Jimmy Carter

President of the United States (1977–1981)

• Born: October 1, 1924
• Place of Birth: Plains, Georgia
• Died: December 29, 2024
• Place of Death: Plains, Georgia

As a Georgia politician and president of the United States between 1977 and 1981, Jimmy Carter was a conservative in some policies and a liberal in others. On one hand, he attacked government bureaucracy, moved away from détente with the Soviet Union, and increased military spending. On the other hand, he supported racial equality, took seriously the problems of underdeveloped countries, and pressured repressive regimes to respect human rights. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Early Life

Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, a town of 550 residents in Sumter County. He was the first child of James Earl Carter Sr., an up-and-coming farmer and rural businessman, and Lillian Gordy Carter, a registered nurse. Along with his sisters Gloria and Ruth and his brother William (Billy), he grew up on the family farm three miles from Plains. After graduating from Plains High School in 1941, Carter briefly attended Georgia Southwestern College and Georgia Institute of Technology. He was appointed to the United States Naval Academy in 1943 and graduated three years later with a bachelor’s degree in physics, standing fifty-ninth in a class of 820. On July 7, 1946, he married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister Gloria. They had four children: John William (Jack), James Earl III (Chip), Jeffrey (Jeff), and Amy.

After two years’ work on battleships, Carter transferred to the Navy submarine service in 1948 and then to the nuclear submarine program in 1951. Subsequently, he served on the precommission crew of the nuclear submarine Seawolf and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. Following his father’s death in 1953, Carter returned to Plains, took charge of the family businesses, and quickly became a local leader. Between 1955 and 1962, he chaired the Sumter County Board of Education. In 1962, he was elected to the Georgia senate. During two terms, he advocated governmental efficiency, regional planning, and better schools. In 1966 he lost the Democratic nomination for governor but ran a strong third in a field of six.

Carter’s defeat produced a mild depression that led, in turn, to an important though undramatic religious experience. He had been reared a Baptist, conducted Bible classes in the navy, and taught Sunday school at the Plains Baptist Church. Following his primary loss, however, Carter began to feel insufficiently devout. Guided by his sister, evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, he was “born again” and vowed to live a more godly life.

This religious conversion caused no basic change in his personality. On the contrary, Carter’s determination to be a better Christian fitted into his long-standing habit of placing high demands on himself. He worked systematically, sometimes taking special courses to improve his memory, reading speed, and knowledge of art, music, and Spanish. He disciplined his body as well as his mind.

A cross-country runner at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, Carter continued to jog into middle age to keep fit. His stern commander in the nuclear submarine program, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, reinforced his perfectionism. Carter set high standards for his family and subordinates. Anyone who fell short risked “the look,” as Carter’s staff called a piercing stare from his hazel eyes.

Nor did spiritual rebirth dampen Carter’s political ambition. Between 1967 and 1970, he visited Northern cities as a missionary and prepared for his next gubernatorial campaign. In 1970, he defeated former governor Carl Sanders in the Democratic primary and easily won the governorship.

Life’s Work

Governor Carter’s inaugural address in January 1971 attracted national attention when he declared that the “time for racial discrimination is over.” Although Carter sometimes courted segregationist voters, he had remained personally moderate on civil rights issues. Now moving in a more liberal direction, he appointed Black Americans to state office and displayed a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the executive mansion. As governor, Carter worked hardest to streamline state agencies, but discrediting prejudice as a political issue was his greatest accomplishment. In 1972 he was mentioned as a dark-horse contender for the Democratic vice presidential nomination. However, ineligible for reelection and more conservative than leading Democrats, he was not a major figure in party or national affairs.

Four years later, Carter used his image as an outsider to win the presidency of a nation unsettled by the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s, and the energy crisis of the early 1970s. Carter’s book Why Not the Best? (1975) announced the central theme of his campaign: Government with effective leadership could be open, compassionate, and competent. Furthermore, claiming a governor’s managerial skill, a nuclear engineer’s technological expertise, and a born-again farmer’s sound morality, Carter presented himself as uniquely qualified to lead. In addition, he blamed President Gerald R. Ford for high unemployment and Machiavellian foreign policy. Despite the wide appeal of these themes, Carter probably would have lost the Democratic nomination if liberal rivals had coalesced against him, and he might have lost the general election if the economy had not been facing rising unemployment and inflation. Carter beat Ford by 1.7 million votes.

Although Carter won a narrow victory, the country greeted the start of his term with enthusiasm. By the end of 1977, however, his legislative program had bogged down in Congress and, according to polls, fewer than half of all Americans approved of his leadership. With some justification, Carter attributed these problems to prejudice against a rural southerner in the White House, but other factors were more significant. While continuing to think of himself as an outsider, the president presented a legislative agenda that would have taxed the skill of an old Washington hand. Moreover, impatient with loose ends, Carter offered what he liked to call “comprehensive” programs. In 1977, he backed bills to reorganize the civil service, restructure the welfare system, lift regulations on major industries, create two new cabinet departments, and end price controls on natural gas. Furthermore, Carter and his aides initially underestimated the need to cultivate powerful senators and House representatives. More important than these considerations of style, temperament, and tactics was Carter’s ideological position to the right of most congressional Democrats. Unmoved by his rhetoric of efficiency, they resented his disinclination to promote national health insurance, full employment, and comparable liberal measures.

Conflicting aspirations, great expectations, and tactical errors also marked Carter’s first efforts in international affairs. The president’s chief foreign policy advisers symbolized his (as well as the country’s) ambivalence about the Soviet Union: Secretary of State Cyrus Vance wanted to continue détente while National Security Council Chair Zbigniew Brzezinski took a tough anticommunist line. Giving mixed signals himself in 1977, Carter both decided against building a new intercontinental bomber and reneged on campaign promises to reduce military spending, while both repudiating the “inordinate fear of Communism” and condemning Soviet suppression of freedom. This criticism of the Soviets may have hindered progress on a strategic arms limitation treaty to succeed the limited accord (SALT I) signed by President Richard M. Nixon. A more decisive factor was Carter’s presentation of a typically comprehensive disarmament plan. Suspicious Soviet officials rejected it, accusing the United States of reopening issues seemingly settled with President Ford.

From the outset, President Carter showed unprecedented concern about human rights abroad. Regimes sanctioning harassment, imprisonment, or murder of dissenters risked White House censure and loss of American aid. Realpolitik, congressional pressure, and bureaucratic maneuvering rendered Carter’s human rights policy less “absolute” than he had promised in his inaugural address. Nevertheless, there were notable successes. Carter’s intervention saved lives in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and other nations ruled by military juntas. His ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, who was Black, cultivated delegates from the developing world, and, in April 1978, Carter became the first US president to visit Africa. Also in April 1978, he secured Senate ratification of treaties that would end American control of the Panama Canal in 1999. Carter’s human rights campaign and empathy for the developing world, however, were less popular at home than abroad. By late 1977, Republican and Democratic cold warriors charged that his soft and self-righteous policies damaged American interests.

Despite growing criticism from both the Left and the Right, Carter secured impressive victories between mid-1978 and mid-1979. Congress revised the civil service system, eased regulations on airlines, and enacted decontrol of natural gas prices. After grueling negotiations at Camp David, Maryland, Carter persuaded Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to accept the so-called Framework for Peace in the Middle East. In December 1978, he established full diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. At the Vienna summit conference in June 1979, Carter and Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev finally signed a strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II). However, none of Carter’s successes was unmixed. Liberals complained that decontrol of natural gas prices enriched big business. Conservatives condemned the recognition of China and viewed SALT II as a needless concession to the Soviets. Perhaps most disappointing to Carter, though he brokered an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in March 1979, the Camp David Accords inspired no other Middle East settlements.

During the summer of 1979, Carter faced a faltering economy, oil shortages, and an angry nation. “Stagflation,” the combination of rising unemployment and inflation, reappeared after two years in remission. Furthermore, when a revolution that deposed the shah of Iran in January 1978 also disrupted Iranian oil exports, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) limited production and doubled prices. As American motorists clamored for scarce gasoline, Carter’s bills promoting energy conservation and synthetic fuels stalled in Congress. On July 15, Carter attempted to rally the country against what he called a “crisis of the American spirit.” This speech temporarily improved his standing in the polls and on Capitol Hill. His subsequent decision, however, to remove several cabinet secretaries and fight inflation instead of unemployment cut short this resurgence. By the early fall, Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy had decided to contest the president’s renomination.

In October, Carter made the most important decision of his presidency, allowing the exiled shah of Iran to enter the United States for medical treatment. On November 4, Iranian revolutionaries seized the United States embassy in Tehran; fifty-two of the original sixty-six Americans stationed there (fourteen were released after a few weeks) remained captive for 444 days. The Middle East situation deteriorated further when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan in December. Carter responded by withdrawing SALT II from Senate consideration, halting grain sales to the Soviet Union, urging a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, and asking for a large increase in military spending. According to the Carter Doctrine announced in January 1980, attempts by outside forces to control the Persian Gulf would be “repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” The president’s rhetoric masked relative American weakness in the region. Indeed, a military mission to rescue the hostages failed in April when American helicopters collided far from Tehran.

Although Carter turned back Kennedy’s challenge to win renomination, his inability to free the hostages combined with the faltering economy cost him the presidency. On November 4, 1980, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan defeated Carter by 8.4 million votes. During his last months in office, Carter, now a convinced cold warrior, stopped aid to the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Negotiations to free the hostages remained his chief concern. They were released minutes after Reagan took office on January 20, 1981, and former president Carter flew to greet them at an American base in Germany.

Carter resettled in Plains, but secular and religious interests often pulled him away from home, and he maintained a high public profile. He acted as the official representative of the United States in several capacities, such as at the funeral of Sadat in Cairo in 1981. In 1982 he founded the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta, where he also joined the faculty as a Distinguished University Professor (he received tenure in 2019). Through the Carter Center, he continued to support human rights. In programs ranging throughout the world, the center helped boost grain production, combat disease, and increase treatment of mental illnesses. In one signal example, its Global 2000 program drastically reduced the incidence of river blindness caused by guinea worm in Africa.

Furthermore, Carter became a leading member of Habitat for Humanity International in 1984, an organization that builds housing for those experiencing poverty. The Jimmy Carter Work Project sponsored new housing in cities in the United States, Mexico, India, eighteen African nations, and the Philippines, projects in which Carter himself frequently worked alongside other volunteer construction workers.

Carter also monitored elections in more than twenty countries and mediated internal and international conflicts in such trouble spots as Haiti, Bosnia, North Korea, and Sudan. In 1994 he helped negotiate an agreement between US president Bill Clinton and North Korean president Kim Il Sung to stop North Korea’s production of weapons-grade nuclear materials in exchange for oil and modern electricity-generating nuclear reactors. In August 1999, Clinton awarded Carter with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor he shared with his wife, Rosalynn.

In 2007, Carter toured the Darfur region of Sudan with South African bishop Desmond Tutu as members of the Elders, an international organization of elder statesmen dedicated to fostering peace and human rights. The two condemned the genocidal civil war there and called for greater international involvement. For his untiring efforts to find peaceful solutions to conflict, improve economic conditions, and safeguard human rights, Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

While his dedication is universally acknowledged, Carter nonetheless drew criticism for some of his post-presidency diplomacy and political pronouncements. His independent missions sometimes departed from the policy goals of his successors. He annoyed the administration of George W. Bush, for instance, by traveling to Cuba in 2002, shaking hands with Fidel Castro, long an adversary of the United States, and delivering a speech (in Spanish) on Cuban national television. In 2004 he observed a referendum in Venezuela to recall its president, Hugo Chávez, and declared the results, in Chávez’s favor, to be accurate; other analysts disputed that judgment, a controversy that proved a further annoyance to the US government. Carter later criticized President Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and ignited controversy with the publication of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in which he argued that Israel established a segregated society that deprives Palestinians of basic human rights.

A prolific author, Carter published in a variety of genres. His works included analyses such as The Blood of Abraham (1985), a well-informed study of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which he rebukes President Reagan for failing to pursue the peace process begun at Camp David; several books of memoirs; a spiritual autobiography, Living Faith (1996); social criticism, such as Our Endangered Values: American’s Moral Crisis (2005); a book of poems, Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems (1995); and historical fiction, with The Hornet’s Nest (2003), a novel about the Revolutionary War. In 2007, he published a retrospective on his postpresidential career, Beyond the White House: Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope. In 2014, he published A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power. He followed this up with such books as the memoir A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (2015) and Faith: A Journey for All (2018), in which he explores the various meanings of the concept of faith.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Carter’s second career led to many honors. Among these were honorary doctorates; awards such as the Albert Schweitzer Prize of Humanitarianism (1987), W. Averell Harriman Democracy Award (1992), and United Nations Human Rights Award (1998); Grammy Awards in 2007, 2016, and 2019 for the audio versions of Our Endangered Values, A Full Life, and Faith, respectively; and a nuclear submarine christened in his honor, the USS Jimmy Carter. Continuing his work for human rights and the promotion of peace and diplomacy, Carter traveled to places including Israel, Palestine, Syria, North Korea, Vietnam, Haiti, and Venezuela. In 2009 he won the International Award for Excellence and Creativity from the Palestinian Authority and the American Peace Award. He also continued his involvement with Habitat for Humanity and the nongovernmental organization The Elders, a group formerly chaired by Desmond Tutu. In 2019, Carter attended one of his last Carter Work Projects in Nashville, Tennessee, where he and Rosalynn helped build twenty-one homes. Between 1984 and 2019, the Carters visited fourteen countries and worked with over 104,000 volunteers to help build and repair over four thousand houses.

In 2015, Carter announced his diagnosis with metastatic melanoma, which doctors found in his liver and brain. In 2019, he became the longest-lived president in US history. In February 2023, the Carter Center confirmed that he had entered hospice care in his home in Plains, Georgia. Several months later, the Carter Center announced Rosalynn's dementia diagnosis. She died at age ninety-six on November 19, 2023. Carter attended Rosalynn's memorial services on November 28, 2023, at Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and her funeral at their hometown church, Maranatha Baptist Church, on November 29, 2023; his appearance at the services marked one of few public outings in several months since he had entered hospice care. At the time of Rosalynn's death, the Carters remained the longest-married presidential couple in US history; they celebrated seventy-seven years of marriage together in July 2023.

Shortly after becoming the first US president to have reached the age of one hundred, Carter died at his home in Plains, Georgia, on December 29, 2024.

Significance

Many have argued that Carter was a more significant and much better president than his overwhelming defeat in 1980 suggests. Ironically, part of his significance lay in legitimating themes, such as the need to shrink the federal government, that Reagan used against him during the campaign. Similarly, by lifting regulations on major industries, moving away from détente, and increasing military spending, Carter initiated policies later continued by Reagan. Notwithstanding these unintended contributions to American conservatism, Carter’s most important accomplishments derived from his liberal side. In the White House, as in the Georgia state house, Carter, a White southern supporter of racial equality, discredited racial prejudice as a political issue. His presidential appointments included many women and Latinos as well as Black Americans. In foreign policy, Carter encouraged Egyptian-Israeli peace by accepting an evenhanded approach to the Middle East, paid respectful attention to underdeveloped countries, and placed human rights on the international agenda. Because he continued to champion human rights and initiated programs to battle disease and poverty when out of the White House, many consider him America’s greatest former president. In 2019, he became the oldest living former US president. The following year, continued interest in analyzing his life, presidency, and legacy was demonstrated in the publication and discussion of the 2020 biography His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life, by Jonathan Alter. Additionally, 2021 saw the release of a new documentary, Carterland, as well as President Joe Biden's trip to see Carter at his Georgia home.

Bibliography

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Balmer, Randall. Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter. Basic, 2014.

Bergman, Megan Mayhew. "'Decades ahead of His Time': History Catches Up with Visionary Jimmy Carter." The Guardian, 4 May 2021, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/03/jimmy-carter-climate-change-carterland-film-biography. Accessed 2 June 2021.

Biven, W. Carl. Jimmy Carter’s Economy: Policy in an Age of Limits. U of North Carolina P, 2002.

Carroll, Peter. It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s. Holt, 1982.

Carter, Jimmy. A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety. Simon, 2015.

Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. Bantam, 1982.

Carter, Jimmy. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Simon, 2006.

Carter, Jimmy. White House Diary. Farrar, 2010.

Carter, Jimmy. Why Not the Best? Broadman, 1975.

Carter, Rosalynn. First Lady from Plains. Houghton, 1984.

Flippen, J. Brooks. Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right. U of Georgia P, 2011.

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Lynn, Laurence E., Jr., and David Whitman. The President as Policymaker: Jimmy Carter and Welfare Reform. Temple UP, 1981.

"Rosalynn Carter Funeral: Family of Former First Lady Says Goodbye in Her Georgia Church." The New York Times, 29 Nov. 2023, www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/29/us/rosalynn-carter-funeral. Accessed 27 Mar. 2024.

Sarantakes, Nicholas Evan. Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War. Cambridge UP, 2011.

Smith, Gaddis. Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy During the Carter Years. Hill, 1985.