a criticized mandate, a life dedicated to peace

Paradoxically, Jimmy Carter’s most lasting works will most likely have been produced after his presidency at the head of the United States, from 1977 to 1981. He himself admitted this shortly before his death, on December 29, 2024: “My life has been more rewarding since I left the White House.

While some ex-presidents were killing time by trying their hand at painting – George W. Bush – or by participating in highly paid conferences – Bill Clinton – Carter decided to launch a foundation in 1982, the “Carter Center”, to promote peace. He then carried out important mediation work in countries affected or threatened by war: Somalia, Bosnia, Cuba… Tirelessly, he advocated dialogue, whoever his interlocutors were, even the most controversial – he negotiated, for example, with the northern dictator. -Korean Kim Jong-il or with the political branch of Hamas, regularly attracting the wrath of hard-line followers.

His dearest wish, as he confided in 2015, was to build lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. He had already, under his presidency, allowed the conclusion of the Camp David peace agreements between Egypt and Israel in 1978. The man often struggled subsequently on this front, not hesitating to denounce, in 2006, an Israeli “apartheid” policy in the West Bank and Gaza.

His foundation also had the mission of observing the smooth running of elections in unstable countries and fighting against forgotten diseases that affect the poorest. That of the Guinea worm, for example, is today almost eradicated thanks to its action. The former president was also known for his involvement in the construction and repair of nearly 4,000 social housing units within Habitat for Humanity.

Who could have predicted such a trajectory for this former submariner, owner of a large family peanut farm in the “deep South” of the United States? Governor of the State of Georgia from 1971 to 1975, Carter was narrowly elected president in 1976 as a Democrat. Its surprise success was partly explained by the difficult presidency of Richard Nixon (1969-1974), marked by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. America wanted to heal its wounds by electing a man of integrity, which Carter was. During his presidency, he gave priority to human rights: agreements on the restitution of the Panama Canal to Panama, treaty on the reduction of nuclear weapons with the Soviets… He also tried to implement an ambitious energy policy to reduce Americans’ dependence on oil. Resistance from Congress forced him to give up.

Carter ended up suffering from poor economic conditions, the sudden Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the affair of the American embassy hostages in Tehran in 1979. He launched a military operation to rescue them, but it failed miserably. This fiasco caused him to be perceived as naive and weak by part of the public. He suffered a heavy defeat against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.

This did not prevent this fervent Christian from continuing his all-out battles. Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2002, he derides the 2003 Iraq War, Guantanamo and even American military drones. In 2014, the man who, fourteen years earlier, left the Southern Baptist Convention because of his “rigid” positions on women, tackled in a book the violence suffered by women around the world: excisions, rape, etc.

In his final years, Jimmy Carter still lived in Plains, his small Georgia hometown, with his wife Rosalynn. In 2015, he was still giving catechism lessons in a nearby Baptist church as a deacon, a position he had held since 1958. It was in the same month that he publicly announced that he had cancerous brain tumors. . But while then observing, with a “pleasant surprise”, that he “sinks neither into despair nor into anger”. He retained his unalterable optimism until the end.