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. 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 re-election 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. His leadership helped prevent at least five wars, and the Camp David accords he engineered proved to be the most successful treaty since the end of World War II. Long before he died, on 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 inhabited 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 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 stepping stone.”
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.
CARTER WAS BORN on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Ga. (pop. 550), the first child of James Earl Carter, a segregationist businessman and farmer, and his eccentric wife Lillian, a nurse who defied Jim Crow norms by tending to Black patients. The family was prosperous and had an automobile and a party-line telephone, but the rest of his youth on a farm outside of town was primitive by today's standards. Until he was 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 just one step removed from slavery.
image [https://d19oxuimcmx63e.cloudfront.net/magtag/1963683/extractedimages/34/0377742977.jpg]
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 technological breakthrough that eventually helped give the U.S. the strategic edge in the Cold War. Much of the intensity and coldness that sometimes lay behind Carter's smile came from Rickover.
image [https://d19oxuimcmx63e.cloudfront.net/magtag/1963683/extractedimages/35/0171973201.jpg]
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 a bystander to the civil rights movement, Carter was elected to the Georgia state senate in 1962. He lost the race for governor in 1966, but ran again in 1970 and won 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.”
image [https://d19oxuimcmx63e.cloudfront.net/magtag/1963683/extractedimages/35/3971037234.jpg]
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 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 Governor 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. But the same post-Watergate mood that helped elect him led to especially harsh press coverage.
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 Senator Ted Kennedy for national health insurance. Some of his achievements were liberal: government job creation; appointing more women to be judges than all of his predecessors combined times five (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; farsighted support of alternative energy (reversed by Reagan, who took down the solar panels Carter had put on the roof of the White House); 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 treaties that led to the U.S. eventually handing over control of the Panama Canal to Panama.
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. After waging four wars in the first 25 years of Israel’s existence, the Egyptian army—the only force that was capable of destroying Israel—hasn’t fired on the state once in all the years since.
Dealing with Moscow was harder. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Carter pulled the SALT II missile and nuclear-weapons agreement 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 was particularly effective. More significant were secret aid to the mujahedin 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 intercontinental ballistic missile—were developed under Carter.
As inflation surged into double digits, Carter’s presidency became an ...
As the longest-lived President, Carter effectively inhabited 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 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 stepping stone.”
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.
CARTER WAS BORN on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Ga. (pop. 550), the first child of James Earl Carter, a segregationist businessman and farmer, and his eccentric wife Lillian, a nurse who defied Jim Crow norms by tending to Black patients. The family was prosperous and had an automobile and a party-line telephone, but the rest of his youth on a farm outside of town was primitive by today's standards. Until he was 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 just one step removed from slavery.
image [https://d19oxuimcmx63e.cloudfront.net/magtag/1963683/extractedimages/34/0377742977.jpg]
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 technological breakthrough that eventually helped give the U.S. the strategic edge in the Cold War. Much of the intensity and coldness that sometimes lay behind Carter's smile came from Rickover.
image [https://d19oxuimcmx63e.cloudfront.net/magtag/1963683/extractedimages/35/0171973201.jpg]
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 a bystander to the civil rights movement, Carter was elected to the Georgia state senate in 1962. He lost the race for governor in 1966, but ran again in 1970 and won 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.”
image [https://d19oxuimcmx63e.cloudfront.net/magtag/1963683/extractedimages/35/3971037234.jpg]
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 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 Governor 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. But the same post-Watergate mood that helped elect him led to especially harsh press coverage.
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 Senator Ted Kennedy for national health insurance. Some of his achievements were liberal: government job creation; appointing more women to be judges than all of his predecessors combined times five (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; farsighted support of alternative energy (reversed by Reagan, who took down the solar panels Carter had put on the roof of the White House); 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 treaties that led to the U.S. eventually handing over control of the Panama Canal to Panama.
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. After waging four wars in the first 25 years of Israel’s existence, the Egyptian army—the only force that was capable of destroying Israel—hasn’t fired on the state once in all the years since.
Dealing with Moscow was harder. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Carter pulled the SALT II missile and nuclear-weapons agreement 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 was particularly effective. More significant were secret aid to the mujahedin 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 intercontinental ballistic missile—were developed under Carter.
As inflation surged into double digits, Carter’s presidency became an ...
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Time (Digital) - 1 Issue, January 27, 2025