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Jimmy Carter

Former US president and Nobel Prize winner Jimmy Carter died at the age of 100 in his home in Plains, Georgia on Sunday 28 December 2024. In 2023, the Carter Center revealed that the 39th US president was fighting an aggressive form of melanoma skin cancer. He spent his last years at home under hospice care. He was the longest-lived president in American history.

Carter celebrated his 100th birthday on 01 October 2024, surrounded by family and friends in his backyard in Plains, Georgia. He was wheeled outside, beneath the shade of his trees, to witness a military flyover with four fighter jets. On 18 February 2023, the Carter Center announced that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter would be entering hospice care. His grandson Jason Carter spoke to the New York Times about his grandfather, saying, "He’s coming to the end, and he's very, very physically diminished."" The family thought they had just days left with him when he entered hospice. Former first lady Rosalynn Carter, wife of the 39th president and advocate for mental health care, died 19 November 2023 at age 96. The former first lady died peacefully at home, the Carter Center said.

Jimmy Carter, former Democratic governor of Georgia, won the presidency in 1976. Portraying himself during the campaign as an outsider to Washington politics, he promised a fresh approach to governing, but his lack of experience at the national level complicated his tenure from the start. A naval officer and engineer by training, he often appeared to be a technocrat, when many Americans wanted someone more visionary to lead them through troubled times.

Carter is considered to be a great ex-president, mainly because his post-1981 life of humanitarian service contrasts with his presidential reputation as an incompetent, vision-free micromanager. But Carter did have a vision, one that was consequential if ignored. He sucked the liberalism out of the Democratic Party, rendering the American Left homeless, marginalized and alienated within electoral politics as the country spiraled into a half-century of rightward decline.

Carter was a man of peace. He didn’t start any wars. He talked about human rights in international affairs, criticizing America’s coddling of dictators. He distanced the US from apartheid-era South Africa and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza. And he negotiated a peace deal between Israel and Egypt.

Born in 1924 in Plains, James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr., was the first of Earl and Lillian Carter’s four children. When he was four years old, the Carter family moved to a farm in the small community of Archery, two and one-half miles away. The Jimmy Carter Boyhood Farm is part of the National Historic Site. The day the family moved to the farm was memorable. Earl Carter had forgotten the key and Jimmy crawled through a window to unlock the front door. Although the house used fireplaces and wood stoves for heat and had no indoor plumbing or electricity, it was a typical middle class rural dwelling for the 1920s. Earl Carter raised cotton, corn, and sugar cane with the aid of tenant farmers and was one of the first in the area to experiment with growing peanuts. He also sold canned goods, coffee, kerosene, overalls, and a large variety of other useful items in the country store/commissary near the house. Jimmy and his African American playmates helped in the fields, and Jimmy sold bags of boiled peanuts on the streets of “metropolitan” Plains for a nickel. His parents raised their children to value education, community service, the Baptist Church, and each other. Jimmy Carter lived on the farm until he went away to college in 1941.

Carter attended the Plains High School from first grade through his graduation in 1941. He quoted Miss Julia Coleman, one of his teachers and an intellectual and cultural inspiration to him, in his presidential inaugural address. After graduation, he attended Georgia Southwestern College and Georgia Tech University briefly before receiving an appointment to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. He came home to marry Rosalynn Smith on July 7, 1946 in the Plains United Methodist Church. He served in the Navy for seven years following his graduation from the Naval Academy, resigning his commission in 1953 to take over the family peanut business after his father died. His income of $200 that first year was so low that he qualified to move into a low-income housing project in Plains. He and Rosalynn lived there for a year but soon turned the Golden Peanut Company into a successful production and processing business.

Following his father’s example, Jimmy Carter became involved in civic, church, and fraternal affairs, but refused to join the local segregationist White Citizens' Council. A lifelong Democrat, Carter entered the political arena in 1962. After a strenuous contest, he won a seat in the State senate and held it for two terms. He showed special interest in education and election reform. Carter abandoned plans to run for the United States House of Representatives to seek the governorship in 1966. Although he failed on his first attempt, he succeeded four years later. During his term as governor, he reorganized the State government, worked for conservation, and attracted national attention as a moderate on civil rights.

Carter’s decision to leap from governor to presidential candidate was a bold one. In a cross-country grassroots campaign, he gained support from a public looking for change after the scandals that had shaken the nation. His surprise success in the Iowa Democratic caucus began a phenomenal rise that confounded the political experts who thought his quest was hopeless. The downtown Plains train depot, which served the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad from 1888 to 1951, became Carter’s local campaign headquarters. Approximately 10,000 people a day came to Plains to find out about this unknown candidate, and Carter’s friends and neighbors gathered outside the depot to celebrate his many successes in State primaries. The Democratic National Convention made Carter their presidential nominee on the first ballot. The depot, now a museum, was again the site of a celebration on his election as president in November 1976. Carter defeated incumbent Gerald Ford by a relatively narrow but conclusive margin in both popular and electoral votes. He is the first president from Georgia and the first elected directly from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor in 1848. Dramatizing his break with tradition, Carter and his family walked hand in hand down Pennsylvania Avenue after his inauguration at the Capitol, to the cheers of the watching crowds.

As President Carter took office, he stressed his plans to fight “stagflation” by both stimulating the economy and attacking inflation. He succeeded in adding millions of new jobs and reducing the budget deficit but could not control inflation, which reached record rates. He developed new policies to fight the energy shortage, expanded civil service reform, and sought to protect the environment. He appointed record numbers of women, African Americans, and Hispanics to government jobs and strengthened the Social Security system. In 1977, Carter pardoned young men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. This controversial decision, combined with his unwillingness to work within the traditional party system, brought him into conflict with Congress.

In economic affairs, Carter at first permitted a policy of deficit spending. Inflation rose to 10 percent a year when the Federal Reserve Board, responsible for setting monetary policy, increased the money supply to cover deficits. Carter responded by cutting the budget, but cuts affected social programs at the heart of Democratic domestic policy. In mid-1979, anger in the financial community practically forced him to appoint Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker was an “inflation hawk” who increased interest rates in an attempt to halt price increases, at the cost of negative consequences for the economy.

Carter also faced criticism for his failure to secure passage of an effective energy policy. He presented a comprehensive program, aimed at reducing dependence on foreign oil, that he called the “moral equivalent of war.” Opponents thwarted it in Congress. Though Carter called himself a populist, his political priorities were never wholly clear. He endorsed government’s protective role, but then began the process of deregulation, the removal of governmental controls in economic life. Arguing that some restrictions over the course of the past century limited competition and increased consumer costs, he favored decontrol in the oil, airline, railroad, and trucking industries.

Personal rebranding and the haze of history have obscured the fact that the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, was conservative. As a right-wing “New Democrat,” he ushered in a radical shift of his party from champions of the working class and skeptics of foreign interventionism to the bellicose defenders of big business currently occupying the White House.

Carter became the first Democratic president not to propose an anti-poverty bill since the realignment that brought former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to power in 1932. A deficit hawk more concerned about inflation than unemployment, he broke his 1976 campaign pledge to push for a national health care plan. He considered, but rejected, proposals from fellow Democrats for a universal basic income and increasing welfare benefits. Though he personally favored and campaigned for decriminalizing cannabis, he backtracked and allowed the brutal War on Drugs to continue.

“Fundamentally, Jimmy Carter ended the New Deal and started America on the path of pushing wealth and power upward, a path dramatically accelerated by his successors,” Matt Stoller, author of “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” told The Washington Post. “As just one simple example, one reason Americans today can’t sue airlines for consumer protection or safety violations is airline deregulation, passed in 1978 and signed by Jimmy Carter. Carter cut capital gains taxes in 1978, and under the term ‘deregulation,’ removed public rules from the banking, telecommunications, railroad, trucking, natural gas and airline industries.”

In foreign policy, his support for human rights complicated his negotiations with the Soviet Union and other foreign states. The president’s highflying rhetoric was full of “built-in hypocrisy,” Foreign Policy magazine’s Jonathan Alter observed in 2020. “The president’s new policy was selective and inconsistent from the start, especially as applied to strategically important allies. Vital interests took priority over moral ones, most fatefully in the case of Iran, where Carter toasted the shah and raised the abuses of his secret police only in their private meetings. When the shah was driven from power in 1979 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Carter’s support for the monarch led to the seizure of U.S. hostages in Tehran.”

His greatest success was the Camp David accords of 1978, which brought about a rapprochement between Israel and Egypt and a reduction of tensions in the Middle East. Carter’s greatest foreign policy accomplishment was the negotiation of a peace settlement between Egypt, under President Anwar al-Sadat, and Israel, under Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Acting as both mediator and participant, he persuaded the two leaders to end a 30-year state of war. The subsequent peace treaty was signed at the White House in March 1979.

After protracted and often emotional debate, Carter secured Senate ratification of treaties ceding the Panama Canal to Panama by the year 2000. Going a step farther than Nixon, he extended formal diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China.

But Carter enjoyed less success with the Soviet Union. Though he assumed office with detente at high tide and declared that the United States had escaped its “inordinate fear of Communism,” his insistence that “our commitment to human rights must be absolute” antagonized the Soviet government. A SALT II agreement further limiting nuclear stockpiles was signed, but not ratified by the U.S. Senate, many of whose members felt the treaty was unbalanced. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan killed the treaty and triggered a Carter defense build-up that paved the way for the huge expenditures of the 1980s.

Carter’s anti-communist national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski encouraged him to arm the radical Islamist mujahedin in Afghanistan, drawing the Soviet Union into a proxy war that helped set the stage for 9/11. He used the Soviet invasion as an excuse to politicize the 1980 Olympics by boycotting the Moscow games. In an attempt to look tough, he restored draft registration, which remained in force despite the all-volunteer military.

And it was Carter who started the giant defense spending spree of the 1980s credited to former US President Ronald Reagan. There may not have been any cash for infrastructure or health care or poverty, but when it came to nuclear saber-rattling against the Soviets, money was no object.

His greatest failure was his inability to free the American Embassy staff members taken hostage by the new Islamic regime in Iran. After an Islamic fundamentalist revolution led by Shiite Muslim leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini replaced a corrupt but friendly regime, Carter admitted the deposed shah to the United States for medical treatment. Angry Iranian militants, supported by the Islamic regime, seized the American embassy in Tehran and held 53 American hostages for more than a year. The long-running hostage crisis dominated the final year of his presidency and greatly damaged his chances for re-election.

Carter’s political efforts failed to gain either public or congressional support. By the end of his term, his disapproval rating reached 77 percent, and Americans began to look toward the Republican Party again. The 14-month long hostage crisis, plus the continuing ruinous inflation, led to his defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980. He continued to negotiate with Iran after his defeat, however, and obtained the release of the hostages hours before the end of his term. He and his wife flew to Germany to greet them.

By 1979, the liberal voting base of the Democratic Party had had enough of Carter’s rightward shift. And then they had their champion: Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy challenged Carter from the left in the 1980 primaries, “trying to run on sort of FDR-type policies, the

old-style liberalism, you know, trying to be a populist,” said journalist Jon Ward, author of a book about that race. Kennedy’s defeat was fateful. 1980 marked the rise of the centrist-right Third Way/Democratic Leadership Council control over the Democratic Party apparatus, which went unchallenged until US Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential bid in 2016. Clinton continued Carter’s aggressive foreign policy and embraced right-wing domestic projects: NAFTA, the crime bill, welfare reform. Obama perfected Carter’s style, controlled and measured and calm in an effort to deliver a vaguely liberal impression rarely reflected by his policy decisions.

Retiring from public office, Jimmy Carter returned to Plains. He continued to work as a humanitarian with the Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity, participates in Middle East peace negotiations, and wrote several books. In 2002, Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize for his "decades of untiring efforts to find peaceful solution to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."