Among the maize, yam and peanut farms of Savelugu-Nanton, a remote district of northern Ghana, the legacy of Jimmy Carter is less complicated than it is back in the former US president’s homeland.
Thanks to the work of his charity, The Carter Center, locals are nowadays spared the misery of Guinea worm disease – a parasite that breeds in the human belly and emerges through the skin before laying larvae in stagnant pools to await the next victim.
Carter’s work in fighting the bug and tracking votes in poor countries won him a Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002. It followed a presidency that achieved a landmark Middle East peace deal, but was hamstrung by economic woes and the Iranian hostage crisis.
He died on Sunday, aged 100, the Carter Center announced. He had entered hospice care in February 2023, electing to stay home after a series of short hospital stays. The former president had been diagnosed with cancer in 2015 but had responded well to treatment. At 100, he was the longest-lived president of the United States.
During six decades of politics, aid work and diplomacy, Carter “was committed to ideals like human rights, peace, and improving human life”, Steven Hochman, research director at The Carter Center, told Al Jazeera.
“He didn’t just want talk, he wanted action,” Hochman said. “Whether this was through monitoring elections in Latin America or witnessing the terrible suffering from Guinea worm disease in Asia and Africa, and working to eradicate it.”
Southern peanuts
Carter grew up on the red clay soil of rural Georgia during the Great Depression. He sold boiled peanuts on the streets of Plains, his hometown, and ploughed the land with his family. His father James “Earl” Carter, was a peanut farmer and warehouseman; his mother, Lillian, was a nurse.
He married Rosalynn Smith, a family friend, in 1946. The couple celebrated their 76th wedding anniversary in July 2022, a year before the former first lady died in November 2023.
After a seven-year US navy career, Carter returned to his home state of Georgia, where he garnered national attention as a Democrat state governor for his prudent management, winning a spot on the cover of Time magazine as a symbol of the “New South”.
Running for the presidency, Carter styled himself as an outsider to Washington politics, which were stained by the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. His “Peanut Brigade”, a group of friends from Georgia, crisscrossed the US and trumpeted their candidate as a straight-talking man of principle.
“Carter’s election in 1976 promised to redeem the nation from the sins of Vietnam and Watergate,” Randall Balmer, a historian and author, told Al Jazeera. “He aspired to restore faith in government, but betrayal during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon years had already given way to cynicism.”
In the White House, Carter’s trademark candour did not always translate into political victories. Many of his progressive social and economic plans hit logjams in Congress; an inability to translate ideals into legislative reality sapped his popularity.
The United States was mired in the stagflation woes of low economic growth, unemployment and high inflation, brought about by an energy crisis from the early 1970s. Carter’s solution, tackling US dependence on foreign oil via taxes and green energy, was quashed in the Senate.
Better abroad
Carter fared better overseas. He struck treaties that saw the Panama Canal brought under local control; established full diplomatic relations with China; and brokered a deal to limit nuclear weapons with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
His masterwork was bringing Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to his presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland, in 1978, and hammering out a peace deal between the foes over 13 tense days.
“He had credibility as a peace negotiator because he listened to both sides. He could think on his feet; and speak on his feet,” said Hochman. “He was a skilled negotiator who came up with ideas for overcoming conflict and tried them out. He took chances, even if that meant he might fail.”
The Camp David Accords led to full diplomatic and economic relations between the neighbours, on condition that Israel return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. They did not solve the Palestinian issue, but they have spared the region a repeat of the multi-state Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967.
“When Carter was considering the summit, and even after he announced it, just about every foreign-policy guru, Henry Kissinger included, counselled against it,” Gerald Rafshoon, the White House communications director under Carter, told Al Jazeera.
“The wise men warned that a head of state should never go into a negotiation without knowing the outcome in advance. Carter rejected that advice – and did more to further the security of Israel than any US president before or since.”
Middle East tumult
The Middle East offered Carter a diplomatic win, but it also brought his downfall. In 1979, Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage – sparking a 444-day crisis that did not end until Carter had been kicked out of the White House.
Carter’s efforts to secure the release of captives via the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were a political liability that was spotlighted nightly on US television news. A botched US rescue mission in April 1980 epitomised Carter’s misfortunes.
Later that year, Americans gave the Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, a former actor and governor of California, a landslide victory over Carter. Carter’s talk of a US “crisis of spirit” and national “malaise” may have been true, but it was no vote-winner.
“People say they want honest leaders, but when you give that to them, they say that’s not what a leader’s supposed to do,” Gary Sick, a White House official under Carter and other presidents, told Al Jazeera. “They expect their leaders to be somewhat devious and make things sound better than they really are.
“Jimmy Carter called a spade a spade, and people weren’t prepared for that honesty.”
Despite losing office, Carter’s diplomatic skills remained in demand. He mediated in Nicaragua, Panama, and Ethiopia, helped broker a power handover in Haiti and tackled North Korea’s nuclear weapons scheme. He wrote several books, mostly on Middle East peace.
He also retained the frankness that created political foes while president. He said the 2003 invasion of Iraq was “unjust”; and that the US was “in bed with the Israelis to the detriment” of Palestinians. An evangelical Christian, he also criticised abortion.
In 2006 Carter published the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He defended the use of the word apartheid in a 2007 interview with the US broadcaster NPR, calling it “an accurate description of what has been going on in the West Bank”.
He also said he hoped the book would make Americans aware of “the horrible oppression and persecution of the Palestinian people and it would precipitate for the first time any substantive debate on these issues”.
More than a decade later, major human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, would back his assessment, accusing Israel of imposing apartheid on Palestinians.
Philanthropy: The Carter Center
Founded in 1982 by the former president and his wife, The Carter Center has monitored 113 elections in 39 countries and tackled diseases such as river blindness, trachoma and malaria, often by bringing medics to less populated, less frequented areas.
There were 3.5 million cases of Guinea worm disease in 21 African and Asian countries when Carter declared war on the metre-long parasites in 1986. Savelugu-Nanton district and the rest of Ghana was declared rid of the disease in 2015, and has virtually been wiped out elsewhere.
Late into life, the former president continued to volunteer for the home-building organisation Habitat for Humanity, hosting an annual event that attracted thousands of volunteers in the US and abroad.
Carter’s supporters say that history will judge his presidency more favourably than American voters did in 1980.
Outside the White House, the legacy of the father of four and grandfather of 22 is assured.
In his own words: “I can’t deny I’m a better ex-president than I was a president.”
