VOA correspondent Ken Farabaugh conducted several interviews with Jimmy Carter on issues ranging from his tenure in the White House to his post-presidency career as a promoter of global health and democracy. Highlights from those interviews are included in this report.
A state funeral will be held on January 9 for former US President Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at the age of 100.
US President Joe Biden has planned to hold Carter’s state funeral on the same day as the National Day of Mourning. Biden has also ordered flags on public buildings to be flown at half-staff for 30 days in Carter’s honor.
Before becoming president, Carter was a peanut farmer and governor of the state of Georgia. When he took the oath of office as President of the United States on January 20, 1977, he promised “a government as good as its people.”
He presided over four turbulent years. Rising inflation and rising unemployment affected his administration’s domestic priorities. He won foreign policy victories with the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel and the Panama Canal Treaty. However, the Iran hostage crisis dominated his final years in the White House and contributed to his defeat in the 1980 general election.
Timeline: Life of Jimmy Carter
Highlights from the life of the 39th US President who died on December 29, 2024 at his home in Plains, Georgia.
But Carter liked to say that the end of his presidency in 1981 was the beginning of a new life, which included traveling the world “fighting disease, building hope, and building peace.”
“It’s opened up a whole new realm of excitement and unpredictability and thrill and challenge and satisfaction for me and my wife, Rosalynn,” he told VOA.
As head of the Carter Center, the Carters traveled to more than 80 countries, monitoring turbulent elections, mediating disputes, and fighting diseases. This active life after the White House ultimately led to the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
He said, “I see the work of the Carter Center as an extension of what I tried to do as president. You know, we brought peace between Israel and Egypt. We brought peace to Latin America with the Panama Canal Treaty. “Opened a bigger relationship with America.” “So what I’ve done since then is kind of an expansion. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that when I won the Nobel Peace Prize, for example, it was because of the work of the Carter Center. So, I’m very passionate about peace and “I mean, who wouldn’t be totally satisfied with having a legacy based on human rights?”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres praised Carter’s “commitment to international peace and human rights”.
“President Carter will be remembered for his solidarity with vulnerable people, his enduring kindness and his unwavering faith in the common good and our common humanity,” Guterres said in a statement. “His legacy as a peacemaker, human rights champion and humanitarian will live on.”
In pictures: Tributes to former President Jimmy Carter
The White House released a statement from President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden on Sunday. It said, “For more than six decades, we have had the honor of calling Jimmy Carter a dear friend. But, what is extraordinary about Jimmy Carter is that millions of people across America and around the world who never met him also considered him a dear friend.
President-elect Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “Jimmy faced the challenges as President at a critical time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For this we are all grateful to him.”
In pictures: A look at the life of President Jimmy Carter
Carter’s journey to the White House began in the small town of Plains, Georgia, where he was born on October 1, 1924.
After serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy, where he helped develop the nuclear submarine fleet after World War II, Carter returned to his hometown in 1953 to run the family peanut-farming business.
He entered politics in the 1960s and served two terms as a Georgia legislator from 1971 to 1975 before becoming the state’s 76th Governor.
In the 1976 presidential election, Carter, a Democrat, ran against Republican incumbent Gerald Ford, who had assumed the presidency after Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Carter narrowly defeated Ford to become president.
The high point of Carter’s presidency came in 1978. Carter brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the Camp David presidential retreat in rural Maryland to negotiate a peace treaty.
He said, “When I became president, there had been four wars between Arabs and Israelis in the last 25 years, led by the Egyptians with the support of the Soviet Union.” “They were the only country that could really challenge Israel militarily. And we succeeded in getting a treaty between Israel and Egypt… not a word of which has been violated.”
Carter also negotiated a treaty to hand over control of the Panama Canal to the Government of Panama and normalized diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.
But in 1979 the primary focus of the Carter administration turned to Iran, where a revolution led by religious clerics toppled the government of the US-backed Shah, who eventually fled to the United States, where he received treatment for cancer.
On November 4, 1979, militants angry at the United States for harboring the deposed Shah attacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage; 13 were released after weeks.
Five months into the crisis, in April 1980, Carter authorized a complex military operation to free the remaining hostages. The plan, called Operation Eagle Claw, called for multiple helicopters and military aircraft to a site in the Iranian desert. Carter, who approved the plan, told VOA that helicopters carrying members of the U.S. military’s elite Delta Force were to fly from there to the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, free the hostages, and return to waiting aircraft. Which will take them out of Iran. ,
“The minimum number of helicopters required would be six very large helicopters. So I decided to send eight. One of those helicopters, inexplicably, turned around and went back to the aircraft carrier. The other fell in a sandstorm in the Iranian desert. The third one developed a hydraulic leak and crashed into one of the C-130 airplanes,” he said.
The aborted mission ended in failure. Eight US military members and one Iranian civilian died as a result of the accident. Carter’s Vice President Walter Mondale told VOA that day was the lowest point of his administration.
Mondale said, “When that rescue operation failed and people lost their lives. I mean, that was just…we were sad that day and for a while afterward.” Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned in protest of the operation.
The failure of the mission damaged Carter’s credibility among the American public. This event occurred seven months before the 1980 presidential election and contributed to Carter’s defeat by rival Ronald Reagan.
“The exact anniversary of the hostage taking was Election Day,” Carter said. “Certainly, the news media was completely obsessed with the anniversary of the hostage taking and the fact that I wasn’t able to get them out. That was the number one issue that caused me to fail.”
The hostages were freed the day Reagan became president.
In 1981, Carter returned to Plains, unsure of the direction of his life after the presidency. His plans for a library and museum were initially modest.
“I imagined it would be a small thing, where I would have an office and some nice buildings in Atlanta. And anyone in the world who had an ongoing conflict or a potential conflict could come to me and I would be in conflict. Will help them mediate and stop the war,” he said.
Under his direction, the Carter Center monitored more than 80 turbulent elections and mediated disputes ranging from the nuclear standoff with North Korea in 1994 to the peace accord between Uganda and Sudan in 1999. The center is also a leader in health and fight promotion. Disease in the poorest parts of the planet.
In one of several interviews with Voice of America, Carter reflected on his life in and out of the White House. He said the greatest part of his legacy was not his accomplishments as president or the Nobel Peace Prize, but the eradication of Guinea worm disease.
“There has only been one disease eradicated in the history of mankind, and that was smallpox,” he said, “so Guinea worm is soon going to be the second disease in history to be wiped off the face of the Earth.”
Thanks to Carter’s efforts, only 13 cases of Guinea worm were recorded in 2022.
Carter lived an active life until the age of 99 and survived brain cancer in 2015.
Declining health and the global coronavirus pandemic of 2020 confined him to his hometown of Plains in his final years.
Jimmy Carter last appeared in public in November 2023 during the funeral of his wife Rosalynn.
In his last public media appearance, Carter shared with VOA his hopes for the future of the Carter Center.
He said, “I want to see the United States in the future striving to be the number one champion in the world of peace, human rights and environmental quality and I would say that everyone should be treated equally.” “If we can do that, we will be a real superpower in the country I love so much.”
Jimmy Carter lived the longest of any occupant of the White House, and his 77-year marriage to wife Rosalynn is the longest of any president and first lady.
Although his final resting place will be on the grounds of his home in Plains, Georgia, Carter’s work and words live on in the pages of the dozens of books he wrote throughout his life. It includes his memoirs, a fantasy novel, controversial examinations of the Middle East, and a collection of his favorite poems.