Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States turned 100 today and the first ever President to reach that milestone. A Southern Democrat and a peanut farmer from the state of Georgia where I currently live, he became President in 1976 after defeating Gerald Ford at a time the country was coming out of the miasma of the famous Watergate scandal which led to the resignation of Ford's predecessor Richard Nixon.
President Carter was a gentleman to core. But unfortunately he presided over a poor economy and the famous hostage crisis when the new government led by cleric Ayotollah Khomeini took American Embassy staff in Teheran hostages for 444 days. Both made him highly unpopular as he was up for reelection in 1980. Earlier same year he tried to salvage his rapidly plummeting popularity as the President of United States by launching a secret rescue attempt on Iranian soil. Unfortunately for him the rescue mission went horribly wrong due to bad weather and collision of two military aircrafts killing some American commandos in the process.
Later that year a few days before the 1980 Presidential Elections when Carter was up for reelection, his Republican opponent Ronald Reagan, once a B-grade Hollywood actor asked the Americans a question - "Are you better off now than 4 years ago ? If so, you have your choice", he said winking at President Carter. His message was well taken as less than a week later Ronald Reagan won by a landslide. Poor Jimmy Carter ended up bring one time President.
President Carter had his tryst with India as in 1978 he was the first President in more than a decade to visit India. It was during height of the Cold War when India was the bete noire of USA as it had firmly tilted towards the erstwhile Soviet Union. The visit went cold when the relationship between a Socialist India and a Capitalist America was at best frosty. The visiting US President told to his officials sitting next to him that he didn't get a good impression of India's Prime Minister Morarjee Desai, whom he found blabbering incoherently during their meeting. Desai who drank his own piss every morning and lived till 99, pissed off the Americans. It was an embarrassing diplomatic moment, as the microphone in front of Carter was not switched off and many could hear the conversation. Carter's visit was a milestone as not a single American President chose to visit India for 31 years except him between 1969 and 2000.
After his Presidency Jimmy Carter didn't sit idle. He never retired, got involved in myriads of charity and humanitarian work all over the world and won the Nobel Prize for Peace. A fighter and survivor he scored a century. Happy Centenary birthday Mr. Carter.
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