Jimmy Carter was elected President in 1976 just one year after the U.S. was defeated in the American War in Vietnam and two years after President Nixon resigned the presidency. Carter seemed to offer the possibility of forgiveness and redemption for our tortured American soul following the morally painful 12 years of death and destruction in Southeast Asia where over 58,000 U.S. troops and 3 million Vietnamese died.
His first executive action as President was to grant amnesty to the estimated 60-100 thousand war resisters and deserters who had fled to Canada, Sweden, and other nations.
Carter exhibited qualities I admired as a teacher in the first years of my long career. He articulated a version of the Christian social gospel and demonstrated personal piety. After hesitating early in his political life to embrace the Civil Rights Movement and an end to segregation, Carter broke with other Southern Democratic governors, including Alabama’s rabid segregationist George Wallace, and became an ally for Black freedom.
The President was also a strong advocate for education, creating the Department of Education and increasing funding for the Head Start early education program for children in poverty. In brokering a lasting peace accord in 1979 between Egypt and Israel, Carter foreshadowed the international peace and fair election work the Carter Center would later pursue.
Unfortunately, the global goodwill so many hoped for and saw from Carter with the Egypt/Israel peace treaty did not expand while he was president. Instead, Carter accelerated the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, resumed the imperial side of U.S. global power, and set in motion wars and death that his successors would accelerate right to the present.
Carter initiated U.S. military support for repressive governments and surrogate warfare in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other Central American countries, committing tens of millions in aid and weapons to support brutally repressive regimes that resulted in the death of 83,000 in El Salvador and 50,000 in Nicaragua — proportionate to over 3 million deaths in the U.S. Then in the ’80s President Reagan, in violation of congressional law, secretly funded, trained, and armed the Contra Army to overthrow the leftist Nicaraguan government — a foreign policy military and human rights crime, known as the Iran-Contra Scandal.
In 1979, Carter proclaimed the Carter Doctrine, which aggressively protected U.S. national interests in the Middle East — especially vital oil supplies. The doctrine became the foreign policy consensus for American wars for the next 40 years in the Middle East and Western Asia.
Despite Carter’s humanitarian failures while President, my spirit is uplifted because of what he did after he left the White House and how I believe he lived a life of redemption. He built homes working with Habitat for Humanity; he mediated peaceful settlements of international conflicts; and he assembled global teams of trusted officials to monitor, report on, and ensure fair elections in highly contentious and divided places like Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, and Tunisia, and recently extended that work to elections in the U.S.
Unlike other U.S. winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, President Carter developed an active, authentic, and prophetic life for peace. In 2006 he risked his public adulation and personal well-being with perhaps the most courageous step in his journey of redemption. With publication of his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, Carter refused to be silent about what amounted to Palestinian ethnic cleansing in Israel. Instead, he made the case that Israel was an apartheid state; that it was unrelenting in confiscating Palestinian land, villages, and homes while further denying millions access to basic human needs in the West Bank and Gaza in ways that made peace unlikely. For this he was viciously pilloried as an antisemite, hostile to the very survival of Israel. In the face of attacks from leading Israeli supporters in the U.S., including the Democratic Party elite, Carter remained unyielding.
When our elected decision-makers tell us that the Gaza War and the genocide of Palestinians is beyond their delegated responsibility, as Oak Park village trustees did last year, ceasefire advocates refuse to yield democratic or social spaces to those demanding our silence and routinely calling us antisemitic.
While eulogizing Jimmy Carter last week, President Biden was also approving the sale of $8 billion in additional weapons for Israel and we continued to watch the unimaginable horror in Palestine, expecting each day a merciful end that does not come.
Biden and Vice President Harris leave office next week and remain politically unwilling, but not personally incapable of acting with the political courage Carter demonstrated.
Still, I am hopeful and continue to join in the ongoing courageous and inspirational peace efforts of students in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Club at OPRF High School and the work of the Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine (CJPIP). As the visionary Princeton historian Eddie Glaude Jr. instructs us and ex-President Carter modeled for us, we and they are the leaders we have been looking for!
John Duffy is a member of the Committee for Equity and Excellence in Education and a longtime resident of the Longfellow neighborhood.