“I kept the peace and I did all I could to promote human rights.” Carter explained how he wants to be remembered in a 2014 interview with WFAA.
DALLAS — Jimmy Carter might be best remembered for what he did after his presidency rather than his tumultuous one-term in the White House.
In 2014, during a trip to Dallas, Carter led 5,000 volunteers to help build more than 100 homes for Habitat for Humanity.
When asked how many homes he had helped to build since the 1980s, Carter said “3,800 is what the Habitat [for Humanity] folks have tabulated.”
Carter, who was 90 at the time, recalled in his deep southern accent many of the firsts he had as president – including being the first U.S. president ever born in a hospital.
“I was. My mother was a registered nurse down in Plains [Georgia]. We had 500 people living in Plains. Now, we’ve grown to 630. And my mother was a nurse. She was the operating room assistant to the doctor. He wanted to get her back in the operating room as quick as he could, and he had an empty room across the hall from the operating room, so my mother had her baby in the hospital,” Carter told WFAA.
Carter is said to have once described himself as “Conservative, moderate, liberal and middle-of-the-road.”
He was governor of Georgia in 1971, then elected president in 1976 amid soaring energy prices and as the country was trying to move beyond the Watergate crisis.
Notably, Carter was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win Texas.
Politically, history will remember Carter as the first to broker peace in the Middle East between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
But many others will remember President Carter for crippling inflation. It soared to 14 percent on his watch.
Then, in 1979, another crisis gripped the nation. Iranian militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage. Carter worked until the final hours of his administration to free them.
But the former president wanted to point out something else in the 2014 interview with WFAA.
“We’ve been at war almost continuously since the Second World War. If you look at it, I think we’ve been at war with 35 different countries now. When I was in the White House, fortunately, and by commitment, we never fired a bullet, we never dropped a bomb. We never launched a missile,” Carter explained.
When asked whether his legacy should be more political or humanitarian, Carter responded: “Well, I think both combined. I think the words I would like to have describe me; I kept the peace, and I did all I could to promote human rights. As we look on human rights, it’s not just freedom of speech, and freedom of the press and trial by jury but also the right to have a home that’s decent. The right to have food to eat. The right to have a modicum of education. The right to have a little bit of healthcare. Those are basic human rights. Quite often, an American doesn’t think about that for human rights. We think about political freedom.”
After he left the White House, Carter did not retire to the speaking circuit but did something no other modern president did. The former president, still surrounded by U.S. Secret Service detail, devoted himself to the common good and spent decades building homes around the world for Habitat for Humanity.
To each new homeowner, Carter said he would give new house keys and a Bible that he signed. It wasn’t a free place to live, the former president stressed, each family has to pay full price for it and help build it, as well.
Carter bragged that he would sometimes revisit Habitat for Humanity homes he helped build and never saw one dilapidated.
The former president also remained an avid outdoorsman into his 80s. He said he would hunt wild turkeys during the spring season and eat quail and venison while trying to avoid red meat.
In 2013, Carter attended the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Carter, a Democrat, was the first evangelical president, but he later supported gay marriage.
“I think all people oughta have an equal right,” Carter told WFAA in 2014. He also made news for saying at the time that he thought the states should decide individually on whether to allow gay marriage, not the federal government.
The following year, on June 26, 2015, in the landmark Obergefell decision, the U.S. Supreme Court required states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages validly performed in other jurisdictions.
Jimmy Carter is the end of an era when a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia could ascend to the world’s most powerful position. But this rural Georgia boy never forgot where he came from.
“You look back and you see, I’ve done all I possibly could as a human being,” the former president said at age 90.
Those words are quite a testament to a life well lived. History will likely remember Jimmy Carter as a humanitarian, peacemaker and president who worked hard in each role to leave this world better than he found it.