Jimmy Carter was not a president of the first rank, but he managed by dint of unceasing effort to become an iconic world leader, with an inspiring, if often contentious, legacy as a dogged peacemaker and a decent and ethical problem-solver. His presidency—beset by a horrible economy, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of American hostages in Iran—was a stunning political failure but a greater substantive success than was recognized when he was crushed for reelection by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
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In today’s world of perpetual military intervention, it’s striking that not a single bomb was dropped or shot fired in combat by American forces on Carter’s watch, and his leadership helped prevent at least five wars—in Panama, Israel, and Iran when he was president, and in Haiti and North Korea after he left office. The Camp David Accords he engineered proved to be the most successful treaty since the end of World War II. Long before he died Sunday, Dec. 29, at 100, his epic journey from barefoot Georgia farm boy to Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian had become a classic American story.
As the longest-lived president, Carter effectively lived in three centuries: He was born in a rural South little changed from the 19th century. He helped advance the four great movements of the 20th century—civil rights, women’s rights, human rights abroad and the environment—and hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. And as an old man in the 21st century, he made sure his Carter Center was on the cutting edge of the new millennium’s big challenges: conflict-resolution, disease eradication, democracy-promotion and sustainable development.
Emory University President James Laney once said, “Jimmy Carter is the only person in history for whom the presidency was a steppingstone.”
There was truth in that line; he reinvented the ex-presidency with a higher purpose that inspired other presidents to use their stature and convening power on behalf of important causes after leaving office. He was the longest-serving former president in American history and by many accounts the best, though every successor was annoyed that he sometimes freelanced as if he were still in power.
Humble Georgia roots
Carter was born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Ga., population 550, the first child of James Earl Carter, a canny segregationist businessman and farmer, and his eccentric wife, Lillian, a nurse who defied Jim Crow norms by tending to black patients. He was nicknamed Jimmy from the start, with the expectation that he would someday be called Jim, which he never was. The family was prosperous and had an automobile and a party line telephone, but the rest of his early life on a farm outside of town was primitive by today’s standards. Until he was age 11, his homestead had no running water, no electricity, no mechanized farm equipment, only slop jars and outhouses, hand-cranked wells, kerosene lamps, ancient mule-driven plows and black sharecroppers to work the land in a feudal system only one step removed from slavery.
Carter picked cotton, stacked peanuts and learned his discipline, attention to detail and prodigious work ethic on the farm, where his early playmates were black. From an early age he set his sights on admission to the U.S. Naval Academy. After graduating in 1946, marrying Rosalynn Smith, his sister’s friend who was also from Plains, and serving as an officer on diesel-powered submarines, he became a “nuc” under the legendary Admiral Hyman Rickover. His assignment was to supervise the construction of one of the first two nuclear subs, a Rickover-led technological breakthrough that eventually helped give the U.S. the strategic edge in the Cold War. Another duty involved descending for a dangerous 90 seconds inside of a Canadian nuclear reactor that had melted down. Much of the intensity and coldness that sometimes lay behind Carter’s smile came from Rickover.
When his father died in 1953, Carter left the Navy and returned to Plains with Rosalynn, and their three young sons: Jack, Chip and Jeff. (Their daughter Amy was born 14 years later). He took over his father’s peanut warehouse and followed his example by assuming a huge array of civic commitments. A progressive on race but bystander to the civil rights movement, Carter was elected to the Georgia State Senate in 1962 only after it was discovered that a corrupt local boss had been stuffing the ballot boxes on behalf of his opponent. Carter specialized in education and read every bill in its entirety. After he lost a race for governor in 1966, he experienced a spiritual crisis and was born-again, an experience that led him to go door-to-door on Baptist missions in the North. He absorbed the work of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote that “the sad duty of politics is to do justice in a sinful world.” In 1970, he won the governorship by running to the right with a rural populist campaign that wasn’t explicitly racist but included subtle appeals to segregationist voters.
Carter immediately angered those voters when he said in his inaugural address that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” His lieutenant governor, the infamous Lester Maddox, was hardly alone in his opposition to Carter hanging a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the State Capitol. Many rural Georgians felt betrayed. Had Georgia law allowed Carter to seek reelection in 1974, he would have likely lost, despite reorganizing state government, improving education and saving rivers and other natural resources from developers.
Ascending to the White House
Carter was unimpressed by the 1972 Democratic presidential candidates he met when they passed through Georgia and decided to launch an improbable bid for the White House. His brother Billy, who ran a Plains gas station and became a celebrity before descending into self-parody and alcoholism, quipped: “I’ve got a mother who joined the Peace Corps and went to India when she was 68. I’ve got a sister who races motorcycles and another sister who’s a Holy Roller preacher. I’ve got a brother who says he wants to be President of the United States. I’m the only sane one in the family.” With the help of two young aides, Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell, Carter’s 1976 campaign was brilliantly timed and executed. His outsider status, modesty (he often slept in the homes of supporters) and “I will never lie to you” message after Watergate proved a perfect match for an electorate that had lost faith in American institutions. Propelled out of Iowa and New Hampshire, Carter held off a late challenge from California Gov. Jerry Brown to win the nomination. Problems with the Democratic establishment that would haunt him later—and an interview with Playboy magazine in which he said “I’ve committed adultery in my heart”—helped the ticket to blow a large lead and barely squeak past incumbent President Gerald Ford (who later became a good friend) in the general election.
Carter started strong by stepping out of his limo on Inauguration Day and walking with his family partway down Pennsylvania Avenue—a new tradition symbolizing his openness. Soon after, he wore a sweater when giving a televised speech on the need for energy conservation, but the symbolism cut both ways and he was bedeviled by photographs of him collapsing from heat exhaustion while running a six-mile race and fending off a killer rabbit in a pond. The same post-Watergate mood that helped elect him led to especially harsh press coverage, with many reporters wrongly assuming he must be hiding scandals.
As president, Carter revolutionized both the vice presidency and the office of first lady. After two centuries of presidents ignoring their vice presidents, Carter gave former vice president Walter Mondale major responsibilities in both domestic and foreign policy, though Mondale briefly threatened to quit over his opposition to the malaise speech. Carter listed Rosalynn—well-regarded by official Washington—first among his most trusted advisers, put her in charge of reforming mental health policy and dispatched her on a diplomatic mission to Latin America, even as he was criticized for letting her sit in on Cabinet meetings.
With the help of an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, Carter—showing impressive command of the issues—had no problem with gridlock and signed scores of important bills. But his non-ideological approach meant he had no reliable base to help him keep promises on tax and welfare reform, much less strike an agreement with Sen. Ted Kennedy for national health insurance. Some of his achievements were liberal: government job-creation; appointing more women judges than all of his predecessors combined (though women’s groups, who thought he wasn’t liberal enough, still attacked him) the establishment of the Departments of Education and Energy, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency; far-sighted support of alternative energy (reversed by Reagan, who took down the solar panels Carter put on the roof of the White House) and other efforts to achieve energy independence; toxic waste cleanup; mental health treatment (also reversed by Reagan) and the mammoth Alaska Lands bill, which along with other environmental initiatives made him the greatest conservation president since Theodore Roosevelt.
Other policies were more conservative, like the deregulation of the airline, trucking and natural gas industries, and his efforts to balance the budget over the objections of liberal Democrats. Carter’s greatest legislative achievement was the 1978 Senate ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, which led to the U.S. eventually handing over control of the Panama Canal to Panama. The treaties were hugely unpopular in polls, thanks in part to Reagan’s use of the issue when challenging Ford in the 1976 GOP primaries. Carter lobbied expertly, explaining that rejection would likely lead to a guerrilla war in Panama, and he convinced 16 Republicans to join Democrats for the two-thirds necessary for passage.
Carter’s foreign policy was both visionary and hands-on. His emphasis on human rights, while unevenly applied, set a new global standard for how governments should treat their people. He also advanced the cause of freedom in Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe. The highlight of his presidency came in September 1978 when he retreated for 13 days to Camp David with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and used his often-maligned attention to detail to engineer an agreement. Many Israelis and American Jews, distrustful of Carter because of his long criticism of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, don’t acknowledge how much the durable Camp David Accords did to secure the Jewish State. After waging four wars in the first 25 years of Israel’s existence, the Egyptian army—the only force capable of destroying Israel—hasn’t fired on the state once in all the years since.
In 1979, building on President Richard Nixon’s breakthrough, Carter hosted the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and together they normalized U.S.-Chinese relations, paving the way for huge changes in the global economy. Dealing with the Soviet Union was harder. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Carter pulled the SALT II missile and nuclear weapons treaty from the Senate floor (though its provisions continued to be abided by), imposed a grain embargo and boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, none of which were particularly effective. More significant were secret aid to the mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan and Carter’s decision to accelerate the Pentagon’s development of stealth technology. Many of the weapons Reagan used to intimidate the Soviets—including the B-2 stealth bomber and the MX missile—were developed under Carter.
As inflation surged into double digits, Carter’s presidency became an economic nightmare. In 1979, he appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve and Volcker’s harsh medicine—double-digit interest rates that decimated businesses and homeowners—tamed inflation but not until after Reagan took office.
A Growing ‘Malaise’
In the summer of 1979, gasoline shortages that grew out of OPEC price hikes and the Iranian revolution led to long, infuriating lines at the gas pump. Losing touch with the American public as well as the Washington political establishment, which often patronized him, Carter retreated to Camp David to consult a wide variety of Americans on why his administration was failing. In the thoughtful sermon-like televised address he delivered afterwards—dubbed “the malaise speech,” though he never used that word—he confessed to leadership shortcomings and preached sacrifice and a need to confront what he called the nation’s “crisis of confidence.” He surged in the polls but plummeted two days later when—in arguably the worst decision of his presidency—he fired several Cabinet members. Resistant to sacrifice, the country was concluding that intelligence, integrity and mastery of the issues were not enough for presidential success. His willingness to make unpopular but necessary decisions went largely unappreciated at the time.
That November, students loyal to the revolutionary Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini seized 52 Americans from the U.S. embassy and held them hostage—retaliation for Carter allowing the deposed Shah of Iran to enter the U.S. for medical treatment. At first, Americans rallied around Carter and he won points for patiently working for the hostages’ release. He beat Ted Kennedy in early Democratic primaries and seemed a decent bet for reelection.
As the crisis wore on in 1980, most other presidents would have taken some kind of military action against Iran, as Rosalynn Carter and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski urged. But Carter believed the hostages would be immediately executed and the resulting war would lead to many American and Iranian deaths. Another option— downplaying the captivity— wasn’t viable in a pre-cable era when the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite, reminded viewers every night on the CBS Evening News exactly how many days the hostages had been held. Ted Koppel’s Nightline, which was launched on ABC News during the period, also kept Americans riveted to the crisis.
In April of 1980, Carter authorized a hostage rescue mission but three of the eight helicopters sent inside Iran malfunctioned in the desert. After the mission was aborted, a helicopter collided with a transport aircraft, killing eight servicemen. Carter blamed the fiasco for his crushing defeat to Reagan in the November election, though the economy, the candidacy of independent John Anderson and Reagan’s strong campaign were also major factors. Carter spent the last nights of his presidency napping in the Oval Office as he worked around the clock to successfully free the hostages. The Iranians released them just moments after Reagan took the oath on Jan. 20, 1981, the 444th day of their captivity. They were all alive and mostly healthy, though Republicans would long argue that the nation’s “honor” was bruised.
A Post-Presidency Renaissance Man
After he left office, the Carters moved back to Plains and refused to take money for speeches or serve on corporate boards. Over time, Carter became the closest thing to a Renaissance Man of any president since Thomas Jefferson. He painted, built furniture, and wrote—poetry, fiction, history, memoirs and even self-help, 30 books in all. His association with Habitat for Humanity—including helping to build houses once a year—helped make it the largest not-for-profit homebuilder in the world.
Since 1982, the Carter Center he built in Atlanta adjacent to his presidential library has focused on specific, solvable problems. Besides monitoring more than 100 elections around the world, it has reduced the incidence of guinea worm disease from 3.5 million cases in 21 countries to only a few dozen scattered cases today. Great progress is also underway in combating river blindness. By contrast, the Atlanta Project, an ambitious attempt to tackle poverty in the capital of his home state, flopped.
Carter was often criticized for his willingness to meet with some of the worst human rights abusers and terrorists in the world, including the head of Hamas. He argued that he would meet with almost anyone if there was a chance for peace. In his later years, he and other retired world leaders joined a group of peacemakers formed by Nelson Mandela called “The Elders.”
Carter’s biggest post-presidential diplomatic breakthroughs both came in 1994 when he convinced the founder of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, to begin to open up and to agree to peace talks with the Clinton Administration. The talks resulted in a deal that would have prevented North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, but it fell apart after a few months when Kim Il-Sung died. (He returned to North Korea in 2010 and brokered the release of American teacher Aijalon Mahli Gomes, who had been arrested after crossing into North Korea illegally.) Also in 1994, President Bill Clinton sent Carter, Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and Colin Powell (then a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) to Haiti, where—under Carter’s direction—they convinced Haitian President Raoul Cedras to leave power, thereby avoiding an imminent invasion by U.S. forces.
But his diplomatic efforts also brought criticism. Clinton was angry at Carter for locking in the Haiti deal on CNN without his authorization. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush, while grateful to Carter two years earlier for convincing Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to leave power peacefully after he lost an election, was furious at Carter for undermining his position on Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait by privately urging other members of the U.N Security Council to oppose the Gulf War. For his part, Carter occasionally took shots at all of his successors, who considered him difficult to handle.
In later years, Carter continued to court controversy. He alienated some of his Jewish friends and supporters in 2006 by titling a book about the Middle East, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, though a decade later even Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister, was making the apartheid comparison. He quit the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000 over its literal interpretation of scripture, as well as its attitudes toward women, though he did continue to welcome visitors from all over the world to his Sunday School classes at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains.
By the time of his death, Carter, who is the longest-lived president, had transcended the invective directed at him over the years. With a reappraisal of his presidency underway and his decency and selflessness praised across party lines, Carter secured a permanent place in the hearts of most Americans.
Jonathan Alter is the author of His Very Best, Jimmy Carter, a Life.
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