Jimmy Carter’s Global Legacy Was Moral Clarity

For President Jimmy Carter, morality was a personal obligation that became a national calling. A deeply religious man, he taught Sunday school for most of his adult life until the point in 2020 when he physically couldn’t anymore, and he projected that same moral leadership from his entry into politics through his ascendance to the presidency. Once there, he understood in a deeply personal way, that he was spreading values—of decency, morality and human rights—to a Cold War world that needed hope.

This is the underappreciated cornerstone of Carter’s legacy. He took seriously America’s moral leadership and tried to use it to better our country and our world. After the Realpolitik relativism of the Vietnam and the Nixon eras, Carter committed himself to diplomacy, deferred to international norms and elevated human rights into a priority of American foreign policy. That vision of America’s role in the world offers hope even today. Despite the cynicism and performative politics, it’s more important than ever to recognize that moral leadership is not out of fashion. Indeed, it is essential.

Carter’s conviction was his most impressive quality, and it could also be his most infuriating. He was incredibly stubborn about doing the right thing, and refused to give up long past the point others would have thrown up their hands. A great example was the negotiations for what became the Camp David Accords, the historic agreement that led to the first Israeli-Arab peace treaty—he refused to let Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin walk away, and shuttled among cabins at Camp David, probing and cajoling until the deal was done.

And he was perfectly willing to pick bruising domestic political fights for the sake of what he felt was right. He called the debate over transferring the Panama Canal to Panamanian authority “the most difficult political fight I ever faced,” but he also believed that continuing U.S. control over a swath of Panamanian territory was an enduring injustice, and one that diminished the U.S. in the eyes of the world. “This issue,” he later wrote, “had become a litmus test, indicating how the U.S., as a superpower, would treat a small and relatively defenseless nation that had always been a close partner and supporter.” In the end, he managed to get two new U.S.-Panama treaties through the Senate with the requisite (and bipartisan) two-thirds majority, plus an extra vote.

Carter is also rightly lauded for the achievements of his post-presidency—from conflict mediation to guinea worm eradication in Africa to Habitat for Humanity. But his global morality came from his personality, and I witnessed this up close: he supported the careers of many who worked for him, including mine. For my first race for Congress, Carter sent me a personal check for $500, with a handwritten note saying: “We love you and wish you well. You represent not only California but the Carter family.” It now hangs on the wall in my office.

This personal commitment to values is evident in a vision he spelled out in a commencement address in the first year of his presidency: “a policy based on constant decency in its values and on optimism in our historical vision.” Carter made his call for moral clarity amid a post-Vietnam crisis of confidence that he said was “made even more grave by the covert pessimism of some of our leaders.” He urged Americans to have confidence in the country’s animating values, especially as democracy gained ground in India, Portugal, Spain, and Greece, proving its attraction.

It is underappreciated that this vision didn’t end with Carter. In fact, it became a central theme among his successors, not least the man who defeated him for the presidency in 1980. Reagan made freedom a cornerstone of his foreign policy when he stood at the Brandenburg Gate and urged Soviet President Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

Tragically, Carter leaves us during another crisis of confidence, when much of the progress since his presidency seems to be falling away. Freedom House recently documented a global decline in freedom for the 18th consecutive year. A Soviet-nostalgic Russian leader is attempting a violent land grab in Europe; the Israel-Hamas war continues to defy a negotiated solution at horrific human cost. Carter’s example should teach us that it is precisely times like these that call for the courage it takes not to give up on the pursuit of freedom and peace. 

Let us recognize, as Carter did, that “it is a new world—but America should not fear it. It is a new world — and we should help to shape it.” Achieving this goal requires vision—and stubbornness.

Jane Harman was Deputy Cabinet Secretary in the Carter administration. She later served nine terms in Congress from California and is co-chair of Freedom House.