Professor Ken Stein spent decades working with and researching the presidency and post-presidency of Jimmy Carter and shared many of his insights with the media and fellow scholars after the 39th U.S. president died Dec. 29, 2024, at age 100.
“I think he was unprepared to be president because I don’t think he had enough knowledge of international affairs,” Stein told Jeff Hullinger of Atlanta’s 11Alive TV news Jan. 4 (watch the 20-minute interview here). “I think he was entirely prepared to be a post-president because he brought his values from rural Georgia with him.”
Carter received praise for the post-presidential humanitarian work through the Carter Center that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, but his earlier actions and policies caused him to be a one-term president. He was elected as a Washington outsider and, according to staff who worked with him then, tried to govern as an outsider rather than engage in the political trade-offs that always have been part of presidential success.
He faced criticism as president for self-assuredness and for an economy that was worse in November 1980 than when he was elected in November 1976. He succeeded in committing Israel and Egypt to peace but alienated many American Jews in the process, despite the warnings of top aide Hamilton Jordan in a brusque secret memo in June 1977.
“Throughout its term, the Carter administration challenged American Jewish and congressional support for Israel, but did not weaken that support over the decades that followed,” Stein writes for the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs in a review of Carter’s Middle East legacies published in September. (Read the full article to see 10 imprints Carter left on the region.)
Upon leaving the White House, Carter was passionately consumed with wanting to be appointed by successive presidents as a Middle East mediator to “finish” what he started with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. By the time Carter wrote Palestine Peace Not Apartheid in 2006, he openly embraced Hamas as a viable political partner to negotiate with Israel, angering Palestinian leadership in Ramallah as well as Israelis and Jordanians. Carter placed Palestinians’ plight and Israelis’ lack of regional acceptance at the feet of Israel’s leaders, never criticizing Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas or Syria’s Assads.
“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,” Stein writes about the 2006 book in his far-reaching obituary of Carter, available here. He notes that Carter’s ever-harsher, one-sided criticism of Israel led some to question whether he was an antisemite, although Stein does not level that charge.
Stein, an Emory professor emeritus, provides unique glimpses into Carter’s engagement in diplomacy and post-presidency. While teaching at Emory, Stein was the first director of the Carter Center and engaged with Carter for almost a quarter-century on Middle Eastern matters. Stein also is the founding president of the Center for Israel Education and the author of the definitive history of Carter’s signature success at achieving the Egyptian-Israeli treaty, Heroic Diplomacy, based on interviews with some 80 participants, including three interviews with Carter.
Among Stein’s conclusions offered in public conversations after Carter’s death:
• To the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ “Morning Brief,” Jan. 6 — “He has a sneaky sense of humor. He is highly conscientious, industrious, has a mind that absorbs information extraordinarily quickly.” (Read the transcript and watch the 18-minute video, starting at the 7:45 mark, here.)
• During a Scholars for Peace in the Middle East webinar, Jan. 6 — “I think Carter had a sense of respect for other religions, including mine, and I never felt, and I don’t think any other person at the Carter Center who was Jewish ever felt, any tinge of something that was not exactly the way it should be in terms of behavior and attitudes.” (Read the transcript of the Q&A portion of the webinar and watch the full 68-minute video here.)
• On “Scott Slade’s Georgia,” WSB radio, Jan. 9 — “When he went to Camp David in ’78, he knew that Sadat would go a bilateral agreement. He knew that Carter, Begin and Sadat were well primed for one another. Now that doesn’t take anything away from the Camp David negotiations and the give and take and the detail and the wrangling that went over words. That was Carter, and that was stewardship, and that was wordsmanship. All terrific attributes.” (Read the transcript and hear the 3-minute conversation here.)
• On Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” podcast, Jan. 9 — “He realized former presidents aren’t held accountable, and no one can hold him accountable. There’s no forum. You can’t get impeached for being a former president. They can’t throw you in jail for being a former president. … Carter was captivated, he was slain, he was addicted to trying to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli and the Arab-Israeli conflict because he thought he could, he thought he should, and he thought he was not given the chance to do so because he lost to Ronald Reagan.” (Read the transcript and view the 57-minute video here.)