When President Joe Biden stopped by former President Jimmy Carter’s home in Plains, Georgia, in April 2021, it was more than just a show of respect from one commander in chief to another. It was the first time in the 40 years since Carter left the White House that any of his seven successors had visited him in his hometown.
Carter had a hot-and-cold relationship with the fellow members of the exclusive club of presidents — more cold than hot, in fact. From his reelection defeat in 1980 until his death Sunday, he was the odd man out, distant from the Republicans and Democrats who followed him and often getting on their nerves because of his outspokenness.
He did not join his fellow presidents on the high-dollar speaking circuit, nor did he team up for many joint humanitarian missions. He was rarely consulted by incumbents except when he forced his way into some issue and made himself hard to ignore. When all of the living presidents gathered to welcome Barack Obama to the White House in 2009, Carter was the one standing slightly off to the side, removed from his chummy peers physically and metaphorically.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th US president, has died at 100
To many of his successors, he was a thorn in their side, always doing his own thing even if it conflicted with official foreign policy. What he considered principled, they considered sanctimonious. While other former presidents generally held their tongues out of deference to the current occupant of the Oval Office, Carter rarely stood on ceremony.
“I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents,” he said in 2010.
He parachuted into trouble spots as an election observer, traveled to North Korea as a freelance negotiator and spoke out on Middle East politics. Often to the consternation of whoever happened to be in the White House at the time, he would meet with ostracized autocrats such as Syria’s Hafez Assad and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. When Carter earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the award committee openly characterized it as a rebuke of President George W. Bush for planning to invade Iraq.
“Jimmy Carter’s not real keen on clubs,” Douglas Brinkley, author of “The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House,” said in an interview before the former president’s death. “The idea that he needs to be in photo ops with these other presidents is not his MO. His heroes in politics were Anwar Sadat and Mahatma Gandhi, not Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.”
Carter understood that he irritated the other presidents, but he evinced little concern about ruffling their feathers. “As he has aged, he was not constrained by political considerations,” said Jack Watson, who served as Carter’s White House chief of staff. “Carter has spoken with a frankness that has not always endeared him to others. But he calls it as he sees it.”
Photos: Jimmy Carter in San Diego
The pattern was set as soon as he left office in 1981 after being defeated by Ronald Reagan. The relationship between the two was “strained,” Carter later said. He considered Reagan dim and dangerous, and the Republican reciprocated, never inviting his predecessor to the White House during his eight years there.
Carter wrote in one of his books that when he traveled during the Reagan administration, he learned that “the U.S. ambassadors had been instructed not to give me any assistance or even to acknowledge my presence.” When his official portrait was ready to be hung in the White House in 1983 during Reagan’s first term, Carter asked that there be no ceremony so as not to have to stand next to the man he did not respect.
To Reagan, Carter was a useful foil he could regularly blame for the nation’s troubles, while Carter just as frequently assailed his successor’s policies as heartless, unwise or ill considered.
Carter forged closer ties with President George H.W. Bush, and the two teamed up with Secretary of State James Baker to help end the long-running Contra war in Nicaragua. “I had a better relationship as a former president with Bush and Baker than any other president,” Carter said in a 2015 interview.
But even then, there was tension. When Bush and Baker sought United Nations authorization to use force to counter Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Carter privately lobbied members of the Security Council to vote against the United States. Some top Bush officials, including Dick Cheney, then the defense secretary, considered that almost treason.
Rest in peace, Jimmy Carter, America’s greatest ex-president
It was hardly better with his own party, though. Carter had a prickly relationship with Clinton even though both were moderate Democrats from the South — or perhaps because of it. They got off on the wrong foot when Carter as president sent 19,000 Cuban migrants to Fort Chaffee in Arkansas in 1980 over the objections of Clinton, then the state’s governor. A subsequent riot by the migrants politically damaged Clinton, who went down to defeat that November along with Carter, a loss the governor blamed on his fellow Democrat.
Once Clinton reached the White House, relations hardly improved. Carter irritated Clinton by chiding the new president for sending his daughter, Chelsea, to a private school in Washington instead of to a public school as the older man had done with his own daughter, Amy. Clinton was so peeved that he snubbed Carter days later at the 1993 inaugural festivities.
Clinton considered Carter a loose cannon but agreed to let him travel to North Korea in 1994 during a period of tension over the country’s nuclear program. The former president cut a deal, called the White House to let it know and then went on CNN without first talking with Clinton about it, boxing in the sitting president.
Three months later, Clinton sent Carter to Haiti along with two other emissaries who together forced a military junta to surrender power and accept U.S. troops. But once again, when Carter returned to Washington, he went on CNN before meeting Clinton for breakfast and a planned joint news conference. Clinton was furious and shouted. Carter shouted back.
Carter was critical of his fellow Democrat after revelations of Clinton’s extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, which led to his impeachment in 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice. But Clinton nonetheless swallowed any irritation and flew to Atlanta in 1999 to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.
“To call Jimmy Carter the greatest former president in history, as many have, however, does not do justice either to him or to his work,” Clinton said.
Carter was more critical of George W. Bush, particularly over the Iraq invasion in 2003. “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter declared in 2007.
He softened somewhat when attending the opening of Bush’s presidential library in 2013, making no mention of their rift over Iraq and instead praising the Republican for helping end a war in Sudan and fighting poverty and the AIDS epidemic in Africa. “I’m filled with admiration for you and deep gratitude for you about the contributions you’ve made to the most needy people on Earth,” Carter told Bush.
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There was less overt tension between Carter and Obama, but little warmth, either. Carter was annoyed at being left off the program of live speakers at Obama’s nominating convention in 2008, but Carter supported the younger man’s efforts to expand health care for the indigent at home while criticizing the continued use of drone strikes to target terrorists overseas, even at the cost of civilian casualties.
Oddly, Carter had more sympathy at first for President Donald Trump, telling Maureen Dowd of The New York Times in 2017 that “the media have been harder on Trump than any other president” and offering support for his efforts to make peace with North Korea while knocking both Clinton and Obama. But his feelings hardened by the second half of Trump’s term.
After Carter sent Trump a letter about China policy, the sitting president called him on a Saturday night in April 2019 to discuss it, interrupting a dinner with friends in Georgia. Trump seemed delighted that the two agreed on China. But two months later, Carter publicly suggested that Trump had actually “lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.” Trump fired back, dismissing Carter as a “terrible president” and a “forgotten president.”
The only president Carter forged a genuine friendship with was the one he beat in 1976, Gerald Ford. The two could hardly have been more different — the stoic Midwesterner and the Southern peanut farmer — but after both had left office, they found themselves together on a long Air Force flight to Cairo along with Richard Nixon in 1981 to represent the United States at the funeral of Sadat, the assassinated Egyptian leader.
With Nixon breaking the ice, Carter and Ford surprised themselves by discovering more in common than they had anticipated — including a shared antipathy for Reagan, who had run against both of them. In years to come, Carter and Ford teamed up repeatedly to monitor foreign elections, promote health programs and write joint opinion pieces on various issues.
Timeline: Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024
Before he died in 2006, Ford asked Carter to give one of the eulogies. “Jerry and I frequently agreed that one of the greatest blessings that we had after we left the White House during the last quarter-century was the intense personal friendship that bound us together,” Carter said at the service in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Perhaps their relationship was better than the others because Ford came before Carter and, therefore, never had to contend with him as a predecessor making life difficult. For those who followed him, Carter remained a hassle. Biden, who was the first senator to support Carter’s original White House bid in 1976, was largely spared this test as the former president headed into his latter 90s.
“It was no secret that Carter was not a member in good standing of the ex-presidents’ club, in part because he never accepted their code,” Jonathan Alter wrote in “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life” (2000). Most of them recognized that Carter could be useful in the right circumstances, he added. “The challenge for them was managing their high-maintenance predecessor.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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