Dear and Glorious Centurion
Reflections on President Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday
America was going through its darkest hour both at home and abroad. It had lost the Vietnam War, a war where there were tens of thousands of casualties on both sides, a war that had become deeply unpopular with Americans for many reasons: the draft, the violence and devastation, the interference in another nation’s civil war, no clear objectives for American intervention in an unwinnable situation.
At home, Richard Nixon, reeling from the Watergate scandal, became the first U.S. president in history to resign the presidency to avoid being impeached and convicted by Congress, the same Nixon who had famously and publicly declared: “I am not a crook!” His successor Gerald Ford also made history as the first unelected person to hold the two highest offices in the land. When Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned due to another scandal, Nixon invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and appointed Ford as vice-president. Then Nixon himself resigned, and Ford became the unelected president. Americans now deeply mistrusted their government.
It was against this backdrop that Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.,) strode on the national stage. Carter entered politics in 1962, first as a Georgia state senator. After an unsuccessful first run for governor, he entered assumed that office in 1971, and then ran for…
