Former president lives the message he preaches
By Roy Ockert Jr.
Aug. 25, 2015
Jimmy Carter, who didn’t get much love as the 39th American president, has become much more revered since he left office in 1981. That’s why the news last week that he is fighting cancer hit so hard.
Carter is 90 years old, and no one lives forever, but he has been so active in his retirement that one hates to think of him not being able to continue his good work.
In a remarkable press conference last week Carter revealed that the melanoma found in his liver in May had spread to his brain. He had already started radiation therapy and a drug regimen. Amazingly, the Georgia peanut farmer who became leader of the free world, discussed his condition with grace and good humor, never hinting of self-pity.
“I have had a wonderful life,” he said, flashing his trademark smile. “I’m ready for anything, and I’m looking forward to new adventure. ... It is in the hands of God, whom I worship.”
He has already lived longer than he thought when he first heard his prognosis. “I just thought I had a few weeks left [to live], but I was surprisingly at ease — much more so than my wife was,” he said. He and former first lady Rosalynn Carter have been together for 69 years, but he didn’t tell her about the cancer for a couple of weeks.
Carter said he would cut back on the globetrotting schedule that has marked his life since leaving the presidency, but this press conference sounded nothing like good-bye. He said he still hopes to make a trip to Nepal later this year for Habitat for Humanity and that he will keep teaching Sunday school in his Plains, Ga., hometown as long as he can.
Indeed, he was in front of his class at the Marantha Baptist Church on Sunday and spent only a few minutes discussing his illness before getting on with a lesson about faith, love and relationships. Usually the class has 40 members, but this time about 460 packed into the room, according to The Associated Press. The turnout was so great that Carter gave a second lesson later at a nearby high school, and even then some people were turned away.
His message was simple but powerful: When your burden grows heavy, ask God for strength.
Meanwhile, the people of Plains, who love that their native son has stayed with his roots, are planting signs in their yards declaring “Jimmy Carter for Cancer Survivor,” a slogan suggested in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial cartoon. The Carters still live in the house they built there in 1961, before he entered politics.
After a career in the Navy was cut short by his father’s death from pancreatic cancer, Jimmy Carter turned his father’s small business into a profitable general farm supply operation. As a successful businessman, he got involved in local politics, starting with the school board, then was elected to the George Senate in 1962.
He ran for governor unsuccessfully in 1966 but won the office four years later. In his inaugural address he shocked the state and gained national attention by declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over.”
It’s important to understand the stage on which Carter entered national politics. In the years leading up to 1970 U.S. citizens had endured three assassinations, the Cuban missile crisis, racial turmoil, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Generation Gap and cultural upheaval. By the time he completed his term as governor we had been through Watergate and the resignation of a president.
When he announced his candidacy for president in 1974, he had 2 percent name recognition nationally. I’ve always felt that Arkansas Sen. Dale Bumpers should have done the same thing that year and that he would have been a better president. But Carter made the leap, and it was a wide-open process, marked by a record number of state primaries and caucuses.
Prevented by Georgia law from succeeding himself, Carter left office in January 1975, giving him more than a year to campaign for president. In early 1976 he won the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and the rest is history, though his general election victory over Gerald Ford was narrow.
The crowning achievement of his presidency was the Camp David Accords in 1978, when he engineered a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, which has held for more than 35 years.
His chances of re-election disappeared with the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 and a failed mission to rescue them in 1980. Ronald Reagan, projecting himself as a stronger leader, was swept into office by a landslide.
Carter returned him to Plains but hardly retired. Instead, he revived his peanut farm, began writing and teaching and established the Carter Center to protect human rights, promote democracy and work for fair elections. Over the years he was called upon to help mediate conflicts in Haiti, Bosnia, North Korea, Sudan and Ethiopia, and he has monitored elections in numerous other countries.
In 2002 he became the only U.S. president to receive the Nobel Peace Prize after his time in office. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Donning their work clothes for a week of hard work every year, he and Rosalynn helped make Habitat for Humanity famous.
Can you imagine a better role model for America?
Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.