Heavy with honours, attended by all living US presidents, and swathed in public affection, Jimmy Carter received a solemn state funeral on Thursday on the kind of cold and crystalline January day at which Washington DC’s climate can excel. Within hours, though, the 39th US president’s remains were interred in a private ceremony alongside his wife Rosalynn, in the shadow of the modest house they built in 1961 in Plains, Georgia, where Mr Carter was born more than a century ago, and where he died at the end of December.
This sharp juxtapositions of Mr Carter’s final day in the world’s eye were somehow appropriate. He made his home in Washington for the four years of his presidency, but his roots and heart were always in Georgia. His manifest personal decency and lack of Beltway experience made him the “not-Nixon” that the US needed after Watergate. Yet after a presidency marked by spiralling oil prices and the Iran hostage debacle, America quickly turned to a “not-Carter” candidate in the shape of Ronald Reagan.
Mr Carter’s funeral was a requiem for what was in many ways a better era in US politics. President Biden, in his eulogy, pointedly praised his “good life in a decent country” and warned that presidents should choose generosity rather than ego, an unmistakable jab at Donald Trump. There was a respectful bipartisan atmosphere in the National Cathedral – epitomised by the very personal eulogy written for Mr Carter by the late Gerald Ford, and delivered by his son, Steve. Donald Trump, sitting in the second row in the nave, was a visitor from another – and worse – political world.
It is a cliche to say that, while Mr Carter was not one of America’s most successful presidents, he was among the most consequential of its former presidents. Mr Carter was as close to being a renaissance man as anyone who has sat in the Oval Office in modern times. The Carter Center, founded by the Carters in 1982, is still one of the most important and respected human rights and anti-poverty non-profits in the world. Mr Carter remained actively involved in its work almost to the end.
But Mr Carter’s presidency should not be dismissed. This may even be, as the former adviser Stuart Eizenstat put it, the time “to redeem his presidency”. In his four years, Mr Carter normalised relations between the US and China, returned the Panama Canal zone to Panama, made an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union and, above all, brokered the Camp David agreement, which normalised relations between Israel and Egypt. If he had won re-election he was determined to turn his attention to global climate change, well before most other world leaders. No subsequent president has a record to compare with that, Mr Trump least of all.
Mr Carter was a far from perfect leader. He got bogged down in detail, chose inexperienced assistants, was unskilled at Capitol Hill power brokerage and failed to read the national mood. He was also unable to unify his party, triggering Ted Kennedy’s run to unseat him in 1980, or to rebuild the Roosevelt-Truman Democratic coalition. For all his virtues, it is important not to idealise Mr Carter. Yet, as Thursday made all too clear, the US has not just lost a significant leader, who hated the growing chasm between rich and poor. It is about to be governed by another leader who actively celebrates that increasingly merciless divide.
-
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
