Jimmy Carter & Manmohan Singh:

by Rajan Philips

Jimmy Carter, the 39th US President, died on Sunday, December 29, at the ripe old age of 100 years, in Plains, a small, rural town in Georgia, where he was born and lived his pre and post political life. Three days prior and across the world, Manmohan Singh, India’s 13th Prime Minister, passed away in New Delhi. Dr. Singh was 92 years old. Carter served as President for four years from 1977 to 1981, 23 years before Manmohan Singh began his two-term tenure (2004-2014) as India’s Prime Minister.

The two leaders were in office nearly 25 years apart, and they led the world’s two largest constitutional democracies that are also culturally and historically vastly different. Yet their lives and their time in politics are remarkable for what they had in common as political leaders and what differentiated them from both their predecessors and their successors. They both had humble beginnings but went on to excel in education and professional careers before entering politics. And as political leaders, they were simple, sincere, honest and have left behind an inspiring legacy of high conduct.

Jimmy Carter was the son of a Southern Baptist peanut farmer who took over the breakeven family farm, modernized it into a profiting commercial enterprise and became a millionaire farmer. He used his new status to become active in local matters and to leap into politics calling for racial equality and tolerance predicated on his deep Christian faith. He became State Senator (1963-1967), Governor of Georgia (1971-1975), and by 1974 declared himself to be a primary candidate for Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. He was the most religious of all American presidents but always kept his religion separate from the affairs of the state.

Before taking over the family farm after his father’s death, Carter was an Electrical Engineer in the US navy and was among the early corps of officers who were trained in submarine and nuclear submarine programs. As a 28 year old Navy Lieutenant in 1952, Carter was part of a team of American nuclear reactor specialists who were despatched to Canada to deal with at the world’s first nuclear reactor meltdown at the Chalk River nuclear power station in Canada. Carter and his colleagues were lowered into the reactor vessel, taking turns of 90 second duration each to limit exposure to radiation, until they dismantled the reactor.

Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 was justifiably seen as bringing closure to America’s political agony in the wake of the Watergate scandal at home and the Vietnam withdrawal that was a humbling lesson on the limits of American power abroad. Carter’s predecessors were Richard Nixon whom everyone in America wanted out of the White House, and Gerald Ford who succeeded Nixon after his involuntary resignation over Watergate. Carter was succeeded four years later by Ronald Reagan, America’s one and only actor president, who did not have any of Nixon’s political smarts but had grown by default to become the poster boy for the American right, exuding Hollywood charm embellished by scripted eloquence.

In between Nixon-Ford and Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter unfolded his one-term presidency. After losing to Ronald Reagan (who became the Republican candidate in his third try after failing badly against Nixon in 1968 and coming up close to Ford in 1976), in 1980, Jimmy Carter co-founded with his wife Rosalynn a new life of humanitarian and human rights activism that had lasted the full 44 years of his post-presidency. The institutions the Carters set up will continue long after them in Georgia and around the world in true testament to their conjugal partnership of faith, love, labour and service that lasted 77 years, well past the biblical milestone for individual human life.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of his post-presidential service is the near eradication of the scourge of guinea worm in many parts of the world purely through the systematic spread of clean living practices without the miracle of a vaccine. The Carter Centre has to-date monitored nearly 115 elections around the world and Mr. & Mrs. Carter have physically contributed to the building of homes for the homeless in partnership with Habitat for Humanity.

Carter as President

A commonplace observation has been that Jimmy Carter was a successful ex-president after being a not so successful president. In fact, at the time of his defeat in 1980 the Carter presidency was seen as a failure. Fortunately for him, President Carter lived long enough to see biographers and historians revisiting his presidency and presenting it in a far more favourable light in the long sweep of history and amidst contemporary exigencies.

Carter presided over many bold initiatives – on social welfare, civil rights, diversity, resources, energy, education, and pragmatic (not ideological) deregulation. On the economy, it was Carter who started the fight against inflation and signalled his intentions in July 1979 by appointing Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve. Volcker was a hawkish advocate for raising interest rates, and his treatment worked as inflation that rose to 14.8% in 1980 fell to below 3% within three years. Reagan kept Volcker on the job and claimed credit for lowering the inflation.

On the external front, Carter made human rights the corner stone of his foreign policy, facilitated the Camp David Accords that cemented a lasting peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, successfully negotiated the hitherto elusive Panama Canal Treaty, and established formal diplomatic relations with China and forged a personal rapport with China’s post-Mao reformist Deng Xiaoping. His Achilles’ heel proved to be the Iran hostage crisis that began in November 1979 when Iranian militants seized the US embassy in Tehran and held as many as 60 US officials hostages for 444 days.

The immediate provocation for hostage taking was the admission of the deposed Shah of Iran to the US for medical treatment. It is known that Carter only reluctantly agreed to allow the Shah to enter the US for medical treatment, and that he (Carter) had been the target of Republican and media criticism in the US for his Administration’s reluctance to support Shah against the Iranian revolution.

On the day President Carter died, The Times of Israel published a vitriolic article by Efran Fard, recounting a whole litany of contemporary criticisms of Carter’s Iranian policy. None more critical than Ronald Reagan who called Carter’s policy “a historical stain in American history.” Some history, some reading! Yet it was Reagan who once again was enabled to declare victory by the revolutionary Iranian government that chose to free the American hostages on January 20, 1981, the day Carter left office and Reagan began his presidency.

It was the Carter Administration that had negotiated the terms for releasing the hostages with Algerian mediation. But Tehran would rather have Carter defeated in the November 1980 election and Reagan elected as President. In his unfriendly obituary article, Efran Fard rekindles old dichotomies, calling the Obama presidency vis-à-vis Iran as “Carter 2”, and the Biden presidency as “Carter 3.” He ends his piece with the wish that Carter’s death “will mark the end of these misguided policies,” and the assertion that “the world first faced the rise of Islamic radicalism during Carter’s era, and the battle against terrorism continues to this day.”

Fard’s article makes no mention of Trump who ended Obama’s ‘Carter 2’ and is now set to deal with Biden’s ‘Carter 3.’ Trump was a fierce critic of Carter during the campaign for the November election, mockingly comparing the rise of inflation under Carter then and under Biden now, as well as taking Carter to task for the Panama Canal agreement he signed. Unlike Fard, however, Trump has been gracious about Carter after his death, offering Carter his “highest respect,” and is planning to attend the state funeral for Carter that President Biden has ordered.

Before the November presidential election, President Carter has made it known that he would cast his vote for Kamala Harris in spite of his physical condition. His death during the last days of the Biden presidency gives Democrats the chance to celebrate Carter’s life and relinquish office on a high moral note. Truth be told, the positions that Trump is articulating now – on inflation, immigration, abortion, education, the environment, and foreign policy including the Panama Canal Treaty – are all echoes of the positions articulated by Ronald Reagan in his campaign against Jimmy Carter.

Reagan was certainly far less coarse and far more charming than Trump. There is nothing compassionate about Trump and he never pretends to be what he is not. And Carter did not have to pretend that he was compassionate about others. That was his nature and nurtured it to perfection to the very end. His long tenure as ex-president makes him almost impossible to be emulated by any presidential aspirant. But he will remain the lodestar of American politics, exemplifying the power of a positive example and not the example of power.

(To be continued)