Former President Jimmy Carter Is Still Building His Legacy, One Home at a Time

http://time.com/5394938/jimmy-carter-houses/

By Molly Ball/Mishawaka, Ind.
September 13, 2018

At 93, Jimmy Carter’s gait is a little stiff, his back a bit stooped. He doesn’t swing a hammer like he once did, preferring to work a table saw. But one week each year, the 39th President of the United States and his wife still travel somewhere in the world to build homes with their own hands for Habitat for Humanity, the global housing charity. And so, on a Thursday in late August, the Carters were on a job site in Mishawaka, Ind., wearing blue hard hats and measuring out lengths of wood for a new patio.

Home is a powerful thing to Carter, the only modern President to return there after leaving the White House. The couple still lives in the two-bedroom ranch house in Plains, Ga., that they built in 1961, and their everyday lives bear little resemblance to the jet-setting and buck-raking of his post-presidential peers. They still cook their own meals and attend their local Baptist church, where Carter teaches Sunday school.

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Carter’s humility might seem a rebuke to those who put more stock in material success or public glory. But he insists he doesn’t judge people with different priorities. “We live the way we want to live,” he says. “That’s what we prefer.” What does annoy him is the worsening inequality he sees in America, which he blames on partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression and the Supreme Court’s “stupid” 2010 campaign-finance decision, Citizens United. “That injected large amounts of money into the political system,” he says, and it “has made our country more of an oligarchy depending on wealth than it is a democracy depending on individual citizens’ votes.”

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The flags at the Habitat site are at half-staff in memory of recently deceased Senator John McCain, whom Carter describes as a personal hero. They both graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, 12 years apart, and learned a strict code. “They have a standard there that the preeminent measurement of a person’s ethical and moral standards is whether or not they tell the truth,” Carter says. As for whether Trump meets that standard, Carter says tersely: “I don’t think the current President has that extraordinary commitment to telling the truth that I just described.”

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“People ask me what I want to be remembered for, and I generally say peace and human rights,” he says. “I think it’s a basic right of a human being to have a home that’s decent in which to raise children, and to have an adequate amount of health care and to have an adequate amount of education to take advantage of whatever talent God may have given them.”

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