Heather Cox Richardson’s assessment about the life and career of President Jimmy Carter is commendable, yet incomplete.
Richardson failed to mention that it was President Carter who led the transfer of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panama.
Wendell Griffen
She did not mention that Carter fired Andrew Young from his position as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations after Young privately met with representatives of the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Yet Carter was the only U.S. president or former president who termed the Israeli government an apartheid regime.
President Carter was not only the most decent and respectable president of my lifetime. He also was the most sincerely reverent, realistic, compassionate and just.
The nation disrespected and rejected him, but Jimmy Carter never dishonored the nation. He was the best patriot, diplomat, humanitarian and egalitarian politician on the global stage of my lifetime. And Carter was the least admired by the pundits, politicians and media commentators.
“The nation disrespected and rejected him, but Jimmy Carter never dishonored the nation.”
Historians may someday realize the United States began its descent toward the fascist populism of Donald Trump the day in November 1980 when voters refused to reelect Carter and instead chose Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan, not Carter, whose candidacy was embraced by white supremacists, so-called Christian nationalists and Zionists, neo-fundamental capitalists, and late 20th-century supporters of patriarchy, sexism, technocentrism and xenophobia.
Mehdi Hasan has shared eight “critical” comments by Jimmy Carter that are not likely to be reported by mainstream media outlets in memorializing Carter. However, we should bear them in mind.
As my South African friend and colleague Allan Boesak wisely observed during our conversation earlier today, 2024 marked the deaths of two very different U.S. political leaders: Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter. Sadly, the nation chose to follow the white supremacist, militarist, capitalist and imperialist values of Kissinger. We should bear this in mind as the nation and world sinks deeper into the clutches of fascism.
Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King Jr. were native Southerners from Georgia. Carter was rejected by the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest Protestant denomination). King was rejected by the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc. (the largest Black Protestant denomination). They each were rejected by their respective religious groups because they refused to embrace the false gods of racism, capitalism and militarism.
The world has become a more hateful and dangerous place because American voters and other American leaders rejected Carter and disrespected King. We will suffer the vicious and violent consequences of those misjudgments for generations to come.
And we should lament the human, environmental and global damage caused by those misjudgments as we remember the remarkable lives of King and Carter, one a preacher, the other a politician, and each a prophet.
Wendell Griffen serves as pastor of New Millennium Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark. He is a retired circuit court judge.
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