While an outsider, Jimmy Carter had a tumultuous tenure in the White House. His presidency was plagued by rising interest rates and inflation, gas pump lines and the Iran hostage crisis that ultimately led to his re-election defeat.
But he rose to greater heights with his post-presidential career, devoting another forty years to work as an international envoy of peace and democracy. James Earl Carter Jr., a peanut farmer who became the 39th president of the United States, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
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EDITOR’S NOTE – Walter Mears was an Associated Press special reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1976 presidential campaign. Before his death in 2022, Mears wrote this retrospective article in tribute to Carter, who entered hospice care on February 18.
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Defeated by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, Carter, at age 56, became a politician with only a past and a “potentially empty life” ahead. Then, in 1982, he organized the Carter Center in Atlanta.
It keeps him traveling, negotiating, leading election observation teams and speaking out, often to the discomfort or even anger of the government he once led. Carter’s Nobel citation honors his “decades-long efforts” to resolve conflicts, promote democracy and promote economic development.
A man who admits that some consider him a “failed president” makes him the most active and internationally involved former president. “My role as a former president is probably superior to that of any other president,” he said in a 2010 television interview.
When he ran for president as the former governor of Georgia, Carter was unable to run, so he said his mother asked him, “What president?”
In order to answer and name recognition ratings that are not seen, they started an early campaign. Carter covered about 50,000 campaign miles, his bag of clothes slung over his shoulder.
He won the Democratic nomination and challenged President Gerald Ford, Nixon’s vice presidential appointee.
Ford had pardoned Nixon for the Watergate crime. After Watergate, Carter was the anti-Richard Nixon figure. “I’m not going to lie to you,” the voters said. But Carter was elected by only 2 percentage points.
The president and his newly elected wife Rosalynn ditched the limousine and walked from the Capitol to the White House after the inauguration and tried to put some pomp around the presidency. But his solo style and inadvertent snubs left him with no political allies when he needed help.
For all that, Carter’s term left landmarks, such as the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement engineered in private negotiations at Camp David in 1978.
He won the start of the energy conservation policy. He secured the ratification of the treaty that resulted in US control of the Panama Canal. He opened full diplomatic relations with China. Departments of energy and education were created. But his administration struggled and Carter shook up his Cabinet amid a “crisis of confidence.”
Then things got worse.
On November 4, 1979, Iranian protesters stormed the US Embassy in Teheran, spurred by the ayatollah to avenge the former shah’s exile to the United States for medical treatment. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for more than a year. Carter tried to negotiate, and when that didn’t work, he ordered a military rescue attempt that failed miserably in the desert in April 1980.
Eight Americans were killed in the attempt. It was Carter’s bleakest hour.
The hostage crisis overshadowed and damaged Carter’s re-election campaign. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy challenged him in the Democratic primaries.
After that, everything went up against Reagan. Carter only carried six states to Reagan’s 44.
Minutes after Reagan was inaugurated on January 20, 1981, the hostages were released after 444 days in captivity. Carter’s first major act as former president was as Reagan’s special envoy to welcome the freed hostages in Wiesbaden, Germany, the next day.
Jimmy Carter, the only president to be inaugurated with a nickname, was born in tiny Plains, Georgia, where he arranged to be buried. The named father is a nut business, with a farm and a warehouse. His father, brother, Billy, and two sisters all died of pancreatic cancer.
Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, the year he married Rosalynn Smith, also of Plains. They have three sons and a daughter, Amy, the youngest, who went to the White House.
Carter spent nearly seven years in the Navy’s nuclear submarine force, resigning to take over the family business after his father died in 1953. His first political stop was in the Georgia State Senate. A moderate Democrat with a New South image, Carter was elected governor of Georgia in 1970, succeeding segregationist Lester Maddox and achieved the first national record when he announced in his inaugural address that “the time for racial discrimination is over.”
After he loses his presidential re-election bid, a shaken Carter retreats to the Plains, to “a new, unexpected part” of his life.
He started the Carter Center which, he later said, offered “better opportunities to do good.” He and Rosalynn also work with Habitat for Humanity, building homes for the poor in the United States and abroad.
Carter was a tireless peacemaker who went through the usual diplomatic channels and, as he said in 1994, went “where others don’t go” – places like Ethiopia, Liberia and North Korea, where he was able to free Americans who had been imprisoned after . wandered across the border in 2010.
He helped oversee democratic elections in Nicaragua and Haiti, and the first Palestinian elections. In all, he participated in 39 of the 100 central election observation trips.
Carter said the center is “filling the vacuum in the world. When the United States won’t deal with a problem area, we go there.”
And it’s not always quiet.
He went to Cuba in 2002, met with Fidel Castro, then delivered a televised speech calling for an end to the US trade embargo. He compared Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians to apartheid. He denounced the Iraq war as “based on lies.” He said George W. Bush was the worst president in history in foreign affairs.
That prompted a Bush White House spokesman to describe Carter as “irrelevant.”
He can be a meddlesome, freelance diplomat who has irritated more than one administration.
But it is never irrelevant.