In several decades of reading about his activities, I and many other people in this part of the world came to believe that former US President Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday last week at the age of 100, was the dattijon bature, the [only] good White man. We all felt sad nine years ago when it was announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer, which had spread to his brain. We felt sad in November 2023 at the passing of his wife, Rosalyn. We watched happily last October when Carter was brought out, on a wheel chair, to celebrate his 100th birthday. Our respect for him increased when he said he hoped to be alive by early November to cast a vote for Kamala Harris, which he did because his native Georgia State had provisions for early voting.
Jimmy Carter was a good friend of African-Americans and of African during his presidency. The American presidential elections of 1976 were the first that I was old enough to follow, in my early years in secondary school. There was no cable television at the time, but TIME and Newsweek magazines as well as BBC World Service reported copiously on the run up to those elections. In 1975, then Governor of Georgia State Jimmy Carter began his quest for the American presidency. At first it looked like a tall order; no one from the Deep South had been elected US President since the American Civil War ended in 1865. When I first read in TIME that Carter was a peanut [what we call here groundnut] farmer, I wondered how a farmer could ever hope to become president. Here in Africa, “farmer” is almost synonymous with poverty and illiteracy.
In all pictures and cartoons of him in those days, Jimmy Carter spotted a very wide grin, which was said to be part of his campaign strategy. TIME said he was a nuclear engineer and a US Navy Lieutenant who quit in 1953 in order to tend his father’s peanut farm upon the latter’s death. The 1976 US presidential election was promising for Democrats because the Republicans that controlled the White House were severely wounded by the Watergate scandal, which led to President Richard Nixon’s forced resignation in 1974. Carter managed to win the Democratic ticket and was up against President Gerald Ford.
Ford was America’s Goodluck Jonathan, even more so. He became US President without standing for election. Ford was House Minority Leader in 1973 when Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign. Nixon nominated Ford to replace Agnew. The following year Nixon too was forced out and Ford replaced him. Early in his tenure, Ford committed a major political blunder when he granted Richard Nixon full pardon for Watergate crimes.
Still, Carter was so little known in national politics that major US media were asking the question, Jimmy Who? Carter wrote a traditional campaign book to explain his vision. It was titled Why Not The Best? Weeks later, an auditors’ report emerged that indicated that the accounts of Carter’s peanut farm were muddled up, so TIME magazine did a story with the headline, Why Not The Best Accounts? Still, Carter managed to defeat Ford by a narrow margin and took over as president on January 20, 1977. Pictures were splashed of him, with his wife Rosalyn and daughter Amy, walking to the White House after the swearing in, the first new US President to walk instead of riding in a limousine.
That same day, katakata erupted in the world’s top newsrooms when the White House announced that President Carter wanted to be known as Jimmy Carter, not by his formal name, James Earl Carter. The question of Jimmy Who? had by then ended with Carter emerging as US President, TIME magazine did a story on the new controversy with the headline, “Who Carter?”
The BBC Board of News debated for ten hours whether it was journalistically appropriate to call a US President “Jimmy.” In the end, they adjourned when they heard that the Board of Editors of the New York Times had been debating the same issue non-stop for 24 hours. BBC decided to follow the example of the New York Times. The next day, New York Times’ lead story referred to “President Jimmy Carter…”, and all the world’s newsrooms followed suit. That precedent enabled President William Jefferson Clinton to call himself Bill Clinton in 1993.
Carter’s top-level appointments were copiously reported in those days. He appointed his old Navy Academy classmate, Admiral Stansfield Turner, as Director of the CIA. I read in TIME magazine that Carter graduated 59th in their 1946 class of 820 cadets. Tuner came first. Carter’s Secretary of Defence, Harold Brown, was described as “the bookish son of a New York City lawyer” who scored 100% in his final year degree Physics exams. Most of Carter’s White House appointees were from his home state of Georgia and were called “the Georgia Mafia.” They included his White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, his press secretary Jody Powell and his budget director, Bert Lance.
Carter’s most controversial appointee was his Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, a black man from Georgia and top aide of Martin Luther King. Young soon became well known for his gaffes. I remember a Newsweek interview he did in 1977 in which he said, “[Somalia’s ruler] Siad Barre is a con man. So is [Ethiopian leader] Mengistu.” Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had nothing of the flamboyance of his predecessor, Henry Kissinger. Vance, who was very liberal, had behind the scenes running battles over foreign policy with Carter’s hawkishly anti-Soviet National Security Adviser, the Polish-American Columbia University professor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski however had humour. In 1979 when Vance resigned and was replaced by the Polish-American Senator Edmund Muskie, reporters asked Brzezinski if he will also quarrel with Muskie. He said, “We are not Poles apart!”
Carter soon launched an international human rights campaign which emboldened Soviet dissidents such as Professor Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Schransky. Carter’s foreign policy however retained the normal American double standards. It overlooked human rights abuses by Latin American dictators, the Shah of Iran, Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Haiti’s Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and pro-US African dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko. Apartheid South Africa was hardly molested, though Andrew Young later teamed up with British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington to put pressure on Rhodesian rebel leader Ian Smith that ultimately led to Lancaster House Talks of 1979 and Zimbabwe’s independence the following year.
Carter boldly got the US Senate to ratify a treaty to return control of the Panama Canal to Panama [a treaty that incoming President Trump recently said he will abrogate]. In the middle of the treaty debate in the US Senate, President Carter visited Nigeria in March 1978, the first ever to Sub-Saharan Africa by a US President. TIME magazine reported at the time that White House aides didn’t want him to be caught on Lagos streets while they wanted him to speak on phone to a recalcitrant senator on the Panama Canal treaty.
Previous US presidents had signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, called SALT with the USSR. Jimmy Carter signed the SALT II treaty with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev in 1979. Though it was not ratified, the two super powers agreed to abide by its terms. His biggest foreign policy triumph, from American viewpoint, was when he got President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Menachem Begin to sign the Camp David Peace Accords in 1978. That’s the American point of view; in reality, Camp David accords neutralised Egypt and encouraged Israeli intransigence in the overall search for Middle East peace.
US allies General Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and Shah of Iran Mohamed Reza Pahlavi were toppled under Carter’s watch. Republicans and US media began asking, “Who lost Iran?” Carter’s worst foreign policy moment was when Iranian students, backed by the revolutionary government, occupied the US Embassy in Tehran for 444 days. The episode only ended a day after Carter left office. It contributed greatly to Carter’s defeat by the far-right Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Carter had kept on campaigning until the polls opened in the eastern states. TIME magazine later reported that his pollster told him that Reagan was ahead, hence the last-minute campaign. After Carter made his last campaign speech and retreated into his cabin on Airforce One for the flight back to Washington, the pollster went in, gave him the latest poll figures which showed Reagan’s lead had widened, and that the election was lost. Carter and his wife then held each other and wept. Days later Carter walked into his first cabinet meeting after the election and said, “Let me start by announcing the result of the election. We lost.”
So much for my Carter-era stories. Jimmy Carter became much more respected around the world from 1982 when he established the Carter Centre in Atlanta. In addition to helping peace negotiations and combating diseases, including leading the effort to wipe out guinea worm from Abakaliki, Carter Centre also became the most credible election monitoring agency in the world. In the 1980s and 1990s, no election anywhere in the world was free and fair until Jimmy Carter determined it to be so. In 1997, General Sani Abacha was toying with the idea of contesting election here in Nigeria, as joint candidate of all five registered political parties, but was worried that the Western powers will reject it. I advised him [tongue-in-cheek] in an article in New Nigerian that all he had to do was to ensure that Jimmy Carter declared the results as free and fair. Trouble was, I wrote, “hell will freeze over” before Carter declared Abacha’s election as free and fair.
His international efforts were crowned in 2002 when Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize. During the investiture ceremony in Oslo, CNN showed a short film clip of his tenure. The anchorman asked Carter what he thought of the clip and he said, “I will be kinder than that.” World history will be very kind to Jimmy Carter, dattijon bature, the good White man and best former President of the United States.
