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Opinion|Jimmy Carter’s Life Was One Big Trust Exercise
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/opinion/jimmy-carter-plains-georgia-early-years.html
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A familiar story surrounds the one-term, small-town president who was James Earl Carter Jr.: a good and honest man, well intentioned but overmatched in his White House tenure, selfless and admired in his postpresidential vocations. When you reach the end of Carter’s 1982 White House memoir, “Keeping Faith,” and find him musing that “as one of the youngest of former presidents, I expected to have many useful years ahead of me,” it’s hard not to smile. Yes, he did.
That story has plenty of truth to it, but it need not be the only version of Carter we choose to remember. Among his more than two dozen books, Carter wrote several autobiographical works, and those reflections and memories show how the instincts and ambitions that drove him — animating both his presidency and his postpresidency — were apparent early in his life. Carter’s writings reveal a man striving to earn trust from others, displaying unerring trust in himself and forever trusting in a country that did not always return the favor.
Those impulses recur in distant moments. As a boy, for instance, he spent a lot of time with the African American families who worked as tenant farmers or day laborers on his father’s land. He played with their children, joined them for meals in their homes, absorbed what he could of their values and even sought to replicate their manner of speech. It is hard (or maybe not so hard) to imagine what they made of such zeal, but for Carter, “it was only natural for me to consider myself the outsider and to strive to emulate their habits and language,” as he wrote in “An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood,” a 2001 memoir about growing up in Depression-era Georgia. He took earnest pride in serving as interpreter between his mother and their Black neighbors — “I made my share of mistakes when trying to shift between the two dialects,” he admitted — and he noticed that the Black adults confided their personal and financial concerns to him, hoping, he assumed, that he would pass them on to his parents. “I usually found a way to bring up these issues at home when I thought it might help,” he wrote.
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Decades later, during the 1978 Camp David peace talks with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Carter again served as intermediary between two parties that, despite living side by side, did not comprehend each other. Begin and Sadat went days without addressing each other directly, so Carter, along with his team, acted as a “referee” or “bridge” between the two camps, he recalled in “Keeping Faith.” The other leaders’ “assessment of my integrity” was a vital factor, Carter decided. The Egyptian president seemed to trust him too much, but the Israeli prime minister not enough — and he took it personally. “My greatest strength here is your confidence,” Carter said to Begin, almost shouting, when he felt the Israeli leader was holding back. “But I don’t feel that I have your trust.”
The presidency of Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday in his birthplace, Plains, Ga., was one big trust exercise. So was his life.
