In the election of 1980, President Jimmy Carter lost against Ronald Reagan, after serving only one term. While writing his farewell address, a precedent set by George Washington, Carter didn’t know what to do next. However, he told the public that he would leave the White House and uphold the title of citizen, “the only reputation superior to the rank of President.”
During his post-presidential life, Carter wrote books and devoted his efforts to advancing global health, democratic rights, and natural rights. Carter stated that the world’s biggest problem was unethical violence against women and girls, and he cited religious texts in speeches as a leading cause of the abuse of women. He also helped ensure fair elections in countries, from Nicaragua to Nepal, by attending the voting events.
The early days of Carter’s post-presidential life were mundane. His biographers said that he was depressed and had no clue on what to do after leaving the White House, other than returning to Plains, Georgia — the town where he grew up and worked as a peanut farmer, before becoming the state’s governor.
However, in 1981, Carter experienced a turning point in his life after the assassination of President Anwar El-Sadat of Egypt, his close friend. Sadat’s death encouraged him to create a center focused on resolving political conflicts in countries.
Douglas Brinkley, the author of the 1998 book, “The Unfinished Presidency,” said, “He [Carter] told me that ‘if Sadat gave his life for peace in this broken world, then I have to dedicate my post-presidency to keeping peace alive.’”
Thus, in 1982, Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter, the former president’s first lady, founded the Carter Center, an organization focused on solving political problems in countries, in partnership with Emory University. Today, the building is located on the hillside in Atlanta.
At first, Carter envisioned the center as a place to solve political problems around the world, but he quickly turned his thoughts to global health. Alongside Dr. William Foege, the Carter Center’s first executive director, Carter worked to eradicate diseases and tropical illnesses such as river blindness and schistosomiasis.
One of Carter’s most significant and overlooked post-presidential achievements was the near elimination of the Guinea Worm disease — an incurable, parasitic infection passed through water, harboring tiny fleas and insect larvae.
Many experts believed the Guinea Worm disease would be impossible to eliminate without a vaccine or treatment, but Carter was willing to try. He received help from Dr. Donald R. Hopkins, who joined the Carter Center in 1987 and led a campaign dedicated to eradicating the disease at C.D.C.
In an effort to eliminate the Guinea Worm disease, a primary goal of the Carter Center, Carter went to Nigeria and Ghana to examine the effects of the illness. When he saw the disease in 1988, Carter wrote in the Washington Post, “Once you’ve seen a small child with a two- or three-foot-long live Guinea worm protruding from her body, right through her skin, you never forget it.”
He then traveled to Delaware to ask the leader of DuPont, a company that uses science and innovation to create solutions for various industries, to donate a type of nylon fiber that could be woven into a water filter. Carter also convinced chemical company executives to give pesticides that could kill larvae.
In 2002, Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize for his untiring effort to solve problems around the world. He also went to four African nations because AIDS, a chronic condition, was rampant in the continent. At the time, antiviral drugs weren’t widely accessible in the nations, resulting in many deaths.
When Carter visited South Africa, he and Nelson Mandela, the country’s former president, attempted to destigmatize a disease called HIV by cradling babies who were infected by the illness. In Nigeria, Carter met commercial sex workers, and they told Carter that they needed condoms to be safe. After seeing the women, he was encouraged to preach at a catholic church as Carter was a strong advocate for women’s rights. Helene D. Gayle, an AIDS expert, said that in his preaching at the catholic church, “He spoke very plainly about sex with and without a condom, the importance of it, that as a Christian, one should be thinking about one’s responsibility to each other.”
Carter gingerly participated in politics again as a political analyst in 2014 to raise money for his grandson, Jason Carter — a Democratic state senator in Georgia. During an interview that year in Plains, the former president examined campaigns for his grandson and criticized Republican incumbent Nathan Deal, calling his leadership “abominable.”
In 2015, Carter, who was 90 years old at the time, went to a doctor’s appointment after visiting the staff of CARE, an international humanitarian organization in Atlanta. The following day, he held a news conference, announcing that he had metastatic melanoma, meaning that he had cancer in his brain. Despite knowing that he was going to die, Carter didn’t worry about it and said he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes.” Instead, he thought about something else. The former president told reporters, “I would like to see Guinea worm completely eradicated before I die. I’d like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do.”
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