Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, once called a ‘pretty good Canadian,’ dies at 100

Rosalynn Carter, a mental health advocate whose role as presidential spouse helped to define the modern first lady, predeceased her husband in November 2023 — a death at 96 that triggered a remembrance to rival his.

“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” the former president said in a statement after she died.

“As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

Conventional wisdom saw his single White House term as middling. But Carter’s altruistic work ethic, faith-filled benevolence and famous disdain for the financial trappings of high office only endeared him to generations after he left politics in 1981.

“The trite phrase has been, ‘Jimmy Carter has been the best former president in the history of the United States,'” said Gordon Giffin, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada who sits on the Carter Center’s board of trustees.

“That grated on him, because it distinguished his service as president from his service — and I literally mean service — as a former president.”

His relentless advocacy for human rights, a term Carter popularized long before it became part of the political lexicon, included helping to build homes for the poor across the U.S. and in 14 other countries, including Canada, well into his 90s.

He devoted the resources of the Carter Center to tackling Guinea worm, a parasite that afflicted an estimated 3.5 million people in the developing world in the early 1980s and is today all but eradicated, with just 13 cases reported in 2022.

And he was a tireless champion of ending armed conflict and promoting democratic elections in the wake of the Cold War, with his centre monitoring 113 such votes in 39 different countries — and offering conflict-resolution expertise when democracy receded.

Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, nearly a quarter-century after his seminal work on the Camp David Accords helped pave the way for a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979, the first of its kind.

“His presidency got sidelined in the historic evaluation too quickly, and now people are revisiting it,” Giffin said. “I think his standing in history as president will grow.”

U.S. President Joe Biden lamented Carter’s loss, saying the world lost an “extraordinary leader, statesman, and humanitarian” in a statement from the White House.

“With his compassion and moral clarity, he worked to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil rights and human rights, promote free and fair elections, house the homeless, and always advocate for the least among us. He saved, lifted, and changed the lives of people all across the globe,” Biden wrote.

“To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning – the good life – study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith, and humility. He showed that we are great nation because we are a good people – decent and honorable, courageous and compassionate, humble and strong.”

A lifelong Democrat who never officially visited Canada as president, Carter was nonetheless a pioneer of sorts when it came to Canada-U.S. relations and a close friend to the two Canadian prime ministers he served alongside.

One of them, former Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark, once called Carter a “pretty good Canadian” — a testament to the former commander-in-chief’s authenticity and centre-left politics, which always resonated north of the Canada-U.S. border.

Clark said Sunday that he had been “privileged” to work closely with Carter.

“Through the Carter Center, Jimmy Carter led much more than his consequential country,” Clark said in a statement posted on X. “He led a selfless and transforming contribution to people and societies wracked by disease, and poverty and disorder.”

The pair were reunited in 2017 at a panel discussion in Atlanta hosted by the Canadian American Business Council, and seemed to delight in teasing the host when she described Clark as a “conservative” and Carter as a “progressive.”

“I’m a Progressive Conservative — that’s very important,” Clark corrected her. Piped up Carter: “I’m a conservative progressive.”

In 2012, the Carters visited Kingston, Ont., to receive an honorary degree from Queen’s University. Instead of a fancy hotel, they stayed with Arthur Milnes, a former speech writer, journalist and political scholar who’d long since become a close friend.

“He became my hero, believe it or not, probably when I was about 12,” said Milnes, whose parents had come of age during the Cold War and lived in perpetual fear of the ever-present nuclear threat until Carter took over the White House in 1977.

“My mother never discussed politics, with one exception — and that was when Jimmy Carter was in the White House. She’d say, ‘Art, Jimmy Carter is a good and decent man,'” Milnes recalled.

“They always said, both of them, that for the first time since the 1950s, they felt safe, knowing that it was this special man from rural Georgia, Jimmy Carter, who had his finger on the proverbial button.”

While Richard Nixon and Pierre Trudeau appeared to share a mutual antipathy during their shared time in office, Carter got along famously with the prime minister.

Indeed, it was at the express request of the Trudeau family that Carter attended the former prime minister’s funeral in 2000, Giffin said.

“The message I got back was the family would appreciate it if Jimmy Carter could come,” said Giffin, who was the U.S. envoy in Ottawa at the time.

“So he did come. He was at the Trudeau funeral. And to me, that said a lot about not only the relationship he had with Trudeau, but the relationship he had in the Canada-U.S. dynamic.”

It was at that funeral in Montreal that Carter — “much to my frustration,” Giffin allowed — spent more than two hours in a holding room with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a meeting that resulted in Carter visiting Cuba in 2002, the first former president to do so.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement following Carter’s death he remembers his father “speaking highly of President Carter as a man of deep faith, strong morals, and firm principles.”

“I had the honour of meeting him a few times over the past decades, and he was always kind and thoughtful, and generous with his advice to me about public service,” the prime minister’s statement said.

“His life embodied the American Dream, rising as he did from humble roots in Plains, Georgia, to become leader of the United States of America,” Trudeau wrote.

Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., also said on X that Carter’s “commitment to diplomacy and humanitarianism will forever serve as inspiration.”

But it was long before Carter ever entered politics that he established a permanent bond with Canada — one forged in the radioactive aftermath of what might otherwise have become the country’s worst nuclear calamity.

In 1952, Carter was a 28-year-old U.S. navy lieutenant, a submariner with a budding expertise in nuclear power, when he and his crew were dispatched to help control a partial meltdown at the experimental Chalk River Laboratories northwest of Ottawa.

In his 2016 book “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety,” Carter described working in teams of three, first practising on a mock-up of the reactor, then on the real thing, in short 90-second bursts to avoid absorbing more than the maximum allowable dose of radiation.

“The limit on radiation absorption in the early 1950s was approximately 1,000 times higher than it is 60 years later,” he wrote.

“There were a lot of jokes about the effects of radioactivity, mostly about the prospect of being sterilized, and we had to monitor our urine until all our bodies returned to the normal range.”

That, Carter would later acknowledge in interviews, took him about six months.

Carter and Clark were both in office during the so-called “Canadian Caper,” a top-secret operation to spirit a group of U.S. diplomats out of Iran following the fall of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. The elaborate ploy, which involved passing the group off as a Canadian science-fiction film crew, was documented in the Oscar-winning 2012 Ben Affleck film “Argo.”

Carter didn’t think much of the film.

“The movie that was made, ‘Argo,’ was very distorted. They hardly mentioned the Canadian role in this very heroic, courageous event,” he said during the CABC event.

He described the true events of that escapade as “one of the greatest examples of a personal application of national friendship I have ever known.”

To the end, Carter was an innately humble and understated man, said Giffin — a rare commodity in any world leader, much less in one from the United States.

“People underestimate who Jimmy Carter is because he leads with his humanity,” he said.

“I read an account the other day that said the Secret Service vehicles that are parked outside his house are worth more than the house. How many former presidents have done that?”

The state funeral has been scheduled for Jan. 9. in Washington.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec, 29, 2024.

James McCarten, The Canadian Press

by The Canadian Press

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, once called a ‘pretty good Canadian,’ dies at 100

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