Ninety-three-year-old Jimmy Carter has now been a former president longer than anybody else and, as his admirers like to say, in the four decades since he left office has “redefined” what it means to be an ex-president. This may well be true, bearing in mind that people tend to live longer than they used to and Carter was comparatively young (52) when he defeated Gerald Ford in 1976. Most living ex-presidents have concentrated on organizing their legacies and steering clear of politics. Carter, by contrast, has been a faithful partisan warrior since Ronald Reagan forced his retirement and has transformed his own presidential library, the Carter Center in Atlanta, into a combination museum-NGO. His indefatigable globetrotting won him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
All this is very admirable in its way. Yet presidents are judged not by their retirement projects but by their tenure in office—and while Carter’s energetic ex-presidency is no doubt an expression of his deepest convictions, it is also a self-evident gesture toward redemption. Like the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, or Theodore Roosevelt’s expedition up the Amazon, Jimmy Carter’s ex-presidency is likely to be regarded by posterity as an interesting footnote to a stint in the White House.
