Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States of America, serving from 1977 to 1981.
- Died: December 29, 2024 (Who else died on December 29?)
- Details of death: Died at his home in Plains, Georgia at the age of 100.
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Jimmy Carter’s legacy
During Carter’s presidency, the U.S. was mired in three significant crises: an oil shortage, a recession, and the Iran hostage crisis. However, he also promoted peace around the world, brokering the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel and signing the SALT II nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union.
Carter’s long post-presidency held some his most triumphant moments, including negotiating diplomatic relations and helping build thousands of homes via Habitat for Humanity. Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for the worldwide work toward peace and democracy fostered by his Carter Center. In 2019, he became the longest-lived president in U.S. history.
Carter was sometimes unpopular while in office, and conventional wisdom has at times called him the worst president of the modern age. Yet as an ex-president, he redeemed himself in the eyes of many, devoting decades to good works and successful international diplomacy. For his part, Carter was proud of the peaceful four years of his presidency, which he considered his greatest legacy.
“We kept our country at peace,” he told the Guardian in 2011. “We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. But still we achieved our international goals. We brought peace to other people, including Egypt and Israel. We normalized relations with China, which had been non-existent for 30-something years. We brought peace between U.S. and most of the countries in Latin America because of the Panama Canal Treaty. We formed a working relationship with the Soviet Union.”
Early life
Carter famously started out as a peanut farmer, one who built his farm up from early failure to great success. Born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, he began farming his own small plot of land – given to him by his father – by the time he was a teen, selling the peanuts he grew. He would return to Plains over and over through the years, making his home in a humble ranch house there even at a stage in his life when other men might opt for greater opulence.
Among the important aspects of his young life that Carter later spoke about extensively was his racially integrated childhood. His mother, Lillian, was liberal and pro-integration in a time when the U.S. was still under the grip of segregationist policies. A nurse, Lillian treated Black patients even when that was an unpopular position to take, and she made sure that young Jimmy’s playmates included Black children. Though father Earl was a segregationist, it was Lillian’s ideals that influenced the boy who would grow up to become a champion for equality.
Carter attended Georgia Southwestern College and Georgia Tech before transferring to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1943, graduating in 1946 as an ensign. While enrolled, he met his future wife, Rosalynn Smith Carter (1927–2023), whom he married shortly after graduation. Carter served in the U.S. Navy until his honorable discharge in 1953, continuing on in the Navy Reserve through 1961.
Carter returned to Plains and to farming after his military career, also becoming active in his community as a leader in the Baptist Church and on the local school board. It was this community involvement that would lead to his political career. He eventually ran for and won a spot in the Georgia Senate, representing the 14th District from 1963 to 1967. It was a time of unrest in the South, and Carter supported civil rights, a position that carried through into his term as governor of Georgia, which he served from 1971 to 1975. He appointed Black employees to state jobs and hung portraits of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) and other Black leaders in the capitol building, despite protests from the Ku Klux Klan.
1976 election
In 1976, Carter threw his hat into the ring for the Democratic presidential nomination. He was up against a record number of competitors for the primary in an election year when the American people were still reeling from President Richard Nixon’s (1913–1994) Watergate scandal and President Gerald Ford’s (1913–2006) unconditional pardon of his predecessor. Seventeen Democrats were in the running for the nomination, and Carter’s win was anything but a given from the beginning.
Carter’s chances weren’t helped by the fact that he was relatively unknown. So unfamiliar was the general public with his name and face that he began to introduce himself to voters he met: “Hello! I am Jimmy Carter, and I am running for president.” Much better known were his competitors, including Alabama Governor George Wallace (1919–1998) and Senator Scoop Jackson (1912–1983) of Washington State. Carter was a dark horse – until he started winning.
Though his campaign got off to a mediocre start, he won important early races in Iowa and New Hampshire. By the time he won his party’s nomination, he was still a relatively new name to most, and he didn’t enjoy broad support even from his own party. The “ABC (Anyone But Carter)” movement swept some arms of the Democratic party, led by prominent Democrats including California Governor Jerry Brown, who worried the Southern governor would be too conservative.
President Carter
In a tight race against incumbent President Ford, Carter ultimately won with 50.08% of the popular vote and a narrow electoral majority. Entering the White House with the goal of creating a more “competent and compassionate” government, Carter enjoyed only a short period of relatively favorable approval ratings before a series of crises sent his rating plummeting.
Much of Carter’s presidency was not as miserable as some critics have deemed it to be. His Camp David Accords were among the most important steps toward peace in the Middle East, as he negotiated peace talks and a bilateral treaty between Israel and Egypt. He created the Department of Education, consolidating previously scattered bits and pieces of policy into one entity. He established the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), also known as the Superfund program, designed to clean up the most dangerously polluted sites in the country.
Yet several issues plagued Carter’s administration, among them the energy crisis. While high oil prices weren’t exclusive to his presidency – the U.S. had weathered a previous debilitating crisis during Nixon’s presidency – the 1979 repeat was painful to the nation and was considered a reflection of Carter’s leadership.
Alternative energy
Carter took the rising oil prices as a catalyst to pursue alternative energy sources, adding solar panels to the White House (which his successor, President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), promptly removed), skipping White House Christmas lights, and using a wood-burning stove in his living space. He instituted the Department of Energy and signed the National Energy Act to investigate conservation and renewable energy sources.
And he spoke to the people of the United States, hoping to inspire them to take part in energy conservation. He called it his “Crisis of Confidence” speech, and it looked at the difficult landscape the country faced, where inflation competed with the oil shortage and the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island for the most awful news headlines of the year.
The speech, intended to inspire Americans a la President John F. Kennedy’s (1917–1963) “Ask not what your country can do for you,” was instead seen by many as a scolding that blamed the American people for their own problems. Carter urged Americans to act: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning….” Instead of feeling roused to patriotic action, Americans felt like they were being shamed for their own malaise – so much so that the speech became known as Carter’s “malaise speech” even though that was a word he never used in it.
Not everyone was annoyed by the “malaise speech” – some were inspired by it, just as Carter intended, and his approval rating saw a positive bump in its wake. But the positivity didn’t last long. Soon pundits began criticizing the speech, and three days after he delivered the speech, Carter requested the resignations of all of his Cabinet members. He ultimately accepted five of those resignations. Carter hoped to shake things up with new advisors, but instead he shook the confidence of the American people, and his approval rating began a freefall.
Hostage crisis
Coming on the heels of the “malaise speech” and the Cabinet shakeup was a new catastrophe – the Iran hostage crisis. Fifty-two Americans were taken hostage by Iranian militants who demanded terms that the U.S. was unprepared and unwilling to meet. The hostages remained in custody for the last year and more of Carter’s presidency, only released in the earliest days of Reagan’s first term.
Carter was blasted for his failure to secure the release of the hostages, especially after he ordered the unsuccessful Operation Eagle Claw, in which eight helicopters flew into Iran but enough of them were disabled that the mission was a bust. In some opinions, Carter should have skipped the small operations and simply bombed Iran until they returned the hostages to American soil.
But Carter was proud of his war-free presidential term, and he maintained throughout his life that he did the right thing by avoiding war with Iran. He later told the Guardian, “(Bombing Tehran) would probably have resulted in the death of maybe tens of thousands of Iranians who were innocent, and in the deaths of the hostages as well. In retrospect, I don’t have any doubt that I did the right thing. But it was not a popular thing among the public, and it was not even popular among my own advisers inside the White House.”
The one-two punch of the “malaise speech” and the hostage crisis effectively destroyed Carter’s chances of reelection, and though he ran for president again in 1980, he lost to Reagan in an Electoral College landslide.
The man who never retired
Even those who thought Carter’s presidency was a disaster have often agreed that he turned his post-presidential career into a rousing success as an international diplomat and a crusader for good. His was the longest post-presidency in history, owing to his relatively young age as president and his remarkable good health well into his 90s. And it was one that “re-invented the post-presidency,” according to his biographer, Julian Zelizer.
The Carter Center, established by the former president and first lady in 1982, works globally in support of human rights and welfare by eradicating disease, promoting democracy, supporting free elections and more. “Our basic principle that has shaped us ever since we were founded is that we don’t duplicate what other people do,” Carter told the Guardian of the Carter Center. “If the World Bank or Harvard University or whoever is adequately taking care of a problem, we don’t get involved. We only try to fill vacuums where people don’t want to do anything.”
One of those vacuums was the tropical disease caused by the Guinea worm parasite. When the Carter Center began its efforts toward eradicating Guinea worm in the mid-1980s, the parasite was endemic to 21 countries in Africa and Asia, affecting about 3.5 million people each year. The Carter Center attacked the disease via education and financial assistance, and as of 2022, Guinea worm disease has been all but eradicated, with only 13 cases reported in just four African countries.
As a diplomat, Carter negotiated difficult situations with leaders in North Korea, the Middle East and beyond, cementing his legacy as one of the greatest U.S. diplomats. He was a key player in the negotiation of the Geneva Accord for Israel and Palestine and of the Nairobi Agreement for Sudan and Uganda. He was a member, along with prominent world leaders including Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) and Desmond Tutu, of the Elders, a group that describes itself as “independent global leaders working together for peace and human rights.”
Carter also served as an honorary chair for both the World Justice Project and the Continuity of Government Commission. And he was a prolific author, writing 23 books that varied from memoir to novel to children’s book to nonfiction. His 2003 novel “The Hornet’s Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War” was the first book of fiction ever published by a U.S. president.
Habitat for Humanity
Carter was a prominent volunteer with Habitat for Humanity in the years after his presidency, going beyond the more typical post-presidential work of sitting on a board of directors or raising funds. Carter dug in and worked, swinging a hammer and building homes alongside his wife. At age 95, Carter was in the news for returning to a Habitat for Humanity job site the day after he took a fall and required 14 stitches.
Of the work, Carter told CNN: “We talk about poor people in need, and this is the best way I know to close that gap between rich people and the people who’ve never had a decent place to live.”
Honored for his service
In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work “to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” He is currently the only U.S. president to receive the prize after his term was over.
Among Carter’s other honors were the Presidential Medal of Freedom, conferred upon him in 1999 by President Bill Clinton; the United Nations Human Rights Award in 1998; the Silver Buffalo Award of the Boy Scouts of America in 1978; the American Peace Award in 2009; and dozens more. Carter won three Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word Album, in 2007, 2016, and 2018. The U.S. Navy Seawolf-class submarine the USS Jimmy Carter was named after him in 1998. Two species were named after him: the beetle Arianops carteri and the fish Etheostoma jimmycarter.
Carter on war
“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.” —from Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize lecture
Tributes to Jimmy Carter
Full obituary: The Washington Post
