It recently was announced that James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, at age 98 the longest-lived president in American history, has begun hospice care. The 39th president is being attended to by his friends and family, including his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Smith Carter.
Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, a rural, inland community about the size of Mossyrock, in a house that lacked electricity, a telephone and even running water. The only regular contact with the outside world was via the U.S. Postal Service.
Despite his modest background, Carter won an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, from which he graduated 60th in a class of 821 midshipmen in 1946. He soon was assigned to the staff of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the stern taskmaster who is generally regarded as the father of the nuclear navy.
Upon his father's death in 1953, Carter resigned from the Navy to manage the family's peanut-growing business in Plains. Always interested in politics, the future president was elected to the Georgia state Senate in 1962 and to the governorship in 1970.
Carter's inaugural speech as governor was remarkable. He explicitly declared the era of racial segregation in the South, "Jim Crow," to be over and done with, no exceptions. His immediate predecessor as governor, Lester Maddox, had chased Black customers out of his restaurant with a pickaxe handle.
Constitutionally limited to a single term as governor, Carter tried for the presidency in 1976. Although unknown nationwide and on a skinflint budget, the Georgian won the Democratic nomination over such better-known rivals as Jerry Brown and our own Henry "Scoop" Jackson.
In the general election, Carter defeated Republican incumbent Gerald Ford by 1.7 million votes and carried 23 states. The election of a president from the Deep South over a century after the Civil War was viewed as an act of national reconciliation.
So far, so good. But Carter had served only a single term as governor of a medium-sized state, and he seemed to lack self-confidence and perspective. He wasted precious time on such minutiae as the White House tennis court schedule, and appeared to blame a national "malaise" for his own shortcomings.
Also, Carter was unlucky. A helicopter mission to rescue American hostages held by the radical Islamic government in Iran ended in catastrophic failure, and the president was humiliated.
In 1980, he lost his bid for re-election to Ronald Reagan by 8.5 million votes and carried only six states.
But if Carter's four-year term as president was disappointing, his 42-year term as a former president has been outstanding. He never cashed in on his status and never forgot his childhood roots.
Carter's volunteer work has been exemplary. Even when well past 80, the former president was hammering away on Habitat for Humanity projects, and the efforts of the Carter Center to eradicate Guinea worm disease in Africa has benefited perhaps 30 million lives.
Jimmy Carter's life has greatly enriched the nation and the world. We will be much the poorer for his loss.
Joseph Tipler
Centralia
