EDITOR’S NOTE — Walter Mears was an Associated Press special correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1976 presidential campaign. Prior to his death in 2022, Mears wrote this retrospective article in appreciation of Carter, who entered hospice care on Feb. 18.
WASHINGTON — Ever the outsider, Jimmy Carter served a turbulent term in the White House. His presidency was beset by soaring interest and inflation rates, gasoline pump lines and the Iran hostage crisis that eventually led to his re-election defeat.
But he rose to even greater heights with his post-presidential career, devoting another four decades to working as an international envoy of peacemaking and democracy. James Earl Carter Jr., a peanut farmer who became the 39th president of the United States, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, Carter was, at 56, a politician with only a past and “a potentially empty life” ahead. Then, in 1982, he organized the Carter Center in Atlanta.
It kept him traveling, negotiating, leading election observation teams and speaking out, often to the discomfort or even resentment of the government he’d once led. Carter’s Nobel citation honored “his decades of untiring effort” to resolve conflicts, promote democracy and foster economic development.
The man who conceded that some considered him “a failed president” made himself the most active and internationally engaged of ex-presidents. “My role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents,” he said in a 2010 television interview.
When he ran for president as a one-term former Georgia governor, Carter was so improbable a candidate that he said his mother asked him, “President of what?”
To answer that and his all-but-invisible name-recognition rating, he started campaigning early. Carter covered some 50,000 campaign miles, his garment bag draped over his shoulder.
He won the Democratic nomination and challenged President Gerald Ford, predecessor Richard Nixon’s appointed vice president.
Ford had pardoned Nixon for any Watergate crimes. In the aftermath of Watergate, Carter was the anti-Richard Nixon figure. “I will never lie to you,” he told voters. But Carter was elected by only 2 percentage points.
The newly elected president and wife Rosalynn shunned the limousine and walked from the Capitol to the White House after his inauguration and tried to drop some of the pomp surrounding the presidency. But his solo style and unintended snubs left him short of political allies when he’d need their help.
For all that, Carter’s term left landmarks, such as the Israel-Egypt peace accord he engineered in personal negotiations at Camp David in 1978.
He won the beginnings of an energy-conservation policy. He gained ratification of the treaties that yielded U.S. control of the Panama Canal. He opened full diplomatic relations with China. The departments of energy and education were created. But his administration struggled, and Carter shook up his Cabinet amid “a crisis of confidence.”
And then things got worse.
On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian demonstrators invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, incited by their ayatollah to retaliate for the exiled former shah’s admission into the United States for medical treatment. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for more than a year. Carter tried to negotiate, and when that didn’t work, he ordered a military rescue attempt that failed disastrously in April 1980.
Eight Americans were killed in the attempt. It was Carter’s bleakest hour.
The hostage crisis essentially crippled Carter’s re-election campaign. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy challenged him in the Democratic primaries.
After that, it was all uphill against Reagan. Carter carried only six states to Reagan’s 44.
Minutes after Reagan was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1981, the hostages were freed after 444 days in captivity. Carter’s first major act as an ex-president was as Reagan’s special envoy to welcome the freed hostages in Germany the next day.
