FILE - President Jimmy Carter meets with Zimbabwean Prime Minister Robert Mugabe in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Aug. 27, 1980. (AP Photo/Barry Thumma, File) ...

President Jimmy Carter meets with Zimbabwe Prime Minister Robert Mugabe in the Oval Office in Washington, on Aug. 27, 1980. Credit: AP/Barry Thumma ...

Serving as 39th US president from 1977 to 1981, Jimmy Carter sought to make government ‘competent and compassionate’. ... His support for Robert Mugabe at the time generated widespread criticism.

Carter from time to time had odd, almost unaccountable affinities—notably his habit, even compulsion, to associate with very bad people: dictators, thugs, people like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Haiti’s ...

Barry Thumma. FILE - President Jimmy Carter meets with Zimbabwe Prime Minister Robert Mugabe in the Oval Office in Washington, on Aug. 27, 1980.

FILE - President Jimmy Carter meets with Zimbabwean Prime Minister Robert Mugabe in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Aug. 27, 1980. (AP Photo/Barry Thumma, File) ...

Carter hosted then-Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe at the White House soon after his country achieved independence and later described Zimbabwe's adoption of democracy as “our greatest single ...

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — Amid everything else on his desk — the Iran hostage crisis, domestic economic turmoil, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a grueling 1980 reelection fight — President Jimmy ...

Relations with Mugabe’s government soon soured amid deadly repression, and by 1986 Carter led a walkout of diplomats in the capital. In 2008, Carter was barred from Zimbabwe, a first in his travels.