Long ago as it was, many Americans have forgotten — or perhaps never knew — just how eventful Jimmy Carter’s presidency was as he ricocheted from triumph to crisis and back again. Take one week in spring 1979, when he was brokering international peace one moment and confronting a domestic disaster the next.
Mr. Carter gathered the leaders of Egypt and Israel on the South Lawn of the White House on March 26, 1979, to sign a peace treaty ending more than three decades of war and hostility between the two Middle East rivals. With some 1,500 people looking on, the grinning president joined President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel in a three-way handshake.
It was one of the most indelible moments of the Carter presidency, the culmination of an arduous and daring diplomatic venture punctuated the previous fall during a marathon 13-day negotiation at Camp David that nearly fell apart but for Mr. Carter’s refusal to let it collapse. At the South Lawn ceremony, Mr. Sadat called the president “the unknown soldier of the peacemaking effort,” to which Mr. Begin agreed “but as usual with an amendment,” adding that Mr. Carter’s achievement would “be remembered and recorded by generations to come.”
The president, however, had little time to savor his success. Two days later, he woke up to news of the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history. A partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania resulted in the release of above-normal radiation into the countryside and sent tremors through a nation nervous about the safety of nuclear energy.
As it happened, unlike peace treaties, this was a challenge that Mr. Carter had some preparation for before his presidency. He was a nuclear engineer, having taken courses in nuclear physics at Union College in New York and worked for the renowned Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the Navy’s nuclear program.
While in the Navy, Mr. Carter served on a military team that helped dismantle parts of a nuclear reactor at the Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, Canada, after a partial meltdown in 1952. Mr. Carter and other personnel donned protective gear and worked in 90-second intervals to limit their exposure to radiation.
Twenty-seven years later, the nuclear engineer-turned-president decided to visit the Three Mile Island site in Middletown, Pa., to calm public fears, even though the danger had not passed. Just as he prepared to enter the plant, he was told that a bubble of gases in the core vessel could expand so much that it would push away coolant water, resulting in an explosion that would spew more radiation into the air. Officials were contemplating evacuating thousands of people.
Mr. Carter, clad in suit and tie, was joined by the first lady, Rosalynn Carter. The two wore yellow baggies on their feet as they toured the facility. The president sought to reassure the community. “If we make an error,” he told residents, “all of us want to err on the side of extra precautions and extra safety.”
In the end, there was no explosion, no one died, and studies have largely concluded there were no major long-term effects on the health of people living nearby, although some contest that finding. The affected reactor never reopened, and the other reactor at the plant closed in 2019.
As for the treaty between Israel and Egypt, it still holds 44 years later.
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