Jimmy Carter
Carter’s book on Israeli ‘apartheid’ was called antisemitic – but was it prescient?
The ex-president was pilloried for his characterisation of the Palestinians’ plight but some say an apology is in order
Chris McGreal in New YorkMon 30 Dec 2024
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”.
Beinart named Foxman and Lipstadt as among those who “attacked and slandered” Carter even though he brokered the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
View image in fullscreenJimmy Carter, center, brokered the peace treaty between President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, left, and the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, in 1979. Photograph: Bob Daugherty/AP
“I think there would be something profoundly valuable for some of those folks … to apologise to Carter,” he said.
“The ability to recognise that you are wrong, that certain facts have made it clear I think that what Carter was saying in 2006 was really ahead of its time, and that Carter was not just right but he was showing a very unusual form of political courage.”
In 2021, Kai Bird, author of a recent biography of Carter’s time in the White House, called accusations of antisemitism “an outrage” but said they continue to linger because he was the first president to speak about the need for a “Palestinian homeland” and because he pressured Israel over peace talks with Egypt.
“The former president’s decision to use the word ‘apartheid’ no longer seems a stretch; indeed, today it seems to describe the reality on the ground in the occupied West Bank. I don’t think Carter has a Jewish problem. It’s just the reverse. The American Jewish establishment has a Jimmy Carter problem,” Bird wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Beinart, an Orthodox Jew whose parents immigrated to the US from South Africa, said Carter’s political allies also turned their backs on him.
“He was thrown under the bus by leading members of his own Democratic party,” he said.
That included Nancy Pelosi, who was about to become speaker of the House of Representatives. She said Carter “does not speak for the Democratic party on Israel”.
Carter was also attacked in the press.
The New Republic’s editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, an ardent supporter of Israel who has since drawn his own accusations of bigotry after calling Arab society “backward” and saying “Muslim life is cheap”, wrote that Carter would “go down in history as a Jew-hater”.
In a book review for the Washington Post, the writer Jeffrey Goldberg accused Carter of “hostility to Israel” in part for failing to recognise that the country “dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements”. Seventeen years later the settlements are still there and expanding.
Carter himself noted that Palestinian voices were largely excluded from the debate about the book. Beinart said that many of the reviews in leading publications were by Jewish Americans while he could not find any by a Palestinian. A New York Times article about the reaction to the book quoted pro-Israel organisations attacking Carter’s motives, but did not include a single view from a Palestinian.
Months after his book’s publication, Carter told the Observer that he did not regret describing the occupation as apartheid.
“The word is the most accurate available to describe Palestine. Apartheid is when two different people live in the same land, and they are forcibly segregated, and one dominates or persecutes the other. That’s what’s happening in Palestine: so the word is very, very accurate. It’s used widely, and every day, in Israel,” he said.
As the former president’s health deteriorated and he withdrew from public view, his foundation, the Carter Center, upset many Israelis further when it called for a ceasefire days after the 7 October Hamas attack by quoting his 2002 Nobel peace prize speech: “We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
The Center warned that collective punishment and the murder of civilians was contrary to international law – a warning that looks prescient now that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been indicted for war crimes alongside his former defence minister and the Hamas military leader, Mohammed Deif.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wonder if you would consider supporting the Guardian’s work as we prepare for a pivotal, uncertain year ahead.
The course of world history has taken a sharp and disturbing turn in 2024. Liberalism is under threat from populist authoritarianism. Americans have voted to install a president with no respect for democratic norms, nor the facts that once formed the guardrails of public debate.
That decision means an alliance critical to Australia’s national and economic security is now a series of unpredictable transactions, with a partner no longer committed to multilateralism, nor efforts to curb global heating, the greatest threat we face. We just don’t know where this will lead.
In this uncertain time, fair, fact-based journalism is more important than ever – to record and understand events, to scrutinise the powerful, to give context, and to counter rampant misinformation and falsehoods.
As we enter an Australian election year, we are deeply conscious of the responsibility to accurately and impartially report on what is really at stake.
The Guardian is in a unique position to do this. We are not subject to the influence of a billionaire owner, nor do we exist to enrich shareholders. We are here to serve and listen to you, our readers, and we rely on your support to power our work.
Your support keeps us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to everyone – whether they can afford to pay for news, or not.
If you’re in a position to do so, please consider supporting our work today. It has never mattered more. Thank you.
Lenore Taylor
Editor, Guardian Australia
“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”.
Beinart named Foxman and Lipstadt as among those who “attacked and slandered” Carter even though he brokered the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
View image in fullscreenJimmy Carter, center, brokered the peace treaty between President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, left, and the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, in 1979. Photograph: Bob Daugherty/AP“I think there would be something profoundly valuable for some of those folks … to apologise to Carter,” he said.
“The ability to recognise that you are wrong, that certain facts have made it clear I think that what Carter was saying in 2006 was really ahead of its time, and that Carter was not just right but he was showing a very unusual form of political courage.”
In 2021, Kai Bird, author of a recent biography of Carter’s time in the White House, called accusations of antisemitism “an outrage” but said they continue to linger because he was the first president to speak about the need for a “Palestinian homeland” and because he pressured Israel over peace talks with Egypt.
“The former president’s decision to use the word ‘apartheid’ no longer seems a stretch; indeed, today it seems to describe the reality on the ground in the occupied West Bank. I don’t think Carter has a Jewish problem. It’s just the reverse. The American Jewish establishment has a Jimmy Carter problem,” Bird wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Beinart, an Orthodox Jew whose parents immigrated to the US from South Africa, said Carter’s political allies also turned their backs on him.
“He was thrown under the bus by leading members of his own Democratic party,” he said.
That included Nancy Pelosi, who was about to become speaker of the House of Representatives. She said Carter “does not speak for the Democratic party on Israel”.
Carter was also attacked in the press.
The New Republic’s editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, an ardent supporter of Israel who has since drawn his own accusations of bigotry after calling Arab society “backward” and saying “Muslim life is cheap”, wrote that Carter would “go down in history as a Jew-hater”.
In a book review for the Washington Post, the writer Jeffrey Goldberg accused Carter of “hostility to Israel” in part for failing to recognise that the country “dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements”. Seventeen years later the settlements are still there and expanding.
Carter himself noted that Palestinian voices were largely excluded from the debate about the book. Beinart said that many of the reviews in leading publications were by Jewish Americans while he could not find any by a Palestinian. A New York Times article about the reaction to the book quoted pro-Israel organisations attacking Carter’s motives, but did not include a single view from a Palestinian.
Months after his book’s publication, Carter told the Observer that he did not regret describing the occupation as apartheid.
“The word is the most accurate available to describe Palestine. Apartheid is when two different people live in the same land, and they are forcibly segregated, and one dominates or persecutes the other. That’s what’s happening in Palestine: so the word is very, very accurate. It’s used widely, and every day, in Israel,” he said.
As the former president’s health deteriorated and he withdrew from public view, his foundation, the Carter Center, upset many Israelis further when it called for a ceasefire days after the 7 October Hamas attack by quoting his 2002 Nobel peace prize speech: “We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
The Center warned that collective punishment and the murder of civilians was contrary to international law – a warning that looks prescient now that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been indicted for war crimes alongside his former defence minister and the Hamas military leader, Mohammed Deif.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wonder if you would consider supporting the Guardian’s work as we prepare for a pivotal, uncertain year ahead.
The course of world history has taken a sharp and disturbing turn in 2024. Liberalism is under threat from populist authoritarianism. Americans have voted to install a president with no respect for democratic norms, nor the facts that once formed the guardrails of public debate.
That decision means an alliance critical to Australia’s national and economic security is now a series of unpredictable transactions, with a partner no longer committed to multilateralism, nor efforts to curb global heating, the greatest threat we face. We just don’t know where this will lead.
In this uncertain time, fair, fact-based journalism is more important than ever – to record and understand events, to scrutinise the powerful, to give context, and to counter rampant misinformation and falsehoods.
As we enter an Australian election year, we are deeply conscious of the responsibility to accurately and impartially report on what is really at stake.
The Guardian is in a unique position to do this. We are not subject to the influence of a billionaire owner, nor do we exist to enrich shareholders. We are here to serve and listen to you, our readers, and we rely on your support to power our work.
Your support keeps us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to everyone – whether they can afford to pay for news, or not.
If you’re in a position to do so, please consider supporting our work today. It has never mattered more. Thank you.
Lenore Taylor
Editor, Guardian Australia
===
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter, peacemaker guided by moral vision but laid low by politics
The 39th president was a Renaissance man who should be celebrated for his environment policy and his work for peace
Jonathan AlterMon 30 Dec 2024 08.22 AEDT
Share
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and a Nobel peace prize-winning humanitarian, died on Sunday in Plains, Georgia, the tiny town where he and his formidable wife and life partner, Rosalynn, were born.
Carter – the longest-lived and longest-married US president – is unlikely to be placed in the first rank of American leaders, but his single four-year term is now seen in a much better light than it was when he was best known for the seizure of American hostages in Iran and for his crushing loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The easy shorthand on Carter – inept president but superb former president – is a major oversimplification. In office, Carter was a political failure but a policy success, with a string of unheralded accomplishments and a partially fulfilled vision of peace and a clean energy future. He was an austere, non-ideological, moral leader who didn’t like to think of himself as a politician and operated as one only during campaigns.
With a peculiar combination of Zen calm and steely-eyed stubbornness, Carter essentially lived in three centuries. He was born in 1924 but it might as well have been the 19th century. His family, while well-to-do for the area, had no electricity, running water or mechanized equipment on the farm. He was connected to almost all of the significant events of the 20th century. And the issues he tackled during his post-presidency – global health, democracy promotion and conflict resolution – are the cutting-edge challenges of the 21st.
Carter was the first president since Thomas Jefferson who could rightly be considered a Renaissance man
As a child, Carter was driven by a dream of attending the US Naval Academy, from which he graduated in 1946. When his father died, in 1953, he left the navy to take over the family peanut warehouse and assume his father’s many civic responsibilities. Ducking the civil rights movement, Carter was elected to the Georgia senate in 1962 and – after dog-whistle appeals to segregationists – as governor in 1970. He immediately turned on his racist supporters and integrated state government before launching a brilliant campaign that, with the help of the Watergate scandal and the support of the “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S Thompson, brought him from 0% in the polls to the Democratic nomination for president in 1976. Though briefly derailed by an interview in Playboy magazine in which the Southern Baptist confessed to having “committed adultery in my heart many times”, he won a narrow victory over Gerald Ford, who had assumed the presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon.
With skills ranging from agronomist, nuclear engineer and sonar technologist to poet, painter and master woodworker, Carter was the first president since Thomas Jefferson who could rightly be considered a Renaissance man.
He was also the first since Jefferson under whom no blood was shed in war. And his record of honesty and decency, once seen as minimum qualifications, have loomed larger with time. At a farewell dinner just before leaving office, his vice-president, Walter F Mondale, toasted the Carter administration: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.” Carter later added a fourth major accomplishment: “And we championed human rights.”
View image in fullscreenJimmy Carter and Walter Mondale at the Democratic national convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City in July 1976. Photograph: Reuters
Carter did so by taking the American civil rights movement global and setting a new standard for how governments should treat their own people. While his human rights policy could be hypocritical – the US continued to support the Shah of Iran and a few other dictators who served American interests – Carter’s new approach contributed to the demise of more than a dozen authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Asia. Two future heads of state, Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Kim Dae-jong of South Korea, credited their freedom from prison in part to Carter, whose words gave hope to thousands of dissidents and, even by some conservative accounts, helped undermine communism.
Carter may be best known for the 1978 Camp David Accords, the most durable major peace treaty since the second world war. Israel and Egypt had fought four wars in 30 years when Carter brought the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, and the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, together at a rustic retreat in the Maryland mountains. At various times, Begin and Sadat (a close friend of Carter) packed their bags and prepared to leave without an agreement. The talks were saved by Carter’s grit. Averell Harriman, Franklin D Roosevelt’s wartime envoy, called Camp David “one of the most extraordinary things any president in history has ever accomplished”.
While Israel and Egypt have maintained a chilly detente for four decades, the second part of the deal – a path to Palestinian statehood – has not been realized. Carter praised Begin for turning over the Sinai to Egypt but argued that he reneged on a pledge to freeze Israeli settlements on the West Bank until the completion of Palestinian autonomy. He believed that had he been re-elected, he would have achieved a comprehensive Middle East peace.
Carter’s most far-reaching accomplishment may have been the normalization of US relations with China. Within days of Deng Xiaoping’s historic 1979 visit to Washington, Deng legalized private property and took other big steps toward a capitalist economy. Carter jettisoned Nixon and Ford’s awkward “two China policy” (which favored Taiwan) and established the bilateral relationship that is the foundation of the global economy.
Another foreign policy victory came when Carter overcame steep odds to win the 67 votes in the Senate needed to ratify the Panama Canal treaties, which turned over the canal to the Panamanians. The treaties sharply improved the standing of the US throughout Latin America and avoided a permanent deployment of more than 100,000 US troops to protect the canal from guerrilla attacks. But several Democratic senators lost their seats over the vote and Carter won no credit for preventing a festering Vietnam-style conflict in Central America.
Anticipating the moderate ‘New Democrat’ presidencies of Clinton and Obama, Carter reduced the budget deficit
Carter sharply increased defense spending and developed the B2 stealth bomber and other hi-tech weapons that years later helped win the cold war, contradicting a rightwing canard that he was somehow “weak” on defense. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he was forced to withdraw the Salt II Treaty from the Senate (though its terms were respected by both nations). Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow and impose a grain embargo on the Soviet Union were ineffective and, eventually, hugely unpopular.
At home, Carter failed to enact welfare, tax and healthcare reform. But he still signed more domestic legislation than any other postwar president except Lyndon Johnson, much of it far-sighted. He established the Department of Education, the Department of Energy and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; replaced tokenism with genuine racial and gender diversity in the civil service and federal judiciary; curbed the power of banks to “redline” (disinvest in) black neighborhoods; and provided the first whistleblower protections and the first bureaucratic watchdogs, or inspectors general.
Carter placed solar panels on the roof of the White House (taken down by Reagan), a symbol of a stellar environmental record that included the first funding for green energy, the first fuel economy standards for autos and the first federal requirements for toxic waste clean-up, among other far-reaching statutes. With the Alaska Lands Act, Carter protected that state from despoilment and doubled the size of the national park system. Had he been re-elected, he planned to begin to address global warming, which was then an obscure problem even in the scientific community.
View image in fullscreenJimmy Carter prepares to address the American people from the Oval Office in April 1980, on the failed mission to rescue the Iran hostages. Photograph: Anonymous/Associated Press
Anticipating the moderate “New Democrat” presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Carter reduced the budget deficit and reluctantly approved a business tax cut. His appointment of Paul A Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve board led to sky-high interest rates that helped cripple his presidency. But Volcker’s harsh monetary medicine eventually ended double-digit inflation, a victory whose political benefits accrued to Reagan.
'Visionary success': Jonathan Alter makes the case for Jimmy Carter
Read more
In the second half of his term, Carter was beset by external problems, many beyond his control. Gasoline shortages led to a public “malaise”, which Carter addressed in a famous speech, without using the word. Senator Edward Kennedy, darling of liberals, launched a damaging campaign against him for the 1980 Democratic nomination. After the seizure of the hostages in Tehran, the American public rallied around Carter for a time, which helped him fend off Kennedy. But when a helicopter mission to free the hostages was aborted in the Iranian desert, Carter’s popularity sank again. While he was unable to free the hostages before the election (perhaps because of an “October Surprise” deal between the Reagan campaign and the Iranian government), he did so afterwards – though the liberated Americans didn’t clear Iranian airspace until moments after Reagan was sworn in.
For four decades after leaving office, Carter continued his work as a peacemaker and promoter of human rights and democratic accountability. He helped eradicate diseases, built houses for the poor and taught Sunday school into his mid-90s.
Jonathan Alter is the author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life, published in the US by Simon & Schuster
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wonder if you would consider supporting the Guardian’s work as we prepare for a pivotal, uncertain year ahead.
The course of world history has taken a sharp and disturbing turn in 2024. Liberalism is under threat from populist authoritarianism. Americans have voted to install a president with no respect for democratic norms, nor the facts that once formed the guardrails of public debate.
That decision means an alliance critical to Australia’s national and economic security is now a series of unpredictable transactions, with a partner no longer committed to multilateralism, nor efforts to curb global heating, the greatest threat we face. We just don’t know where this will lead.
In this uncertain time, fair, fact-based journalism is more important than ever – to record and understand events, to scrutinise the powerful, to give context, and to counter rampant misinformation and falsehoods.
As we enter an Australian election year, we are deeply conscious of the responsibility to accurately and impartially report on what is really at stake.
The Guardian is in a unique position to do this. We are not subject to the influence of a billionaire owner, nor do we exist to enrich shareholders. We are here to serve and listen to you, our readers, and we rely on your support to power our work.
Your support keeps us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to everyone – whether they can afford to pay for news, or not.
If you’re in a position to do so, please consider supporting our work today. It has never mattered more. Thank you.
Lenore Taylor
Editor, Guardian Australia
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter, peacemaker guided by moral vision but laid low by politics
The 39th president was a Renaissance man who should be celebrated for his environment policy and his work for peace
Jonathan AlterMon 30 Dec 2024 08.22 AEDT
Share
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and a Nobel peace prize-winning humanitarian, died on Sunday in Plains, Georgia, the tiny town where he and his formidable wife and life partner, Rosalynn, were born.
Carter – the longest-lived and longest-married US president – is unlikely to be placed in the first rank of American leaders, but his single four-year term is now seen in a much better light than it was when he was best known for the seizure of American hostages in Iran and for his crushing loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The easy shorthand on Carter – inept president but superb former president – is a major oversimplification. In office, Carter was a political failure but a policy success, with a string of unheralded accomplishments and a partially fulfilled vision of peace and a clean energy future. He was an austere, non-ideological, moral leader who didn’t like to think of himself as a politician and operated as one only during campaigns.
With a peculiar combination of Zen calm and steely-eyed stubbornness, Carter essentially lived in three centuries. He was born in 1924 but it might as well have been the 19th century. His family, while well-to-do for the area, had no electricity, running water or mechanized equipment on the farm. He was connected to almost all of the significant events of the 20th century. And the issues he tackled during his post-presidency – global health, democracy promotion and conflict resolution – are the cutting-edge challenges of the 21st.
Carter was the first president since Thomas Jefferson who could rightly be considered a Renaissance man
As a child, Carter was driven by a dream of attending the US Naval Academy, from which he graduated in 1946. When his father died, in 1953, he left the navy to take over the family peanut warehouse and assume his father’s many civic responsibilities. Ducking the civil rights movement, Carter was elected to the Georgia senate in 1962 and – after dog-whistle appeals to segregationists – as governor in 1970. He immediately turned on his racist supporters and integrated state government before launching a brilliant campaign that, with the help of the Watergate scandal and the support of the “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S Thompson, brought him from 0% in the polls to the Democratic nomination for president in 1976. Though briefly derailed by an interview in Playboy magazine in which the Southern Baptist confessed to having “committed adultery in my heart many times”, he won a narrow victory over Gerald Ford, who had assumed the presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon.
With skills ranging from agronomist, nuclear engineer and sonar technologist to poet, painter and master woodworker, Carter was the first president since Thomas Jefferson who could rightly be considered a Renaissance man.
He was also the first since Jefferson under whom no blood was shed in war. And his record of honesty and decency, once seen as minimum qualifications, have loomed larger with time. At a farewell dinner just before leaving office, his vice-president, Walter F Mondale, toasted the Carter administration: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.” Carter later added a fourth major accomplishment: “And we championed human rights.”
View image in fullscreenJimmy Carter and Walter Mondale at the Democratic national convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City in July 1976. Photograph: ReutersCarter did so by taking the American civil rights movement global and setting a new standard for how governments should treat their own people. While his human rights policy could be hypocritical – the US continued to support the Shah of Iran and a few other dictators who served American interests – Carter’s new approach contributed to the demise of more than a dozen authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Asia. Two future heads of state, Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Kim Dae-jong of South Korea, credited their freedom from prison in part to Carter, whose words gave hope to thousands of dissidents and, even by some conservative accounts, helped undermine communism.
Carter may be best known for the 1978 Camp David Accords, the most durable major peace treaty since the second world war. Israel and Egypt had fought four wars in 30 years when Carter brought the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, and the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, together at a rustic retreat in the Maryland mountains. At various times, Begin and Sadat (a close friend of Carter) packed their bags and prepared to leave without an agreement. The talks were saved by Carter’s grit. Averell Harriman, Franklin D Roosevelt’s wartime envoy, called Camp David “one of the most extraordinary things any president in history has ever accomplished”.
While Israel and Egypt have maintained a chilly detente for four decades, the second part of the deal – a path to Palestinian statehood – has not been realized. Carter praised Begin for turning over the Sinai to Egypt but argued that he reneged on a pledge to freeze Israeli settlements on the West Bank until the completion of Palestinian autonomy. He believed that had he been re-elected, he would have achieved a comprehensive Middle East peace.
Carter’s most far-reaching accomplishment may have been the normalization of US relations with China. Within days of Deng Xiaoping’s historic 1979 visit to Washington, Deng legalized private property and took other big steps toward a capitalist economy. Carter jettisoned Nixon and Ford’s awkward “two China policy” (which favored Taiwan) and established the bilateral relationship that is the foundation of the global economy.
Another foreign policy victory came when Carter overcame steep odds to win the 67 votes in the Senate needed to ratify the Panama Canal treaties, which turned over the canal to the Panamanians. The treaties sharply improved the standing of the US throughout Latin America and avoided a permanent deployment of more than 100,000 US troops to protect the canal from guerrilla attacks. But several Democratic senators lost their seats over the vote and Carter won no credit for preventing a festering Vietnam-style conflict in Central America.
Anticipating the moderate ‘New Democrat’ presidencies of Clinton and Obama, Carter reduced the budget deficit
Carter sharply increased defense spending and developed the B2 stealth bomber and other hi-tech weapons that years later helped win the cold war, contradicting a rightwing canard that he was somehow “weak” on defense. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he was forced to withdraw the Salt II Treaty from the Senate (though its terms were respected by both nations). Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow and impose a grain embargo on the Soviet Union were ineffective and, eventually, hugely unpopular.
At home, Carter failed to enact welfare, tax and healthcare reform. But he still signed more domestic legislation than any other postwar president except Lyndon Johnson, much of it far-sighted. He established the Department of Education, the Department of Energy and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; replaced tokenism with genuine racial and gender diversity in the civil service and federal judiciary; curbed the power of banks to “redline” (disinvest in) black neighborhoods; and provided the first whistleblower protections and the first bureaucratic watchdogs, or inspectors general.
Carter placed solar panels on the roof of the White House (taken down by Reagan), a symbol of a stellar environmental record that included the first funding for green energy, the first fuel economy standards for autos and the first federal requirements for toxic waste clean-up, among other far-reaching statutes. With the Alaska Lands Act, Carter protected that state from despoilment and doubled the size of the national park system. Had he been re-elected, he planned to begin to address global warming, which was then an obscure problem even in the scientific community.
View image in fullscreenJimmy Carter prepares to address the American people from the Oval Office in April 1980, on the failed mission to rescue the Iran hostages. Photograph: Anonymous/Associated PressAnticipating the moderate “New Democrat” presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Carter reduced the budget deficit and reluctantly approved a business tax cut. His appointment of Paul A Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve board led to sky-high interest rates that helped cripple his presidency. But Volcker’s harsh monetary medicine eventually ended double-digit inflation, a victory whose political benefits accrued to Reagan.
'Visionary success': Jonathan Alter makes the case for Jimmy Carter
Read more
In the second half of his term, Carter was beset by external problems, many beyond his control. Gasoline shortages led to a public “malaise”, which Carter addressed in a famous speech, without using the word. Senator Edward Kennedy, darling of liberals, launched a damaging campaign against him for the 1980 Democratic nomination. After the seizure of the hostages in Tehran, the American public rallied around Carter for a time, which helped him fend off Kennedy. But when a helicopter mission to free the hostages was aborted in the Iranian desert, Carter’s popularity sank again. While he was unable to free the hostages before the election (perhaps because of an “October Surprise” deal between the Reagan campaign and the Iranian government), he did so afterwards – though the liberated Americans didn’t clear Iranian airspace until moments after Reagan was sworn in.
For four decades after leaving office, Carter continued his work as a peacemaker and promoter of human rights and democratic accountability. He helped eradicate diseases, built houses for the poor and taught Sunday school into his mid-90s.
Jonathan Alter is the author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life, published in the US by Simon & Schuster
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wonder if you would consider supporting the Guardian’s work as we prepare for a pivotal, uncertain year ahead.
The course of world history has taken a sharp and disturbing turn in 2024. Liberalism is under threat from populist authoritarianism. Americans have voted to install a president with no respect for democratic norms, nor the facts that once formed the guardrails of public debate.
That decision means an alliance critical to Australia’s national and economic security is now a series of unpredictable transactions, with a partner no longer committed to multilateralism, nor efforts to curb global heating, the greatest threat we face. We just don’t know where this will lead.
In this uncertain time, fair, fact-based journalism is more important than ever – to record and understand events, to scrutinise the powerful, to give context, and to counter rampant misinformation and falsehoods.
As we enter an Australian election year, we are deeply conscious of the responsibility to accurately and impartially report on what is really at stake.
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Lenore Taylor
Editor, Guardian Australia
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