Atlanta, Georgia — When he returned to Plains, Georgia, in 1981, President Jimmy Carter was defeated — rejected by voters in a landslide election to Republican Ronald Reagan. The pouring rain at Carter's welcome home reception reflected his gloomy mood and that of the country.
"In office, he was a political failure. He lost overwhelming[ly] to Ronald Reagan. But he was a substantive and visionary success," says author and historian Jonathan Alter, who recognizes what many know Carter for today — humanitarian work with his Carter Center, "waging peace, fighting disease and building hope" around the world that led to Jimmy Carter receiving the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
"He's done terrific work supervising elections in more than 100 countries. But former presidents don't have as much power as presidents, not nearly as much, and the list of his accomplishments as president that were ignored, minimized, or forgotten entirely was very long," said Alter.
The Iran hostage crisis, rising inflation and oil embargoes of the 1970s doomed Carter's White House tenure, casting a long shadow over his legacy. However, the onetime peanut farmer, Georgia governor, president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate's 100th birthday milestone comes as authors and historians reevaluate his failures and accomplishments as a one-term U.S. president.
Alter's biography, "His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life," is among several that conclude his four years in the White House were anything but a failure.
"Not just famously [the] Camp David accords and opening relations with China," Alter told VOA in an interview in August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, "but a long string of legislative accomplishments on the environment and many other issues that actually exceed the legislative accomplishments of both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton."
Carter signed the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act protecting more than 100 million acres — including land, national parks, refuges, monuments, forests and conservation areas — which Alter says is now considered one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation ever passed.
"The story I tell in my book is a surprising one," says Alter. "It's of somebody who worked hard in ways that actually bore fruit."
"I think we'll remember President Carter as a president who served in very enormously difficult times who had to deal with circumstances that were far beyond his control," says Emory University's first "Jimmy Carter Professor of History" Joseph Crespino. Carter routinely visited with Crespino and his students in Atlanta to discuss the good and bad decisions he made while president.
"Putting human rights front and center in American foreign policy — no president had done that in the way that Jimmy Carter had," Crespino told VOA during a recent interview at his office on campus at Emory University. "It was important in shifting the balance of power in the Cold War, but it was also an important moment in the aftermath of the Vietnam War to reassert once again America's moral responsibilities in the world."
Crespino says some of Carter's overlooked domestic accomplishments include reorganizing the federal government and deregulation of the airline, trucking and beer industries. "We oftentimes associate a kind of freeing up of the free enterprise economy with the conservative turn that came in with Ronald Reagan, when in fact Jimmy Carter before Reagan was already doing a lot of deregulatory work in his presidency in recognizing the kind of limits of government oversight of these private industries."
Members of Carter's Cabinet, including former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, are grateful his long life has allowed him to witness the longer lens of history reflect more positively on his legacy.
"There's no place in the world I know where people don't have some good things to say about him," Young told VOA as he spoke with reporters September 17 at Carter's 100th birthday concert at the Fox theater in Atlanta. "Whether he succeeded or not … he gave it as good a try and came as far as the world would let him go."
A world that continues to benefit from the Carter Center's work, including fighting diseases including Guinea worm, which is down to a few cases in Africa and could become only the second disease ever eradicated.