Jimmy Carter was the first winning presidential candidate ever to get my vote.
I was 26 in 1976, but I had only voted in one presidential election before that. I couldn’t vote in 1968 even though I was 18, but the voting age wasn’t lowered from 21 until a year after that election.
So my first national election wasn’t until 1972, when I cast my vote for George McGovern. At least I got the opportunity to vote against Richard Nixon once.
The 1976 election was the only one in which I voted by absentee ballot and the only in which I was living outside the United States. Carter was the first president from the Deep South since before the Civil War and the first Democratic president of the post-Watergate era.
Republicans have been dining out on calling him the worst president ever, but historians have been re-evaluating his four years in office, and besides, Gee Dubya Bush and Donald Trump have made Carter look a lot better in retrospect.
He brokered a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that has lasted nearly half a century, and his pressure brought to bear on the Soviet Union for human rights violations has been called the greatest single factor in the fall of the USSR.
In the more than 42 years since he left office, he has distinguished himself as perhaps the greatest ex-president ever. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work promoting democracy around the world and he was building houses for Habitat for Humanity into his nineties.
President Carter is the longest-lived president in American history. He celebrated his 98th birthday in October, and barring a miracle, there won’t be a 99th. A statement issued Saturday by the Carter Center basically said that the end is near.
ATLANTA (Feb. 18, 2023) — After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention. He has the full support of his family and his medical team. The Carter family asks for privacy during this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.
He has certainly had a good life. He didn’t get rich or join the jet set, but he is loved by many people and has been married to the love of his life for more than 76 years. It’s amazing to me that as old as I feel, when I was born in December 1949, Jimmy and Rosalynn had already been married for three years.
If there is one thing certain to me, it is that when President Carter is gone, we will not see his likes again.
I am thankful we had him as long as we did.
He may not have been a great president, but he was — and is — a truly great man.