#the carter center

[retropopcult]

A sad farewell to President Jimmy Carter who passed away at the age of 100. He is the first US president to become a centenarian.

James Earl Carter Jr. (October 1, 1924 – December 29, 2024) was an American politician and humanitarian who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981 (shown above in the Oval Office in 1978). A Democrat, he is the longest-lived president in U.S. history and since leaving office won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his peace-keeping negotiations and humanitarian work.

[democracyunderground]

[tomorrowusa]

There's more we'll be saying about President Jimmy Carter in the next few days. For now, it should be noted that he stayed active in both body and mind and I think that contributed to his long life.

The Carter Center has put up a memorial site where you can learn more about the greatest ex-president in US history.

Official Jimmy Carter Memorial Site | Remembering the 39th U.S. President

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 29, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 30, 2024

Former President Jimmy Carter died today, December 29, 2024, at age 100 after a life characterized by a dedication to human rights. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, died on November 19, 2023; she was 96 years old.

James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, in southwestern Georgia, about half an hour from the site of the infamous Andersonville Prison, where United States soldiers died of disease and hunger during the Civil War only sixty years earlier. He was the first U.S. president to be born in a hospital.

Carter’s South was impoverished. He grew up on a dirt road about three miles from Plains, in the tiny, majority-Black village of Archery, where his father owned a farm and the family grew corn, cotton, peanuts, and sugar cane. The young Carters and the children of the village’s Black sharecroppers grew up together as the Depression that crashed down in 1929 drained away what little prosperity there was in Archery.

After undergraduate coursework at Georgia Southwestern College and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carter completed his undergraduate degree at the U.S. Naval Academy. In the Navy he rose to the rank of lieutenant, serving on submarines—including early nuclear submarines—in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.

In 1946, Carter married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s, who grew up in Plains. When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and took his family back to the Carters’ Georgia farm, where he and Rosalynn operated both the farm and a seed and supply company.

Arriving back in Georgia just a year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Carter quickly became involved in local politics. In 1962 he challenged a fraudulent election for a Georgia state senate seat, and in the runoff, voters elected him. The Carters became supporters of Democratic president John F. Kennedy in a state whose dominant Democratic Party was in turmoil as white supremacists clashed with Georgians eager to leave their past behind. Kennedy had sent troops to desegregate the University of Mississippi.

Carter ran for governor in 1966, the year after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. He lost the primary, coming in third behind another liberal Democrat and a staunch segregationist Democrat, Lester Maddox, who won it and went on to win the governorship. When Carter ran again in 1970, he emphasized his populism rather than Black rights, appealing to racist whites. He won the Democratic primary with 60% of the vote and, in a state that was still Democrat-dominated, easily won the governorship.

But when Carter took office in 1971, he abandoned his concessions to white racists and took a stand for new race relations in the United States. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he told Georgians in his inaugural speech. “No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”

His predecessor, Maddox, had refused to let state workers take the day off to attend services for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral; Carter pointedly hung a portrait of King—as well as portraits of educator Lucy Craft Laney and Georgia politician and minister Henry McNeal Turner—in the State Capitol.

Carter brought to office a focus not only on civil rights but also on cleaning up and streamlining the state’s government. He consolidated more than 200 government offices into 20 and backed austerity measures to save money while also supporting new social programs, including equalizing aid to poor and wealthy schools, prison reform and early childhood development programs, and community centers for mentally disabled children.

At the time, the state constitution prohibited Carter from reelection, so he built recognition in the national Democratic Party and turned his sights on the presidency. In the wake of the scandals that brought down both President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, as well as many of their staff, when it seemed to many Americans that all of Washington was corrupt, voters welcomed the newcomer Carter as an outsider who would work for the people.

He seemed a new kind of Democrat, one who could usher in a new, multicultural democracy now that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had brought Black and Brown voters into the American polity. Like many of the other civil rights coalitions in the twentieth century, Carter’s supporters shared music reinforced their politics, and Carter’s deep knowledge of blues, R&B, folk, and especially the gospel music of his youth helped him appeal to that era’s crucially important youth vote. Bob Dylan; Crosby, Stills & Nash, Nile Rodgers, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, as well as the Allman Brothers, all backed Carter, who later said: “I was practically a non-entity, but everyone knew the Allman Brothers. When they endorsed me, all the young people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers like him, we can vote for him.’”

Elected by just over 50% of American voters over Republican candidate Gerald R. Ford’s count of about 48%, Carter’s outsider status and determination to govern based on the will of the people sparked opposition from within Washington—including in the Democratic Party—and stories that he was buffeted about by the breezes of polls. But Carter's domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat once said that Carter believed an elected president should “park politics at the Oval Office door” and try to win election by doing the right thing. He took pride in ignoring political interests—a stance that would hurt his ability to get things done in Washington, D.C.

Carter began by trying to make the government more representative of the American people: Eizenstat recalled that Carter appointed more women, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans to official positions and judgeships “than all 38 of his predecessors combined.”

Carter instituted ethics reforms to reclaim the honor of the presidency after Nixon’s behavior had tarnished it. He put independent inspectors in every department and established that corporations could not bribe foreign officials to get contracts. He expanded education programs, establishing the Department of Education, and tried to relieve the country from reliance on foreign oil by establishing the Department of Energy.

Concerned that the new regulatory agencies that Congress had created since the mid-1960s might be captured by industries and that they were causing prices to rise, Carter began the deregulation movement to increase competition. He began with the airlines and moved to the trucking industry, railroad lines, and long-distance phone service. He also deregulated beer production—his legalization of homebrewing sparked today’s craft brewing industry.

But Carter inherited slow economic growth and the inflation that had plagued presidents since Nixon, and the 1979 drop in oil production after the Iranian revolution exacerbated both. While more than ten million jobs were added to the U.S. economy during his term—almost twice the number Reagan added in his first term, and more than five times the number George H.W. Bush added in his—inflation hit 14% in 1980. To combat that inflation, Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve, knowing he would combat inflation with high interest rates, a policy that brought down inflation during the first term of his successor, Ronald Reagan.

Carter also focused on protecting the environment. He was the first president to undertake the federal cleanup of a hazardous waste site, declaring a federal emergency in the New York neighborhood of Love Canal and using federal disaster money to remediate the chemicals that had been stored underground there.

Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as a national monument, saying: “These areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic and cultural value, and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world,” he said. In 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Coming after Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and support for Chile’s right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose government had systematically tortured and executed his political opponents, Carter’s foreign policy emphasized human rights. Carter echoed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights established by the United Nations, promising he would promote “human freedom” while protecting “the individual from the arbitrary power of the state.” He was best known for the Camp David Accords that achieved peace between Israel and Egypt after they had fought a series of wars. Those accords, negotiated with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel paved the way for others. Carter credited the religious faith of the three men for making the agreement possible.

Carter also built on his predecessor Nixon’s outreach to China, normalizing relations and affording diplomatic recognition of China, enabling the two countries to develop a bilateral relationship. While commenters often credit President Reagan with pressuring the Soviet Union enough to bring about its dissolution, in fact it was Carter who negotiated the nuclear arms treaty that Reagan honored and who, along with his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as a major breach in international relations. He cut off grain sales to the USSR, ordered a massive defense buildup, and persuaded European leaders to accept nuclear missiles stationed in their countries, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said was a significant factor in the dissolution of the USSR.

To Carter also fell the Iran hostage crisis in which Muslim fundamentalists overran the American embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran, seizing 66 Americans and holding them hostage for 444 days, in return for a promise that the American-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whom Carter had admitted to the U.S. for cancer treatment, be returned to Iran for trial. Carter immediately froze Iranian assets and began secret negotiations, while Americans watched on TV as Iranian mobs chanted “Death to America.” A secret mission to rescue the hostages failed when one of the eight helicopters dispatched to rescue the hostages crashed, killing eight soldiers. Before he left office, Carter successfully negotiated for the hostages’ return; they were released the day of Reagan’s inauguration.

Carter left office in January 1981, and the following year, in partnership with Emory University, he and Rosalynn established the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization to advance peace, health, and human rights around the world.

The Carter Center has supervised elections in more than 100 countries, has helped farmers in 15 African countries to double or triple grain production, and has worked to prevent disease in Latin America and Africa. In 1986, when the Carter Center began a program to eradicate infections of the meter-long Guinea worm that emerges painfully from sufferers’ skin and incapacitates them for long periods, 3.5 million people a year in Africa and Asia were infected; in 2022 there were only 13 known infections, in 2023 there were 14. So far in 2024, there have been 7, but those will not be officially confirmed until spring 2025. In a 2015 interview, Carter said he hoped to outlive the last case.

President Carter said, “When I was in the White House, I thought of human rights primarily in terms of political rights, such as rights to free speech and freedom from torture or unjust imprisonment. As I traveled around the world since I was president, I learned there was no way to separate the crucial rights to live in peace, to have adequate food and health care, and to have a voice in choosing one’s political leaders. These human needs and rights are inextricably linked.”

In 2002, Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” When journalist Katie Couric of The Today Show asked him if the Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me, I think that’s the most exciting thing.”

In his Farewell Address on January 14, 1981, President Jimmy Carter worried about the direction of the country. He noted that the American people had begun to lose faith in the government’s ability to deal with problems and were turning to “single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens, our own personal views and our own private interests are protected.” This focus on individualism, he warned, distorts the nation’s purpose because “the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.”

Carter urged Americans to protect our “most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” and to advance the basic human rights that had, after all, “invented America.” “Our common vision of a free and just society,” he said, “is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[calicojack1718]

Send Jimmy Carter a Little Love for his 100th Birthday!

Jimmy Carter is in hospice and no longer wakes up everyday. He has said that he is holding on to vote for Kamala Harris on Monday 7 October. We can all send him a little love by sending a photo to the Carter Center for his 100th. #JimmyCarter

Wish Jimmy Carter a happy 100th birthday You can use the QR code in the image to the left or follow this link, Celebrating 100. Jimmy Carter turns 100 on 1 October, but he is in poor health. His family reports that he is no longer waking up every day, but that he is hanging on to see one more milestone in American history, voting for the first Black-Asian American female president. Early…

[brucestambaughsblog]

Farewell and Godspeed, Jimmy Carter

My wife and I with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter at Maranatha Baptist Church, Plains, Georgia. Today, the nation says farewell to its 39th president. The state funeral will be held in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.. In contrast, a private service will be held tomorrow at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, where Jimmy and Rosalynn attended and Jimmy taught Sunday school. That’s…

[garudabluffs]

Photos: Jimmy Carter 100

An eclectic lineup of all-star performers and celebrities turned out for a spectacular concert at Atlanta's historic Fox Theatre to celebrate Jimmy Carter's 100th birthday. View photos

Tune in for a Tribute on Oct. 1

"Jimmy Carter 100: A Celebration in Song" makes its television premiere on Georgia Public Broadcasting today! Filmed at Atlanta’s The Fox Theatre, the concert featured an array of genre-spanning artists, including Eric Church, India Arie, Chuck Leavell, The B-52s, and more. Tune in Oct. 1, at 7 p.m. ET on GPB-TV. Don’t live in Georgia? You can watch the show on demand beginning Oct. 1 here:

gpb.org/jimmycarter100.

[galerymod]

James Earl Carter Jr.

1924-2024

39th President of the United States

We say goodbye to what is likely the last humanist president of the United States.

mod

He stood for sincerity, integrity and truthfulness, values that are rarely found in global politics today.

“We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes — and we must.”

Jimmy Carter

We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.

Jimmy Carter

[ronk]

Jimmy Carter

Former President Jimmy Carter is in hospice care. I rank him at the top of U.S. Presidents for what they have accomplished since leaving the White House.

I have always admired Jimmy Carter. He probably doesn’t make the top 10 American Presidents list but I rank him #1 for what he has accomplished since leaving the White House. I have followed him and his work and have been a supporter of The Carter Center. Founded, in partnership with Emory University, on a fundamental commitment to human rights and the alleviation of human suffering, the Center…

[deepbreakfast]

Another great one from Mike Luckovich.

[tomorrowusa]

Rosalynn Carter (1927-2023)

Rosalynn Carter has died at the age of 96. She was one of the more influential First Ladies – ranking behind just Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.

Rosalynn Carter, the wife of former President Jimmy Carter and a longtime mental health advocate and humanitarian, died on Sunday in her home in Plains, Ga., surrounded by family, according to the Carter Center. She was 96. The Carter Center announced Rosalynn Carter was in hospice care on Friday. Her family said earlier this year that she was diagnosed with dementia. Jimmy Carter, who is 99, has been in hospice care since February. "Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished," the former president said in a statement. "She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me." Rosalynn Carter was first lady from 1977 to 1981 and was dubbed the "Steel Magnolia" by the press during her years in the White House for the toughness she exhibited behind the gentle persona she outwardly embraced. Throughout Jimmy Carter's time in public office, she was her husband's closest political adviser. She also revolutionized and professionalized the first lady role by expanding the office beyond hostess duties. [ ... ] After her husband was elected president, Carter ushered in a new era as first lady. She attended Cabinet meetings and was only the second first lady to testify before Congress. According to Brower, she took a professional approach to the role, exemplified by the fact that she was the first presidential spouse to carry a briefcase to the office on a daily basis. "I think Rosalynn was a feminist and somebody who wanted to be a true partner to her husband," Brower said. "And she didn't see any reason why she shouldn't be allowed to do that."

She had been an advocate for mental health long before she came to Washington.

As first lady of Georgia, Carter encouraged her husband to establish a governor's commission on mental health, which outlined an influential plan to shift treatment from large institutions to community centers. "She really began the effort in this country to modernize mental health care," Cade said. "And the mental health care system that we have today in many ways reflects her 50 years of advocacy." Carter was also an early advocate for reducing the stigma around mental illness and, in speeches, often framed mental health care as "a basic human right." In 1980, President Carter signed the Mental Health Systems Act, which provided grants for community mental health clinics, one of many achievements credited, at least in part, to his wife's advocacy in the U.S. and globally.

Mental health as a basic human right is one of Rosalyn Carter's legacies.

On the subject of mental health, Mrs. Carter took part in a forum at the JFK Presidential Library in November of 2010.

ROSALYNN CARTER ON THE MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS | JFK Library

[riesenfeldcenter]

In memory of President Jimmy Carter (1924-2024), we would like to share a handful of photos from the former president’s visit to the law school in 2001. The law school’s current home, Walter F. Mondale Hall, was dedicated in 2001 after its completion, and the Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center was also established with the new building.

1. President Carter views items from our rare books collection with former curator, Katherine Hedin.

2-4. President Carter poses with Walter Mondale and gives a speech at the dedication of Walter F. Mondale Hall.

[deadpresidents]

Just after the 2008 election, outgoing President George W. Bush invited all of the living former Presidents to the White House for a private lunch with President-elect Obama. A memorable Oval Office photograph shows the Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Obama chatting like old friends on the left, with Carter standing alone on the right. One of the Presidents confided later that the photo perfectly captured the chemistry of their meeting and lunch that day. The other Presidents gave Obama convivial advice on the peculiarities of the office, while Carter wanted to press his serious policy agenda. Carter later told Brian Williams of NBC News that the body language was deliberate because "I feel that my role as a former President is probably superior to that of other Presidents."

-- Jonathan Alter, writing about a lunch at the White House on January 7, 2009 with all living American Presidents and President-elect Barack Obama which highlighted the often-strained relationships that former President Jimmy Carter had with his successors, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO).

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Chris McGreal at The Guardian:

Jimmy Carter’s terminal illness reignited a bitter dispute over accusations the former president was antisemitic after he wrote a bestselling book likening the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories to South African apartheid. Prominent American supporters of Israel lined up to denounce Carter and the book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, when it was published in 2006. Abe Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, called the former president a “bigot”. Deborah Lipstadt, who is now the Biden administration’s special envoy against antisemitism, accused him of having a “Jewish problem”. Alan Dershowitz, the US constitutional lawyer and ardent advocate for Israel, said Carter set out to offend Israelis and Jews. “Jimmy Carter’s sensitivities seem to have a gaping hole when it comes to Jews. There is a term for that,” he wrote.

Others did not beat around the bush and called Carter an antisemite. Pro-Israel pressure groups placed ads in the New York Times accusing Carter of facilitating those who “pursue Israel’s annihilation” and claiming he was “blinded by an anti-Israel animus”. But nearly two decades later, the book looks prescient given that leading Israeli politicians and major human rights organisations now accuse Israel of imposing a form of apartheid on the Palestinians in breach of international laws. News that Carter had entered hospice care at the beginning of the year prompted calls for critics to apologise for the abuse, drawing an admission from at least one critic. Among those outraged by Carter’s book in 2006 were members of the former president’s own foundation, which has built an international reputation for its work on human rights and to alleviate suffering. Steve Berman led a mass resignation from the Carter Center’s board of councillors at the time. Earlier this year, Berman revealed that he later wrote to Carter to apologise and to say that the former president had been right. “I had started to view Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians as something that started in 1967 as an accident but was now becoming an enterprise with colonial intentions,” Berman said in his letter to Carter. Shortly before Carter’s death, Peter Beinart, described as “the most influential liberal Zionist of his generation”, said the time had come for the former president’s critics to apologise for the “shameful way that the book was received by many significant people”.

When the late Jimmy Carter released his Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid book in 2006, the book’s release drew a lot of controversy because it called out Israel’s occupation of Palestine and compared their situation to South Africa’s highly controversial and racist Apartheid policies aimed at non-Afrikaner South Africans, especially the Blacks.

Turns out that Carter was well ahead of his time in calling out Israel Apartheid before it became a mainstream issue in some parts of the left in the US.

[holdensheadonthings]