Jimmy Carter: The peanut farmer who changed the course of history by Hamid Dabashi

 

The news of the death of former United States President Jimmy Carter on 29 December 2024 at the age of 100 has ushered in an avalanche of memories in many people in my age group - students of the 1970s who remember his presidency with a mixture of nostalgia, bitter awakening and historic turning points in American and world history. 

Carter did not dramatically change my politics. But he did help change the historical course of my homeland, Iran, and I daresay American history after his troubled one-term presidency from 1977 to 1981.  

Both the Iranian Revolution of 1977-1979 and the dramatic Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981 happened on Carter's watch. And it was also when I happened to arrive in the US.  

I was born and raised in southern Iran, graduated from university in Tehran in 1975, and soon after received a US visa and admission to the University of Pennsylvania, where I earned my doctoral degree in sociology of culture.  

I landed in what was at the time the tiny Philadelphia International Airport on 15 August 1976. I had flown into the city of "Brotherly Love" while Americans were celebrating their bicentennial.

A few weeks before, the first televised debate between President Gerald Ford and Carter was held there.

I recall that my English was still not good enough to follow the debate closely. But from that moment, Carter became integral to my personal and political history.

Two other debates happened between the presidential candidates that year, of which I have no clear recollection - except for two famous takeaways. One was a derogatory aside that Ford "could not chew gum and speak at the same time", referring to his rather clumsy demeanour. And the other was that Carter was a peanut farmer.

Decades later, the man who has now met his maker would be arguably the most consequential president of his generation - not just by virtue of what he did or did not do - but by the intended and unintended consequences of his actions, inactions, and, above all, his misadventures.    

Gathering storm

Those happy memories of my earliest encounter with American presidential politics and folklore were quickly overshadowed by the commencement of the revolutionary momentum in the homeland I had just left behind.

The Iran hostage crisis crippled Carter's final year in office until he lost to Ronald Reagan and a calamitous turn to reactionary politics commenced in the US

Between 1977 and 1979, the ruling Pahlavi monarchy was successfully challenged by an ageing Ayatollah Khomeini and soon toppled and replaced by the Islamic Republic.  

Meanwhile, in the US, the newly-elected president and his administration would soon be dragged into a foreign policy quagmire that arguably cost him his second term.

Iran's revolutionary momentum resulted in the downfall of the Pahlavi monarchy - for which, to this day, many conspiratorial royalists hold Carter responsible.  

They are particularly suspicious of the four-day Guadeloupe Conference in January 1979, where Carter was joined by the leaders of Britain, France and West Germany to discuss various world issues - among them, the Iranian revolution.

It is here that Iranian royalists believe (without much evidence) that Carter had given the signal that the shah had to leave.  

Such conspiracy theories, of course, are pervasive in Iranian (as indeed many other) political cultures and rest on denying any agency to Iranian people themselves. Be that as it may, the legacy of Carter is forever wedded to the revolutionary unfolding that still affects Iran.  

Just about a month after the Guadeloupe Conference, the shah's regime fell in February of that year. Khomeini returned to Iran, and the entire country was cast in a revolutionary frenzy.  

The following summer, I returned to Iran to see the unfolding drama for myself. For about two months, I was part of the revolutionary momentum that changed the fate of my homeland.

I would spend much of my time on the Tehran University campus and adjacent areas and join debates and discussions regarding the draft of the new constitution before dashing to the Ministry of Justice, where women were demonstrating against the suggestion they could not be judges in the new regime.

In early September, I returned to my graduate studies. But soon after, the unrest in my homeland again rippled across the globe to the unsuspecting University of Pennsylvania campus, where student activists were busy debating the Iranian revolution.  

During that fateful autumn, the Iran hostage crisis - in which 52 Americans were held captive in the US embassy in Tehran for 444 days from 4 November 1979 to 20 January 1981 - crippled Carter's final year in office until he lost to Ronald Reagan and a calamitous turn to reactionary politics commenced in the US.  

US President Jimmy Carter, right, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, left, smile at one another as the shah arrived for a state visit at the White House in Washington, DC, on 15 November 1977 (Benjamin E 'Gene' Forte/ CNP/Sipa USA)

One of the first things Carter did in retaliation to the hostage crisis was to cancel Iranian student visas. We had to report back to immigration services to be issued new visas and were effectively stranded in the US until the end of the crisis.  

The prominent newscaster Ted Koppel became a household name during these tumultuous days, when every night he had an ABC network television programme, Nightline, counting the days and detailing the ordeals of the American hostages.  

For years, there were unsubstantiated but persistent reports that Reagan's presidential campaign was in touch with Iranian revolutionaries to delay and postpone the release of the hostages until he came to office, which is exactly how things unfolded.

More recently, even more corroborating evidence has surfaced supporting this possibility.  

I recall walking out of Penn's Van Pelt Library and hearing on someone's transistor radio (if people still remember those gadgets) the news that the hostages were released right in the midst of Reagan's inauguration ceremony. 

'Vietnam Syndrome'

What seriously contributed to Carter's defeat was the disastrous military mission he had authorised to rescue the hostages.

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Operation Eagle Claw, or Operation Tabas in Iran, as it was codenamed, was an attempt on 24 April 1980 to rescue the hostages - from the very same embassy I had walked into just a few years earlier to get my American visa.
 
The dispatched helicopters ran into mechanical failures, and the operation had to be aborted. As the forces were withdrawing from their rendezvous spot, there was a midair collision between a helicopter and an aircraft, and eight US servicemen were killed.

We first heard of the Texan billionaire and future presidential candidate Ross Perot during this time when he arranged for a successful rescue mission of his own.

He successfully pulled two of his employees out of Iran, using his company's resources and a retired US Army colonel, Arthur D "Bull" Simons, as recounted in Ken Follet's best-selling book, On Wings of Eagles, and later depicted in a two-part movie starring Burt Lancaster.  

Meanwhile, the humiliation of Carter's military fiasco provoked what at the time was called the "Vietnam syndrome", meaning the reluctance of the US to engage in military operations in faraway lands.  

In the years to follow, Reagan's singular mission was to overcome that syndrome with a massive increase in military spending.

The US invasion of Grenada on 25 October 1983 began to define the military culture of the Reagan era. Codenamed Operation Urgent Fury, it reasserted US supremacy in the region that soon developed into full military engagements around the globe - most publicly during the 1986 US bombing of Libya.

I still remember Clint Eastwood's 1986 film Heartbreak Ridge, which lent a Hollywood hand to re-militarising American foreign policy under Reagan.  

What seriously contributed to Carter's defeat was the disastrous military mission he had authorised to rescue the hostages

Lancaster, Eastwood, Reagan and a mismatched southern peanut farmer were the cast of my youthful encounter with American politics and Hollywood at the same time.  

What was eventually to be called the Iran–Contra affair further exacerbated this militarisation trend of the Reagan doctrine when, between 1981 and 1986, senior US officials were secretly and illegally engaged in the sale of arms to Iran, the proceedings of which were to be used to fund the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua.  

For days in July 1987, I was glued to the television, watching the testimonies of Lieutenant Oliver North in a US congressional hearing about his role in the scandal.

It was a crash course on the US and world politics.  

Right-wing swing

Things began to snowball into a right-wing swing in American politics. Reagan's presidency eventually led to the emergence of the neoconservatives and the Project for a New American Century during the George W Bush era.

From there, it continued to the rise of the Tea Party and, eventually, the Maga movement that defined Donald Trump's presidency.  

The events of 9/11 on Bush's watch resulted in two massive military operations - first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. American politics was now fully recovered from its "Vietnam syndrome".

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Iran was not spared from this turn to reactionary politics.

The ruling Islamists used the US hostage crisis to destroy their domestic ideological opponents and then, before the crisis was over, turned to prolong the Iran-Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had started in September 1980, which could have ended within a few months but lasted for eight bloody years.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza is today the final butterfruit of that era, with Carter spearheading the Camp David Accords, resulting in the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

The shameful role and complicity of Egypt in Israel's starvation of Palestinians and man-made humanitarian crisis has been well documented.

It is perhaps too much to think that all of these developments are rooted in the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Still, the fact is that something innocent and intensely fragile broke in the period between the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s - culminating in the end of the Vietnam War - and the radical right turn of American politics beginning with Reagan.

And that something happened during the time of one idealist peanut farmer who first dared to call the Israeli regime's treatment of Palestinians Apartheid and who became the US president almost at the same time that I began my own American sojourn.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

 

The following is an overview from the New York Times. 

 

 

	By Anna Marks Opinion Staff Editor

Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at 100, spent much of the latter half of his life eclipsing his cardigan-wrapped, conflict-laden presidency with a glowing reputation as one of America’s pre-eminent humanitarians.

This country’s highest office encourages the lionization of those who hold it. As a result, our public imagination often crystallizes presidents’ posthumous identities into a sort of virtuous mythology that can easily occlude reality. Times Opinion offers an exploration of Carter’s life and legacy in several essays. To what extent did the man meet his mythos?

The Times editorial board writes that, despite his tumultuous final year as president, Carter amounted to “a disciplined man of integrity and rock-solid values whose vision was to restore honor to government.” After the presidency, the board says, he set his sights on “waging peace,” a mission that even he could not finish.

Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, evaluates Carter’s signature, even radical emphasis on human rights. She attributes much of his approach to his deeply held evangelical faith and his “empathy for individuals who had suffered human rights abuse,” at home and abroad.

The Times columnist Carlos Lozada read Carter’s autobiographical works and found someone who frequently wrestled with the weight of his office and his unique position in the world. “Carter’s writings,” Lozada says, “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.”

And the columnist Nicholas Kristof writes that his admiration for the former president came after traveling with him to Africa as part of a campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease. “I admire a man who seeks out suffering children, weeps unashamedly with them — and then does his utmost to eradicate the parasite that torments them,” writes Kristof.

In each of these essays about Carter, I encountered a man who chose to pursue the betterment of the human condition over his own aggrandizement, enrichment or legacy. Americans love to imagine ourselves as noble leaders deeply committed to generosity, tolerance and the greater good. As these essays argue, Carter was the rare one of us who actually met that image’s challenge, to the benefit of the world.