Former Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., told Newsmax on Monday that while former President Jimmy Carter leaves behind a mixed legacy, "no one would say [he] was a bad guy."
Carter, 100, a peanut farmer who became president and later a global humanitarian, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, more than a year after entering hospice care.
"Georgia had never had a president before, so we were all very, very proud about that and he came out of, I'd say, maybe the ashes of Watergate, the anti-Vietnam War protests, the racial riots of the late 1960s," Kingston said on "Wake Up America." "He'd been in the state Senate, then he ran for governor, and he was a different kind of guy.
"He was seen as a breath of fresh air, kind of on a provincial basis. People might not know his connection with the Allman Brothers Band that was rising at the same time, and they had basically endorsed him and done a concert for him. But they were part of his legacy. So, we were very excited about it when he was running for president.
"Now, as it turned out, he was very liberal. I think he had a very good AG [attorney general] in Griffin Bell. Everybody loved him. In fact, when [former President] George Bush did the recount, Griffin Bell was his lawyer, from the Florida 'hanging chads' episode. That's how good Griffin Bell was. But then there were other Cabinet members, like Joseph Califano, who was at HEW [the Department of Health, Education and Welfare] at the time, which is now HHS [Health and Human Services], he wasn't so good. And there were a lot of kind of what [former U.N. Ambassador] Andrew Young called 'smart-aleck white boys' that he surrounded himself with, who never returned phone calls and thought they were just too good to come back home and talk to us poor folks from Georgia."
Kingston said Carter earned "good marks for the Camp David Accords," and said the 39th president "made a very tough decision on the Vietnam draft evaders in terms of amnesty," pointing to how it "moved us in a new direction," and "kind of brought some closure to the Vietnam War."
"But good gosh, the inflation was horrible, our stature abroad fell, the military funding really just almost grinded to a halt," Kingston said. "So, it was not a really supersuccessful presidency, but no one would say Jimmy Carter was a bad guy."
Kingston said he is "resentful" of the way Carter was treated by the Democratic Party after leaving office.
"They did not embrace him as this good man that he was, the founder and the driving force behind Habitat for Humanity," Kingston said. "And again, as a Georgian, I was always resentful of that because I felt like he did his duty and he did support the liberal agenda, and then they ran from him and tried to hide him."
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Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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