Jimmy Carter's Consequential Life
Remembering Carter's commitment to diversity, peace and health with special appearances by RBG, Colin Powell and Bill Clinton
For me, Jimmy Carter started out as a cartoon and became one of the most consequential men in American life.
Carter was the first president I remember, and my recollections are what you might expect from an elementary school kid. He was a peanut farmer with big teeth -- a memory mostly the product of cartoonists who often featured his big, toothy smile and my own love of peanut butter and honey sandwiches.
I learned a lot more about President Carter as I got older.
Elected Georgia governor in 1970, he forged a new path for southern Democrats away from segregation and discrimination and toward a future that offered hope to all Georgia’s citizens.
Carter continued that commitment as president. He brought Reverend Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement into the presidency when he made King confidant Andrew Young Ambassador to the United Nations.
While Republicans get credit for appointing General Colin Powell the first Black National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State, if not for Jimmy Carter’s commitment to diversity we may never have known Powell’s name. When Clifford Alexander, President Carter’s African American Secretary of the Army, was presented a list of colonels to promote without a single African American name, he demanded the military leadership review the criteria, remove evidence of bias and bring any additional Black or white candidates who emerged. One of the names they came up with was then-Colonel Colin Powell.
Carter also made diversity on the federal bench a priority. He named 41 women judges and 57 people of color. Among those were Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Amalya Kearse, the first African American woman appointed to the circuit court and Damon Keith of the 6th Circuit, from my hometown of Detroit.
Only 56 years old when he lost the White House to Ronald Reagan, Carter was young as far as ex-presidents go. So, after the White House, Jimmy Carter forged a new path and raised the bar for every former president to follow.
Carter got busy building houses with Habitat for Humanity in Americus, Georgia near his home in Plains. He helped build or remodel 4,447 homes all over the world. He built the Carter Center in Atlanta to house his international work. That’s where he helped negotiate peace, monitor elections around the world, and bring leaders together to focus attention on international hotspots.
I was tangentially connected to one of his post-presidency missions. In 1994, Carter muscled his way into negotiating a peaceful end to the military overthrow of Haitian president Jean-Bertrande Aristide. President Bill Clinton sent U.S. Senator Sam Nunn and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell with him to cover all the bases.
After months of pressure from leaders like TransAfrica’s Randall Robinson who had embarked on a hunger strike, President Clinton resolved to send U.S. troops to the island if the junta leaders did not leave voluntarily. On the night of September 17, 1994, invasion was imminent, but first President Clinton had a speech to give at the annual Congressional Black Caucus Phoenix Awards dinner. I staffed him that night. Clinton looked warn and his tone was somber. He didn’t even wear the customary tuxedo. Time was ticking.
The next day Carter, Nunn and Powell got a deal. The junta leaders left in October. Five months later I was at Warrior Base in Port-Au-Prince as President Clinton addressed U.S. troops stationed on the island to help maintain order. Without Carter’s intervention, their peaceful mission would have been much bloodier.
Arguably President Carter’s most successful mission launched just five years after leaving the White House in 1981. According to the Carter Center, there were 3.5 million cases of Guinea worm disease (a waterborne parasitic disease) in 21 African and Asian countries when the former President established the Guinea Worm Eradication Program in 1986. There were 188,000 cases in Ghana alone, just after President Carter first saw a case up close near Ghana’s capital Accra. In 2015, the World Health Organization certified that Ghana had eliminated the disease. In 2023 there were only 14 cases reported on Earth.
Big titles don’t really matter. Neither do cartoonish reality show antics that drive the news cycle. In a public life, what should matter is the answer to a simple question: Who is better off after your efforts than before? Carter can rest easy. He channeled the power at his disposal to help people from Americus, Georgia to Accra Ghana.
Jimmy Carter was consequential.