Jimmy Carter Enters Hospice Care at Home {Edit: Jimmy Carter has passed (12/29/2024)}
You can debate who the best president was but I don’t think you can debate who the best ex president was
Jimmy Carter hands down
As an ex-President, he could just be himself and do productive, helpful humanitarian work with Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity, hes living his own life and can dictate the terms better for himself and his family and help re-define how the American public or the wider world views him.
In the vicious, nasty, bitter world of post-Nixonian/Watergate partisan politics, where even if you have good intentions, good ideas or policies that might be beneficial 25-30 years from now, what you do here and now and how much tangible progress you make or achieve that positively affects the lives of most Americans lives in the short-run is what matters most. Carter inherited a struggling, weak, immediate post-Vietnam War peace time economy that had stagflation, massive huge interest rates that were 3x times higher then what Biden's facing now, OPEC oil shocks that were intruding and disrupting the daily lives of millions of Americans, the price of commercial goods, wages and salaries stagnated. Plus, the Cold War was still ongoing and IMHO, Carter was a bit naive or not completely in tune to the reality of Soviets true intentions and that more then likely, they werent being totally 100% sincere or honest about respecting human rights worldwide (Helsinki Accords), they were cynically using detente or SALT missile reduction treaties negotiated by Nixon and Ford as a way to gain a tactical/logistical advantage. I'm also not entirely sure if Carter even realized that during his presidency, just how badly Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev's cognitive decline truly was and how badly his personal health had worsened. (KGB did a good job obscuring that fact for a long time from Western intelligence services, by late 1970's, Brezhnev's speeches had to be type-written to the largest font possible.) Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and any possible deal or reducing tensions for Carter just vanished into smoke by December 1979.
Then the Iranian hostage crisis began and that, rightfully, was "unending screw" that cost Carter a likely second term. He didnt cause nor was he responsible for the conditions that lead to the massive upheaval that overthrew the Shah, nor saw the rise of a Islamic fundamentalist regime led by a medieval autocrat, but he didn't make the overall situation much better or more stable by ignoring his VP and NSA's pleas to not allow the sick, cancer-ridden Shah into the U.S. for medical treatment because it might lead to a backlash where our embassy staff are taken hostage, and their worst fears were realized.