As he approaches 80, Jimmy Carter could be enjoying retirement -- teaching Sunday school, relaxing with family and reflecting on a life that's taken him from the peanut fields of Plains, Georgia, to the White House and back.
Instead, Carter continues to use his status as a former president to promote peace, health and voting initiatives across the globe at a startling pace for his age.
PHOTO: AP
"I have been blessed by graduating from the White House at an early age," said Carter, who left the presidency at 56. "Enough so that I could use the prestige and fame and experience from being president of the greatest nation in the world to have access to leaders and understand the problems that they face."
The majority of the work that Carter does is through the Carter Center -- a combination of a presidential library and a "mini-United Nations" he and his wife founded in 1982 on a wooded patch of land in Atlanta.
Carter, whose 80th birthday is Friday, won the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago. He has remained active on other fronts as well, from his woodworking shop in Plains to the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Witness his schedule for this year:
Carter traveled to Ghana, Togo and Mali in February as part of an effort to eradicate Guinea worm -- a painful disease that has ravaged parts of Africa since Biblical times.
He spent a week in June in rural Alabama and Georgia helping build houses with Habitat for Humanity -- an annual tradition he plans to take to Mexico next year.
In July, he joined Carter Center staff in Indonesia to monitor that nation's first round of elections, followed by a vacation in the Galapagos Islands.
He traveled to Venezuela in May and August for more election monitoring.
Last month, he spoke at his party's national convention in Boston.
And throughout the year, he continued to teach Sunday school in Plains and lectured at least once a month at Atlanta's Emory University, where he has been on the faculty since leaving the White House.
He published his 19th book, Sharing Good Times, late last year and spent much of this year working on a sequel to The Hornet's Nest, a novel of historical fiction set during the Revolutionary War.
At the same time, he continued to make time for hobbies that include woodworking and oil painting.
"President Carter keeps a schedule that would wear out much younger men and women," said Steven Hochman, director of research for The Carter Center.
What helps him keep up such a pace age 79, Carter says, is that it doesn't feel like work.
"The bottom line is that it's an enjoyable thing," he said. "Nothing that I do is sacrificial."
Since his days as Georgia's governor from 1971 to 1975, some observers have called Carter a micro-manager. He says his later years have taught him to delegate day-to-day duties to others.
"That's one of the lessons you learn with advancing age," he said. "No matter how intense your commitment is to a profession or your current duties, there's always time to expand your life, to stretch your heart and mind and to have things that are much more enjoyable in your life."
One would have to go back to William Howard Taft to find another US president whose post-presidency years were as busy, said University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock. Taft, who spent four uneasy years in the White House from 1908 to 1912, went on to become chief justice of the US Supreme Court.
Most other presidents "once they left the White House, pretty much withdrew," Bullock said. "They either retired altogether or at least dropped out of the limelight."
Carter's harshest critics have called his post-presidency work a bid to redeem a failed presidency.
Carter has described his overwhelming defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 as a personal low. Massive inflation, spiraling gas prices and a demoralizing hostage crisis in Iran left the public sour toward the soft-spoken Georgian and ready for Reagan's "Morning in America" message.
Carter says his work today is not about bolstering his image.
"If I was primarily interested in a legacy, why would I be in the most remote villages in the world, where there are not any news reporters or television cameras or photographers?" he said.
"That is kind of a moot question for me."
He also vigorously defends his tenure in the White House.
He helped broker a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel at Camp David, normalized diplomatic relations with China, and signed the SALT II arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS