Today, at Washington’s magnificent National Cathedral, America stopped for just a moment to witness the State Funeral for Jimmy Carter, the 37th President of the United States.
His was a presidency badly misunderstood during his time in the Oval Office, but over the years, historians have re-examined his accomplishments and awarded them high marks.
Don’t believe me? While president, Carter created the Departments of Energy and Education. Conservatives seethe at each, and each is now in jeopardy, but both have furthered the nation’s interests by combating the effects of climate change and educational inequality. He was the first president to attempt any of that.
Carter was also the first president to not only acknowledge, but also do something about climate change. In addition to creating the Department of Energy, Carter created the first national energy policy that included conservation, price controls, and new technology.
He installed solar panels on the roof of the White House, which Ronald Reagan promptly removed. The solar panels may have been a bit of a gimmick, but Carter was serious about America’s energy trajectory.
Although he did not get credit for it, he successfully negotiated the release of the Iranian hostages, a release that happened minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. Reagan, who did nothing to deserve it, was the political beneficiary of this achievement, as he was for Carter’s successful efforts to lower the high inflation rates of the mid-1970s.
The Carter Administration negotiated the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the Panama Canal Treaty, which, with Donald Trump’s ascendancy, is also in jeopardy.
Carter also personally and successfully negotiated the Camp David Accords between Anwar Sadat, of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, of Israel. To this day, that is the only real peace treaty ever achieved in the middle east. And for it, Sadat was assassinated, but the treaty he signed lived on. At today’s funeral, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s Chief of Domestic Policy, described how for thirteen straight days Carter personally drafted treaty proposal after treaty proposal for Sadat and Begin to ponder.
Sadat and Begin were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. When Carter was awarded the prize in 2002, Gunnar Berge, the Nobel Committee Chairman, said he should have won it with Sadat and Begin. Perhaps he should have won two, one for the Camp David Accords and one for his post-presidency.
Today’s eulogies were both moving and enlightening. Carter’s grandson, Jason, describing the Carter Center’s successful effort to eradicate from Africa the parasitic guinea-worm disease, said, “Before he took it on, guinea-worm disease killed three and a half million people a year. Last year, the number was 14. He didn’t do that with medicine; he did it with better water management in tiny 600-person villages.”
Growing up deep in the Jim Crow south, Jimmy Carter was elected Governor of Georgia in 1972, succeeding the axe-handle-wielding racist Lester Maddox. He immediately set civil rights as a cornerstone of his administration, blazing a trail that has now led Georgians to elect Raphael Warnock the state’s first African American U.S. senator, as well as the first African American Democrat elected in the entire South.
Ninety-two-year-old Reverend Andrew Young delivered today’s penultimate eulogy. Carter appointed Young to serve as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Young was the first African American to hold the position. It was Andrew Young who described one, small moment in Jimmy Carter’s life that struck a chord with me. Carter was a Naval Academy graduate, and, when he first got to Annapolis he learned that the Academy had also enrolled its first black midshipman. Carter asked if he could be that midshipman’s roommate. “As a minority himself, Plains, Georgia, being only 20-25% white,” Young said, “he thought he might be able to make things easier for his classmate.”
That small moment of moral generosity seems emblematic of Jimmy Carter’s entire time on earth.
Requiescat in pace.
