Dear President Carter,
Former President Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church, in Plains, Ga., in November 2019. John Amis/Associated Press, File
As you calmly await death in Plains, Georgia, I send you this song from my home on the coast of Maine, a song by Albert E. Brumley that I sang to my own father when he was dying:
Some glad morning, when this life is over, I’ll fly away,
To a home on God’s celestial shore, I’ll fly away.
You and I have a long history, going back nearly half a century. Given how it began, I can hardly believe that I am writing to you now.
Back then, 1975, I was a college student working as a congressional intern in Washington, D.C. After seven long years of the Nixon presidency, the Watergate scandal and its fallout, a presidential election was approaching. Several of those vying for the Democratic nomination spoke to the congressional interns.
My political heroes were the leaders of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. They wanted to force America to live up to its ideals. You, by contrast, took a cautious, detail-oriented approach to social change. Your oratory left me yawning. It seemed impossible that you could win the Democratic nomination, never mind the presidency.
Yet, somehow, you pulled that off.
Fast forward to the fall of 1977. I was working on a scientific project in the Negev Desert. I lived with young Israelis, many of them veterans of the bloody Yom Kippur War. On days off, I sometimes visited a Quaker friend who worked with Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. That deeply unsettled my Israeli friends. They thought of Palestinians as their enemy.
And then, suddenly, the world changed. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his groundbreaking peace overture to Israel. You, President Carter, were in the right place at the right time to move the peace process forward. Through your patient coaxing, the Camp David Accords were signed.
Israelis who had grown up amid ongoing war with their Arab neighbors suddenly opened their minds to the possibility of a better future. You were the midwife who brought about that change. I found myself respecting you in a whole new way.
Fast forward to the fall of 1980, another presidential election year. I was working as a reporter for a newspaper outside Washington. For the first time ever, I spent election night as an impartial observer rather than a campaign volunteer. My assignment was to cover Republican headquarters in Fairfax County, Virginia.
The election was a disaster for Democrats. Republicans won the presidency and the U.S. Senate. Every time news announcers reported that another Democratic senator had been defeated, the crowd at Republican headquarters whooped and cheered. I felt sick with grief as I carried out my reporting duties.
When you headed home to Plains after leaving office, I assumed that would be the last I ever thought of you. And it was, for a long time.
Years passed. I would read from time to time about how you were helping to build houses for Habitat for Humanity, or monitoring elections in places like Haiti. Like many Americans, I could see that you were crushing it as an ex-president.
Fast forward to today. The world is far scarier than it was during your presidency. We’re struggling with an ever-rising tide of gun violence. Climate change is accelerating. In the Middle East, the peace accords that you helped broker lie in shambles.
Through it all, you’ve steadily held your course. You’ve lived a life of integrity, one that made a real difference in the world. You haven’t given up hope, even when some of your biggest accomplishments were destroyed.
I never thought that you, of all people, would be a role model for me. But you are, and for that, I am grateful. May you fly away gently to the peaceful place that you deserve.
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