History, I am certain, will be kind to Jimmy Carter, perhaps the most misunderstood president in the last century. He worked hard to fulfill his mission to better humanity. But that long list does not fully tell the story of a man I came to respect and revere, a man who was our nation’s conscience.
I think back to 2002, when I first met Carter. I was a reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution whose job was to write about global organizations that were based here. The Carter Center, then celebrating its 20th anniversary, was among the most well-known. I drove down to Plains for an interview. I was nervous, obviously. Intimidated. I had never spoken with a president before. I did not know what to expect as we passed through Secret Service checkpoints.
Beyond lay a ranch-style house, modest in comparison with the mansions that line Church Street in Plains. The former president was waiting outside for us.
“Hello. So nice to meet you,” he said, extending his arm for a handshake.
He was wearing what had become his uniform when he was not at suit-required events: a plaid shirt, gray pants, cowboy boots and a silver “JC” belt buckle.
“Come on in. I’ll get Rosalynn,” he said, flashing his toothy signature smile.
We stepped inside onto the parqueted-floor entrance and sat on a couch in the small and sparse living room. The plush, baby blue carpeting hearkening to a bygone era. The Carters had lived in that house since 1961. And even after four years in the White House, when so many might have been tempted to scale up, they returned home, to this most unpresidential of abodes.
Mrs. Carter poured sweet tea and served us herself as we began our hourlong interview.
“Which has meant more to you — your work as president or your work at the Carter Center?” I asked him.
He replied both were meaningful in their own ways.
“Except I don’t agree,” Mrs. Carter chimed in. “I think the country would have been better off had he had another term as president.”
I realized then what a sweet relationship the two had. They had been married since 1946.
A few months after that first meeting in Plains, I traveled to Cuba to report on Carter’s historic visit. No American president had gone to the island nation since the Cuban revolution. Nor has any president visited since then.
Credit: Annemarie Poyo / The Carter Center
Credit: Annemarie Poyo / The Carter Center
Carter walked through Old Havana hand-in-hand with Rosalynn. Cubans lined the streets and peered out of windows to catch a glimpse of the gringo president. He visited schools, medical clinics and the country’s top biotechnology lab. He spoke fluently in Spanish in an unprecedented speech at the University of Havana that was broadcast live on Cuban television and radio. Carter, who had by then gained a reputation as a global champion of human rights, did not hold back in this indelible moment. He urged Castro, who sat in the front row, to recognize the civil liberties of the Cuban people.
“Your constitution recognizes freedom of speech and association,” Carter said, “but other laws deny these freedoms to those who disagree with the government.”
He took the air out of the room. Few could have imagined a U.S. president castigating Fidel Castro on his home turf. It was an indelible moment.
Castro shook hands with Carter after the speech and made light of the moment by telling him to shed his suit and get into something more comfortable. The two then motored to a nearby stadium for a Cuban all-star baseball game, where Carter, wearing a Cuba baseball cap, tossed out the ceremonial first pitch.
Credit: David Tulis / AJC
Credit: David Tulis / AJC
What I remember most about that Cuba trip is watching Carter, the former president, morph back into the simple Baptist man from South Georgia. At a church in Havana’s Marinao neighborhood, a choir sang “We Shall Overcome” and Carter put policies and politics aside. The Sunday school teacher from Plains brought a simple message about love and compassion.
“The most important thing in my life is my faith in Jesus Christ,” Carter said.
He told them he taught lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church and that he learned Spanish by reading a page from the Bible in that language for the last two decades.
Later that year, in October, the phone rang at the Carter residence in Plains at 4:02 a.m., early even for the Carters. They thought something might have happened to one of their children. Or that it was a prank call. But it was the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Carter had finally won the coveted prize that had eluded him for years.
I asked him that day about the Nobel citation. He was humble. He surmised he had won in 2002 because that year marked the 20th anniversary of the Carter Center.
“I was very grateful that they put their primary focus on the work of the Carter Center in the last 20 years, our work for peace and human rights and the alleviation of suffering,” he said. “And they mentioned in passing ... that I had helped negotiate the Camp David agreement between the Egyptians and Israelis.”
In December, I flew to Oslo to watch Carter receive his prize. The war in Afghanistan was raging and a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq seemed imminent. In his acceptance speech, Carter implored world leaders to meet global challenges with “an emphasis on peace.”
The Nobel ceremonies were grand but even at the height of elegance, Carter’s humble roots shone bright. The Nobel dinner featured peanuts as the centerpiece of every table. A musical extravaganza featured divas Angelique Kidjo and Jessye Norman and, of course, country singer Willie Nelson, one of Carter’s favorite musicians.
Credit: CARTER CENTER
Credit: CARTER CENTER
Nelson serenaded Carter with “Georgia on My Mind” and Carter, still on stage, sang along. Afterward, he and Nelson embraced.
“When I hear Willie Nelson, my heart pounds,” Carter said.
The celebrations in Oslo had barely ended when Carter prepared to leave for Jamaica, where he was to lead an international team of election observers.
I stopped covering Carter on a regular basis when Iraq became my primary focus. But time to time, I would call for an interview on various matters. The last was on the eve of the 2009 presidential inauguration. Carter had made history as the first Georgian to ascend to the presidency and the first president to walk from his inaugural ceremony at the Capitol to the White House. I asked Carter to reflect as another man, Barack Obama, was also about to make history by becoming America’s first Black president.
“I knew I wanted to reassure the American people that I was one of them, which I was,” he said about his inauguration walk. “I was just a peanut farmer before I started debating President (Gerald) Ford.”
As always, Carter’s answers were thoughtful and refreshingly blunt. He was never one to use political jargon. He spoke as the honest man that he was; each sentence carrying the weight of his experiences. I thought of him more as a philosopher and theologian rather than a politician.
I once had had a chance to speak with some of Carter’s family members: his sons, grandson and his Aunt Sissy, the sister of his mother, Miss Lillian. Those conversations painted a portrait of man who had led a life shaped by sheer determination and a will to do good.
He grew up in a strict family and was spanked for stealing a penny out of the collection plate at church. Carter would go on to raise his own boys with love but the same stern discipline.
As a young boy in Plains, Carter listened intently to beloved school Principal Julia Coleman; she was a big influence on his life. Apparently, she had him reading Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” when he was 12.
Carter mentioned Coleman both at his inauguration and in his Nobel speech. She had once given him an admonition that he kept close to his heart in the White House and in the years since. “We must adjust to changing times,” she had told him, “but still hold to unchanging principles.”
Carter was also inspired by Aunt Sissy’s husband, his uncle Tom Gordy, who was stationed in Guam during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and spent the rest of World War II as a prisoner of war. Before his capture, Gordy had sent his young nephew postcards from his Pacific tour. One was of a Chinese junk. The image of the flat-bottomed lugsail ship launched a thousand dreams for the young and impressionable Jimmy and, at 18, he landed in Annapolis. He had the Navy in his head even before he had finished high school.
These are the stories I heard over the years that helped me better understand Carter.
I remember the kind gestures, starting with the hospitality in Plains to our last day in Cuba. He had made it a point to call on me from the podium at his final news conference when my voice got drowned by media big guns like CNN and The New York Times. In 2015, I happened to be on a flight with him from Atlanta to Paris. He made sure to say hello.
I watched him, along with Rosalynn, monitor elections and build houses for the poor with Habitat for Humanity both here at home and in faraway nations. I watched him travel to nations rife with disease. He had so wanted to live to see the day that Guinea worm disease, a devastating and neglected infection, would be eradicated. He came so close. After years of the Carter Center’s work to vanquish Guinea worm disease, only seven human cases were reported in 2024.
Even after surgery for a brain tumor, Carter left no doubt about his dedication or stamina. The last time I visited Plains was in August 2015, just three days after Carter had received radiation treatment. He was already back teaching Sunday school classes at his beloved Maranatha Baptist Church. The small sanctuary was overflowing that day, well beyond its 460-person capacity.
He was 90 then and seemed unstoppable, though I knew that he had long been keenly aware of his own mortality. When I heard the news that Carter had chosen to go into hospice care in February 2023, I opened again his 1995 book of poems, “Always a Reckoning.” In one, “A Committee of Scholars Describe the Future Without Me,” Carter wrote:
Some shy professors, forced to write
about a time that’s bound to come
when my earthly life is done
described my ultimate demise . . .
stating the lamented fact
in the best and gentlest terms
that I, now dead, have recently
reduced my level of participation.
Carter described this poem as humor. The last line, he said in a C-SPAN interview, stemmed from a euphemism used by Emory University scholars who were looking into the school’s relationship with the Carter Center after Carter’s death.
“They couldn’t bring themselves to use any sort of frank language about my being dead,” Carter said. “Instead of saying, ‘when he’s dead,’ they said, ‘when his level of participation is reduced.’ So just to kid them, I wrote the first version of this poem and just sent it to them as a funny thing. Then I decided, well, it’s an interesting concept. I’ll just make a poem out of it.”
On the afternoon of Sunday, Dec. 29, my phone lit up with the sad news about Carter’s reduced level of participation. He had died peacefully at home in Plains.
In the days ahead, the headlines are sure to be dominated by Carter’s legacy. I’ve heard historians, biographers, colleagues and friends speak of the man they knew and loved. About Carter’s successes in the White House that were perhaps downplayed or overlooked altogether over the years by the problems that dogged him. About how Carter promised Americans he would never lie to them and got bad press for his eat-your-peas attitude. And about how Carter blazed a brave new trail as a former president; even his greatest foes express respect and admiration for the Carter Center’s efforts to relieve human suffering.
Carter was a true champion of human rights. A man of integrity. That’s a rare quality in politicians these days, I fear.
Thank you, James Earl Carter Jr., for all that you gave to this world. It is a better place because you were in it. Even if it was only for 100 years.
— Moni Basu is the director of the MFA in Narrative Nonfiction at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
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