said.

The Iran hostage crisis, rising inflation and the oil embargoes of the 1970s doomed Carter’s tenure in the White House, casting a long shadow over his legacy. However, the centenary of the former peanut farmer, governor of Georgia, president and Nobel Peace Prize winner – who celebrates a century of life this October 1 – comes at a time when authors and historians reassess his failures and achievements as president of USA for a single term.

Alter’s biography, “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life,” is one of several that conclude that his four years in the White House were anything but a failure.

“Not only the famous Camp David agreements and the opening of relations with China,” Alter told the Voice of America in an interview in August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, “but a long list of legislative achievements on the environment and many other issues that actually surpass the legislative achievements of both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.”

Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980, protecting more than 100 million acres (including lands, national parks, refuges, monuments, forests and conservation areas), which, according to Alter, are now It is considered one of the most important environmental laws ever passed.

“The story I tell in my book is amazing,” says Alter. “It’s someone who worked hard in ways that really paid off.”

“I think we will remember President Carter as a president who served during enormously difficult times and who had to deal with circumstances that were far beyond his control,” says Joseph Crespino, Emory University’s first “Jimmy Carter Professor of History.” . Carter routinely visited Crespino and his students in Atlanta to discuss the good and bad decisions he made while president.

“No president had done that like Jimmy Carter by placing human rights at the center of American foreign policy,” Crespino told the VOA during a recent interview in his office on the Emory University campus. “It was important in changing the balance of power in the Cold War, but it was also an important moment after the Vietnam War to once again reaffirm America’s moral responsibilities in the world.”

Crespino said some of Carter’s overlooked national achievements include reorganizing the federal government and deregulating the airline, trucking and beer industries.

“We often associate a kind of liberation of the free enterprise economy with the conservative turn that came under Ronald Reagan, when in reality Jimmy Carter, before Reagan, was already doing a lot of deregulatory work in his presidency by recognizing the kinds of limits of government oversight of these private industries,” he warned.

Members of Carter’s cabinet, including former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, are grateful that his long life has allowed him to witness a broader perspective of history that more positively reflects on his legacy.

“I don’t know any place in the world where people don’t have good things to say about it,” Young told the VOA while speaking to reporters on September 17 at Carter’s centennial concert at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. “Whether he succeeded or not… he tried as hard as he could and went as far as the world would allow him to go.”

A world that continues to benefit from the work of the Carter Center, including the fight against diseases such as dracunculiasis, a disabling parasitic disease, which has been reduced to a few cases in Africa and could become the second disease eradicated in history.

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