NBC News - During Carter’s era, the Latino population in the country was about 14.6 million, or 6.5% of the overall U.S. population, and his administration reflected the awakening of Latinos as a political force....Carter did not just bring qualified Latinos to work with him; he also selected people who had been part of the grassroots political and civil rights movements...At the time, Carter brought in a record number of Hispanics to work for his administration. They were able to do so because they recruited leaders from the emerging Latino civil rights and advocacy groups.
Jonathan Alter, The Guardian -Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and a Nobel peace prize-winning humanitarian, died on Sunday in Plains, Georgia, the tiny town where he and his formidable wife and life partner, Rosalynn, were born.Carter – the longest-lived and longest-married US president – is unlikely to be placed in the first rank of American leaders, but his single four-year term is now seen in a much better light than it was when he was best known for the seizure of American hostages in Iran and for his crushing loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The easy shorthand on Carter – inept president but superb former president – is a major oversimplification. In office, Carter was a political failure but a policy success, with a string of unheralded accomplishments and a partially fulfilled vision of peace and a clean energy future. He was an austere, non-ideological, moral leader who didn’t like to think of himself as a politician and operated as one only during campaigns.
With a peculiar combination of Zen calm and steely-eyed stubbornness, Carter essentially lived in three centuries. He was born in 1924 but it might as well have been the 19th century. His family, while well-to-do for the area, had no electricity, running water or mechanized equipment on the farm. He was connected to almost all of the significant events of the 20th century. And the issues he tackled during his post-presidency – global health, democracy promotion and conflict resolution – are the cutting-edge challenges of the 21st.
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