Irish Examiner view: Competent and compassionate

The Carter Centre, the charity created by Former US President Jimmy Carter announced he is receiving hospice care from it.

Jimmy Carter, the 98-year-old former US president who has elected to spend “his remaining time at home with his family” was a rare example of a political leader who seemed to care more about honour than for the levers of power.

Carter, whose great grandparents were from Antrim, and who visited the Republic in 1984, was famously a peanut farmer, whose principal merit upon election in 1977 seemed to be that he had no connection with the corrupt and cynical Republican White House of predecessor Richard Nixon.

Although he had domestic successes in creating millions of new jobs while simultaneously reducing the budget deficit, and internationally in brokering peace between Egypt and Israel and negotiating the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union (an achievement for which successor Ronald Reagan took credit), it was foreign affairs which brought him down and denied him a second term.

In 1979, students in the failing state of Iran, under the influence of Ayatollah Khomeini, seized 52 US diplomats and citizens at the US embassy compound in Tehran for a 14-month standoff which included a disastrous rescue mission by American special forces. 

That humiliation was the primary factor in the Reagan electoral landslide of 1980.

Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work in conflict resolution, democracy, human rights, and peaceful economic development. His desire, he once said, was to make government “competent and compassionate”. The world could do with more of his ilk in 2023.