Fair winds, following seas to President Carter

Jimmy Carter was a Navy nuclear officer, a Georgia governor and the 39th president of the United States of America; high accomplishments for a small rural town peanut farmer.

Carter studied engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and was accepted at the U.S. Naval Academy and graduated in the top 10% of his class in 1946. He served on submarines for five years and worked with Adm. Hyman G. Rickover developing the nuclear submarine program.

When Canada’s Chalk River nuclear reactor had a partial meltdown, which ruptured the reactor and flooded the facility with radioactive water, Carter and his team were sent to clean the site. The three-man teams were lowered into the reactor for 90-second intervals for radioactive cleanup as that was the maximum time humans could be exposed to the high levels of radiation present. For six months after the radioactive exposure, Carter passed radioactivity in his urine and feces.

Carter resigned his commission when his father died. He was elected for two terms as state senator and was elected governor of Georgia in 1970. As governor, he reorganized the state government to reduce the number of personnel to increase efficiency and reduce costs and improved the weak educational system of the state.

Carter became the president of the United States in 1977 and introduced a broad list of programs for administrative, economic and social reform.

However, the Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate did not support his programs and significantly limited success during his presidency. President Carter established the Department of Energy, the Department of Education and created the Superfund to clean up abandoned toxic waste dumps. Carter’s greatest successes for long-term benefit to the nation were to promote the Airline Deregulation Act to increase competition in the airline industry; the Staggers Rail Act, which deregulated the national railroad industry, and the Motor Carrier Act benefiting both workers and customers.

Carter convinced Congress in 1977 to abolish all federal criminal penalties for the possession of small amounts of marijuana.

His greatest challenges were an oil crisis, high inflation, low growth, Soviet strategic gains, and the Iran hostage crisis, which he was unsuccessful in resolving.

Jimmy Carter inherited a troubled economy. His presidency had the highest GDP growth since Lyndon B. Johnson but had the highest inflation rate and the third-highest unemployment rate during the same period.

Carter’s greatest accomplishments were in foreign affairs where he obtained treaties to transfer the Panama Canal to Panama; shepherded the Camp David Accord which established peace between Israel and Egypt: established full diplomatic relations with China; and signed a new bilateral Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with Russia. The Nobel Peace Prize 2002 was awarded to Jimmy Carter “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance Democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

After Carter’s presidency, he established the Carter Presidential Center, which provided badly needed health care to the world, including 60 million treatments for preventable blindness and essentially wiped out Guinea Worm Disease, which affected 3.5 million people per year. He worked with Habitat for Humanity building homes for the poor. Jimmy Carter became a prolific author, writing two books on the Middle East, a book on the Revolutionary War, and three books on the lessons of aging.

Kai Bird in “The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter” states, “No modern president worked harder at the job and few achieved more than Carter.” He was the epitome of service before self and a committed Christian. It informed his daily walk and governance. Jimmy Carter deserves credit and respect, and we wish him fair winds and following seas.

Roger Oberbeck is a Navy veteran , electrical engineer, guided missile systems field engineer, Navy nuclear engineer, author and biotech senior validation engineer. He is a member of The Right Stuff Committee and can be reached at roger oberbeck@yahoo.com.