High Plains drifter

IN THIS mobile age, ever fewer people remain anchored to the place they grew up, especially not the powerful, with their cosmopolitan lives and multiple homes. Jimmy Carter is an exception. He still lives in Plains, the small town where he was born in 1924, amid the flat, south Georgian landscape of farmland, pecan trees and superabundant churches—in one of which he taught his regular Bible lesson on August 23rd, shortly after revealing that his cancer had spread to his brain.

Plains returns his affection. Hundreds of mock campaign placards, exclaiming “Jimmy Carter for Cancer Survivor”, are fixed along the route to the house he has lived in since 1961, give or take spells in the governor’s mansion and the White House. They begin at the edge of town, at the statue of a peanut with a toothy Carteresque grin, a relic of his triumphant presidential campaign of 1976, when his “peanut brigades”, named for the crop he still farms, were dispatched across America from his cramped Plains HQ. He frequently tours the modest high street, where, as a boy, he sold five-cent bags of nuts he had boiled and salted. Willie Bell Raven, proprietress of Mimmie’s diner, recalls how Jimmy would go to the movies with black friends, even though they had to sit separately on the train and in the cinema. Mr Carter spoke at her husband’s recent funeral.

At over 34 years, Mr Carter’s post-presidential life is already the longest in American history. His devotion to his hometown is one of the twin, contradictory traits that have made it unique in content as well as duration—because, as well as being strikingly parochial, it has also been relentlessly globetrotting. He has conducted freelance diplomacy, sometimes helping to avert conflict, from North Korea to Haiti. He and his Carter Centre have monitored (and sometimes denounced) elections around the world, and helped to combat hitherto neglected tropical diseases, such as river blindness and Guinea worm, now almost eradicated. “I want the last Guinea worm to die before I do,” Mr Carter said on August 20th. He and Rosalynn, his Plains-born wife, have spent a week every year building houses for the poor.

All politics is local

Jason Carter, his grandson, thinks there is a link between these local and global commitments: Mr Carter’s bond with his ancestral land, Jason says, helps him understand the passions of territorial conflicts such as Israel’s and Palestine’s. His views on that issue have caused controversy, as has his willingness to talk to pariahs; he has unceremoniously reciprocated occasional criticism from later administrations. But the upshot of these instincts, and of his sense of how the presidency’s moral authority could be wielded, has been unprecedented. His single term in the White House, which floundered in the Iran hostage stand-off and economic woe, remains a lazy byword for executive dither (its accomplishments, such as peace between Israel and Egypt, tend to be overlooked). His post-presidency earned him the Nobel peace prize in 2002.

Hampered as they have been by scandal, or by the tact required by their relatives’ careers, it is hard to see his successors matching it. Mr Carter’s public discussion of his illness was almost as remarkable, its candour exceeding even the letter about his Alzheimer’s that Ronald Reagan wrote to the American public in 1994. With a characteristic mix of Christian faith and technical curiosity (a legacy of his spell as a submariner), Mr Carter described the four spots of melanoma on his brain, the removal of a tenth of his liver and his radiotherapy schedule. He said he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes”, but hopes to visit Nepal later this year. His grandson says his intention was merely to be honest, but many found his undaunted frankness inspirational.

Mr Carter ranked the peach pies delivered by his neighbours in Plains above the consolatory phone calls from other presidents. He is said to be working on a painting of Rachel Clark, a beloved black neighbour alongside whom he picked cotton during his childhood.