After winning the 1978 vote at the age of 32, Bill Clinton of Arkansas became the youngest government in the country. Two years later, he was the youngest previous government, having been ousted by citizens after a one, two-year name.
A Carter management decision to home 19, 000 Caribbean immigrants at Fort Chaffee, an Arkansas Army National Guard setup, reportedly sparked Clinton’s years-long rage toward the former president. Along with migrants who eluded the socialist island to the United States in the Mariel boatlift, the immigrant group included numerous criminals who were recently released from prison by Cuban bodybuilder Fidel Castro. Clinton, as chancellor, had objected to the Fort Chaffee program, views vindicated by a subsequent rebellion among some migrants being held it, which certainly unexpectedly riled locals. Arkansas voters took it out on Clinton, almost detonating his social job.
Clinton won the presidency a decade later after winning the state’s election in 1982, but the incident was the result of a frequently conflicted relationship between the former Southern governors ( Carter led Georgia from 1971 to 1975 ). Successive presidents of both parties may have their different issues dealing with Carter, who died on Dec. 29, 2024, at time 100. Carter, by far the longest-serving president and commander in chief out of office the most of the time, nearly 44 years, had personal interactions with all of the current presidents that were occasionally difficult and occasionally more sympathetic.
In what is sometimes referred to as the world’s most exclusive club, Carter became an outlier among the living presidents due to everything. Most people tend to keep their mouths shut, regardless of public disagreement over policy or past personal piques. Carter didn’t roll that way.
Carter’s tensions with Clinton continue
By June 1994, Carter had more than 13 years as an ex-president, during which he undertook unprecedented freelance diplomacy. Carter resisted the Clinton administration’s request to allow him to travel to the closed one-party totalitarian dictatorship as a result of U.S. tensions with North Korea over its nuclear program. Carter and the North Korean regime struck a deal, which was discussed on CNN prior to a private State Department debrief.
Three months later, Carter declared his desire to put an end to the military junta’s rule in Haiti. Carter made a public request for a role in the crisis, but Carter reluctantly accepted. Clinton did this informing the Haitian government that the deposed, democratically elected leader would be used against him if that country’s deposed, democratically elected leader was not brought back to power. A Carter mission, with former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell and then-Sen. Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, successfully achieved that end. Once more, Carter discussed it on CNN prior to a slated White House meeting with Clinton and a press conference.
Friction with George W. Bush
By the time of Republican George W. Bush’s Jan. 20, 2001, presidential inauguration, Carter’s White House tenure was a distant memory for many people. After the tragedy of the September 11 terrorist attacks, they received a refresher course.
Carter helped bring about the establishment of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 2002, an honor that had previously sat untapped in his presidency. The Nobel Committee in 2002 lauded Carter for his “vital contribution” to the Camp David agreement, along with what it called Carter’s commitment to human rights, a commitment to furthering democracy globally, and his work fighting tropic diseases.
The Carter Nobel Peace Prize decision was criticized by the award committee for planning an invasion of Iraq, the award committee claimed in openness. Carter himself said in a 2007 interview,” I think this administration has been the worst in history, the worst administration ever,” out of all the subtleties he had about the current president.
By that point, Carter had also marginalized himself somewhat in the court of public opinion, even among those who came to see in a better light his troubled presidency, plagued by high inflation, gas shortages, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and many other problems.
Yes, the peace treaty that Carter brokered between , Israel , and Egypt has been an enduring success. Yet Carter, in the eyes of many, devoted a great deal of his post-presidential energies to praising the world’s worst tyrannies and offering relentless criticism of , Israel. To the point where he asserted that Hamas was a strong supporter of the peace process in 2015. The terrorist group’s intentions were clear long before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, in which its forces killed about 1, 200 Israelis and took around 250 hostages.  ,
Barack Obama and a more sombre relationship
Carter and President Barack Obama had less obvious rifts, but there was little warmth. After all, Obama had a high school diploma in Hawaii when Carter became president and had never had a public image since the 1970s.
Carter did express annoyance at being cut off from the live audience at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. Once Obama took office, Carter criticized the use of drone strikes to target terrorists overseas, even at the cost of civilian casualties. Though Carter did praise the Obama administration’s push to enact what became Obamacare, fulfilling a long-held Democratic goal of expanded healthcare coverage.
An old friend in Joe Biden
Joe Biden fought for the presidency himself, but it took him more than 32 years and three tries. However, Biden had a significant impact on Carter’s winning 1976 campaign when the former governor defeated a number of well-known Democratic rivals for the nomination before ousting Republican president Gerald Ford.
Biden, a Delaware Democrat, was elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 29. Four years later, he was the first national figure to endorse Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination, citing his character. That began a more than half-century friendship between the pair, as Biden went on to spend 36 years in the Senate, eight as vice president, and finally winning the presidency in 2020.
Even though Biden, back in 1980, according to his memoirs, was encouraged by Democratic operatives to challenge Carter in that year’s primaries, Biden demurred and stayed loyal to Carter politically and as a friend personally.
Biden, after Carter’s death, said he and the late president “hung out” for decades, explaining that their families were bound by something deep: cancer. Carter revealed that he had surgery to get rid of a mass in his liver. About a week later, the then-90-year-old announced he had been diagnosed with cancer — from which he recovered. That same year, though, a son of then-Vice President Biden,  , former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, died from brain cancer at age 46.
Donald Trump has a mix of relationships with him.
Carter had a surprisingly sometimes cordial relationship with the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president, Republican Donald Trump. The two couldn’t be more different. Carter’s public persona was infused with religiosity and at-time moral scolding. Trump, during his business and celebrity days and in the political realm, is a proudly transactional character.
Carter was in his 90s and had largely slowed from international globe-trotting by the time Trump was elected in what would turn out to be his first of two nonconsecutive presidential terms. Carter distanced himself from Democratic “resistance” efforts against Trump. Carter was the first living president to say he would attend Trump’s Jan. 20, 2017, inauguration.
Over the course of the next few years, Trump and Carter kept in touch frequently. Following Trump’s announcement of new sanctions against the nation, Carter claimed in 2018 that he had been given a briefing on North Korea. In April 2019, Carter wrote Trump a letter on U. S. China trade, and they spoke by phone.
However, the relationship deteriorated later that year when Carter demanded a thorough investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Carter argued that an investigation “would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election.” Carter also criticized Trump’s handling of COVID-19 in 2020.
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Trump, in May 2024, running to retake the presidency, swiped at Carter and, intentionally or not, confused him with a one-time tennis star. Trump compared Carter to Carter in the race with Biden still in the race before giving the Democratic nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump, in a backhanded compliment to Carter, said his decades-earlier predecessor had a “bad reputation” during his time in office but was considered “brilliant” in comparison to Biden.
However, Trump had mistakenly called Carter” Jimmy Connors”, a former world No. 1 tennis player in the 1970s.
