Jimmy Carter’s legacy lives on.
One month after Carter, the oldest living U.S. president of all time, passed away at 100, the 39th president posthumously made history at the 67th Grammy Awards,…
Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood are momentarily stepping back into the spotlight.
While the couple have remained largely out of the public eye since an anonymous woman filed a sexual assault…
The Carters may have had a young daughter but they also had three daughters-in-law by the time Jimmy became president, and most of the family moved to Washington.
Jack and wife Juliette “Judy” Langford stayed in Georgia, where they had welcomed son Jason James Carter on Aug. 7, 1975, and where daughter Sarah Rosemary would be born Dec. 19, 1978. (After their divorce, Jack married mother of two Elizabeth Brasfield on May 15, 1992.)
The Carters’ second son, James Earl “Chip” Carter III, worked for the Democratic National Committee in Washington while his dad was in office and moved into the White House with wife Caron Griffin, who was eight months pregnant on Inauguration Day. Still, she strolled along the parade route with the rest of the family for a few blocks when the president and first lady made the unprecedented move to walk the whole mile and a half from the Capitol to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“People along the parade route, when they saw that we were walking, began to cheer and weep,” Jimmy later wrote, “and it was an emotional experience for us as well.”
George W. Bush is giving a new meaning to the presidential hello.
The former president was one of several U.S. leaders who attended the funeral of Jimmy Carter at the Washington National Cathedral on Jan. 9, and folks could not get enough of the moment he shared with Barack Obama.
As he entered the cathedral for the services, Bush—who was joined by wife Laura Bush—went to take his seat next to Obama, who was already seated beside President-Elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump.
As the Bushes walked by, Obama stood to let them pass, leading to the moment where President Bush gave Obama a friendly tap on the belly with his hand before sitting down.
The interaction quickly went viral, with many delighted by the relationship between the Bushes and the Obamas.
“The belly tap is remarkable,” one user posted to X, formerly Twitter. Another joked, “I have just watched this 100 times without blinking.”
Michelle Obama is sending her condolences to late president Jimmy Carter from afar.
After the former president died Dec. 29 at the age of 100, President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden,…
Since former President Jimmy Carter’s death on Dec. 29, commentators have focused on two supposedly defining features of his presidential tenure: his successes in promoting peace and human rights internationally, and his failures in leading the American people through the economic and cultural wilderness of the late 1970s.
This conventional wisdom ignores one of the most important and ironic legacies of Carter’s career: the powerful brand of civic populism he brought to the presidency, but later abandoned in favor of the “expert-knows-best” technocratic culture that had already come to dominate much of Washington.
Today, political and cultural elites tend to associate “populism” with the demagogic appeals to right-wing, anti-immigrant, and nationalist sentiments permeating the last few election cycles. In the words of New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohen, the current era of U.S. politics is “defined by Donald Trump’s brand of conservative populism.” Such interpretations elide the actual history of populism in America. In the process, they encourage a reflexive aversion among anti-Trump elites to any genuine engagement with those who deeply (or even vaguely) sympathize with him—an aversion that millions of voters noticed and punished at the polls.
Anti-Trumpists eager to formulate a compelling alternative should study the deeper history of American populism. They would find that populism, in the main, has not been a politics of grievance and demagoguery. It has more often been a politics of hope, collaboration, and innovation among diverse Americans committed to expanding their collective power in public life. Such populism is best described as “civic.” It is an alternative to today’s partisan politics, putting “the people” rather than strategists, technocrats, or business moguls at the center of the action.
Civic populism is still alive in neighborhoods and self-organizing communities addressing problems and advancing goals their governments will not or cannot address. We should celebrate and build on these examples, bringing the politics Carter left behind back to the fore of American democracy.
The language of populism originated in the Gilded Age from the 1870s to the 1890s, an era of business consolidation and monopoly capitalism. These trends were accompanied by falling commodity prices and predatory lending schemes that threatened the livelihood of small farmers. In response, many such farmers—often in interracial groups—organized cooperatives across the South and Midwest with millions of members in more than 40,000 local alliances. While building and operating their own granaries, mills, and equipment exchanges, they also published over 1,000 newspapers promoting the ideal of a “cooperative commonwealth.” That ideal resonated beyond rural America, attracting artisans, blue collar workers, and small business owners in groups like the Knights of Labor as well as leaders of diverse women’s groups who viewed concentrated economic power as a threat to family health and their own standing as equals.
The movement culminated in the short-lived People’s (or Populist) Party, which between 1892 and 1900 mounted significant challenges to the two-party system. Despite some regional successes in forging cross-racial alliances, and others’ in creating strategic partnerships with urban labor unions and immigrant communities, racial and cultural differences hobbled the party. By 1904 it had ceased to be a national force. Yet populism as a movement of self-directed, commons-building work enlisting the civic energies of everyone and viewing democracy as a way of life, not simply a trip to the ballot box, persisted in the twentieth century.
Various progressive impulses and reforms of the Roosevelt and Wilson eras, New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, and above all, the Black Freedom Struggle built on and descended from this civic populist legacy. All of these movements had what Melvin Rogers, a leading theorist of Black politics, calls an “aspirational” view of citizenship: dynamic, pluralist, and created by the people themselves through their own collaborative relationships. Such citizenship is radically different from the constitutional version denied to so many throughout history: It can be supported by the state, but never taken away.
Jimmy Carter campaigned for president as a populist outsider to Washington. A peanut farmer who grew up among African Americans, he was deeply religious, civic minded, and a champion of empowering communities. Upon taking office as Georgia’s governor, he shocked southern politicians by declaring that racial discrimination must end.
An evangelical, Carter forged an alliance with Geno Baroni, Director of the Urban Task Force of the U.S. Catholic Conference and founder of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. After serving as the liaison between leaders of the 1963 March on Washington and Catholic Bishops, Baroni argued for a “new populism” that would bridge growing divides between racial and ethnic groups in cities and towns nationwide. His forceful paper, “Neighborhood Revitalization,” drafted for a 1976 conference convening multiracial neighborhood leaders and politicians from both parties, galvanized the neighborhood movement across the country.
Baroni argued that federal, state, and municipal policies had “nearly destroyed” the organic “human associations” which, for residents, “make urban life possible.” Challenging orthodoxy, he insisted that policymakers in both parties were to blame. “We have failed to recognize that people live in neighborhoods, not cities,” he argued, and “have transferred so much authority and decision-making power to various levels of government that the vitality and problem-solving capacity of our neighborhoods are steadily disappearing.” Baroni concluded with an old and venerable adage: “Power must be returned to the people.”
After helping Carter connect with white ethnic and working-class communities in industrial states, thus helping secure him the presidency, Baroni was appointed Assistant Secretary for Neighborhood Development in the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs. With initial support from the president and the ardent backing of First Lady Roslyn Carter, Baroni transformed several federal programs, eschewing block grants to cities and states and instead directing resources to community organizations focused on self-help and capacity-building work with their immediate neighbors.
The First Lady remained a champion of Baroni’s approach, but most of the President’s Ivy League advisors deemed him a sentimental idealist with an exaggerated view of the people’s potential. In his 1978 State of the Union address, Carter subtly channeled their condescension. To mitigate the sense of distance and disaffection—growing even then—between citizens and government, he proposed “what Abraham Lincoln sought… a government for the people.” As political theorist Sheldon Wolin keenly observed soon after, this formulation was a tellingly technocratic revision of Lincoln’s ideal, omitting the latter’s equal commitment to a government of and by the people. In Carter’s streamlined framework, the people are passive: government provides solutions and benefits, the president is manager-in-chief, and citizens mere clients and customers. Ironically, Carter lost the 1980 election in a landslide to an opponent, Ronald Reagan, who ran (disingenuously, it turned out) as a champion of neighborhood revitalization—a theme Carter, the former civic populist, ignored.
That pattern has now been repeated over more than four decades. Despite moments of affirming strong citizenship—Bill Clinton’s “New Covenant” State of the Union in 1995, Barack Obama’s 2008 “Yes We Can” campaign—Democrats have foundered on the technocratic paradigm ever since. Too often, Democrats propose government for the people but not of, by, or even with the people. When seeking solutions beyond government, Democrats and Republicans alike have turned to markets—a decades-long preference for neoliberalism over civic populism that has eroded their standing among once reliable constituencies.
Indeed, both Trump and Harris voters expressed deep dissatisfaction with the direction our nation is heading. But there are also stirrings suggesting that Americans’ ancient impulses for self-organizing, public-minded work remain potent.
For instance, hundreds of poor and working-class communities cooperate to create common goods and build civic capacity through the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the nation’s oldest and largest community organizing network (and one with which Baroni had close ties). Meanwhile, the National Civic League’s “Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Map” lists thousands of local democracy groups, many created recently. All provide foundations for a revival of civic populism as a public philosophy and political ethos that generates hope, generosity, and empowerment rather than the resentment, polarization, and nihilism our current ideological climate breeds. As democracy researcher Will Friedman has found, the more people hear about and discuss such stories of citizen-led, civic-minded work, the more they believe change—of the kind that benefits all—is possible.
Toward the end of his presidency, Carter hinted at a renewed appreciation for such work. As he declared in his farewell address of December 14, 1981: “I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office, to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of President, the title of citizen.” Carter spent his post-presidential years advancing important causes he thought governments were ignoring.
But we do not need to be Jimmy Carter, or even Geno Baroni, to embrace civic populism in our communities. We need only to draw on the best of our traditions—above all, the tradition of seeking and bringing out the best in our fellow citizens. “We the people” made America. We need to continue the work.
The official state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter will take place on Jan. 9 in Washington, D.C., following days of services and ceremonies to honor the 39th President.
President Joe Biden declared Jan. 9 a National Day of Mourning, and ordered all executive departments and agencies of the federal government to close out of respect for the former President, who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100. But ceremonies honoring Carter will start before then, on Jan. 4, when a motorcade will take Carter through his hometown of Plains, Georgia.
Here’s what to know about the scheduled tributes for the former President.
On Jan. 4, Carter will be taken through his hometown by motorcade, which will take a “brief pause” at his boyhood home in front of his family’s farm, according to a schedule released by the Joint Task Force-National Capital Region and the U.S. Army Military District of Washington. There, the National Park Service will salute and ring a historic farm bell 39 times.
The motorcade will then take Carter to Atlanta, pausing at the Georgia State Capitol for a moment of silence led by Gov. Brian Kemp and other state and local officials. Carter will then be carried into the Carter Presidential Center, where a private service will take place. The former President will then lie in repose at the Atlanta center and the public can come and pay their respects until 6 a.m. on Jan. 7.
Read More: Jimmy Carter Was More Successful Than He Got Credit For
On Jan. 7, Carter will be taken to the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C., where a funeral procession will march to the U.S. Capitol. There, members of Congress will be able to pay their respects during a service held in the Rotunda. The former President will then lie in state, which will open to the public later that evening. Carter will lie in state until the morning of Jan. 9.
The morning of Jan. 9, a motorcade will take Carter from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington National Cathedral, where the national funeral service will run from 10-11 a.m. ET. The schedule released by the U.S. military task force didn’t include details about the state service, but Biden previously said that Carter had asked him to deliver a eulogy at his funeral.
After the service, Carter will be flown back to Georgia, and a private funeral service will take place in Plains at Maranatha Baptist Church, where Carter taught Sunday school and where a funeral service was held for his wife, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, in November 2023.
A motorcade will then take the former President and his family through downtown Plains for Carter’s final journey through his hometown. The motorcade will take Carter to his family’s residence for a private interment next to his wife, according to the New York Times. Before the interment, the U.S. Navy will honor the former President with a missing man formation flyover.
Biden will attend the state funeral, and other former presidents and first ladies are likely to attend as well. President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he plans to attend the funeral.
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.
ATLANTA — Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer who won the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, endured humbling defeat after one tumultuous term and then redefined life after the White House as a global humanitarian, has died. He was 100 years old.
The longest-lived American president died on Sunday, more than a year after entering hospice care, at his home in the small town of Plains, Georgia, where he and his wife, Rosalynn, who died at 96 in November 2023, spent most of their lives, The Carter Center said.
“Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia,” the center simply said in posting about Carter’s death on the social media platform X.
Businessman, Navy officer, evangelist, politician, negotiator, author, woodworker, citizen of the world — Carter forged a path that still challenges political assumptions and stands out among the 45 men who reached the nation’s highest office. The 39th president leveraged his ambition with a keen intellect, deep religious faith and prodigious work ethic, conducting diplomatic missions into his 80s and building houses for the poor well into his 90s.
“My faith demands — this is not optional — my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have to try to make a difference,” Carter once said.
A moderate Democrat, Carter entered the 1976 presidential race as a little-known Georgia governor with a broad smile, outspoken Baptist mores and technocratic plans reflecting his education as an engineer. His no-frills campaign depended on public financing, and his promise not to deceive the American people resonated after Richard Nixon’s disgrace and U.S. defeat in southeast Asia.
“If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I would not deserve to be your president,” Carter repeated before narrowly beating Republican incumbent Gerald Ford, who had lost popularity pardoning Nixon.
Carter governed amid Cold War pressures, turbulent oil markets and social upheaval over racism, women’s rights and America’s global role. His most acclaimed achievement in office was a Mideast peace deal that he brokered by keeping Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the bargaining table for 13 days in 1978. That Camp David experience inspired the post-presidential center where Carter would establish so much of his legacy.
Yet Carter’s electoral coalition splintered under double-digit inflation, gasoline lines and the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran. His bleakest hour came when eight Americans died in a failed hostage rescue in April 1980, helping to ensure his landslide defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan.
Carter acknowledged in his 2020 “White House Diary” that he could be “micromanaging” and “excessively autocratic,” complicating dealings with Congress and the federal bureaucracy. He also turned a cold shoulder to Washington’s news media and lobbyists, not fully appreciating their influence on his political fortunes.
“It didn’t take us long to realize that the underestimation existed, but by that time we were not able to repair the mistake,” Carter told historians in 1982, suggesting that he had “an inherent incompatibility” with Washington insiders.
Carter insisted his overall approach was sound and that he achieved his primary objectives — to “protect our nation’s security and interests peacefully” and “enhance human rights here and abroad” — even if he fell spectacularly short of a second term.
Ignominious defeat, though, allowed for renewal. The Carters founded The Carter Center in 1982 as a first-of-its-kind base of operations, asserting themselves as international peacemakers and champions of democracy, public health and human rights.
“I was not interested in just building a museum or storing my White House records and memorabilia,” Carter wrote in a memoir published after his 90th birthday. “I wanted a place where we could work.”
That work included easing nuclear tensions in North and South Korea, helping to avert a U.S. invasion of Haiti and negotiating cease-fires in Bosnia and Sudan. By 2022, The Carter Center had declared at least 113 elections in Latin America, Asia and Africa to be free or fraudulent. Recently, the center began monitoring U.S. elections as well.
Carter’s stubborn self-assuredness and even self-righteousness proved effective once he was unencumbered by the Washington order, sometimes to the point of frustrating his successors.
He went “where others are not treading,” he said, to places like Ethiopia, Liberia and North Korea, where he secured the release of an American who had wandered across the border in 2010.
“I can say what I like. I can meet whom I want. I can take on projects that please me and reject the ones that don’t,” Carter said.
He announced an arms-reduction-for-aid deal with North Korea without clearing the details with Bill Clinton’s White House. He openly criticized President George W. Bush for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also criticized America’s approach to Israel with his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” And he repeatedly countered U.S. administrations by insisting North Korea should be included in international affairs, a position that most aligned Carter with Republican President Donald Trump.
Among the center’s many public health initiatives, Carter vowed to eradicate the guinea worm parasite during his lifetime, and nearly achieved it: Cases dropped from millions in the 1980s to nearly a handful. With hardhats and hammers, the Carters also built homes with Habitat for Humanity.
The Nobel committee’s 2002 Peace Prize cites his “untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” Carter should have won it alongside Sadat and Begin in 1978, the chairman added.
Carter accepted the recognition saying there was more work to be done.
“The world is now, in many ways, a more dangerous place,” he said. “The greater ease of travel and communication has not been matched by equal understanding and mutual respect.”
Carter’s globetrotting took him to remote villages where he met little “Jimmy Carters,” so named by admiring parents. But he spent most of his days in the same one-story Plains house — expanded and guarded by Secret Service agents — where they lived before he became governor. He regularly taught Sunday School lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church until his mobility declined and the coronavirus pandemic raged. Those sessions drew visitors from around the world to the small sanctuary where Carter will receive his final send-off after a state funeral at Washington’s National Cathedral.
The common assessment that he was a better ex-president than president rankled Carter and his allies. His prolific post-presidency gave him a brand above politics, particularly for Americans too young to witness him in office. But Carter also lived long enough to see biographers and historians reassess his White House years more generously.
His record includes the deregulation of key industries, reduction of U.S. dependence on foreign oil, cautious management of the national debt and notable legislation on the environment, education and mental health. He focused on human rights in foreign policy, pressuring dictators to release thousands of political prisoners. He acknowledged America’s historical imperialism, pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders and relinquished control of the Panama Canal. He normalized relations with China.
“I am not nominating Jimmy Carter for a place on Mount Rushmore,” Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic policy director, wrote in a 2018 book.
“He was not a great president” but also not the “hapless and weak” caricature voters rejected in 1980, Eizenstat said. Rather, Carter was “good and productive” and “delivered results, many of which were realized only after he left office.”
Madeleine Albright, a national security staffer for Carter and Clinton’s secretary of state, wrote in Eizenstat’s forward that Carter was “consequential and successful” and expressed hope that “perceptions will continue to evolve” about his presidency.
“Our country was lucky to have him as our leader,” said Albright, who died in 2022.
Jonathan Alter, who penned a comprehensive Carter biography published in 2020, said in an interview that Carter should be remembered for “an epic American life” spanning from a humble start in a home with no electricity or indoor plumbing through decades on the world stage across two centuries.
“He will likely go down as one of the most misunderstood and underestimated figures in American history,” Alter told The Associated Press.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains and spent his early years in nearby Archery. His family was a minority in the mostly Black community, decades before the civil rights movement played out at the dawn of Carter’s political career.
Carter, who campaigned as a moderate on race relations but governed more progressively, talked often of the influence of his Black caregivers and playmates but also noted his advantages: His land-owning father sat atop Archery’s tenant-farming system and owned a main street grocery. His mother, Lillian, would become a staple of his political campaigns.
Seeking to broaden his world beyond Plains and its population of fewer than 1,000 — then and now — Carter won an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1946. That same year he married Rosalynn Smith, another Plains native, a decision he considered more important than any he made as head of state. She shared his desire to see the world, sacrificing college to support his Navy career.
Carter climbed in rank to lieutenant, but then his father was diagnosed with cancer, so the submarine officer set aside his ambitions of admiralty and moved the family back to Plains. His decision angered Rosalynn, even as she dived into the peanut business alongside her husband.
Carter again failed to talk with his wife before his first run for office — he later called it “inconceivable” not to have consulted her on such major life decisions — but this time, she was on board.
“My wife is much more political,” Carter told the AP in 2021.
He won a state Senate seat in 1962 but wasn’t long for the General Assembly and its back-slapping, deal-cutting ways. He ran for governor in 1966 — losing to arch-segregationist Lester Maddox — and then immediately focused on the next campaign.
Carter had spoken out against church segregation as a Baptist deacon and opposed racist “Dixiecrats” as a state senator. Yet as a local school board leader in the 1950s he had not pushed to end school segregation even after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, despite his private support for integration. And in 1970, Carter ran for governor again as the more conservative Democrat against Carl Sanders, a wealthy businessman Carter mocked as “Cufflinks Carl.” Sanders never forgave him for anonymous, race-baiting flyers, which Carter disavowed.
Ultimately, Carter won his races by attracting both Black voters and culturally conservative whites. Once in office, he was more direct.
“I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he declared in his 1971 inaugural address, setting a new standard for Southern governors that landed him on the cover of Time magazine.
His statehouse initiatives included environmental protection, boosting rural education and overhauling antiquated executive branch structures. He proclaimed Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the slain civil rights leader’s home state. And he decided, as he received presidential candidates in 1972, that they were no more talented than he was.
In 1974, he ran Democrats’ national campaign arm. Then he declared his own candidacy for 1976. An Atlanta newspaper responded with the headline: “Jimmy Who?”
The Carters and a “Peanut Brigade” of family members and Georgia supporters camped out in Iowa and New Hampshire, establishing both states as presidential proving grounds. His first Senate endorsement: a young first-termer from Delaware named Joe Biden.
Yet it was Carter’s ability to navigate America’s complex racial and rural politics that cemented the nomination. He swept the Deep South that November, the last Democrat to do so, as many white Southerners shifted to Republicans in response to civil rights initiatives.
A self-declared “born-again Christian,” Carter drew snickers by referring to Scripture in a Playboy magazine interview, saying he “had looked on many women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” The remarks gave Ford a new foothold and television comedians pounced — including NBC’s new “Saturday Night Live” show. But voters weary of cynicism in politics found it endearing.
Carter chose Minnesota Sen. Walter “Fritz” Mondale as his running mate on a “Grits and Fritz” ticket. In office, he elevated the vice presidency and the first lady’s office. Mondale’s governing partnership was a model for influential successors Al Gore, Dick Cheney and Biden. Rosalynn Carter was one of the most involved presidential spouses in history, welcomed into Cabinet meetings and huddles with lawmakers and top aides.
The Carters presided with uncommon informality: He used his nickname “Jimmy” even when taking the oath of office, carried his own luggage and tried to silence the Marine Band’s “Hail to the Chief.” They bought their clothes off the rack. Carter wore a cardigan for a White House address, urging Americans to conserve energy by turning down their thermostats. Amy, the youngest of four children, attended District of Columbia public school.
Washington’s social and media elite scorned their style. But the larger concern was that “he hated politics,” according to Eizenstat, leaving him nowhere to turn politically once economic turmoil and foreign policy challenges took their toll.
Carter partially deregulated the airline, railroad and trucking industries and established the departments of Education and Energy, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He designated millions of acres of Alaska as national parks or wildlife refuges. He appointed a then-record number of women and nonwhite people to federal posts. He never had a Supreme Court nomination, but he elevated civil rights attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the nation’s second highest court, positioning her for a promotion in 1993. He appointed Paul Volker, the Federal Reserve chairman whose policies would help the economy boom in the 1980s — after Carter left office. He built on Nixon’s opening with China, and though he tolerated autocrats in Asia, pushed Latin America from dictatorships to democracy.
But he couldn’t immediately tame inflation or the related energy crisis.
And then came Iran.
After he admitted the exiled Shah of Iran to the U.S. for medical treatment, the American Embassy in Tehran was overrun in 1979 by followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Negotiations to free the hostages broke down repeatedly ahead of the failed rescue attempt.
The same year, Carter signed SALT II, the new strategic arms treaty with Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union, only to pull it back, impose trade sanctions and order a U.S. boycott of the Moscow Olympics after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
Hoping to instill optimism, he delivered what the media dubbed his “malaise” speech, although he didn’t use that word. He declared the nation was suffering “a crisis of confidence.” By then, many Americans had lost confidence in the president, not themselves.
Carter campaigned sparingly for reelection because of the hostage crisis, instead sending Rosalynn as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy challenged him for the Democratic nomination. Carter famously said he’d “kick his ass,” but was hobbled by Kennedy as Reagan rallied a broad coalition with “make America great again” appeals and asking voters whether they were “better off than you were four years ago.”
Reagan further capitalized on Carter’s lecturing tone, eviscerating him in their lone fall debate with the quip: “There you go again.” Carter lost all but six states and Republicans rolled to a new Senate majority.
Carter successfully negotiated the hostages’ freedom after the election, but in one final, bitter turn of events, Tehran waited until hours after Carter left office to let them walk free.
At 56, Carter returned to Georgia with “no idea what I would do with the rest of my life.”
Four decades after launching The Carter Center, he still talked of unfinished business.
“I thought when we got into politics we would have resolved everything,” Carter told the AP in 2021. “But it’s turned out to be much more long-lasting and insidious than I had thought it was. I think in general, the world itself is much more divided than in previous years.”
Still, he affirmed what he said when he underwent treatment for a cancer diagnosis in his 10th decade of life.
“I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” he said in 2015. “I’ve had a wonderful life. I’ve had thousands of friends, I’ve had an exciting, adventurous and gratifying existence.”
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.
Read More: How U.S. Failures in the 1970s Contributed to the Israel-Hamas War
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.
The presidency of Jimmy Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at age 100, is typically understood as bland and ineffective—perhaps best symbolized by the uninspiring cardigan sweaters he favored wearing in office.
Four decades of subsequent good works have transformed Carter’s cardigan into a symbol of something more wholesome, humble even. Carter’s post-presidential authenticity has even attracted a young, left-leaning fan base, like those using the TikTok hashtag #jimmycartergotmepregnant as a mock ironic lament about the declining quality of recent presidents.
Yet, both portraits miss the mark. Carter was neither as ineffective a president as his critics allege, nor as liberal a politician as his new fans believe. Instead, the 39th president scored enormous policy successes—but observers often missed them because they didn’t grasp that Carter was one of the most substantively conservative presidents of the last half-century. In some ways, Carter actually did more to push American economic policy to the right than his Republican successors Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Understanding this reality paints Carter’s presidency in a totally different light.
Carter often described himself as a “conservative progressive,” which he defined as being “a fiscal conservative, but quite liberal on such issues as civil rights, environmental quality, and helping people overcome handicaps to lead fruitful lives.” Carter’s fiscal conservatism was perhaps natural for a successful, sophisticated agribusinessman.
During his 1976 presidential campaign, Carter stumped on the proposition that Washington was a “confused, bloated bureaucratic mess.” If elected, he pledged to streamline government agencies and reduce spending just as he had as governor of Georgia. This was not mere campaign rhetoric that disappeared once Carter entered office. In his 1978 State of the Union address, Carter said, “Government cannot solve our problems …[or] eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy, or reduce inflation, or save our cities, or cure illiteracy, or provide energy.” It was an applause line one might have expected from a stalwart conservative Republican, not a Democratic president.
Unsurprisingly, Carter’s conservatism alienated much of the Democratic left. Looking back on his presidency in 1982, one union leader remarked, “As presidents go, he [Carter] was on par with Calvin Coolidge.” It was a fitting comparison for a president who once bragged that his policies represented “the greatest change in the relationship between business and government since the New Deal.”
Carter’s conservatism ran deeper than mere rhetoric. He transformed government regulation of the economy more than any other modern president. It was Carter, not Reagan, who was the true “Great Deregulator.” Carter viewed deregulation as the solution to stagflation, the unprecedented economic challenge confronting America in the 1970s. During his presidency, inflation rose from 6.5% to 13.5%, even as unemployment reached eight percent by the time he left office. And Carter blamed excessive regulation for these economic headwinds.
Not all of his deregulatory push generated opposition from the left. Deregulation of certain industries, especially trucking and airlines, even garnered support from Carter’s most prominent liberal critic and 1980 primary challenger, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). At the 1980 Democratic Convention, Kennedy bragged that his party had “ended excessive regulation … and we restored competition to the marketplace.” Kennedy’s views angered the labor unions who had long backed him in Massachusetts, but he believed that making himself the congressional face of deregulation would improve his national, presidential appeal.
That calculus explained why Kennedy and Carter joined forces to unshackle the airline industry. Carter appointed the economist and deregulatory hawk Alfred Kahn to the Civil Aeronautics Board, which created pressure on Congress to pass Kennedy’s legislation ending government regulation of flight routes and ticket price controls.
Carter’s success with airline deregulation in 1978—and Republican pickups in the midterm elections—lowered the political barriers to further deregulation. Carter pounced on the opportunity and went far beyond what liberals found tolerable. The administration worked to free scores of industries, from energy to trucking to rail, in subtle, yet significant ways. For example, after passage of the Motor Carrier Act of 1980—which allowed trucking companies to choose their own routes—500,000 new truckers flooded the market. The new efficiencies and additional competition ultimately reduced carriage costs by a third, benefiting every category of good produced or sold in America.
The positive impacts of these moves are often credited to Carter’s successors because the benefits only became evident after he had left office. But in concrete ways, he helped lay the foundation for the economic prosperity of the 1980s and 1990s.
Yet, perhaps the most underrated front in Carter’s war on regulation reshaped broadcasting, politics, and entertainment. Charles Ferris, Carter’s Federal Communications Commission Chair, was a zealous deregulator, who called the FCC’s thicket of regulations “ossified” and a “dead shell.” He repealed regulations that had stunted cable television’s growth, and acquiesced to the courts limiting FCC oversight. As a result, cable grew rapidly; by the mid-1980s, the share of households with cable subscriptions had tripled to nearly 60 percent.
Ferris also slowed enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine—a rule meant to promote balance in political broadcasting—which had been weaponized by the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations against political opponents. By streamlining the station license renewal process, Ferris also made it far harder for activists on both sides of the political spectrum to use the doctrine to threaten broadcasters. While it was Reagan’s FCC that did away with the Fairness Doctrine—something for which many on the left still curse him—it simply put the finishing touches on Carter’s revolution.
These deregulatory moves transformed news and entertainment, making everything from HBO to cable news channels to hit shows like The Sopranos and The Daily Show possible.
Read More: Jimmy Carter Was More Successful Than He Got Credit For
Carter’s deregulatory campaigns therefore reshaped the American economy, the media landscape, and national politics in seismic ways.
If he had been a Republican, he might rank higher than a subpar 26th (out of 44) in presidential rankings, perhaps even neck-and-neck with the ninth place Reagan. But he was too conservative for his most progressive allies and his policy stances soon became far out of step with a rapidly homogenizing Democratic Party. Meanwhile, Republicans—who were ideologically more amenable to Carter’s laissez-faire policy accomplishments—were not predisposed to recognize the achievements of a member of the opposition.
Yet, Carter’s conservative victories compare favorably to the accomplishments of his Republican successors. Reagan decreased the power of unionized air traffic controllers; but Carter deregulated the entire airline industry with profound results. Americans today fly four times as many miles at less than half the cost per mile as they did when Carter was president, while as many Americans now fly each year (an average of 49% from 2015-2019) as the percentage in 1971 who had ever flown before.
Similarly, George H.W. Bush sent troops to Kuwait to protect U.S. oil imports; but Carter cut American dependence on foreign oil imports nearly in half by deregulating the energy sector and encouraging domestic production. George W. Bush massively expanded the federal education bureaucracy with the No Child Left Behind Act, while Carter cut entire federal agencies, like the Civil Aeronautics Board. During Trump’s presidency, the federal debt to GDP ratio broke the record previously set during World War II, whereas Carter reduced that ratio to its lowest point since the beginning of the New Deal.
For good or ill, Carter remains the most substantively conservative president of the last half century—even though neither his champions or critics recognize it.
Paul Matzko is a historian and a research fellow at the Cato Institute. His book, The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement was published in 2020 by Oxford University 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recent press accounts indicate that Republican intermediaries—including former Treasury Secretary and Texas Gov. John Connally—meddled in the Iranian hostage crisis to benefit Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.
This reporting has raised anew one of the major “what if” questions in recent American political history: would Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday, Dec. 29, 2024, aged 100, have gotten re-elected if he had secured the release of the hostages? As always, historical counterfactuals are impossible to prove or disprove. But in this instance, while it’s tempting to think that freeing the hostages would have upended the race, a closer look at history reveals that Carter’s political troubles ran far deeper than the Iran crisis.
One the best contemporaneous narrators of Carter’s political struggles turned out to be Peter Jay, the British ambassador to the United States for two years of the 39th president’s term. Jay—a journalist by training—was an acute observer, so his secret dispatches back to London ably illuminated Carter’s political rise and fall.
Jay’s initial cables from Washington in 1977 described unique historical conditions that had permitted an unknown southern governor to win the presidency. For more than a decade, dating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, a constant stream of blows—from race riots to assassinations to Vietnam to Watergate had “shaken profoundly” what Jay called “the pillars of American self-esteem—morality, invincibility, stability, and growth.”
In Jay’s mind, Carter’s election expressed “as clearly as anything the yearning of the American people for a fresh start.” After years of unrelenting calamity, Americans were ready for something new and different.
Read More: Jimmy Carter Was More Successful Than He Got Credit For
Jay recognized that the new president brought to the White House a unique combination of personal attributes: spotless ethics, “a subtle, penetrating and ice-cold mind” and a commitment to tackling hard problems head-on—all of which stood in stark contrast to the failings of his immediate predecessors from both parties. Carter’s chief virtue was “his boldness” in identifying big policy problems and proposing solutions guided largely by “his perception of the national interest, with little regard to short-term or narrow sectional political considerations.” When presented with conventional wisdom to avoid political pain, Carter’s standard rejoinder to those around him was, effectively, “Don’t chicken out.”
Jay lauded Carter’s assessment of “the bankruptcy of pressure group politics … and his commendable determination to take the high road of national leadership.” If given an array of options ranging from “the most immediately unpopular but, on the merits, correct” to “the most popular, but, on merits, wrong,” Carter could be reliably counted upon to choose the former.
Perhaps the best manifestation of this trait came in September 1977, when Carter’s aggressive lobbying secured ratification of the Panama Canal treaties. The president was convinced that the national interest was best served by conveying control of the canal to Panama—despite vigorous opposition to what conservative critics called a “giveaway.” His opponents were by Carter’s lights either ill-informed or ill-intentioned. While he sensed that their arguments were potent politically, any price he had to pay at the polls was an acceptable consequence of doing the right thing.
A mere two months later, however, Jay began to detect significant unease with the president’s unique approach. In a confidential cable to London titled “Is Mr. Carter in Trouble?”, the ambassador observed increasing doubts about the president’s capacity to translate his high aspirations into political reality.
This cable remarked how quickly Carter, as president, had become buffeted by problems that, ironically, emerged from those very forces that brought him into office. He came to the presidency at a moment when it was an impaired institution. “The abuses of the Vietnam War, the scandal of Watergate, and the changing structure and attitudes of the Congress” all combined to “hamper the work of the would-be active President.”
A huge class of independent legislators elected in 1974—the “Watergate babies”—was intent on reasserting the authority of Congress in governing the nation. This surge of legislative independence included members of the president’s own party, who seemed more comfortable in opposing the White House than in doing Carter’s bidding on Capitol Hill. According to Jay, some of Carter’s aides privately acknowledged that when they came to the White House “they had no idea … how deeply the [institution of the] Presidency has been damaged.”
But Jay also acknowledged subsequently that Carter’s problems weren’t all structural. Instead, there was “a muffled and uncertain quality” about how he handled “people and problems,” which left “even those who are best disposed to him puzzled, disappointed, and occasionally irritated.”
The president lacked “the imagination to see how things will affect and look to others” who didn’t share Carter’s habit of considering “all sides of every issue.”
Carter exacerbated this lack of perceptiveness with what Jay termed a “dangerous proclivity” for seeing truth as “its own messenger.” Rather than explaining himself or selling his policies, Carter thought it was “enough to have a good reason [for policy].” In sum, Carter had “proved [to be] a better statesman and a worse politician than could have been expected.”
These observations came while Americans were enduring a constant parade of negative news, especially on the economy. Significant successes for Carter, capped by the Camp David Accords in September 1978, at best merely interrupted this steady stream. What Reagan started calling the “misery index”—a sum of the inflation and unemployment numbers—reached an all-time high in Carter’s term. The president seemed increasingly powerless to reverse the misery.
In July 1979, Carter’s most famous speech confirmed Jay’s tepid assessment of his political instincts. While the president’s main focus was supposed to be energy policy, he chose to delve simultaneously into a deeper “crisis of confidence” among the American people (later lampooned as a national “malaise”). Although the speech was received far better than history remembers, Carter, in his own words, “frittered away” any advantage he might have gained from it by immediately insisting that his entire Cabinet resign, which communicated instability. Once again, he had miscalculated political optics in such a way as to undermine his policies.
Jay’s outlook by the end of his term as ambassador had considerably darkened. Carter was “not much loved in America,” Jay admitted. “Nor has he yet inspired full confidence in other world leaders, friendly or otherwise.” Carter’s insular, “highly unconventional style of Government,” plus his lack of sensitivity to politics, were at the root of these problems. In over two years as president, he had failed “to win sufficiently widespread understanding of the virtue and necessity of this radical departure.”
Carter’s approval rating when Jay filed this final cable sat at 29%. Importantly, this was five months before the hostages were seized in Tehran. Carter’s polling numbers remained in that rough neighborhood for the balance of his presidency—except for a temporary jump, just after the hostages were taken, when Americans rallied around the flag.
Massive interest rates (the Federal Reserve’s painful antidote to inflation), rising gas prices, and a primary challenge from Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) all also hurt Carter in 1980. But as Jay had observed, the president was plagued by increasing doubts about his unconventional leadership and his ability to combat any of these problems in a way that would satisfy the public.
So, would the hostages’ return have made a difference? The evidence suggests probably not. A more persuasive case might be made that had the Republican efforts to interfere become public, it would have generated sufficient outrage to torpedo Reagan’s chances. But whatever did happen in those secret conversations, the Reagan campaign made every effort, successfully, to preserve deniability.
On his way out the door, after being replaced by new prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Jay predicted that even if Carter lost, the United States “is most certainly not going to disappear … Give it only a visible enemy and a fast horse, and you will still see all that old American ‘can-do.’” This prediction proved prescient. Carter lost in 1980 to a man who specialized in fast horses and visible enemies.
Russell L. Riley is the White Burkett Miller Center Professor of Ethics and Institutions at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and cochair of the Presidential Oral History Program. 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.
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