Jimmy Carter

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Jimmy Carter was born on the 1st of October 1924, in the Wise Sanitarium in Plains, Georgia, where his mother worked as a registered nurse. That detail made him the first US president born in a hospital. It is a small but fitting fact for a man whose life continually broke with precedent. He would grow peanuts on a Georgia farm, command nuclear-trained sailors inside a crippled reactor, win the White House as a name almost nobody outside his home state recognized, and then, after losing it in a landslide, spend the next four decades making the case that a president's most important work might come after leaving office. He lived to age 100, longer than any other president in US history. What shaped the boy from a dirt road in Archery into the 39th president of the United States? What did he actually accomplish in four turbulent years at the center of American power? And how did a man whose presidency historians have ranked below average come to be seen, in his later years, as one of the most consequential figures of the twentieth century?

• 2. Peanuts, Navy, and a Reactor

  ›

  Archery, the community where Carter's family settled, was almost entirely populated by impoverished Black families. His father, though staunchly pro-segregation, allowed young Jimmy to befriend the Black farmhands' children, a contradiction that would echo through Carter's political life for decades. As a teenager, Carter was given his own acre of farmland, where he grew and sold peanuts, and he also rented out a section of tenant housing he had purchased. He was already thinking like an entrepreneur.

  The United States Naval Academy was a long-held dream, and Carter graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1946, finishing 60th out of 821 midshipmen. While there, he met Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister Ruth. They married shortly after his graduation and remained together until her death on the 19th of November 2023.

  Naval service brought Carter into the orbit of Captain Hyman G. Rickover, who led the Navy's fledgling nuclear submarine program. Carter later said that, next to his parents, Rickover had the greatest influence on his life. On the 12th of December 1952, an accident at Atomic Energy of Canada's Chalk River Laboratories caused a partial meltdown of the experimental NRX reactor. Carter was ordered there to lead a US maintenance crew. Each team member had to don protective gear and be lowered individually into the reactor for 90 seconds at a time, limiting radiation exposure while they disassembled the crippled reactor. Carter said that experience shaped his lifelong views on atomic energy and led him to cease development of the neutron bomb during his presidency.

  His father's death from pancreatic cancer in July 1953, two months before construction of the USS Seawolf was to begin, ended Carter's nuclear submarine career. He obtained a release from active duty to take over the family peanut business. Rosalynn, who had grown comfortable with their life in Schenectady, New York, later said returning to small-town Plains seemed "a monumental step backward." Carter's first-year harvest failed due to drought, and he opened several lines of credit to keep the farm afloat before the business eventually grew into a genuine success.

• 3. The Road to the Governorship

  ›

  Carter entered Georgia state politics in 1962, announcing his campaign for an open State Senate seat. Early vote counting showed him trailing his opponent, Homer Moore, but that count was later proven to be the result of fraudulent voting. A new election was held, and Carter won. He served in both the 127th and 128th Georgia General Assemblies, chaired the Senate's Education Committee, and helped expand statewide education funding, including securing a four-year program for Georgia Southwestern State University.

  The 1966 gubernatorial race gave voters an early glimpse of Carter's complexity. Running against liberal former governor Ellis Arnall and conservative segregationist Lester Maddox, Carter described his own ideology as "Conservative, moderate, liberal and middle-of-the-road... I believe I am a more complicated person than that." He finished third. In the general election, Republican Bo Callaway won a plurality but not a majority, allowing the Democratic-majority Georgia House to elect Maddox. Carter saw Maddox's victory as the worst outcome possible. This period was also a spiritual turning point; Carter declared himself a born-again Christian.

  The 1970 race against liberal former governor Carl Sanders was a harder, uglier campaign. Carter leaned more conservative, praised Alabama segregationist George Wallace, and criticized Sanders for his perceived connections to the national Democratic Party. Senior campaign aides distributed a photograph of Sanders celebrating with Black basketball players. Black state senator Leroy Johnson later offered a sobering analysis: "I understand why he ran that kind of ultra-conservative campaign. I don't believe you can win this state without being a racist." Carter won. On the 12th of January 1971, he was sworn in as the 76th governor of Georgia, and in his inaugural address declared that "the time for racial discrimination is over," a statement that shocked the crowd and caused many segregationists who had supported his candidacy to feel betrayed.

• 4. Dark Horse to President

  ›

  On the 12th of December 1974, Carter announced his presidential campaign at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He was competing against sixteen other candidates, and his name recognition was so low that opponents asked "Jimmy Who?" Carter responded by making his name the centerpiece of his pitch: "My name is Jimmy Carter, and I'm running for president."

  His strategy was methodical. He traveled more than 50,000 miles, visited 37 states, and delivered more than 200 speeches before any other candidate had entered the race. He won the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, building momentum as an outsider while the Watergate scandal was still fresh in voters' minds. In June 1976, he published a memoir titled Why Not the Best? to introduce himself to a national audience.

  In July 1976, Carter chose US Senator Walter Mondale as his running mate. Carter and incumbent President Gerald Ford then participated in three televised debates, the first US presidential debates since 1960. A Playboy interview, published in November 1976, in which Carter said "I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times," produced a media feeding frenzy in the campaign's final weeks. Despite a narrowing of his polling lead, Carter and Mondale defeated Ford and running mate Senator Bob Dole, receiving 297 electoral votes and 50.1 percent of the popular vote. Carter's overwhelming support among Black voters in closely contested states was decisive; in Ohio and Wisconsin, where the margin between Carter and Ford was under two points, the Black vote was essential to Carter's victory.

• 5. Four Years in Power

  ›

  Carter was inaugurated as the 39th president on the 20th of January 1977. One of his first acts was issuing Proclamation 4483, declaring unconditional amnesty for Vietnam War-era draft evaders, fulfilling a campaign promise.

  His domestic record was wide-ranging. He signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, regulating strip mining. He declared a federal emergency in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, after more than 800 families were evacuated from a neighborhood built atop a toxic waste landfill; the Superfund law was created in response. In December 1978, using the 1906 Antiquities Act, he designated 56 million acres of Alaska as a national monument, protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge until Congress codified it with the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, which doubled the amount of public land set aside for national parks and wildlife refuges.

  On the 4th of August 1977, he signed the Department of Energy Organization Act, forming the Department of Energy, the first new cabinet position in eleven years. On the 17th of October 1979, he signed the Department of Education Organization Act. He signed the Airline Deregulation Act on the 24th of October 1978, removing government control over fares, routes, and market entry in commercial aviation. He also signed a bill allowing homebrewing and small-scale craft brewing to operate legally for the first time since the 1920 beginning of Prohibition, a change that by the 2000s had given rise to a strong craft microbrew culture in the United States.

  On the 18th of April 1977, Carter delivered a televised speech declaring that the energy crisis was the "moral equivalent of war." He wore a cardigan to offset turning down the heat in the White House and installed solar panels on the roof. His "malaise speech" of the 15th of July 1979, identified what he called a "crisis of confidence" among American people, and its mixed reception illustrated a persistent problem: Carter could diagnose national challenges with precision but struggled to bring Congress along.

  His relations with Congress were chronically troubled. He avoided phone calls from members of Congress and was unwilling to return political favors. He issued a "hit list" of 19 projects he called pork-barrel spending, then was weakened when he signed a bill containing many of those same projects. House Speaker Tip O'Neill found his approach inappropriate. Yet Carter also achieved genuine legislative victories, including the $3.5 billion bailout of Chrysler, secured through the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, which saved thousands of jobs.

  The 1977 Carter administration was the first US presidential administration to invite gay and lesbian rights activists to the White House to discuss federal policy. In 1978, Carter urged California voters to reject the Briggs Initiative, which sought to ban LGBTQ people from teaching in public schools. The 1980 Mental Health Systems Act allocated block grants to states to support community health services; the Reagan administration repealed most of it by September 1981.

• 6. Foreign Policy and Crisis

  ›

  Carter invited Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David in September 1978. The negotiations could not resolve Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, but they produced the Camp David Accords, which ended the war between Israel and Egypt. The accords faced fierce domestic opposition in both countries.

  In December 1978, Carter announced that the United States would formally recognize the People's Republic of China starting on the 1st of January 1979, severing ties with Taiwan in the process. This extended formal diplomatic recognition to the PRC for the first time and led to a significant expansion of trade between the two nations. The Panama Canal Treaties returned control of the canal to Panama. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II, signed with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev on the 18th of June 1979, addressed the control of nuclear weapons.

  The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the 24th of December 1979, upended Carter's foreign policy calculus. He imposed an embargo on grain shipments to the Soviet Union, tabled SALT II, requested a 5 percent annual increase in defense spending, and called for a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, which 65 other nations ultimately joined. He also initiated a program to arm Afghan mujahideen through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, securing a pledge from Saudi Arabia to match US funding. Despite that support, the Soviet Union was unable to quell the insurgency and withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989.

  The Iran hostage crisis began on the 4th of November 1979, when Iranian students took over the US Embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days. Carter remained in isolation in the White House for more than 100 days during the crisis. On the 24th of April 1980, he ordered Operation Eagle Claw to free the hostages. The mission failed, leaving eight American servicemen dead and two aircraft destroyed. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had opposed the mission, resigned. A declassified CIA memo released in 2017 concluded that Iranian hardliners, especially Ayatollah Khomeini, were "determined to exploit the hostage issue to bring about President Carter's defeat in the November elections." The hostages were freed immediately after Ronald Reagan succeeded Carter as president on the 20th of January 1981.

  Carter's 1980 reelection campaign attacked Reagan's gaffes and age, but it was his own "stagflation"-ridden economy and the unresolved hostage crisis that defined the contest. Reagan and George H. W. Bush defeated Carter and Mondale in a landslide, winning 489 electoral votes. Carter's 49 electoral votes were the second-fewest for an incumbent president seeking reelection. The Senate went Republican for the first time since 1952.

• 7. The Long Post-Presidency

  ›

  Shortly after leaving office, Carter told the White House press corps that he intended to emulate Harry S. Truman and not use his subsequent public life to enrich himself. What followed was the longest post-presidency in US history, and one that transformed how the world thought about Carter.

  He established the Carter Center to promote human rights, and in 2002 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He traveled to conduct peace negotiations and monitor elections across the globe. He became a major supporter of the attempted eradication of dracunculiasis, a neglected tropical disease. He was a key figure in Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit housing organization.

  His diplomatic work never stopped. In 1994, President Clinton sent Carter to negotiate with Kim Il Sung in North Korea, and on the 21st of October 1994, North Korea and the United States signed the Agreed Framework. In August 2010, Carter traveled to North Korea and negotiated the release of Aijalon Gomes. In July 2007, Carter joined Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg to announce his participation in The Elders, a group of independent global leaders working together on peace and human rights issues.

  He also wrote prolifically, producing political memoirs and books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as poetry. A September 1981 meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and a March 1983 tour of Egypt that included members of the Palestine Liberation Organization marked the early diplomatic phase of his post-presidency. He continued writing and speaking into very old age, reaching the milestone of age 100 before his death on the 29th of December 2024. His Nobel Prize citation and his decades of hands-on work at Habitat for Humanity build sites offered a portrait of a man who found in public service, not office, his true home.