Jimmy Carter

The first thing that pops into my brain when I think of President Jimmy Carter is inflation (bear with me, my memories of Carter improve significantly. I promise).

 Kim and I had just gotten married in 1980 and within a year, we were looking to buy our first house. The trouble was, inflation was running at 14 percent at the time. I think most mortgage interest rates were hovering around 18 percent, if memory serves (this was, after all, 44 years ago).

We finally heard of a program offered by a local financial institution where first-time home buyers could purchase a house for 16 percent interest over 30 years. We jumped on it. Over time, we were able to refinance a couple of times to lower the interest rate, and eventually we paid off the mortgage ahead of schedule.

At the time, I thought the Carter presidency was unremarkable. It was also in 1980 that saw the failed hostage rescue attempt ("Operation Eagle Claw") that left eight American servicemen dead in the Iranian desert.

It seemed America could do nothing right. High inflation, coupled with the failed rescue attempt, hustled Ronald Reagan into office later that year, seemingly booting Carter to historical oblivion as a one-term president.

But when Carter died last month at the age of 100 and the retrospectives began poring in, my ever changing perspective of Carter's presidency changed even more.

Carter actually inherited the high inflation rate when he took office in 1977. In an effort to curtail inflation, Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve. Volcker raised interest rates, eventually knocking down inflation just in time for Reagan's first term.

Most of us might regard the Camp David Accords as Carter's crowning achievement, bringing a peace between Egypt and Israel that still exists. Carter also continued to normalize relations with China after Nixon first opened doors.

It was during the Carter administration that negotiations brought about the release of the hostages in Iran on the day that Reagan was inaugurated.

Carter, a principled man of faith, was also a social visionary who long pushed for civil and human rights.

He was also a dedicated environmentalist, placing 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection and soon signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which included protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Carter also tried to clean up government with ethics reforms in the wake of Nixon's Watergate adventure by putting independent inspectors in every department. He attempted to make government more representative of the country itself by appointing more Blacks, Jews and women to political positions than all previous presidents combined.

He also created the Department of Education, the Department of Energy and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Carter's post presidency and his work with Habitat for Humanity showed us the innate decency of the man, as if we could ever forget. He did, after all, win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflict, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.

We are about to embark on an era that will inaugurate a convicted felon (who is also an adjudicated rapist) to the presidency and whose first inclination is to pardon hundreds of insurrectionists who violently tried to change the will of the American people with a damned lie. 

This fact alone makes the Carter years seem like it happened in a different country.