Former President Jimmy Carter grinned in the Oval Office in January 2009 for a photograph, a visible gap separating him from four of his successors. As the others stood shoulder to shoulder, he positioned himself off to the side, a hand in one pocket, as if to distance himself just slightly from that most exclusive club.
Mr. Carter had no qualms about breaking one of that club’s unwritten rules, namely that former presidents restrain their critiques of the current occupant of the Oval Office. In the four decades after leaving the White House following the 1980 election, he caused regular stirs with pointed opinions about his successors.
“He was in fights with everyone, Democrats, Republicans,” said Julian E. Zelizer, the author of “Jimmy Carter” and a historian at Princeton University, who called Mr. Carter “a maverick through and through.”
Stuart Eizenstat, a former adviser to Mr. Carter, said the former president wasn’t the type of person to just go back to Plains, Ga., and “work on carpentry and painting.”
“When he left office, he was in his mid 50s,” Mr. Eizenstat said. “He didn’t want his voice to be unheard.”
Ronald Reagan
The animosity between the men, biographers said, can be attributed to Mr. Reagan constantly using Mr. Carter as a foil, dismissing policies Mr. Carter prioritized and largely bucking his practice of briefing his predecessors.
After Mr. Reagan handily won a heated election, Mr. Carter initially refrained from criticizing the new president. But it was not long before the two men began to trade barbs.
To Mr. Carter, Mr. Reagan’s budget cuts and environmental policies were “ill-advised” and “misguided,” and his administration was an “aberration on the political scene” that had abandoned American leadership and commitments to human rights. And, he said, Mr. Reagan had “never accepted responsibility” for lack of progress in Middle East peace, for budget deficits or trade imbalances, for the deaths of American soldiers in Beirut or “for anything that’s unpleasant.”
Mr. Reagan, after claiming the military had been neglected for a decade before he took office, modernized the nation’s battle arsenal, prompting Mr. Carter to accuse Mr. Reagan of uttering statements “he knows are not true and which he personally promised not to repeat.”
The two men exchanged compliments during the dedication of Mr. Carter’s presidential library in the fall of 1986. But the cease-fire was brief. Mr. Reagan returned, just days later, to bashing Mr. Carter for the “mess” he had created.
When the Iran-contra affair came to light, Mr. Carter hit back hard, accusing Mr. Reagan of “damaging the institution of the presidency” and “making believe that he’s telling the truth” about the scandal and calling the affair more serious than Watergate.
“Allowing Ronald Reagan to become president was by far my biggest failure in office,” Mr. Carter later told the historian Douglas Brinkley in his book, “The Unfinished Presidency.”
George Bush
Theirs was a productive and respectful alliance — “an almost perfect relationship,” Mr. Carter said in 1989 — until the first Gulf War.
Whereas Mr. Reagan boxed out Mr. Carter, Mr. Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, sought Mr. Carter’s advice, dispatched him on diplomatic missions and pursued a Middle East policy that Mr. Carter thought was more in line with his own. Their views didn’t always align, however.
“There was very much I liked about Bush,” Mr. Carter told Mr. Brinkley. “But his belief that democracy comes through bombs instead of food and medicine and the ballot box was not one of them.”
Mr. Carter reserved much of his criticism of Mr. Bush for private correspondence, writing to senators and the leaders of the countries in the United Nations Security Council to urge them against joining American war efforts in the Persian Gulf. (The letter to foreign leaders so incensed the Bush administration that an aide later accused Mr. Carter of violating the Logan Act, which bars private citizens from engaging in diplomacy.)
Mr. Carter’s public statements about Mr. Bush were much more measured than they’d been toward Mr. Reagan. In November 1990 — amid the military buildup before Operation Desert Storm began two months later — Mr. Carter said Mr. Bush had initially handled the situation “extremely well.” At the same time, he urged caution against an invasion that he said would lead to “serious and deleterious political consequences” like thousands of American and civilian casualties and the everlasting ire of the Arab world.
Mr. Carter also encouraged Mr. Bush to sign a voting rights bill in 1992, expressing disappointment that the Bush administration had threatened to veto the bill and had fallen prey to “myths” about voter fraud. He also said Mr. Bush’s plan to allow for clear-cutting forests as a “serious threat” to the environment and took issue with a lack of emphasis on human rights in trade deals with China.
Bill Clinton
“You could write a whole book” on the personal and political antipathy between the two Democrats.
The relationship between the two men had been strained since 1980, when Mr. Clinton lost his re-election campaign for governor of Arkansas and attributed his loss to Mr. Carter’s decision to send Cuban refugees to his state. Things did not improve when, days before Mr. Clinton’s inauguration, Mr. Carter said he was “very disappointed” that the first daughter, Chelsea, would not be attending public school in Washington.
“This enrages the Clintons and they cut Carter out of as many of the inauguration events as they can,” said Jonathan Alter, author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter.” “You could write a whole book on them.”
Mr. Carter’s diplomatic peacekeeping mission to North Korea in 1994 further irritated Mr. Clinton and his aides, who saw the former president as a “a freelance secretary of state,” Mr. Alter said. It did not help when Mr. Carter told The New York Times that September that he was “ashamed” of his country’s policy in Haiti.
In a 1995 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Mr. Carter also accused Mr. Clinton of inconsistency, arguing that he had issued empty threats to veto Republican legislation, shifted “from one major issue to another” and “abandoned” efforts to overhaul the country’s health care system.
After revelations of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Mr. Carter said he did not believe Mr. Clinton had been truthful and he was “deeply embarrassed” by what had transpired, but added that he was also embarrassed by the broader reaction to the affair.
And when Mr. Clinton pardoned the fugitive financier Marc Rich on his last day in office, Mr. Carter called it “disgraceful” and “one of his most serious mistakes.”
George W. Bush
The Iraq war dominated Mr. Carter’s condemnations of the younger Bush.
Six months into Mr. Bush’s first term, Mr. Carter said he was “disappointed in almost everything he has done.” The criticisms only accumulated from there.
As the president weighed going to war in Iraq, Mr. Carter spoke out against his authorization of tribunals to try terrorist suspects; called his “axis of evil” labeling of North Korea, Iran and Iraq “overly simplistic and counterproductive”; and warned that the administration was “disavowing U.S. commitments” on arms and human rights and that “American stature will surely decline further if we launch a war in clear defiance of the United Nations.”
The criticisms turned sharper still once the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. The war, Mr. Carter said, was “a completely unjust adventure” based on “lies or misinterpretations,” and the Bush administration had squandered the United States’ reputation as a champion of freedom and justice through “a virtually unbroken series of mistakes and miscalculations.”
“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Mr. Carter said in 2007.
Barack Obama
Though Mr. Carter endorsed Mr. Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary and continued to praise him, he did not spare Mr. Obama from the occasional barb.
Drone strikes conducted under Mr. Obama showed “how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended,” Mr. Carter wrote in a 2012 New York Times Op-Ed that did not name Mr. Obama but sharply critiqued his administration’s interrogation and surveillance tactics.
In 2014, he said of Mr. Obama’s handling of the Islamic State, “President Obama, it’s been hard to figure out exactly what his policy is. It changes from time to time.”
In 2015, Mr. Carter offered a mixed review of the Obama administration: “I think he’s done some good things domestically like the health program and so forth, but on the world stage, just to be as objective about it as I can, I can’t think of many nations in the world where we have a better relationship now than we did when he took over.”
Donald J. Trump
In the first months of Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Carter stayed curiously reticent on the man whom many describe as his polar opposite. But later, he characterized Mr. Trump as illegitimate and a liar.
After lamenting that Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign had “tapped a waiting reservoir there of inherent racism,” Mr. Carter earned a tweet of appreciation from the former president when he said that the “media have been harder” on Mr. Trump than any of his predecessors. (Mr. Trump has also praised Mr. Carter as a “very nice man” who “oftentimes comes to my defense.”)
The assessments were more mixed in 2018. That year, Mr. Carter suggested that Mr. Trump should be considered for a Nobel Peace Prize if he could broker a treaty with North Korea, but also that the president “dealt a damaging blow” to a chance of Middle East peace and “is very careless with the truth.”
By 2019, Mr. Carter was no longer holding back. Mr. Trump, he said, was “put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf” and his re-election would be a “disaster.”
Joe Biden
The two men were longtime political allies, and Mr. Carter offered some praise for Mr. Biden’s presidency.
When Mr. Carter announced his campaign for the presidency in 1976, Mr. Biden was the first senator to endorse him. Though Mr. Carter did not reciprocate when Mr. Biden ran for president in 1988, 2008 and 2020, he praised Mr. Biden’s “integrity and judgment” at the 2020 Democratic National Convention and said he was the “right person for this moment in our nation’s history.”
Mr. Carter kept a low profile during the coronavirus pandemic and did not attend Mr. Biden’s inauguration in 2021 — the first he missed as a former president. But in recorded remarks, he said he hoped that Mr. Biden would “adopt the same goals I had of keeping the peace and honoring human rights.”
Asked in the summer of 2021 how he thought Mr. Biden was faring, Mr. Carter noted that immigration, China and the Democrats’ legislative agenda remained challenges but said that “in general, Joe Biden has done very well.”
“With Biden in office and with the inherent qualities of the American people’s judgment, I would say I’m fairly optimistic about the future,” he said.
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