Carter’s century of service to the country and the world

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Minnesota Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Jimmy Carter wrote 32 books after his presidency. One of them, a memoir of his White House years, has a title reflecting a lifetime belief in — and service to — this country and the world.

It’s called “Keeping Faith.”

On Sunday, the sabbath of his unwavering Christian belief, Carter died. He was the longest-living president and had the most enduring, and likely most impactful, post-presidency. He lived — and shaped — a century as a centurion of American (and indeed universal) values that seemed to be best expressed in the years after his decisive defeat by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.

Far from receding in defeat or profiting from his presidential tenure, Carter (often with Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years) went to work, swinging a Habitat for Humanity hammer or a proverbial gavel overseeing international elections. While the former peanut farmer stayed rooted to his native Plains, Ga., Carter crossed countries and continents to seek peace and improve lives, including his efforts to eradicate disease in the developing world like Guinea worm, which fell from 3.6 million cases when Carter got involved in 1986 to just 13 worldwide last year.

For these and other efforts, Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “his decades of untiring efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

That ethos guided his White House years too, including and especially his direct diplomacy that led to the landmark Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel.

“You can’t do the history of the Middle East without saluting Carter’s epic diplomacy,” historian Douglas Brinkley, an author of books on Carter and other 20th-century figures, told me in 2023, when Carter announced he would enter hospice care. (As amazing as his life arc was, Carter’s 22 tenacious months before succumbing Sunday were remarkable, too.)

“Where Carter succeeded was through his willpower and tenacity,” Brinkley said then. “It was best exemplified by the [1976 presidential] campaign, but of course where he kept [Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin and [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat in Maryland; wouldn’t leave the room. And that alone, in my mind, the greatness of Camp David, means to be that Carter has been a really important president.”

The negotiation was “agonizingly difficult,” Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief White House domestic policy adviser, told me back then. Eizenstat, the author of “President Carter: The White House Years,” said those 13 days at Camp David weren’t led by appointees but the president himself, the commander in chief becoming an envoy enveloping his fellow world leaders in expertise and empathy, including at a key moment with Begin.

The Israeli leader began packing his bags, saying “I can’t compromise anymore,” Eizenstat said. Carter had extensive political and even personal intelligence on each leader and knew how close Begin was to his grandchildren. So pre-summit the president had a photo taken of the prime minister’s three grandkids, had them sign it, and as Begin began to leave Carter handed it to him.

“He saw Begin’s eyes tear up and his lips quiver,” recalled Eizenstat. The prime minister “put his bags down and said, ‘I’ll give it one last time.’ And that’s what made Camp David possible.”

Carter didn’t just rest on the accord’s accolades, however. Ever the carpenter, he headed to the Mideast to frame out a final peace treaty. “I think it’s the greatest feat of personal presidential diplomacy in American history,” Eizenstat stated.

Other efforts were diplomatic disappointments (or debacles, in many critics’ and voters’ views), including with the theocracy that had overrun Iran and taken American Embassy personnel hostage. To his credit, Carter worked up to the moment his successor was inaugurated to free them from 444 days of captivity and was relieved by their release, even though it was hours into Reagan’s presidency. The Panama Canal treaty was also contested by conservatives at the time and even now by President-elect Donald Trump.

Just as those enmities endure, so do the ones between the U.S. and Russia. In Carter’s era it was the Cold War, and U.S.-USSR relations froze over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led Carter to take tough, domestically unpopular decisions on the international crisis, including an embargo of grain sales that hit U.S. farmers hard as well as a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics that hit athletes hard.

Carter, an Annapolis graduate, also showed resolve on projecting strength, approving weapons systems that because of their deployment were often incorrectly credited to Reagan. And while Nixon is rightly remembered for his historic outreach to China, official diplomatic recognition was done by Carter.

Domestically, Carter’s appointment of Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker to fight inflation — the scourge that in part helped elect him because of perceptions of President Gerald Ford’s fecklessness on the issue — bore results too late for re-election as well. Other policies seem especially prescient, however, including the president’s emphasis on conservation (Carter “doubled the size of the National Park System,” said Eizenstat), energy conservation and deregulation, which helped spark the next decade’s economic boom.

“I believe it was the most consequential one-term presidency in modern American history,” Eizenstat stated.

Presidential historians will continue to consider that. What’s not in dispute is how his vice presidential partner and friend, Minnesotan Walter Mondale, described the Carter administration: “We told the truth, we obeyed the law, and we kept the peace.”

In other words, in a presidency of four years and a century of extraordinarily consequential contributions to the world, Jimmy Carter kept the faith.