January 10, 2025
By Dr. Kenneth Stein, Emeritus Professor, Emory University
As the 39th president of the United States, James Earl Carter held office from 1977 to 1981. Carter was the longest-surviving former president in American history. He was the only U.S. president elected from Georgia. How his presidency and post-presidential life are evaluated remains dependent on one’s age, recollections from the 1970s, political outlook, and against whom he is compared. Carter passed away December 29, 2024, in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family. Carter was 100 years old.
Carter is remembered for several foreign and domestic policy accomplishments. He popularized advocacy of human rights as an integral element of foreign policy and oversaw two generational benchmark changes in the Middle East. With the feist and foresight of Egyptian and Israeli leaders, he stewarded to conclusion the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, which secured peace for those two states that had been enemies since 1948. That treaty relationship has endured for 45-plus years, becoming a bedrock of regional stability.
Definitely more disadvantageous to long-term stability of the region, his administration monitored the demise of the Shah’s regime in Iran, ending a three-decade rule as a vital U.S. ally. Abruptly, the Shah was replaced by a radical Islamic republic, which became the super agitator for anti-Americanism, held 52 Americans hostages during the last two years of his administration, and for the next four and half decades threatened the stability of Israel and Sunni Arab states, jeopardizing oil flows and price stability.
The impact of both events still reverberates throughout the Middle East. The Shah’s fall hastened efforts in Washington to upgrade its strategic relationship with Israel, causing it to become a vital cog to America’s national interest in the Middle East.
Immediately for Carter’s re-election bid, events in Iran contributed to his 1980 defeat. Iran labeled America as the Great Satan. The Americans were held hostage for 444 days; a rescue mission to free them in April 1980 failed miserably. Leading American academics and diplomats said Khomeini was a “reasonably moderate leader, … Gandhi-like,” and Andrew Young, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called him “some kind of saint.”
Every day from November 1979 forward, worldwide television networks reminded everyone that the U.S. as a nation was in a hostage mode. Walter Cronkite ended every evening CBS news program with a number and the words “this was such-and-such day in the hostage crisis.” By August 1980, Gallup and Harris polls showed Carter’s popularity at an unprecedented low of 21%. Initially, Carter chose not to campaign; he remained behind the White House fences, a reminder of the American president under siege, itself a drag on his popularity.
In his post-presidency, Carter became the most publicly engaged former president in U.S. history. His Atlanta-based Carter Center became his public forum for addressing major policy issues. He did not step back from the public limelight, as did every president from Truman to Obama. With no self-constraint and a keen desire to be noticed, he repeatedly criticized his successors for their policy choices, generating crusty relationships with almost all succeeding presidents. He wrote more than 30 books and hundreds of newspaper opinion pieces. For three decades he lectured regularly at Emory University on topics ranging from judicial reform, arms control and health care to democracy in the Americas and the Middle East. In 2002, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work in eradicating disease, monitoring elections and promoting democracies. As if to blunt the memory of his 1980 election defeat, Carter intentionally chose an active and controversial post-presidency.
Carter was born October 1, 1924, in rural Plains, Georgia. His father was a farmer of modest means. He went on to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy and served in the submarine force. He was driven to become a submarine captain but was denied that opportunity, diverting back to Plains in 1953 to lead the family’s faltering peanut-growing business. Under his direction it turned modest profits.
In 1946, he married Rosalynn Smith. The Carters had four children and 22 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Rosalynn Carter died November 19, 2023, at the age of 96.
Carter became a Georgia state senator in 1963 and was the governor from 1971 to 1975. While out of office, Carter emerged on the national political scene in the immediate post-Watergate era after Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. Slowly, he promoted himself as an honest, moral and a non-Washington voice. He garnered people’s attention, and though a neophyte about national politics, he used recent campaign reforms in the delegate selection process to capture the nomination and win the election.
Carter ran his 1976 campaign as a Washington outsider; he did not lobby traditional Democratic bases for support and consequently did not feel beholden to them upon reaching office. Robert Strauss, who headed the Democratic Party in 1976, noted that Carter “ran against Washington and governed the same way as an outsider.”
In the November 1976 election, Carter narrowly defeated Ford, the Republican incumbent, with 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240. By comparison, in the 1980 election, Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide, taking only 49 electoral votes to Reagan’s 489 electoral votes. That was the highest number of electoral votes ever won by a nonincumbent in U.S. history. Carter’s pollster, Patrick Caddell, estimated that without the more than 70% of the Jewish vote cast for him in the 1976 election, Carter would not have won in key states to gain the electoral victory; as the Democratic standard-bearer in 1980, Carter received fewer Jewish votes than any other Democratic presidential candidate in the 20th century.
According to Strauss, who as chair of the Democratic National Committee appointed Carter to lead the DNC’s campaign division in 1974 and was Carter’s campaign chair in the 1980 election, Carter “ran against Washington,” and his administration’s shortcoming after winning the election “was that they tried and failed to govern against Washington.”
Carter did not like pandering to a group’s interests for purposes of political expediency. That philosophy made him uncomfortable with the preferences of unfamiliar interest groups. He admitted to me that he was much more comfortable with rural farmer interests and much less so with labor unions, the intricacies of Washington’s power structures, American Jewry or the complexities of Middle Eastern politics.
For that matter, many of his closest advisers who went with him to Washington with were not schooled in the rhythms of Washington. Carter ran his 1976 campaign as an outsider; he did not lobby traditional Democratic bases for support and consequentially didn’t feel beholden to them upon reaching office. From the 1976 campaign he realized that the American Jewish community was cool to him; it preferred Senators Henry Jackson and Walter Mondale. When Carter as the incumbent was challenged by Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, he still carried a personal view of being an outsider working against the establishment.
Carter’s rural background, with few connections beyond south Georgia, helped shape his personality and attitude toward others in the political realm. More than any other characteristic, Carter developed a self-assertive view that his decisions were the correct ones, and others should follow his lead. According to Carter biographer Peter Bourne, he “tended to view self-serving constituency groups as threatening to distract him from what he believed was the right thing for the country. In his dealings with Congress, he assumed that as reasonable people, if they understood his approach, he would earn their respect.”
Carter evolved a relentless drive to engage in challenging work and seeing tasks through to conclusion. He was tenacious, stubborn and industrious beyond most people’s comprehension. In his post-presidency, I saw him combine charm, wit and sarcasm while often adapting an image or crafting a remark to please a listening audience. He did not shy away from being provocative, polarizing or pious. With an engineer’s mentality, he believed that problems had real solutions if reason, logic and will prevailed. He disdained obstacles that were clearly in his decision-making path, be they politicians, systems of government or historical hang-ups that he believed had unnecessarily fossilized the thinking of foreign or domestic leaders.
More than merely being annoyed, he greatly disliked limitations on his prerogatives. He particularly disdained lobbying groups, and here he ran afoul of American Jews, who were often passionately outspoken about his administration regularly and harshly treading upon Israeli decision-making, particularly his decisions about Israel’s security borders. He disliked and fervently circumvented Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s promise to the Israeli government not to negotiate with the PLO until it accepted Israel’s legitimacy. He told me in a 1991 interview that Kissinger’s promise was an “unwanted and unneeded handicap to my administration.” Nonetheless, Carter negotiated privately with the PLO as if the constraint did not exist.
In 1984, Carter told an interviewer, “I did what I thought was best for the country, and I didn’t worry much about the domestic political consequences. I could overcome them.”
Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic affairs adviser for four years during the presidency and earlier when Carter was governor, noted that there “was his overriding guiding principle of presidential governance to do the things that had to be done, in the belief that he was doing the right thing, he would ultimately be rewarded by the American people with another term.” Further, Eizenstat said, “Carter felt that foreign policy in general, and the Middle East in particular, should be insulated from domestic politics.”
This was an example where Carter’s stubborn tenacity about how American supporters of Israel should support his views repeatedly hurt him domestically. He knew that castigating Israel in public hurt him politically, and he knew it in the first six months of his presidency. His chief political adviser, Hamilton Jordan, provided Carter a highly secret assessment in June 1977, telling Carter that “the American Jewish community is extremely nervous about your attitudes toward Israel; in the absence of immediate action on our part, I fear that these feelings might solidify, leaving us in adversary posture with the American Jewish community. I advocate that we begin immediately with an extensive consultation program with the American Jewish community.”
Until he left office, Carter supported Israel’s physical and military security needs while maintaining a continuously exasperated relationship with its leader, Menachem Begin. His administration either supported or did not veto four U.N. Security Council resolutions that criticized Israel’s settlements, its policies toward the Palestinians and its presence in East Jerusalem (Resolution 446, Resolution 452, Resolution 465 and Resolution 478). One of those resolutions was acted on within weeks of the 1980 New York primary. which he lost consequently to the challenge of Senator Kennedy. Though he had the power, as President Ford did and exercised, at no time in his four years in office did Carter threaten to suspend any kind of aid to Israel because it engaged in policies unacceptable to the United States, such as building settlements. He persisted in a piously righteous attitude in his criticisms of Israel, discounting the public tarnish it brought, as if the objective were more important than absorbing the consequences of political self-flagellation. As president, he irked, perturbed and chastised Israel and her supporters in the United States. Carter admitted to Eizenstat, his domestic affairs assistant, “that he had lost a tremendous amount of Jewish support because he talked about a Palestinian homeland and dealt with very sensitive issues in a politically foolish way.”
While being a fiscal conservative, Carter was a liberal idealist. He did not have an overarching attitude about foreign affairs, as Ford or Reagan possessed against the intentions of the Soviet Union. With the least amount of knowledge in foreign affairs of any president since Harry Truman, he relied heavily on reading materials to learn what he did not know and upon Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Columbia University professor who became his national security adviser and his world affairs tutor.
According to Madeleine Albright, who worked in the Carter administration and was secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, Brzezinski had an outsized influence on Carter because of the closeness that he had with the president and the respect that Carter paid to his views. Brzezinski convinced Carter that the Arab-Israeli conflict could be resolved in a comprehensive fashion. He convinced Carter that rising oil prices or a potential oil embargo from Arab states could be avoided if the Palestinian quest for self-determination were satisfied, an Israeli West Bank withdrawal achieved, and portions of Jerusalem put under Muslim control. Brzezinski believed that if he delivered on the Palestinians, the Saudis would prevent both oil price hikes and oil shortages.
For his entire presidency, the Carter administration drove to achieve a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace; its efforts resulted in partial success with the 1978 negotiations between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Thirteen days of negotiations resulted in the 1978 Camp David Accords, followed by the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. Intensively and doggedly, Carter immersed himself in the nuances and the details of Middle East negotiations, unprecedented for any president in 20th century American diplomatic history. Carter gained enthusiastic international respect for stewarding Begin and Sadat to a positive outcome. While Moshe Dayan, Begin’s foreign minister, frequently had fierce disagreements with Carter over content and procedures, Dayan respected Carter’s “diligence, dedication and resourcefulness to see agreements concluded.” Dayan said, “If not for Carter, we [Israelis and Egyptians] would not have arrived at a final agreement.”
However, Palestinian autonomy or self-rule, which was outlined at Camp David, never commenced because Carter’s attentions went elsewhere, and neither Sadat nor Begin particularly wanted the Palestinian issue interrupting the implementation of their treaty. Only in 1993 was an outline for Palestinian self-government in a limited geographic area signed in the PLO-Israeli Oslo Accords. At the end of his administration, Carter had not accomplished his cherished comprehensive Middle East peace; instead, he achieved what Nixon, Ford and Kissinger earned, another bilateral Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement. It was a great disappointment to Carter; of all the issues that consumed him in the post-presidency, he devoted the most emotional energy and time to climbing that unsurmountable hill.
In the Camp David negotiations, a bitter and lifelong dispute arose between Carter and Begin over Israel’s continued insistence in building settlements in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip and around Jerusalem in areas that the Carter administration wanted reserved for the evolution of Palestinian self-determination. Relentlessly, Carter promoted Palestinian political rights and criticized Israel’s management of the territories for the remainder of his life; he passed some degree of that policy preference to each of the seven presidents who succeeded him.
During his second two years of office, Carter faced a whole host of issues that undermined American public confidence in his performance. In mid-July 1979, he gave an emotional speech to the nation chiding Americans for “self-indulgence, consumption and pursuing self-interest.” The speech was well received, but within a month, Carter fired half of his Cabinet, hoping to have more competent people in place as he headed to the 1980 election. According to pollster Cadell, “the speech was successful until he fired the Cabinet and the whole tenor of things changed.” Carter’s approval rating slumped. In the context of rising inflation, higher oil prices and gas lines, the Cabinet firings were viewed by some as a sign of desperation led by presidential pessimism.
As the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty unfolded in 1979 a sense of hope among supporters of Israel, it was received with lukewarm support in Egypt and disdain elsewhere in the Middle East, and incidentally was not embraced by Saudi Arabia as Brzezinski and Carter had hoped. Iran erupted in turmoil. The Iranian Islamic Republic spewed hatred at the United States. By the end of 1979, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and Americans were held hostage in Tehran. In April 1980, a military effort to rescue the hostages failed.
Carter’s inexperience in foreign affairs and ineptitude to comprehend the motivations of Islam as a potentially dangerous political platform, combined with a sagging economy. From the beginning to the end of the election year, Carter’s public approval ratings sank from the high 50s to the low 30s. With Iran, Brzezinski dithered, as did the president. Analysts and scholars have asked, “Could Iran’s future have turned out differently if so much concentration had not been devoted to concluding and implementing the Egyptian-Israeli treaty?” We shall never know.
By November 1980, the U.S. economy was reeling. About Carter’s loss, Hamilton Jordan said, “We had a divided Democratic Party, a president who was trying to take a liberal party in a moderate direction; and, second, we had bad economic circumstances. When we came into office, the price of a barrel of oil on the world market was eight dollars; when we left, it was thirty-two. That drove our economy and created an economic set of problems that I think made President Carter’s re-election impossible.”
Post-Presidency
As soon as the Carters left office on Monday afternoon, January 20, 1981, the Iranian government released the American hostages. Carter went to greet them, but their release did not do anything to remove the remorse and bitterness shaken by their loss. When the Carters returned to Plains, they were devastated by the smashing defeat at the hands of Governor Reagan. As they worked on their memoirs, Carter joined Emory University as a distinguished university professor. I frequently heard the Carters speak about how hurt they were by their defeat by Reagan, who they felt was completely unqualified to be president.
Several miles from the Emory campus, Carter chose to build his presidential library in tandem with the newly evolving Carter Center. Carter told several of us Emory professors, working to outline what the center would take on as its focus, that he did not want its work to be passive in writing research or policy papers, but to concentrate on topics where action engagements could accompany areas of study that deeply interested him. He chose arms control discussions, pursuit of democracy in the Americas, promotion of Middle East peace, endorsement of human rights abroad, and later in the 1980s multiple health care issues, the eradication of disease and election monitoring.
His post-presidency life and the center were co-terminus, making a difference in people’s lives. Still possessing a need to be noticed, he took public positions on all sorts of issues. He picked up a hammer and built homes for the poor as readily as he used his pen to promote viewpoints. Out of office and with the center as his base, he was happily unshackled from political considerations. The Carter Center became a forum where he rebounded from the 1980 defeat. For the next 40-plus years, he raised hundreds of millions of dollars for center programs that by 2024 numbered more than 2,500 employees around the world. His lectures to my Emory undergraduates on Arab-Israeli negotiations and on the fall of the Shah were gripping and memorable.
As a young Emory Middle Eastern history professor, I met Carter in 1982. He tapped me to become the executive director of the Carter Center, then his primary analyst on Middle Eastern matters. For the first years of the center’s operation, even before the center building opened in October 1986, Middle Eastern topics and programs assumed a quarter of all its programs.
When we wrote The Blood of Abraham (1984) together, I realized how deep his anger was toward Menachem Begin for failing to move forward on Palestinian self-rule and for Begin’s persistence in building settlements in the territories. At times he simply said to me, “Begin lied.”
Out of office he was perennially frustrated that he was not asked to rejuvenate a negotiating process. Many times, he said that if “American Jews had not abandoned me,” he would have beaten Reagan. Carter placed blame for his loss directly on Begin’s shoulders and on evangelicals for not supporting him in 1980. Each time he mentioned how Jews had not voted for him in 1980 as they did in 1976, he was correct: He received the lowest percentage of Jewish votes of any Democratic presidential nominee since Truman.
I reminded him that there were economic and leadership issues that contributed to his loss and that he himself had directly challenged American supporters of Israel. Others who voted against him did so because he did not steward the economy properly and because he regularly stumbled in foreign policy matters. In discussions with him, I used the same reasons that Hamilton Jordan gave for his defeat. Carter dismissed the reality that his own actions and policy choices had contributed to his defeat.
In March 1983, March 1987 and March 1990, the Carters and I with a small staff traveled to Middle Eastern capitals and places of unique historical interest. Every head of country provided five-star hospitality for us. We went to Mount Sinai and Assad’s hometown in Qardaha, landed on Masada via helicopter, engaged in a massive feast in the Saudi desert (where the Secret Service agents “misplaced Rosalynn” for about four hours), and every day spent hours in conversations with leading politicians, heads of state, academics, American ambassadors, religious leaders and every NGO imaginable.
Carter found learning from specialists without political pleadings a sublime avenue for absorbing information quickly. Upon his return from each Middle Eastern trip, he reported on his meetings to the sitting president or State Department officials. The reports were always upbeat, always conveying the not-so-hidden message that if called upon, he would be that special mediator. Carter was not subtle about how he shaped his remarks to them. In Atlanta, after each of our Middle East trips, we hosted three-day meetings at the Carter Center where Middle Eastern issues were discussed with candor and detail with politicians and academics alike. We never had an issue with having specialists join us. Carter was a magnet for interest to all because substance was debated, and it was learned quickly that as a former president he wanted to be engaged with topics of the day.
Since I had met him, we had been honest and direct with each other. Mrs. Carter understood that I was always forthright in my analyses of the region and in our private conversations. She knew that I never violated the contents of a private talk I had with him. More than once she told me that she appreciated the analyses and candor. In Cairo in March 1983, when I noted to Carter, at her precise suggestion, that “he could not be criticizing Ronald Reagan while in a foreign country,” Carter listened and nodded and did not criticize Reagan in public for the remainder of our Middle East trip. Throughout the 1980s we talked often about Middle Eastern matters, and he acknowledged at one point, “You helped me restrain myself in op-ed pieces.” That is accurate, but his strong and frequent anti-Israeli views and word choices always prevailed.
With Middle Eastern audiences, he astonished listeners by his knowledge of a topic and ability to deliver a talk without a typed manuscript. Before he gave a presentation, he wrote half a dozen words or phrases on letter-sized paper folded in thirds. As he stepped to a microphone, he took the paper from his inside jacket pocket and delivered an extemporaneous talk, as if he had an entire prepared text in front of him. In casual conversations his probing questions kept everyone’s attention.
Into the 1980s and 1990s, Carter became ever more frequently vocal and angry about Israeli politicians not doing enough to aid the Palestinians, and certainly not enough to push Palestinian self-determination forward. Carter still believed that he could mediate an end to the conflict. On April 2, 1987, in an evening meeting at the U.N., we met with the Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar and his Middle East specialist, Marrick J. Goulding. Carter told them both that he was available to be consulted because he had “unique access to Assad.” When we left that evening meeting, Goulding said to me, “He wants back in.” Other times in the 1980s and 1990s, he said, “If only they (the administration in office) would give me a chance, I could finish this.” Each time my response was the same: “Arafat is not Sadat, and the West Bank/Gaza Strip is not Sinai.”
Carter still had not grasped that not all Middle Eastern leaders wanted to resolve the conflict. And many Arab leaders and their populations still despised Israel’s very existence. When I sat with him for several hours in 1992, talking about the goals of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, showing him their promises to destroy Israel, he still retained a view that such ideas could be modified. I would learn later, after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, that he repeatedly embraced Hamas as a possible political participant with Israel in future negotiations.
Hundreds of times across the world, the Carter Center intervened to make positive differences in people’s everyday lives. It was fulfilling for some who collaborated with him. I remember two in particular. Carter had me write monthly letters to Hosni Mubarak, asking that that Egyptian president free Pope Shenoudah from house arrest, put there by Sadat. Dozens of letters later, the Egyptian Coptic pope was released. And in 1987, with data provided by the ADL in New York, Carter assisted me at a lunch with Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara in having five Syrian Jews released from jail before Passover.
By the early 1990s, Carter and the Carter Center changed their engagements from being almost always a place to meet to activities where he was more personally assertive and doing so much more abroad. He traveled the world, sometimes with and sometimes without the permission of sitting presidents. My notes from dozens of Carter Fellow meetings reminded me how and when he described telling U.S. presidents and vice presidents that he was going to visit a country or individual, but not really asking for permission. He sometimes bordered on violating the Logan Act, which is supposed to criminalize unauthorized American citizens having contact with a foreign government. He met controversial leaders, many unsavory autocrats, because he could. And he did. It brought him notice. Election monitoring and eradication of disease had become central for the Carter Center. In 2002 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian interventions. His views were news. No media outlet refused to interview him or publish his opinion pieces.
The last time Carter lectured in one of my Emory undergraduate classes was in October 2006, just as his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid was released. Before giving that class presentation, he told me that there was another book on the Middle East that he had written; he clearly made the point that “I did not want you reading this one in advance.” Together we had crafted five versions of the 1984 book The Blood of Abraham. We had swapped chapters in that book’s preparation. We were critical of each other’s word choices or concepts omitted. This time, he was not interested in my comments. This time, knowing again that I would read it closely, he clearly wanted to avoid me responding to his assumptions, his assertions, and what I would learn after reading the book were the factual errors and omissions in it.
Carter, in Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (2006), wrote history the way he wanted it to have unfolded and the way he wanted it to be. Some of his criticisms of Israel were certainly valid. Of all the former politicians in the world, Carter knew fact from fiction about Middle Eastern diplomacy; he had mastered the detail. Now he twisted facts. Carter made dozens of false claims in the book. Some were pure inventions. I had taken notes of meetings where I was the only note taker in the room. I still have them, and I shared them with him after our various trips and meetings. When I compared what he had written in this book with my own notes, his versions were intentionally skewed to put failure to negotiate on Israeli shoulders.
In a singularly harsh statement about Jews, he egregiously wrote that “it is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when (my emphasis) international laws and the ultimate goals of the ‘Roadmap’ for peace are accepted by Israel.” The explicit statement endorsed killing of Jews. He omitted that sentence in later versions of the book. The book was replete with errors, and I wrote about them in “My Problem With Jimmy Carter’s Book.” Together we had written The Blood of Abraham; I wanted no confusion with readers that I had had any association with this later book. By the middle of December, I resigned from the Carter Center; 14 members of the Carter Center advisory board followed immediately.
Once the book was published, he continued his periodic and angry criticisms of Israel. In repeated interviews, in college campus presentations and in a full-length film, Carter banged away at Israel. Carter repeatedly put Israel’s actions on trial; he still had his animus for Begin and for Israeli settlement building. Then he published the book and went on extensive book and lecture tours promoting his anger at Israeli policies. Increasingly the question was asked, “Was Carter an antisemite?” Those who answered the question one way or other noted that whatever the answer, he should be lauded for the good works he undertook after leaving office.
Carter remained relentless in shoehorning himself into possible Middle East negotiations. He aimed at reconciling the political differences between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. From 2006 on, Carter embraced Hamas as a legitimate political actor, though it did not hide its goal of Israel’s destruction through terrorism. I am not certain, but he believed he could persuade Hamas to be moderate in its outlook toward Israel. Three decades earlier, he repeatedly made similar efforts, though then secretly, to have the PLO give up armed struggle and Israel’s destruction as a prerequisite for PLO participation in negotiations with Israel. Then the PLO outright rejected his overtures.
Now he wanted Hamas accepted as a legitimate negotiating participant before it gave up terrorism. He stated this in a Foreign Policy article written in August 2014; he told the Times of Israel in May 2015 that Hamas’ “leaders are committed to peace.” Carter still did not understand the depth of animosity that elements of the Palestinian political community retained for Israel, as if Israeli politicians would trust negotiating with them and relinquish the West Bank if they were moderated. Carter’s decade-long embraces of Hamas discounted its passionate genocidal intentions for Jews and Israel; for Carter, an evolving negotiating process would moderate their ideology, where logic and give and take would inevitably prevail.
As president in February 1978, after the PLO attack on Israelis on the Coastal Road, Carter ignored the PLO’s actions and still sought to embrace Arafat. He was applying the same logic 30 years later. Hateful behavior could be modified, and Carter saw himself as the person to do that. As Carter demonstrated as president, he could dismiss the fiercely held ideological beliefs of others because those views obstructed the path that he believed was the correct and righteous one. Carter, who grasped Scripture and biblical history as well as most, dismissed the reality that fiercely held theology had been and could be religiously inspired motivation to kill.
And then there was the other side of Carter. Just after we started the Carter Center, two positive vignettes played themselves out, both from our March 1983 trip to the Middle East. In Egypt, when we exited from one of the tombs at Luxor, a group of young Israeli tourists greeted us with song, “Heveynu Shalom Aleichem.” Hearing the translation, “Peace be upon you,” Carter teared up. Then, at 25,000 feet in a private jet flying from Lebanon to Morocco on a Friday evening, four of us were sitting around the table, ready for dinner: Carter; Faye Dill, his most able and devoted secretary; Rosalynn; and me. Carter asked the steward to bring out wine for dinner. With it, Carter produced a challah that he had had put on the plane when we were in Israel three days earlier. As we sat around the table, ready for dinner, Carter asked if I would say the blessings over the candles, the wine and the challah, as I had done with family members every Friday night throughout my life.
Peter Bourne, Stuart Eizenstat, Steve Hochman and others who knew Carter over a lifetime and who have studied his politics in depth have pointed to the same recurring personality trait. Carter was going to do, say or write what he thought was right, giving little concern for fallout. He impressed many by dedication to a cause. He was the first U.S. president to call publicly for a Palestinian homeland; he worked diligently for that objective in office and afterward. His deep involvement in Arab-Israeli negotiations generated the expectation across the world that direct American presidential involvement would be essential for achieving future agreements between Arabs and Israelis.
For 40-plus years, he used the post-presidency as an extended second presidential term which he always believed he had deserved but wrongfully lost. Among all former U.S. presidents, he set standards for a post-presidency that will never be surpassed. He defined his post-presidency by actions, zealous engagements, humanitarian breakthroughs, prolific writing and public pronouncements. He relished meetings with unsavory international leaders. He was often unrelenting with criticism for the president in office. He regularly engaged in unwanted and uninvited intrusions into America’s international affairs. Since Carter’s presidency, other former presidents have stayed out of the public eye. Forty years after he presided over two significant Middle Eastern political turning points, the Egyptian-Israeli treaty and the advent of the Iranian Islamic Republic, they remain polarizing and unfinished legacies.