Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, has died at the age of 100, and the New York Times gargantuan obit made it onto Monday’s front page. The print headline underlined “peacemaker”: “A Peacemaker Who Never Stopped Striving.” On A-16, the headline deemed Carter as "Peacemaker Amid Crises."
Online, the subhead offered more nuance: “Jimmy Carter, Peacemaking President Amid Crises, Is Dead at 100 -- Rising from Georgia farmland to the White House, he oversaw the historic Camp David peace accords, but his one-term presidency was waylaid by troubles at home and abroad."
The 10,000-word obituary was co-written by the paper’s White House correspondent and the late Roy Reed, former Times national correspondent. who worked for the paper until 1978, halfway through the Carter presidency (Reed died in 2017).
As the Times is wont to do, the obituary often cast the Democratic president as a passive victim of events, while skimming over Carter’s post-presidential controversies, especially in the foreign policy field, while praising Carter as a “great peacemaker.”
Jimmy Carter, who rose from Georgia farmland to become the 39th president of the United States on a promise of national healing after the wounds of Watergate and Vietnam, then lost the White House in a cauldron of economic turmoil at home and crisis in Iran, died on Sunday at his home in Plains, Ga. He was 100.
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With his peanut farmer’s blue jeans, his broad, toothy grin and his promise never to tell a lie, Mr. Carter was a self-professed outsider intent on reforming a broken Washington in an era of lost faith in government. He became one of his generation’s great peacemakers with his Camp David accords, bringing together Israel and Egypt, but he could not turn around a slumping economy or free American hostages seized by militants in Iran in time to win a second term.
While his presidency was remembered more for its failures than for its successes, his post-presidency was seen by many as a model for future chief executives. Rather than vanish from view or focus on moneymaking, he established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease and combat social inequality. He transformed himself into a freelance diplomat traveling the globe, sometimes irritating his successors but earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
The Times noted Carter's profound differences compared to fellow “outsider” Trump, presumably to make Carter's rise more impressive.
Unlike the thrice-married New York playboy mogul with the flashy golf resorts and the private airliner, Mr. Carter grew up on a peanut farm with no electricity or running water. He was a frugal born-again Christian who taught Sunday school and was married to the same woman for more than three-quarters of a century.
The Times admitted Carter’s “four-year tenure was a story of distraction, disappointment and serial drama that came to an end only in the last tortured minutes of his presidency," but suggested that wasn't really his fault but "an unfortunate confluence of circumstances" that "cost him dearly in the domestic arena.” In fact, "Several recently published books argued that his presidency had been more consequential than it was given credit for."
After defeating Republican Gerald Ford, aided by a bad economy, "Circumstances outside his control made matters worse," including "the Iranian revolution in late 1978" which "cut oil production in Iran and increased energy problems in the United States. There were long lines at gasoline stations."
But while the Times didn't blame Carter went things went wrong overseas, he was given ample credit for foreign policy successes.
Mr. Carter’s pursuit of a Middle East peace settlement was an even more momentous venture in personal diplomacy. He invited Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt to Camp David in September 1978 for what would become 13 days of dramatic negotiations to end decades of conflict between their nations.
Baker rehashed old anti-Reagan conspiracy theorizing around the Iranian hostage crisis which eclipsed Carter's presidency, a theory that held the 1980 election victor Reagan responsible in sinister fashion for Carter’s loss, but was briefer on Carter criticism, skipping post-presidential Carter going gentle on the terrorists of Hamas while being unjustly critical of Israel, and his presidential handling of Iran dictator Ayatollah Khomeini.
Of all his books, the most controversial was “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” (2006), which compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to South Africa’s former system of racial repression. The book generated a backlash among Israel’s supporters, and 14 members of the Carter Center advisory board resigned in protest.
After noting Carter "initially expressed sympathy" in 2017 for Trump being battered in the media, he later turned harsher. There was no condemnation for this “election denial":
At one point, Mr. Carter asserted that Mr. Trump “didn’t actually win the election in 2016” and that he had assumed office only with the help of Russia….
