As with the passing of all former presidents, many tributes to Jimmy Carter were written in anticipation of his death, some not so flattering here and here. Carter was 100 years old at his death on December 29; he was the longest-living president in American history and a man who had a very active post-presidency.

What follows is a more personal assessment by one who “came of age” during his presidency.

Carter is the second-place holder of the dubious distinction of America’s Worst Presidents since World War II. Fortunately for his presidential standing, his domestic and foreign policy failures have been far exceeded by the first-place record holder, the inept and vacuous Joe Biden, whose legacy of failure is shared by his equally inept VP, Kamala Harris.

That being said, brace yourself: I voted for Jimmy Carter 48 years ago. Given the benefit of hindsight now, that is a shameful admission, but at the time, as a 19-year-old college freshman, he seemed like a better choice than Gerald Ford. However, my youthful perspective on Carter turned a corner soon after he took office.

Perhaps you, like me, made a few mistakes when you were young and naïve. I still make mistakes, just at a substantially reduced frequency.

I have met Carter several times, the first being soon after his election. In the early 1980s, I traveled in close quarters with him and Rosalynn for a week, and soon thereafter, they were guests in our family home. I was honored to know both of them then as good and decent people, though Carter was an abject failure as our nation’s president.

For context, why did I vote for Carter?

The presidential election of 1976, ironically the bicentennial year of our nation’s founding, was the first presidential contest after Richard Nixon’s resignation, the result of his effort to conceal what he knew about the Democratic National Committee burglary at the Watergate building. For the record, the actions of the Nixon campaign’s black-bag team were amateur compared to the Democrat-controlled deep state collaboration and conspiracy to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump 40 years later.

Nixon had won a record landslide reelection in 1972, with more than 60% of the popular vote and 520 of 538 Electoral College votes — second only to Ronald Reagan’s historic 525 electoral votes in 1984. But the Watergate scandal led to his resignation in 1974 and the ascension of his vice president, Gerald Ford. Notably, Ford had not run on Nixon’s landslide 1972 ticket — that was Spiro Agnew, who resigned before Nixon under duress related to criminal investigations for corruption when he was governor of Maryland.

Nixon replaced Agnew with Ford at the recommendation of then-House Speaker Carl Albert (D-OK), who recalled, “We gave Nixon no choice but Ford.” It was the first time the 25th Amendment provision pertaining to a vice-presidential vacancy was used. At the time, Ford told his wife Betty that the vice presidency would be “a nice conclusion” to his political career — turns out he was right.

At the time of the Ford/Carter contest, I was an idealistic college freshman, and it was my first presidential vote. From my fledgling perspective, Ford represented the downfall of Nixon and the corruption of the Republican Party. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter was a “conservative Democrat” (yes, there was once such a thing), a man of devout faith, a Naval Academy graduate and Navy Veteran, and an affable grassroots political leader as governor of Georgia.

The state line between Tennessee and Georgia divided my childhood home, and though we were residents of Tennessee (by the grace of God), I considered myself an honorary citizen of Georgia. As such, Jimmy Carter was a far more admirable governor than our corrupt Democrat Gov. Ray Blanton at the time — who was convicted of federal felonies and sent to prison.

At 19, I had yet to embrace my parents’ considerable wisdom and advice about many things, including not voting for Carter.

In a tribute to my father after his death, I noted an observation attributed to Mark Twain about maturing enough to recognize the wisdom of our elders: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

The summer after Carter took office, I graduated from a state police academy. I began working as a uniformed officer while in college — four years of experience that taught me more about life than my undergraduate and two graduate degrees ever could. I first met Carter when he came to visit the region where I worked. I was selected to walk perimeter gun with his protection detail — an armed college kid walking just a few feet from the president. It was a different era.

I note “walking” because when Carter was part of a parade, he often walked the route. Recall that after being sworn in as president, he and Rosalynn walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House — the first president to exit his limousine and lead the motorcade on foot.

Yes, this was two decades before we launched The Patriot Post in 1996, after which I most certainly would not have passed the background check for providing perimeter security…

Soon after Carter’s election, I learned a lot from his presidency.

For example, I learned what domestic and foreign policy disasters looked like long before Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden were elected.

In his naiveté, Carter embraced dictators, including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Daniel Ortega. He empowered the PLO’s terrorist kleptocrat, Yasser Arafat, among other actions, such as undermining our allied efforts to contain the Islamic State after his presidency, which could arguably be categorized as anti-Semitic. His weakness empowered the Soviets to invade Afghanistan — a precursor to future Russian incursions empowered by Clinton, Obama, and Biden. Carter’s response was to boycott the Olympics.

I learned all about “national malaise,” blanket amnesty for draft dodgers, coddling of traitors like John Kerry, stagflation, middle-class-choking double-digit inflation, and unprecedented increases in fuel prices.

Carter came to DC, ironically, much as Trump did in terms of his commitment to make his own way doing what he thought was best for America. He rejected the Democrat Party power centers, and they quickly rejected him, in effect crippling his presidency.

Despite the fact that Carter had a Demo trifecta — both the 95th and 96th Congresses (1977 and 1979) had Democrat majorities in the House and Senate — he failed to unify that trifecta.

Moreover, Carter empowered the Iran hostage crisis during my junior year in college. That was my inspiration to volunteer for military service — much as many young people were inspired to raise their hand after the 9/11 Islamist attack on our nation. That was the second of many oaths I have taken “to support and defend” our Constitution since being sworn in as a law enforcement officer in 1977.

To best put Carter’s endless loop of foreign policy malfeasance into context, consider this anecdote from a national security briefing a decade after the 444-day Iran hostage disgrace ended. The briefer was COL “Chargin’ Charlie” Beckwith, who in 1980 was the Army DELTA SF regiment commander preparing to lead “Operation Eagle Claw” — the mission to free the 52 American hostages being held by the Islamist regime in Tehran.

Beckwith recounted the operation briefing he gave to Carter’s then-deputy secretary of state, who asked what he would do if he encountered student revolutionaries guarding the American hostages. Beckwith replied in his inimitable tempo: “Sir. Anyone who is holding a hostage, we intend to shoot him — and shoot him right between the eyes. We intend to shoot him twice.” That spineless deputy secretary, taken aback by Beckwith’s response, replied, “Would you consider shooting them in the leg, or in the ankle, or the shoulder?”

And that, folks, adequately sums up our failed foreign policy under Jimmy Carter — and Bill Clinton. You see, the deputy secretary who posited that absurd question to COL Beckwith was none other than Warren Christopher, who served as Clinton’s secretary of state. Christopher, Hillary Clinton, and Biden Secretary of State Tony Blinken are in a historic three-way tie for worst SecStates ever.

However, in what amounts to a textbook example of a foreign adversary contemplating the return of a powerful American president, on January 20, 1981, as President Ronald Reagan was 10 minutes into his 20-minute inaugural address, the Iranian regime announced that all of the American hostages were being released.

Similarly, the contrast between Trump’s considerable and well-documented record of domestic and foreign policy successes stands in stark contrast to the abysmal Biden/Harris record of policy failures, especially their long list of disastrous foreign policy decisions over the last four years.

Right now, our nation’s adversaries are once again taking cover in advance of the return of a strong American president.

But correcting the disaster the Biden/Harris regime is leaving in its wake will be a long uphill slog for Trump.

Frankly, comparing Biden with Carter is an insult to Carter.

Tracking Carter’s public approval ratings from the 70s when he first entered office to the 30s in his final year charts the details of a failed presidency — much as does Biden’s approval rating collapse.

However, what I learned most from Carter’s presidency is the contrast between a failed president and a truly great president by any historical measure.

We had to endure four years of Carter for the rise of Ronald Reagan, for whom I had the privilege of voting — twice — and serving in a national security capacity during his second term. Reagan set the gold standard for both domestic and foreign policy, and more than any Republican since, Trump modeled his policies after those of Reagan. (Recall that Trump borrowed Reagan’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”)

In the years since Carter’s presidency, he devoted his life to humanitarian service. His name is synonymous with Habitat for Humanity, building homes across the country for those unable to rise above poverty. Ironically, that systemic poverty is the direct result of decades of failed Democrat social policies.

But notably, over the last two decades of his life, as his health and mental acuity failed, so did his embrace of the foundational tenets of the Christian faith he professed — which is to say those around him were increasingly dictating his narrative and coopting his name to promote their own agenda. As Carter became more infirm, he has been propped up by leftists and used as a mascot for their statist and cultural causes.

An early indication of Carter’s susceptibility to being used as a pawn was tapping Morris Dees as his 1976 presidential campaign’s national finance director. Dees is the prolific and corrupt hate-hustling profiteer who founded the leftist so-called Southern Poverty Law Center. (In 2019, Dees’ association with SPLC abruptly ended in controversy and disgrace.)

Carter is a case study of a person with an influential name surrounded by those whose power is tied to that name, which will not allow them to humbly and appropriately retire from public life. (See Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, et al.)

After his presidency, Carter authored 30 books, most of which were related to his faith. Those books track his gradual slide into the Democrat Party platform’s moral abyss, particularly as it relates to killing children before birth and gender confusion pathology.

In his 2005 book, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, there is a chapter entitled “My Traditional Christian Faith.” In that chapter, Carter asserts that “most of the rudiments of my faith in Christ as Savior and the Son of God are still shared without serious question by Protestants, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Copts, Seventh-day Adventists, and many other religious people.” That was largely true then.

In 2012, Carter asserted: “I never have believed that Jesus Christ would approve of abortions and that was one of the problems I had when I was president having to uphold Roe v. Wade and I did everything I could to minimize the need for abortions. … I’ve signed a public letter calling for the Democratic Party at the next convention to espouse my position on abortion which is to minimize the need … and limit it only to women whose life are in danger or who are pregnant as a result of rape or incest.”

But he grew silent on abortion over his last decade, and his choreographed slide into the moral abyss accelerated as evident in his declaration that he believed “Jesus would approve of gay marriage” and that “Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else, and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else.”

Carter even became an “election denier,” parroting his handlers’ 2016 presidential rhetoric, insisting, “I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”

That notwithstanding, in a gracious tribute to Carter this week, Trump wrote: “Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History. The challenges Jimmy faced as President came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Trump added: “While I strongly disagreed with him philosophically and politically, I also realized that he truly loved and respected our Country, and all it stands for. He worked hard to make America a better place, and for that I give him my highest respect. He was a truly good man and, of course, will be greatly missed. He was also very consequential, far more than most Presidents, after he left the Oval Office.”

For his part, predictably, Biden chose to refer to himself in relation to Carter: “I’ll always be proud to say that I was the first national figure to endorse him in 1976 when he ran for president.” Assuming that is not one of Biden’s prolific prevarications, his endorsement was a harbinger of the disastrous Carter presidency and indicative that Biden is far beyond his own political expiration date.

All said, unlike his Democrat successors, Jimmy Carter was selfless and humble, however inept and misguided. He was preceded in death by his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, his “Steel Magnolia,” in November 2023. Despite his long list of failures as president and since then, on a personal level 40 years ago, I found them then to be genuinely kind and decent people.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

(Updated)

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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