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Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.
In 2006, Jimmy Carter published a controversial and best-selling book on Palestine with the word “apartheid” in the title. Then he went on a whirlwind book tour, captured on film by Jonathan Demme, to promote it. Carter spoke, signed books and calmly rebutted criticism and attacks with his trademark Sunday-school demeanor. Allies, including Nancy Pelosi, then on the verge of becoming speaker of the House, were annoyed. Enemies were livid. As for Carter, he was 82 years old and itching for a fight that mattered.
Then again, everything seemed to matter to Carter, who died Sunday at age 100. In addition to writing a best-selling book on a foreign conflict, Carter wrote poetry and sermons, memoirs, advice, a novel and reflections on faith. He was a Georgia farmer, Navy submariner and a politician who bravely preached, and practiced, racial reconciliation — but gave himself a moral mulligan when necessary. “I ran for Congress and then shifted to governor to fill a competitive urge,” he wrote, skipping the traditional pablum about public service, “and then really enjoyed making decisions as a top government executive.”
The son of a hard-to-please father and an expansive, socially engaged mother who joined the Peace Corps in her late 60s, Carter yearned to do good, and to be seen doing it. He taught, worked with wood and painted — another thing he wrote about. Deep into old age, he built homes for the poor and nurtured a foundation and think tank devoted to “waging peace, fighting disease, building hope.” He won the Nobel Peace Prize more than two decades after leaving office.
When you look at the full scope of his intellect, interests, commitments, talents and deeds, Carter seems more a man from the dexterously imaginative generation of America’s Founders than from the late 20th century reign of specialization.
Which is one reason his presidency has always been a bit confounding. He was a politician so supple and skilled that he forged peace between Egypt and Israel, and so stubborn and hapless that he managed to lose the support of much of his own party in Congress, essentially sabotaging the legislative majority that might have changed his trajectory, and ultimate place, in history.
When Carter learned in 2009 that his White House press secretary, Jody Powell, had died of a heart attack, the octogenarian former president drove to the nursing home where Powell’s mother was living to break the awful news in person. But when he occupied the White House, with glittering political lures at his command (Carter infamously fussed over the schedule of the White House tennis court), he failed to court other powerful leaders, including Sen. Edward Kennedy, a rival who threatened his future. Facing down energy disruptions, a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, stagflation and, later, a hostage crisis, the president could have used a friend.
The cardigan-clad commoner who dialed down the White House thermostat as he urged Americans to sacrifice their comfort for the national good came off as arrogant, moralistic and condescending to many. Economizing in response to scarcity, Carter said, “can be an enjoyable thing. It can bring families together. It can bring communities together. It can make us proud of ourselves.” Meanwhile, Carter failed, spectacularly, to bring Washington to his side. Washington journalists, Powell noted in his own memoir, “do not take kindly to being looked down upon by any politician, especially not a peanut farmer from some piddly-assed little gnat-hole in South Georgia.”
Carter’s late-inning triumph as a “model ex-president” is perhaps better appreciated as a template for a model old age. He shared quiet meals with his lifelong partner, Rosalynn Carter, until she died last year. He kept intellectually nimble by thinking, reading, speaking and writing. And he remained passionate about his commitments, which included humans, their dignity and rights, and the planet on which they reside.
Jimmy Carter may not have been a great president. But he was an elder for the ages.
