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For President Jimmy Carter, morality was a personal obligation that became a national calling. A deeply religious man, he taught Sunday school for most of his adult life until the point in 2020 when he physically couldn’t anymore, and he projected that same moral leadership from his entry into politics through his ascendance to the presidency. Once there, he understood in a deeply personal way, that he was spreading values—of decency, morality and human rights—to a Cold War world that needed hope.
This is the underappreciated cornerstone of Carter’s legacy. He took seriously America’s moral leadership and tried to use it to better our country and our world. After the Realpolitik relativism of the Vietnam and the Nixon eras, Carter committed himself to diplomacy, deferred to international norms and elevated human rights into a priority of American foreign policy. That vision of America’s role in the world offers hope even today. Despite the cynicism and performative politics, it’s more important than ever to recognize that moral leadership is not out of fashion. Indeed, it is essential.
Carter’s conviction was his most impressive quality, and it could also be his most infuriating. He was incredibly stubborn about doing the right thing, and refused to give up long past the point others would have thrown up their hands. A great example was the negotiations for what became the Camp David Accords, the historic agreement that led to the first Israeli-Arab peace treaty—he refused to let Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin walk away, and shuttled among cabins at Camp David, probing and cajoling until the deal was done.
And he was perfectly willing to pick bruising domestic political fights for the sake of what he felt was right. He called the debate over transferring the Panama Canal to Panamanian authority “the most difficult political fight I ever faced,” but he also believed that continuing U.S. control over a swath of Panamanian territory was an enduring injustice, and one that diminished the U.S. in the eyes of the world. “This issue,” he later wrote, “had become a litmus test, indicating how the U.S., as a superpower, would treat a small and relatively defenseless nation that had always been a close partner and supporter.” In the end, he managed to get two new U.S.-Panama treaties through the Senate with the requisite (and bipartisan) two-thirds majority, plus an extra vote.
Carter is also rightly lauded for the achievements of his post-presidency—from conflict mediation to guinea worm eradication in Africa to Habitat for Humanity. But his global morality came from his personality, and I witnessed this up close: he supported the careers of many who worked for him, including mine. For my first race for Congress, Carter sent me a personal check for $500, with a handwritten note saying: “We love you and wish you well. You represent not only California but the Carter family.” It now hangs on the wall in my office.
This personal commitment to values is evident in a vision he spelled out in a commencement address in the first year of his presidency: “a policy based on constant decency in its values and on optimism in our historical vision.” Carter made his call for moral clarity amid a post-Vietnam crisis of confidence that he said was “made even more grave by the covert pessimism of some of our leaders.” He urged Americans to have confidence in the country’s animating values, especially as democracy gained ground in India, Portugal, Spain, and Greece, proving its attraction.
It is underappreciated that this vision didn’t end with Carter. In fact, it became a central theme among his successors, not least the man who defeated him for the presidency in 1980. Reagan made freedom a cornerstone of his foreign policy when he stood at the Brandenburg Gate and urged Soviet President Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
Tragically, Carter leaves us during another crisis of confidence, when much of the progress since his presidency seems to be falling away. Freedom House recently documented a global decline in freedom for the 18th consecutive year. A Soviet-nostalgic Russian leader is attempting a violent land grab in Europe; the Israel-Hamas war continues to defy a negotiated solution at horrific human cost. Carter’s example should teach us that it is precisely times like these that call for the courage it takes not to give up on the pursuit of freedom and peace.
Let us recognize, as Carter did, that “it is a new world—but America should not fear it. It is a new world — and we should help to shape it.” Achieving this goal requires vision—and stubbornness.
Jane Harman was Deputy Cabinet Secretary in the Carter administration. She later served nine terms in Congress from California and is co-chair of Freedom House.
The career of Jimmy Carter, the U.S. President who died on Dec. 29 at age 100, will be remembered for many things: his peanut-farming background, his speedy rise to political fame and fall after one term, his handling — or mishandling — of the energy crisis and the Iran hostage crisis.
Another achievement, from early in his career, may be less well known, but is just as worthy of remembrance.
The mid-1970s, when Carter became a national public figure, was a time of transition, full of the aftershocks of the progress and devastation that had characterized the previous decade, not least in the arena of the civil rights movement. Carter was a Georgian of many generations, whose farming family’s presence in the South predated the United States itself. He had no trouble establishing his Southern credentials, but he also differed from many of his neighbors when it came to integration and other racial issues.
As TIME recounted in a 1976 profile of the then-candidate, his mother, known as “Miss Lillian,” was a formidable presence in her four children’s lives and encouraged them to have compassion for all people, regardless of race—despite any judgment from neighbors steeped in prejudice.
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In 1966, Carter, the oldest of those four children, lost the Georgia gubernatorial primary to a segregationist. Four years later, he managed to win the support of some prominent segregationists in the state by ceding ground to them: He said that he would allow George Wallace, perhaps the most famous of them all, to speak at the state house if he won. But, after winning the office, Carter made it clear that he hadn’t totally abandoned his principles, as TIME recounted in the 1976 story:
“Elected by a landslide vote, Carter appeared to be a changed man in office—leading to accusations that he had misled the voters. In his inaugural address, he proclaimed: “The time for racial discrimination is over. No poor rural white or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.” [Segregationist former Governor Lester] Maddox cried foul and started sniping at Carter. He has never stopped. He even pursued Carter to New Hampshire last month to denounce him as “the McGovern of ‘76” and “the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of ‘76.”
Unlike [former governor Carl] Sanders, Carter appointed blacks to posts at every level of state government. (Sanders today concedes: “Carter is far more liberal than I ever was.”) He set up a biracial “disorder unit” of various experts to mediate clashes between blacks and whites. Since Georgia did not have federal referees to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Carter deputized all the high school principals in the state as registrars so that they could sign up voters at school. He overhauled the state prison and mental hospitals, which contained a high proportion of blacks. He set up a system of drug treatment and day care centers.
Carter appealed to blacks perhaps even more strongly by making certain symbolic gestures. When black legislators had a party in their part of town, they sent a routine invitation to the Governor. Much to their surprise, he showed up, and word spread quickly that the Governor was eating chitlins with the brothers. In the state capitol in 1974, Carter placed a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. on a wall amid pictures of other Georgia notables, while an integrated audience sang We Shall Overcome. Many blacks who did not vote for Carter swung over to his support. Now his presidential drive is endorsed by men as disparate as Martin Luther King Sr. and Henry Aaron.”
Sure enough, in the presidential primaries that year, again and again Carter carried the African American vote. As TIME remarked, “The phenomenon of blacks backing a Southern white reared in the Georgia backwoods is one of the most intriguing aspects of the campaign to date.” Though support for Carter was driven by his record of conciliation, which he often couched in spiritual language, it was also helped by the fact that George Wallace was one of his main opponents.
That choice helped many voters overlook the moments when Carter’s civil rights record could be called into doubt, such as his wavering support for busing to integrate schools. During the presidential campaign, Carter also had to apologize for what he called a “careless” choice of words in defense of his stance in opposition to legislating the integration of neighborhoods. (His discussion of the “purity” of communities called to mind, for many, some of history’s worst examples of prejudice.) But as TIME noted when naming him 1976’s Man of the Year, his success “destroyed forever the hopes of Alabama’s George Wallace of rising to national power —a possibility already dimmed by the bullet of a would-be assassin. By showing that a nonracist Southerner could win a major party nomination, Carter gave new pride to his region and went far to heal ancient wounds.”
After his Presidency, following a period of relative seclusion in his Georgia hometown, he returned to public life and brought his ideals with him, devoting his life to bettering the world. In 1989, TIME declared that he “may be the best former President America has ever had”; in 2002, he was awarded a Nobel Peace Price.
Not that those who followed his career would be surprised. Asked by TIME, shortly before he came into the White House, whether all the work he had to do was an overwhelming prospect, Jimmy Carter showed the same humble dedication that would carry him through the decades that followed: “Yes,” he said, “but not so much that I would want someone else to do it.”
Read an interview with Jimmy Carter on the eve of his inauguration: “I Look Forward to the Job”
Read Jimmy Carter’s “Man of the Year” cover story from 1977: I’m Jimmy Carter, and…
Some U.S. presidents have the (mis)fortune of having their entire foreign policy defined by their handling of one part of the world. For Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday, Dec. 29, 2024, aged 100, it was the Middle East.
There, he reached his highest point as a peacemaker and his lowest one as a seemingly inept protector of Americans. His legacy in the region is a complex one, featuring stunning triumphs and bitter defeats—and setting dubious precedents.
In November 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel to seek peace, creating an opening for an agreement between the heretofore bitter enemies. By July 1978, however, the talks had stalled. In an attempt to resurrect them, Carter audaciously proposed that he, Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin meet at the presidential retreat at Camp David in September.
After 13 days of arduous negotiations and diplomacy, Carter brokered the Camp David Accords. The agreement had two parts: a framework for peace between Egypt and Israel, and a framework for negotiations on Palestinian autonomy. Although Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty in March 1979, the Palestinian autonomy talks ultimately went nowhere, in large part due to Israeli intransigence.
This left a mixed legacy for the agreement.
On the one hand, it ended the threat of conflict between Israel and the strongest Arab state, thereby drastically decreasing the chances of another large-scale Arab-Israeli war like those that took place in 1967 and 1973. That not only prevented mass casualties and destruction, but it also reduced the possibility of a nuclear war between the superpowers—something that had seemed possible during the 1973 war when there was a nuclear standoff between the United States and Soviet Union.
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On the other hand, Egypt’s peace with Israel hamstrung the Palestinians, depriving them of their greatest source of pressure on Israel to negotiate fairly. Furthermore, the United States repeatedly missed or forfeited the chance to involve the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the negotiations. When Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, secretly met with a PLO representative, Carter fired him. Carter later expressed regret for that decision, and he had understandable reasons for not wanting to upset the Israelis—after all, without them, there could be no negotiations—or to suffer the potential domestic political costs of engaging the Palestinians. Yet, the move punctuated Carter’s failure to seriously and directly engage with “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” or to sufficiently pressure Israel on Palestinian rights.
Carter also rebuffed Soviet attempts to engage in the peace talks, which erased the possibility of securing comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, as historian Galen Jackson argues in his recent book. Without Soviet involvement, there was no way to bring the other Arab nations to the table, making a broader deal and regional peace impossible. But Cold War considerations trumped all for Carter, and instead of working on a peace deal, the Soviets joined with the Arabs to oppose the Egyptian-Israeli peace.
While Carter was preoccupied with guiding the Egyptian-Israeli talks to completion and negotiating a strategic nuclear arms deal with the Soviets, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, America’s closest partner in the Middle East, faced a revolution at home, beginning in November 1978. When pushed by his hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to encourage the Shah to use force against the opposition, Carter refused, and the Shah abdicated in January. Ultimately, the radical Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power and turned Iran from a close American ally into a staunchly anti-Western force in the region, despite the Carter Administration’s efforts to develop positive relations with the new government.
Iran’s collapse added to the anxiety of other American partners in the region—especially Saudi Arabia—who were unsure whether the United States would support them if revolution crept to their doors. This fear was punctuated by a border conflict between the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and its southern Marxist neighbor, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) in February and March 1979, which threatened Saudi Arabia’s security. Hoping to reassure U.S. allies, Carter ordered a Navy carrier to the Gulf of Aden and used a congressional waiver to hasten arms deliveries to the YAR. That conflict ultimately ended in a cease-fire in mid-March.
Though short-lived, this crisis, sometimes called the Second Yemenite War, was a turning point for Carter’s Middle East policy that signaled his increased openness to military intervention. This willingness stemmed from the administration’s impression that the Persian Gulf was vital to American security, that the situation was rapidly spinning out of control and that it could only be rectified through a stronger pro-American security architecture in the region—what Brzezinski dubbed a “consultative security framework.” Accordingly, the administration also undertook a drastic increase in arms sales to Saudi Arabia as part of a recognition of its outsize role in American interests in the region, especially due to its oil production.
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Carter’s mettle would be tested again later that year, when, on Nov. 4, Iranian student protesters seized the American embassy in Tehran and took over 60 U.S. Embassy personnel and expatriates hostage, only releasing some of the African American and female captives in a show of solidarity. Despite tireless diplomatic efforts to free the hostages, 52 Americans languished in captivity in Iran for 444 days—a colossal embarrassment to the Carter Administration (though recent reporting has renewed debate over whether the Reagan campaign may have quietly signaled to Iran not to release the hostages while Carter was in office).
To make matters worse, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late December 1979, marking the end of the period of improved Soviet-American relations known as detente. The Soviets had grown wary of American moves in the Middle East and feared that Afghanistan could become an American proxy on their border.
Western intelligence agencies were shocked by the invasion and American policymakers worried that the Soviet Union might be angling to control the Persian Gulf and its oil, through Iran or Saudi Arabia. This possibility represented a significant threat to American interests, as it raised the specter of worsening the existing oil crisis caused by the Iranian Revolution, and prompted Carter to promulgate what came to be known—much to his chagrin—as the “Carter Doctrine.”
In his Jan. 23, 1980 State of the Union address, Carter bluntly declared that “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
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The Carter Doctrine set the stage for a more militant American policy toward the Middle East and created a policy rationale that allowed for the disastrous April 1980 attempt to free the hostages in Iran (the first offensive U.S. military action in the region since 1958), the even-more-catastrophic U.S. intervention in Lebanon between 1982 and 1984, the 1991 Gulf War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Carter also helped create the basing system and diplomatic relations necessary for projecting American power into the Middle East, a feat that was previously far more difficult because of the lack of U.S. bases and forces in the region.
What, then, is Carter’s Middle East legacy?
He was a peacemaker but was unable to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict — something he urged his successors to do by recognizing a Palestinian state.
He believed in restraint but ended up looking weak to many Americans, which contributed significantly to his defeat in 1980.
He was an advocate for human rights and a reluctant interventionist, but paved the way for decades of American policy excesses in the Middle East, including unjust wars and torture.
This mixed record reflected not only the complexity of Carter, but also the difficulty of the region and the cross pressures facing American policymakers as they determine a course in the Middle East.
Benjamin V. Allison is a PhD student in history at the University of Texas at Austin, where he specializes in U.S. foreign and national security policy since 1945, especially toward the Middle East and Russia. He also studies terrorism. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.
In recent years, major new studies have tried to rehabilitate the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at age 100. They’ve emphasized a range of underappreciated accomplishments in everything from foreign policy to environmental protection and racial equity. These accounts still acknowledge Carter’s failures but balance them with a longer-term perspective on how his presidency changed the United States and the world.
This positive reappraisal, however, hasn’t extended to health care policy. This makes sense considering how devastating the battle over health care was to Carter during his presidency. Congress rejected his major health care policy initiatives, and his grudging support for a much more limited national health insurance plan in part spurred Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) to challenge the incumbent Carter from the left in the 1980 Democratic presidential primary.
Yet Carter’s health care record deserves a more nuanced evaluation. More than any other modern president, he took on the health care industry, as well as his own allies, by attempting to address the high costs of American health care. And his health care proposals pushed his party toward the policy strategies that eventually produced the landmark Affordable Care Act in 2010.
Carter’s willingness to tackle the politically perilous task of trying to rein in health care costs offers a template for the kind of leadership and focus needed to address the health care system’s enduring flaws in 2024.
Carter entered office at a moment when health care spending was skyrocketing. Between 1970 and January 1977, total national health expenditures had more than doubled, from $74 billion to $152 billion. As a percentage of gross domestic product, health care spending had risen from 6.9% to 8.1%.
Much of this increase stemmed from the enactment of Medicare in 1965, with its generous reimbursement formulas for hospitals. These formulas not only raised direct costs, but, critically, also allowed hospitals to generate new revenue streams that enabled them both to build capital reserves and take on debt by entering the bond markets. Hospitals in turn used this access to capital to build new facilities, renovate old ones and add sophisticated new equipment. This created a cost spiral as hospitals competed with one another on facilities and technology, rather than affordability.
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Carter tried to duck the issue of health care policy in the 1976 Democratic primary, but exploding prices, along with continued interest in national health insurance on the left flank of the Democratic Party, made that impossible. After Carter’s victory in the Florida primary in March 1976, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union demanded that he endorse national health insurance as a condition for receiving its critical endorsement. As an outsider from Georgia, Carter needed the union’s support. So after extended negotiations, he agreed to satisfy the UAW’s demand in an April 1976 speech.
Even then, however, Carter refrained from backing Kennedy’s “Health Security Bill”—which offered complete single-payer public health coverage with no cost sharing and no role for private insurers—despite all of his main rivals for the Democratic nomination endorsing it. Instead, he described the general principles of a program that would be introduced in phases. Carter envisioned relying on private as well as public insurance, and his plan included checks on both hospital and physician fees to control costs. Carter also tied his program, in some unspecified way, to reductions to welfare.
Since the union wanted to maintain influence if Carter won, this proposal was enough to secure its support. Carter went on to win the nomination and the election in 1976.
As the president-elect and his team evaluated their priorities, concerns about the federal budget deficit and rising inflation took precedence over his campaign promise on health insurance. They decided to focus on hospital costs instead. As one Carter adviser later put it, they couldn’t “even begin talking about affording a national health insurance program if hospital costs had an unlimited straw into the Federal Treasury.”
Kennedy and other supporters of a national health program deferred to the new president—but they were unhappy about it. They agreed about the need to control costs, but believed the two goals could be pursued simultaneously.
By April 1977, the Carter team had drafted an innovative, two-part hospital cost containment proposal. The first part capped total hospital revenue growth at nine percent annually, with limited exceptions, achieved through a limit on average revenue per admission. The second part of the Carter bill audaciously proposed limiting total annual hospital capital expenditures to $2.5 billion nationally. This would cut spending for new facilities, and thus was key to slowing the rapid growth of the hospital sector.
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Together, the two prongs had the potential to be as transformative as Kennedy’s “Health Security Bill” because of the way they challenged unchecked hospital expansion and cost increases.
The proposal triggered a brutal war.
The hospital industry organized an aggressive local lobbying campaign against the bill while implementing a much-hyped “voluntary effort” to control costs. Anne Wexler, Carter’s special assistant for public liaison, explained that every local hospital board included “the president of the bank, the president of whatever local community organizations there were, the leading lights in all the religious organizations in town and so forth.” The hospitals’ powerful allies meant that Carter had lost public opinion, “before we ever got going.”
Congress voted down Carter’s proposal multiple times between 1977 and 1979, dealing what he considered to be a crucial blow against his domestic agenda.
Meanwhile, a frustrated Kennedy pressed the president to announce a national health insurance plan before the 1978 midterm elections. Carter recognized, however, that Kennedy had no support from moderate and conservative Democrats in Congress and pushed to defer release of a specific plan until the following year. Kennedy grudgingly agreed, but at the midterm Democratic convention that December, he savaged Carter’s inaction.
Finally, in June 1979, Carter released a plan for the first phase of a program to achieve universal coverage. It relied on both public and private insurance to cover “catastrophic” medical costs, and it proposed federalizing Medicaid by combining it with Medicare into a new federal program known as “Healthcare.” This would have eliminated the state-to-state variations that made Medicaid an inconsistent and unequal vehicle for insuring low-income Americans.
While covering all expenses for the poor, Healthcare had a $1250 deductible ($5151 in 2023 dollars) for higher income recipients. In addition, the Carter plan retained employer-provided private insurance with a mandate that employers offer at least catastrophic coverage for their workers for costs above a deductible of $2500. On the cost control side, the bill limited hospital capital expenditures and added a new system of physician fee controls.
More comprehensive coverage, the administration argued, could be added as economic conditions allowed.
Kennedy balked at the skimpy benefits, understanding that Congress could not be relied on to regularly expand coverage. Even so, Carter’s vision influenced him. Kennedy’s own proposal began to include public and private elements, including an employer mandate and a requirement that insurance companies provide marketing and administrative services for the plan’s public elements. It also included an annual national health budget to control costs.
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Neither bill made any real progress in Congress, and Kennedy’s frustrations fueled his decision to challenge Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination.
Despite the political damage done by Carter’s twin defeats on health care, he achieved two major things. First, he recognized the burgeoning cost control problems in the American health care system. His proposal, if passed, would have laid the foundation for a more cost effective and equal system. He understood that such hospital cost containment was a prerequisite for achieving universal coverage.
Second, Carter changed the terms of the health care debate for Democrats. No longer would they push universal federally provided insurance like Kennedy’s proposal from the early 1970s had done. Instead, Bill Clinton (unsuccessfully) and eventually Barack Obama in his signature bill in 2010 both embraced a mixture of public and private health insurance that built on Carter’s legacy. Its debatable whether this shift was positive, but it marked a key step toward our current system.
The other element of Carter’s health care agenda—the critical but politically perilous problem of high costs—remains largely unaddressed. While President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act took important steps to control the costs of prescription drugs, those only account for nine percent of healthcare costs. Also under Biden, the Federal Trade Commission has increased its scrutiny of both horizontal and vertical hospital mergers, but this has had limited effects and is largely after-the-fact, as the industry has already undergone significant consolidation. Unlike Carter, Biden has not pursued the direct regulation of costs stemming from hospitals, physicians, and clinical services, despite them accounting for 51 percent of health care costs.
With cost problems still plaguing Americans in 2023, Carter has proved right on health care. While he couldn’t bend Congress to his will, his hospital spending caps could have prevented many of the challenges we continue to confront. The question now is whether today’s political leaders have the courage to follow his lead.
Guian McKee is professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs. He is the author of Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.
“I am a farmer, an engineer, a businessman, a planner, a scientist, a governor, and a Christian,” Jimmy Carter introduced himself to elite journalists — and by extension their audiences — at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, 1974, during the announcement speech launching his 1976 presidential campaign. Over the next five decades, the media, increasingly the primary power brokers under the new rules of U.S. politics, shaped Carter’s image. As the nation grapples with Carter’s legacy after he died on Sunday, Dec. 29, aged 100, Americans may have to contend with the fact that his presidency signaled a shift toward a more adversarial relationship between politicians and the press.
Initially, national political reporters struggled to understand the Georgia governor who “whistled a different tune.” He was a White southerner who declared that “the time for racial discrimination [was] over.” He was a peanut farmer turned nuclear physicist. A deeply religious man, he also often quoted the words of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
Many bought into an initial assessment from the New York Times: “Carter, like the South, is … an enigma and contradiction.”
Such an observation was not just about Carter. It reflected a shifting journalistic environment. As the Chicago Tribune’s rookie campaign reporter later explained to Carter biographer Betty Glad: “The Nixon Presidency helped create a whole breed of political journalists, who appeared in great numbers in 1976 to explain the character of Presidential candidates. It was a kind of Teddy White-ism gone wild … Yet for all of us out there trying to explain what kind of person Jimmy Carter was, most of us didn’t or couldn’t and opted to call him an enigma.”
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The collective shorthand among journalists, inspired by their lingering anxieties over corrupt politicians, signified their uneasiness and shared antipathy toward the still little-known candidate. They may have admired his candor, but they feared that behind his enigmatic mask lurked another opportunistic politician.
This suspicion and other nagging uncertainties about the New South’s redeemer lingered in the minds of traveling reporters throughout the 1976 presidential campaign. As Village Voice staff writer Ken Auletta contended in the November 1976 issue of More: The Media Magazine, the cynical campaign pack remained distrustful of the politician who “with a straight face … promises never to lie” and kept Carter under constant scrutiny on the trail. “They are always on guard, watchful of his every move,” Auletta wrote. “[Only Carter’s] absurd claim gives the press their potential advantage in the chess game. So they spend a fair amount of time searching for evidence Carter is lying — or at least fudging.”
Shortly after the end of President Carter’s First 100 Days, political reporters, lusting to be the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein, seized on their first strategic opportunity — a financial scandal involving Carter’s longtime adviser and Office of Management and Budget Director Bert Lance — what became known in the popular parlance of the era as Lance-gate.
Throughout the investigation into Lance’s alleged misdeeds, Carter stood by his man, reaffirming his faith in Lance as a “man of complete integrity.” But, amid persistent negative coverage and calls from the Senate for Lance’s resignation, Carter succumbed to pressure to cut ties with his longtime adviser.
In the aftermath of the Lance Affair, the relationship between the Carter Administration and the press became more contentious and hostile. Carter’s press secretary Jody Powell contended that journalistic attack dogs foamed at the mouth. Amid an increasingly adversarial milieu, they pounced on the failures of the Carter Administration in the handling of domestic challenges and international threats, as well as self-inflicted political embarrassments.
After his landslide defeat at the hands of former actor and California Gov. Ronald Reagan, the adversarial pack dismissed Carter’s presidency as a failure, and many historians followed their lead. Carter was “a good and decent man,” the popular historian Doris Kearns Goodwin once put it. But this depiction often coincided with understanding his one-term presidency as a failure.
Yet, his post-presidency made clear the values Carter attempted to infuse into the Democratic Party — that “love must be aggressively translated into simple justice,” a line from his 1976 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. After he left the White House, he focused his attention on combating “disease, hunger, poverty, conflict and oppression” from the Carter Center and, in his spare time, teaching the Gospel from the pulpit at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., and building houses for the poor — the labor of love he remained committed to even after he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma brain cancer in August 2015 and suffered a subdural hematoma in October 2019.
It is worth remembering this commitment to the message of moral improvement that attracted supporters equally among liberals, conservatives, and moderates during the 1976 primaries.
And finally, journalists are taking note of more than his failures. Pulse news site executive Paul Brannan wrote that Carter “deserves better” before pointing to his work on the Camp David Accords in 1978, his role as a champion of human rights, and his efforts to move the nation past the era of the credibility gap. “Telling the truth, obeying the law, keeping the peace, and championing human rights is quite a legacy,” he concluded. “So forget Iran … and all of the other perceived failings.”
The challenge in constructing Carter’s legacy rests in separating the media hype from the historical work he did. In the end, however, Jimmy Carter told journalists that he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” perhaps the only question that remains is — are we?
In the wake of Watergate, a newly adversarial political press scrutinized Jimmy Carter, looking for any sign that he was breaking his pledge not to lie, and pouncing on any blunders that his administration made. This shaped perceptions of Carter as a failed president, but his post-presidency complicates that idea and highlights aspects of his presidency often missed by the media in the moment.
Amber Roessner is a professor at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism & Media and author of Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign (LSU Press, 2020). Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.
President Jimmy Carter has died today, December 29, after receiving more than a year of hospice care at his home in Plains, Ga. President Carter will be remembered for living out his devout Baptist faith through his pursuit of peace and support for human rights as well as acts of service, such as building homes for Habitat for Humanity. When it came to following Jesus, Carter walked the walk.
Lesser known, and particularly relevant for American politics today, is our 39th president’s commitment to the Baptist value of religious liberty. The United States’ most religious president in recent memory was also the most committed to the separation of church and state.
“I think that prayer should be a private matter between a person and God,” then-President Carter told a group of news editors in 1979 concerning Supreme Court rulings against mandatory government-sponsored prayers in public schools in 1962 and 1963. “I think the Government ought to stay out of the prayer business and let it be between a person and God and not let it be part of a school program under any tangible constraints, either a direct order to a child to pray or an embarrassing situation where the child would feel constrained to pray.” He told the editors that he agreed with the Supreme Court’s rulings “as a Baptist.”
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Here’s how Carter described his commitment in his 2010 autobiography A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety: “My religious faith had become a minor issue during the [1976] campaign, when I responded ‘yes’ to a reporter’s question ‘are you a born-again Christian?’ Some reporters implied that I was having visions or thought I received daily instructions from Heaven. My traditional Baptist belief was that there should be strict separation between church and state. I ended the longstanding practice of inviting Billy Graham and other prominent pastors to have services in the White House and our family assumed the role of normal worshippers in a church of our choice.”
Before I moved back to my home state of Texas, I was a member of the church the Carters chose, The First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C., and I currently lead the organization – BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty) – that continues to advocate for religious freedom for all in the same spirit as Carter did. BJC awarded Carter our J.M. Dawson Religious Liberty Award in 1996. We continue to strive to see a country where Americans like Carter, who have deep theological convictions, can bring their full selves to their public lives, while never imposing their religious beliefs on others or using the government to promote religion.
“I just look at death as not a threat,” Carter said during an interview in 1976. “It’s inevitable, and I have an assurance of eternal life.” As we remember his life and mourn with his family, we are also concerned about the threats to the separation of church and state—an American ideal that Carter championed throughout his life. Sadly, people who seem inclined toward a theocracy instead—like many who were part of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021—continue to organize and gain political power. The ultra-conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court is eroding the line between government and religion in case after case.
Carter was also concerned about the growing alliance of right-wing politics and conservative Christianity. “There’s no doubt that the Christian right has gone to bed with the more conservative elements of the Republican Party,” he said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1997. “And there’s been a melding in their goals when it comes to the separation of church and state.”
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In addition to his work at the Carter Center, Carter continued to play an active role in Baptist life. While he publicly broke from the Southern Baptist Convention following the fundamentalist takeover of the denomination, Carter remained a deacon and taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, well into his 90s. In 2007, he brought Baptist leaders from across racial and theological divisions in Baptist life together, culminating in the New Baptist Covenant.
In a time of growing Christian nationalism reinforced and manipulated by officeholders and candidates, more government entanglement with religion as a result of misguided decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court, and the rapid decline in church attendance, I hope we can pause for a moment as we remember the life of Jimmy Carter to consider how different the relationship between religion and government would look in the United States if our political leaders would follow Carter’s example.
Not only would our nation’s commitment to religious freedom for all—including those who want to be free from religion—be strengthened, but I also believe Christianity would flourish. Baptists believe that faith should be freely chosen, not imposed on people by the government. “We believe in separation of church and state, that there should be no unwarranted influence on the church or religion by the state, and vice versa,” Carter said at a press conference as president in 1977.
We don’t need theocracy to revive American Christianity; we need people to act like Jesus.
Thank you, my dear brother in Christ, for being the epitome of a faithful Christian in American public life. May we remember and be inspired by your life during these challenging days for our country and our faith.
In the spring of 1980, I entered the voting booth for the first time. I was a senior in high school, and the Democratic Party was experiencing a heated presidential primary race between incumbent President Jimmy Carter and his challenger, Sen. Ted Kennedy. I was 18 years old, and like so many at that age, I felt I knew it all. I saw Carter as a bumbler who had mismanaged domestic and international affairs. So I cast my ballot for Kennedy.
Though Carter won the 1980 Democratic nomination, on November 4, 1980, he lost his re-election bid to Gov. Ronald Reagan, ending his presidential tenure after a single term. He and First Lady Rosalynn Carter left the White House on January 20, 1981, and returned to their home in Plains, Ga. We didn’t know the phrase at the time, but Carter was, essentially, cancelled.
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The world looks very different today—and so, too, does the man who was turned out of office all those years ago. Five decades later, Carter is viewed as a humanitarian and a statesman; a reputation that eluded him during his 1980 campaign. With Carter’s passing, we should take a moment to reflect on a person who showed incredible grace and grit in a post-presidential life and career. Those of us in the trust building business, in particular, should consider how his status changed so significantly—and what lessons we can learn.
In fact, I’ve found that there are four takeaways from Carter’s reputation restoration:
First, time will reveal the truth. During Carter’s re-election campaign, the President’s inability to free the 52 Americans being held hostage at the American Embassy in Iran became a central issue. His approval ratings plummeted to 31% during the period. Some have since suggested that if the hostages had been released prior to the election, it would have boosted Carter’s reelection prospects— yet the hostages were not released until January 20, 1981, minutes after Reagan’s inauguration. We learned why only recently. In 2023, The New York Times revealed that Reagan ally and Texas political giant John B Connally, Jr., took a private trip to the Middle East during the 1980 campaign with a message for heads of state: Iran would get better treatment from Reagan than Carter, so they should hold the hostages until after the election. That’s exactly what they did, and Carter was denied a victory that might have sent him back to the White House. This revelation certainly reframes history—and recasts Carter’s role.
Read More: Freeing the Hostages Wouldn’t Have Gotten Jimmy Carter Re-Elected
Second, dream new dreams. After they left the White House, the Carters didn’t gaze into the rearview mirror with anger or bitterness. They returned to Georgia and pursued new careers and projects with gusto. They became authors and university professors, and started the Atlanta-based Carter Center—an organization that embodied their shared devotion to humanitarian causes. I’ve been honored to see their work firsthand; my company, Pfizer, has long partnered with The Carter Center to eliminate blinding Trachoma in countries where neglected tropical diseases are endemic. I have had the privilege to visit The Carter Center as well as several treatment sites in Africa where Pfizer and The Carter Center continue to aid those impacted by Trachoma. But my greatest honor was hosting and interviewing President Carter at Pfizer’s headquarters in 2013 to celebrate 15 years of partnership with the International Trachoma Initiative. His warmth, sincerity, intelligence, and charisma were evident to all—and so, too, was the satisfaction he had found in a post-presidential career that allowed him to take on new and vital challenges.
Third, work with your hands. In 1984, shortly after their return to Plains, the Carters launched the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project, an annual home-building blitz organized through Habitat for Humanity. The Carters were advocates for affordable housing, but they were also hands-on volunteers. The Work Project wasn’t about galas or red carpets; instead, their construction work kept them busy swinging hammers and driving nails. The Carter Work Project built over 4,400 homes in 14 countries in the 35 years the Carters were directly involved—and allowed the Carters to recreate deep bonds with the public.
Finally, be an optimist—and recognize the opportunity that a new day provides. In Carter’s book, The Virtues of Aging, he writes of a sweeping Barbara Walters interview that covered all aspects of his life. The two spoke about his extensive journey from peanut farmer to submariner; from the Governor’s mansion to the White House, and back home to Plains. At one point, Walters asked him: “Mr. President, you have had a number of exciting and challenging careers; what have been your best years?” Carter’s response was: “Now is the best time of all.”
Read More: A Media Looking for Mistakes Portrayed Jimmy Carter as a Failure. It’s Time to Look Deeper
Let us all take comfort and courage in the former President’s example. Over the course of five decades, he taught us that our best years are not necessarily about the height of our power, but the depths of our resiliency; that history is long, and new opportunities abound. Above all, he taught us that, with the right approach and the right attitude, now can be the best time of all.
President Carter may not have earned my vote as a high schooler in 1980. But nearly five decades later, he has certainly earned my gratitude, admiration, and respect. But most importantly, the life he lived offers lessons for us all.
The Carters spent their earliest days as husband and wife at the Naval base in Norfolk, Va., where Jimmy was gone most of the week on assignments and Rosalynn enjoyed a crash course in homemaking.
Their first child, son John William “Jack” Carter, was born July 3, 1947, so the couple celebrated their first anniversary at the hospital as a family of three. The following year, Jimmy was selected for submarine school in New London, Conn., and finally had regular hours so he could be home each night with his wife and child.
They welcomed son Chip on April 12, 1950, while they were living in Hawaii. Then it was onto San Diego, Calif., then back to New London—where son Donnel Jeffrey “Jeff” Carter was born Aug. 18, 1952—and then they moved to Schenectady, N.Y., so Jimmy could study nuclear power at Union College.
Rosalynn has said that she planned on being a Navy wife, moving from city to city and seeing the world with her husband. Which she ultimately did, but not in the way she ever would have imagined.