Jimmy Carter, a sometimes outcast in the world’s most exclusive club – Washington Examiner

Clinton long blamed the loss, at least partly, on the top Democrat on the 1980 ballot, President Jimmy Carter, who, much more famously at the time, also lost his reelection bid.

Clinton’s reported anger for years after at the former president stemmed from a Carter administration decision to house 19,000 Cuban migrants at Fort Chaffee, an Arkansas Army National Guard installation. The migrant group included many criminals released from prison by Cuban strongman Fidel Castro, along with refugees who escaped from the communist island to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Clinton, as governor, had objected to the Fort Chaffee plan, views vindicated by a subsequent riot among some migrants being held there, which not surprisingly riled locals. Arkansas voters took it out on Clinton, nearly detonating his political career.

Clinton regained the Arkansas governorship in the 1982 elections and won the White House a decade later, but the episode reflected an often-strained relationship between the one-time Southern governors (Carter led Georgia from 1971-75.) Subsequent presidents of both parties would have their distinct challenges dealing with Carter, who died on Dec. 29, 2024, at age 100. Carter, by far the longest-lived president and commander in chief out of office the most time, nearly 44 years, had personal interactions with all current living presidents that were at times fraught and at other points friendlier.

It all made Carter an outlier among living presidents in what is sometimes called the world’s most exclusive club. No matter private disagreement over policy and past personal piques, most usually keep their mouths shut. Carter didn’t roll that way.

Carter’s tensions with Clinton continue

By June 1994, Carter had more than 13 years as an ex-president, during which he undertook unprecedented freelance diplomacy. Amid U.S. tension with North Korea over its nuclear program, Carter inserted himself into negotiations and pressured the Clinton administration to allow him to travel to the closed one-party totalitarian dictatorship. Carter cut a deal with the North Korean regime — discussing it on CNN before a private State Department debrief.

Three months later, Carter said he was eager to help end the rule in Haiti of a military junta. Carter again publicly appealed to Clinton for a role in the crisis, and the president reluctantly agreed. Clinton did so while warning about the pending use of American military force in Haiti if that nation’s deposed, democratically elected leader was not restored to power. A Carter mission, with former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell and then-Sen. Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, successfully achieved that end. Yet once more, Carter discussed it on CNN before a planned White House meeting with Clinton and a joint news conference.

Friction with George W. Bush

By the time of Republican George W. Bush’s Jan. 20, 2001, presidential inauguration, Carter’s White House tenure was a distant memory for many people. They got a refresher course after the tragedy of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, an award that had eluded him while president when he helped shepherd into existence a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. The Nobel Committee in 2002 lauded Carter for his “vital contribution” to the Camp David agreement, along with what it called Carter’s commitment to human rights, a commitment to furthering democracy globally, and his work fighting tropic diseases.

Still, the award committee openly characterized the Carter Nobel Peace Prize decision as a rebuke of Bush for planning to invade Iraq. Carter himself dispelled any subtlety about his feelings about the sitting president when, in a 2007 interview, he said of Bush and his White House team, “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”

By that point, Carter had also marginalized himself somewhat in the court of public opinion, even among those who came to see in a better light his troubled presidency, plagued by high inflation, gas shortages, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and many other problems.

Yes, the peace treaty that Carter brokered between Israel and Egypt has been an enduring success. Yet Carter, in the eyes of many, devoted a great deal of his post-presidential energies to praising the world’s worst tyrannies and offering relentless criticism of Israel. To the point that in 2015, he called Hamas a strong proponent of the peace process. The terrorist group’s intentions were clear long before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, in which its forces killed about 1,200 Israelis and took around 250 hostages. 

A more placid relationship with Barack Obama

There was less overt tension between Carter and President Barack Obama, yet also little warmth. After all, Obama had graduated high school in Hawaii during Carter’s presidency and was the first commander in chief with no public profile dating back to the 1970s era.

Carter did express annoyance at being left off the program of live speakers at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. Once Obama took office, Carter criticized the use of drone strikes to target terrorists overseas, even at the cost of civilian casualties. Though Carter did praise the Obama administration’s push to enact what became Obamacare, fulfilling a long-held Democratic goal of expanded healthcare coverage.

An old friend in Joe Biden

It took Joe Biden three tries and more than 32 years to win the presidency himself. But Biden had played a cameo role in what would be Carter’s winning 1976 bid when the former Georgia governor beat a scrum of better-known Democratic rivals for his party’s nomination and then ousted an incumbent president, Republican Gerald Ford.

Biden, a Delaware Democrat, was elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 29. Four years later, he was the first national figure to endorse Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination, citing his character. That began a more than half-century friendship between the pair, as Biden went on to spend 36 years in the Senate, eight as vice president, and finally winning the presidency in 2020.

Even though Biden, back in 1980, according to his memoirs, was encouraged by Democratic operatives to challenge Carter in that year’s primaries, Biden demurred and stayed loyal to Carter politically and as a friend personally.

Biden, after Carter’s death, said he and the late president “hung out” for decades, explaining that their families were bound by something deep: cancer. Carter revealed he had surgery to remove a mass on his liver. About a week later, the then-90-year-old announced he had been diagnosed with cancer — from which he recovered. That same year, though, a son of then-Vice President Biden, former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, died from brain cancer at age 46.

Mixed relations with Donald Trump

Carter had a surprisingly sometimes cordial relationship with the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president, Republican Donald Trump. The two couldn’t be more different. Carter’s public persona was infused with religiosity and at-time moral scolding. Trump, during his business and celebrity days and in the political realm, is a proudly transactional character.

By the time Trump was elected in 2016 to what would turn out to be the first of two nonconsecutive presidential terms, Carter was into his 90s and had largely slowed from international globe-trotting. Carter distanced himself from Democratic “resistance” efforts against Trump. Carter was the first living president to say he would attend Trump’s Jan. 20, 2017, inauguration.

Trump and Carter were in touch multiple times over the next few years. In 2018, Carter said he received a briefing on North Korea following Trump’s announcement of new sanctions on the country. In April 2019, Carter wrote Trump a letter on U.S.-China trade, and they spoke by phone.

The relationship deteriorated later that year, though, when Carter called for a full investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Carter suggested such an investigation “would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election.” Carter also criticized Trump’s handling of COVID-19 in 2020.

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Trump, in May 2024, running to retake the presidency, swiped at Carter and, intentionally or not, confused him with a one-time tennis star. With Biden still in the race before ceding the Democratic nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump compared the incumbent with Carter. Trump, in a backhanded compliment to Carter, said his decades-earlier predecessor had a “bad reputation” during his time in office but was considered “brilliant” in comparison to Biden.

However, Trump had mistakenly called Carter “Jimmy Connors,” a former world No. 1 tennis player in the 1970s.