Famous deaths in the last 100 hours of a year date all the way back to the very first year of the Christian era with the Bethlehem babes (December 28 – this columnist remembers a child horrified at receiving a Christmas present bought at Harrods since Harrod was understood to be the king slaughtering the innocent infants). Many centuries ago St. Thomas Becket was slain at the altar in Canterbury on December 29, 1170, inspiring T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and the unsaintly interpretation of his martyrdom as “suicide while of unsound mind.” The death of Elector Max Joseph of Bavaria in the closing hours of 1777 triggered the War of the Bavarian Succession to complicate the international panorama yet further at the time of the American Revolutionary War. Despite breaking all records for presidential longevity, Jimmy Carter was not the only former Democratic president to fade away in the last week of the year – Harry S. Truman (age 88) died on the Boxing Day of 1977. Rasputin was murdered in every possible way on the penultimate day of 1916, the same day Saddam Hussein was executed in 2006. Pelé (widely considered the greatest footballer of all time, especially beyond these shores), former British Prime Minister Harold “you never had it so good” Macmillan and Pope Benedict XVI were others going out with the year without exhausting the famous names but enough of such digressions – this column is dedicated to Jimmy Carter and Jorge Lanata.
Sharing the same initials (James Earl and Jorge Ernesto), Carter and Lanata contrasted in many ways. The one profoundly humanitarian, the other deeply human. Carter’s exemplary health equipped him to think constantly of others and elevate humanity with good causes whereas Lanata’s premature end stemmed from a total inability to look after himself (which can also be interpreted as a form of selflessness) – instead of aspiring to improve people, his flawed brilliance and mordant irony were dedicated to preventing the species from falling yet further, especially when it came to corruption.
Following both alphabetical and chronological order, Carter (who died last Sunday) is first up. His name is indelibly linked here with the defence of human rights against the 1976-1983 military junta – a stance very much his since it might have been so much easier to consider a far right dictatorship an invaluable Cold War ally, a logic pursued by his fellow-centenarian Henry Kissinger. Yet this columnist does not propose to explore this aspect of Carter further since the story of how those guidelines were echoed here by Robert Cox, Tex Harris, Patricia Derian and others is best told by Cox himself as a direct witness and surviving protagonist of that period.
Nor is this columnist qualified to comment much on his 1977-1981 presidency as a whole since living in Germany at that time and not following it too closely apart from his 1976 election. Carter was such an unknown outsider that he missed out on a landslide against a Gerald Ford dead in the water(gate) with his monumental “there is no Communism in Eastern Europe and nor will there be while I’m President” debate gaffe – the electoral college went 297-240 but Carter actually won less states than Ford and nothing west of the Mississippi apart from formerly Confederate Texas voting for a Southerner (California was not then the current blue bastion with multi-million Democratic majorities).
Carter’s presidency was not a success and his 1980 re-election bid garnered only 49 of the 538 electoral college votes but this rare failure of an incumbent also needs to be placed in its international context. Just as the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown has been electoral kryptonite for governments worldwide in this decade, the oil shock of 1973-1974 was equally disruptive half a century ago with inflation the upshot of both – the wheels started coming off such entrenched forces as French Gaullism or Britain’s Labour Party and Germany’s Social Democrats both representing majority classes. It might be added that during the Carter presidency many countries had a terrorist problem (be it the IRA, ETA, Baader Meinhof, Brigate Rosse, etc.) in a turbulent period worldwide but only Argentina tore up the law-book.
Even if the 444-day Iranian hostage crisis was fatal for his re-election, Carter was more successful internationally, winning the Nobel Peace Prize for the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt as well as signing the treaty to repatriate the Panama Canal (now suddenly an issue with president-elect Donald Trump). And while his human rights crusade is remembered here, it should be recalled that it was a worldwide policy consistently applied with South Korea perhaps its acid test as a front line against Communism.
Carter’s humble Georgia origins also need to be underlined – as a peanut farmer he was only a few notches above white trash (or “crackers” as they are called in those parts). His gubernatorial victory in 1970 ended a century of racism in Georgia between the end of Reconstruction in 1871 and the segregationist Lester Maddox, an Old South hopelessly romanticised by the Gone with the Wind of the Margaret Mitchell novel and the Victor Fleming film – perhaps you can even make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but it remains racism. A largely forgotten achievement of Carter was to end racial discrimination in his home state.
The wide-ranging work of the exemplary Carter Center over four decades also deserves extended mention but apart from this columnist not having followed it closely, this tribute to the 100 years of Carter (including his 77-year marriage to Rosalynn) needs to be cut short to leave some space for Lanata.
Plenty on him in the rest of this newspaper so these few lines will try to avoid some inevitable overlap. His unique style was already defined by the two words of his first major entry into journalism – the Página/12 newspaper, which he founded at the incredibly tender age of 26 in 1987, owed its name to the 12th page covering the op/ed (opinion/editorial) in the traditional press. In other words, the entire newspaper was to be dedicated to opinionating and editorialising, throwing pretensions to objectivity out the window. That this newspaper continues to this day is remarkable, considering that the first 30 months of a centre-left scandal-mongering opposition newspaper were under a centre-left Radical government with no real scandals for almost four years (until Swiftgate) – although there were always human rights. Lanata’s ability to secure capital underpinning for his multiple media ventures is also remarkable, given no visible business talents (apart from a flexibility permitting him to become an intense protagonist of Grupo Clarín, including the newspaper and Radio Mitre, after a decade demonising it) – perhaps the many women in his life should not be underestimated on this front.
But it was the year 2013 which undoubtedly elevated him to mega-star status – both for pinpointing Argentina’s polarisation with the word “grieta” at the Martín Fierro prize ceremony and the runaway success of his television programme Periodismo para todos (launched on the centenary of the Titanic on April 15, 2012 but with rather better luck) that year with its almost monothematic denunciations of Kirchnerite corruption. Coining the word “grieta” was genuinely original but “Korruption” had already been denounced almost a decade previously with Lanata’s contribution being to draw mass public attention rather than discover it, contrary to widespread belief (which in no way denies that he exposed other scandals too numerous for this space). Lanata also pioneered a focus on BRICS as early as 2010.
Issues great and small – ranging from globalisation to gleefully sharing show business gossip with Marina Calabró on Radio Mitre – all drew his interest. Too prolific and versatile a talent to do full justice, even using the entire newspaper.
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