Jimmy Carter

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• Born: 1 October 1924
• Birthplace: Plains, Georgia
• Best Known As: 39th President of the U.S., 1977-81

Name at birth: James Earl Carter, Jr.

Jimmy Carter defeated incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976 to become president of the United States. Carter grew up on a farm in Georgia and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946. After working with the nuclear submarine program, he resigned his commission after his father's death in 1953 and returned to the family farm. He entered local politics in 1962 and by 1971 was elected Governor of Georgia. In the presidential election of 1976 Carter, a dark horse candidate of the Democratic party, won the nomination and then defeated the Republican Gerald Ford, who had replaced Richard M. Nixon after Nixon's resignation. Carter championed human rights and responsible government, but his term was dogged by high inflation, high unemployment and an energy crisis. The last fourteen months of his term were dominated by an ongoing hostage situation at the U.S. Embassy in Iran. Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale ran for a second term in 1980, but they were defeated by Republicans Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Since leaving office, Carter has worked internationally for the disenfranchised, fighting hunger and poverty through a variety of non-profit organizations. His many books include Negotiation: The Alternative to Hostility (1984), the Middle East study Blood of Abraham (1985), Living Faith (1996), the controversial Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), and the memoirs Keeping Faith (1983) and Hours Before Daylight (2001). He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his years of humanitarian work.

Carter's best-known achievement as president was the peace treaty he negotiated between Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Premier Menachem Begin. The treaty is known as the Camp David Accords for the presidential retreat where the trio negotiated for 13 days before reaching the agreement. Sadat and Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize...For many years Carter taught Sunday school at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia.

(b. Plains, Georgia, 1 Oct. 1924) US; Governor of Georgia 1971 – 4, President 1977 – 81 The son of a farmer and a registered nurse, Carter was educated at local public school in Georgia before spending a year at Georgia Southwestern University and then entering Georgia Institute of Technology as a naval ROTC cadet. In 1943 he entered the US Naval Academy at Annapolis — a childhood ambition — graduating in 1946 and being commissioned as an Ensign in the US Navy. Shortly after graduation, he married Rosalynn Smith, from Plains. After two years of service on experimental radar and gunnery vessels, he switched to submarines. On one occasion, he came close to being lost at sea, after being swept from the submarine bridge during a storm. He subsequently applied, and was accepted, to participate in the nuclear submarine construction programme directed by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. He took courses in nuclear physics and reactor technology at Union College, New York. His naval career was cut short in 1953 when his father died, at a relatively early age, of cancer. He returned home to Plains to run the family peanut-farming and fertilizer business, despite the protestation of his wife. After some lean years, he built the family concern into a prosperous business. He also began to get involved in civic and church affairs, making a name for himself by being the only person locally to refuse to join the racist White Citizens' Council. He also started to take an interest in elective office. His father had been elected a member of the state assembly the year before he died and had encouraged his son to take an interest in public affairs. The principal spur to seeking office, though, came several years later when Carter served as chairman of the local school board. A proposal from the board was subject to a local referendum and he went round giving speeches in support of the proposal. The proposal was narrowly defeated. He made his first bid for elective office in 1962, seeking election to the State Senate. After a bitter primary contest — in which he had to resort to court action to overturn the corrupt practices of his opponents — he won the general election and served two terms (1963 – 7). He took a particular interest in election reform and improving the education system. He was also a regular opponent of "sweetheart bills", giving particular individuals breaks on salary or retirement benefits. His autobiography, Why Not the Best?, written before he won national office, also reflected a dislike of lobbyists.

In 1966 he announced his intention to run for the US Congress, but after the leading Democratic contender for governor had a heart attack and withdrew from the race, Carter was persuaded to seek the nomination. He lost the nomination to a segregationist, Lestor Maddox, and resolved to contest the nomination again in 1970. After an intense period of planning and campaigning, he was successful the second time round. In the interim, he became a Born Again Christian.

As Governor, he reorganized government, reducing significantly the number of agencies and streamlining the administration. He implemented a number of public sector reforms and increased the number of blacks appointed to public office. He disliked patronage and compromise, and preferred rallying popular support for his measures among voters to bargaining with members of the state legislature. He also sought to raise Georgia's profile abroad, undertaking ten overseas visits in order to promote trade and inform himself about other countries.

In 1972 he began to think seriously about running for President. He served as chairman of the National Democratic Party 1974 Campaign Committee, giving him experience of campaign organization and strategy. In the autumn of 1974 he announced his candidacy for the 1976 presidential nomination. He completed his term of office as Governor in 1975 and thus had time to campaign unfettered by responsibilities of office. The field of candidates increased but Carter scored a major success early in 1976 by topping the poll in the New Hampshire primary. This established him as the front-runner and generated a bandwagon effect. He won six of the first eight primaries. Despite some setbacks — he polled badly in New York and Massachusetts — his opponents were gradually eliminated. By early June he had enough delegates to be assured of the nomination. He had announced in advance that he would select Senator Walter Mondale as his running mate. He began the general election with a clear lead over the Republican, President Gerald R. Ford. Ford was the successor to Richard Nixon, who had resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal. Ford had kept on various Nixon appointees and had pardoned Nixon for any offences he may have committed. The situation favoured the Democratic candidate. However, Carter's support slipped as the campaign progressed — his Southern speaking style worked to his disadvantage and he performed below expectations in the first televised debate with Ford — but he held on to win with a 2 per cent margin of victory. He polled well among blacks and blue-collar workers. He was the first Georgian to be elected President and the first President elected from the deep South since 1848.

In the White House, Carter tried to set a high moral tone. He stressed human rights in international affairs and opposed "pork barrel" legislation at home. In domestic affairs, he stressed the need for energy conservation and sent a major Energy Bill to Congress. He persuaded Congress to approve a major reform of the civil service, something that his predecessors had failed to achieve. In foreign affairs, he obtained Senate approval — by one vote — for the Panama Canal Treaty, restoring the Canal to Panama. In 1978 he hosted a meeting at Camp David with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachim Begin of Israel, resulting in the Camp David Agreement in which both signed up to a peace framework. In the sector of defence, he departed from past policy and cancelled the B1 bomber project. He also vetoed a measure for a $2 billion dollar nuclear carrier; Congress failed to override his veto. He also persuaded Congress to lift the arms embargo on Turkey.

However, Carter's successes in the office were sporadic rather than consistent. His relationship with Congress was not a harmonious one. He had fought the election as an "outsider" to Washington and now had to work with the institution that formed part of the establishment he had attacked. His narrow victory had denied him a coattails effect. The Democrats were well entrenched in both Houses, but with the members not owing their victory to the President. Carter adopted a high moral stance, assuming that Congress would recognize the rightness of his measures. He sent several measures to Congress at the same time and then failed to lobby for them. His Energy Bill got bogged down and emerged eventually in a somewhat emasculated form. Though most of his measures were passed, his success rate in Congress — just over 75 per cent — was markedly lower than for his Democratic predecessors Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy and only marginally better than that achieved by the Republican Dwight Eisenhower. Carter surrounded himself with advisers drawn from Georgia — dubbed "the Georgia Mafia" — who had no real grasp of Washington politics. A number of important measures, including a Labour Law Reform Bill, failed. Carter appeared increasingly out of his depth. The Camp David Agreement produced a temporary increase in popular support, but his standing soon fell back to low levels. In foreign affairs, crises appeared to be the norm and he appeared surprised by events. The fall of the Shah of Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan caused particular difficulties and highlighted the incapacity of the US government to do much about either. Carter cut off grain sales to the USSR and encouraged a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow — neither having much impact — and his decision to allow the former Shah into the USA for medical treatment sparked the seizure of hostages in the American embassy in Tehran. The holding of the hostages dented Carter's already fragile public support. In desperation, he authorized a rescue attempt that ended in failure.

Until 1980, Carter experienced low popular ratings because of poor economic performance. Inflation and unemployment were rising and there was little optimism about future prospects. Perceptions of poor performance were then compounded by Carter's handling of the hostages crisis. In 1980, with his popularity in the opinion polls lower than that of any president since Warren Harding, he faced a challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy for the Democratic nomination. He fought off the challenge, but it served to demonstrate the turmoil and dissatisfaction within Democratic ranks. In the general election, he was beaten by a clear margin by the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan. Carter won 35.4 million votes against 43.9 million for Reagan. It was the first time an incumbent had been defeated since 1932. Carter retired to Plains, but maintained an active public career, involving himself in projects to assist Third World countries and occasionally engaging in some international mediation.

Great things were expected of Carter when he entered the White House. He was a highly intelligent individual, a problem solver, a Democrat with a Congress dominated by fellow Democrats. Yet he proved to be a failure. He never really grasped what was required of the incumbent of the Oval Office. He tried to do too many things at once, failed to focus his activities, and was too obviously influenced by the last person he had spoken to. He was viewed as a good man, but one increasingly out of his depth. His White House staff were generally viewed by members of Congress as lightweight; a number — including the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance — became embroiled in scandals. The White House was both scandal-prone on occasion as well as accident prone. On a visit to Warsaw in 1978, an interpreter was hired who was not up to the job — translating Carter's words on arrival as "I desire the Poles carnally" and "When I abandoned the United States, never to return" — and Carter's participation in a jogging marathon in Washington was cut short when he collapsed and had to be carried away. Some members of his family also attracted unwelcome publicity, his brother Billy receiving money to provide advice to the Libyan government. There was little observable enjoyment in the final months of his presidency.

In the 1982 Tribune poll, Carter was ranked the tenth worst president in US history. He fared a little better in the Murray poll of the same year, being ranked 25th out of 36, one behind his Republican predecessor, Gerald Ford. His public work since leaving office increased his standing in the eyes of the public, though it did little to affect historians' judgement of his presidency. In the 1995 Chicago Sun-Times poll of presidential scholars, he was ranked 22nd out of 38. Though some reassessment of his presidency has occurred, as in John Dumbrell's The Carter Presidency: A Re-evaluation (1993), he has not been subject to a new interpretation. Richard Nixon fared better in the 1995 poll than he did.

Born in Plains, Georgia, Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 and became a nuclear submarine officer. After his father's death (1953), he returned to manage the family's farming enterprises. Active in the local Baptist church and state politics, Carter was a state senator (1963–67) and governor of Georgia (1971–75). In 1974, he narrowly defeated President Gerald Ford.

As president, Carter characterized himself as nonideological, a social liberal and fiscal conservative. He had a strong sense of morality and equity. A rational and diligent manager, Carter proved a technician rather than a logrolling politician or a highly inspiring leader. He experienced only a mixed success in foreign and defense matters, a result of circumstances and of Carter himself.

Diplomatically, the Carter administration negotiated and secured a divided Senate's ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, completed normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China, and spectacularly achieved a peace treaty, the Camp David Accords (1978), between Israel and Egypt.

Carter was also confronted with major challenges over which he had little control, although he was criticized for lurching between weak and hard‐line policies. Soviet intervention in Cuba and the Horn of Africa and Russian military occupation of Afghanistan led the administration to support a military buildup. Carter ended his opposition to increases in the military budget, approved construction of the MX missile, abandoned his SALT II Treaty, canceled U.S. participation in the Summer Olympics in Moscow, and resumed compulsory draft registration. In the “Carter Doctrine,” he pledged protection of the oil‐rich Persian Gulf region and established a rapid deployment force to enforce it.

Seizure of U.S. Embassy hostages in November 1979 by successful Iranian revolutionaries led Carter to impose diplomatic and economic sanctions against Iran. In April 1980, an ill‐fated military rescue attempt was aborted at the “Desert One” site south of Tehran after three of the eight helicopters malfunctioned. Another helicopter and a C‐130 transport plane collided in the nighttime lift‐off. Government released the hostages in January 1981 when Ronald Reagan became president.

Out of office, Carter pursued his own agenda, involving human rights, social welfare, and international mediation. He played particularly important, if often controversial, roles in easing later conflicts with Nicaragua, North Korea, and Haiti. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work as a mediator and head of the Carter Centre in Atlanta.

[See also Conscription; Iran, U.S. Military Involvement in; Panama, U.S. Military Involvement in; SALT Treaties.]

Bibliography

• Burton I. Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr., 1993.
• Gary M. Fink and Hush Davis Graham, eds., The Carter Presidency, 1998

Carter, Jimmy (1924-) 39th president of the United States (1977-81), born James Earl Carter, Jr., in Plains, Georgia. After graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy, Carter served in the navy under Adm. Hyman Rickover in the nuclear submarine program (1946-53). He was governor of Georgia (1970-74) and defeated incumbent President Gerald R. Ford (1976). Carter's initiatives included transportation deregulation, environmental protection, new departments of energy and education, efforts toward long-term national energy policy, and attention to international human rights. Carter obtained the Panama Canal Treaties (1977), signed the SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union (1979), announced the Carter Doctrine, asserting U.S. protection of the Persian Gulf, and mediated the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt (1979). After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he ordered an embargo of grain sales to the USSR and a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Carter was paralyzed by the Iran hostage crisis (1979-81) and humiliated by a failed rescue attempt (see Operation Eagle Claw). He suffered a bitter challenge for Democratic nomination by Sen. Edward Kennedy and was defeated in a landslide by Ronald Reagan (1980).

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The first U.S. president to be elected from the deep South in 132 years, James Earl (Jimmy) Carter (born 1924) served one term (1977-1981). In 1980 he lost his bid for re-election to Republican candidate Ronald Reagan but went on to be a much admired worker for peace and human rights at home and abroad.

James Earl Carter was born in the small southern town of Plains, Georgia, on October 1, 1924. He was the first child of farmer and small businessman James Earl Carter and former nurse, Lillian Gordy Carter. When Carter was four, the family moved to a farm in Archery, a rural community a few miles west of Plains. At five, Jimmy was already demonstrating his independence and his talents for business: he began to sell peanuts on the streets of Plains. At the age of nine, Carter invested his earnings in five bales of cotton which he stored for several years, then sold at a profit large enough to enable him to purchase five old houses in Plains.

Following his graduation from high school in 1941, Carter enrolled in Georgia Southwestern College, but in 1942 he received word that a much desired appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis had been approved. Carter entered the academy in 1943, and showed a special talent for electronics and naval tactics, eventually going on to work on the nation's first nuclear powered submarines. During his time in the Navy he also met Rosalynn Smith who he married on July 7, 1947 and had four children with: John, James Earl III, Jeffrey, and a daughter born much later, Amy.

Civic Activist to Politician

Carter had ambitions to become an admiral, but in 1953, following his father's death from cancer, he returned to Plains to manage the family businesses. He took over both the farm and the peanut warehouses his father had established, enlarged the business and, in order to keep up with modern farming techniques, studied at the Agricultural Experimental Station in Tifton, Georgia.

During these years in Plains, Carter began to play an active role in local civic affairs. From 1955 to 1962 he was active in a number of local functions and served on the boards of several civic organizations. In this civic life, Jimmy Carter distinguished himself by his liberal views on racial issues which could be traced back to his mother's disregard for many of the deep South's racist traditions.

As far as Carter's interest in politics goes, this may have come from his father, who had served for a year in the Georgia legislature. In 1962 Carter ran for a seat in the Georgia Senate and defeated his Republican opponent by about 1,000 votes. As a state senator, Carter promised to read every single bill that came up and when it looked as if he wouldn't be able to keep this promise due to the great volume of bills, he took a speed reading course to solve the problem. In government he earned a reputation as one of the most effective legislators and an outspoken moderate liberal. Carter was reelected to the state Senate in 1964.

In 1966, after first declaring himself as a candidate for the U.S. Congress, Carter decided to run for the office of governor of Georgia. He was beaten by Lester Maddox in the Democratic primary election though. Disappointed and spiritually bankrupt, Carter then became "born again" and pushed forward. Between 1966 and 1970 he traveled widely through the state, making close to 1,800 speeches, studying the problems of Georgia, and campaigning hard. In the 1970 gubernatorial election, Carter's hard work paid off and he won Georgia's top position.

Governor of Georgia

In his inaugural address Carter announced his intentions to aid all poor and needy Georgians, regardless of race. This speech won Carter his first national attention, for in it he called for an end to racial discrimination and the extension of a right to an education, to a job, and to "simple justice" for the poor. As governor, Carter worked for, and signed into law, a bill which stipulated that the poor and wealthy areas of Georgia would have equal state aid for education. Carter also worked to cut waste in the government, merging 300 state agencies into only 30. The number of African-American appointees on major state boards and agencies increased from three to 53 and the number of African-American state employees rose by 40 percent. During his term, laws were passed to protect historical sites, conserve the environment, and to encourage openness in government.

While governor, Carter became increasingly involved in national Democratic Party politics. In 1972 he headed the Democratic Governors Campaign Committee, and in 1974 was chair of the Democratic National Campaign Committee. That same year Carter officially declared his intention to run for president in the 1976 race. When Carter announced his intentions to seek the presidency, he was still little known outside the state of Georgia. As late as October 1975 a public opinion poll on possible Democratic candidates did not even list his name. Then, in January 1976, Carter's whirlwind rise to national prominence began and by March 1976 he was the top choice among Democrats for the presidential nomination.

The 1976 Election

Carter's success against ten other candidates began with a victory in the New Hampshire primary in February. He was successful in making himself a symbol of a leader without ties to the entrenched interest groups of the nation's capital. Carter convinced voters that without these ties he would be able to act independently and effectively. In his campaign he also vowed to restore moral leadership to the presidency which had been badly shaken in the wake of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. Carter easily won 17 of 30 primary contests and was elected on the first ballot at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

With his running mate, Minnesota liberal Democrat Walter Mondale, Carter made unemployment a central issue of his campaign, urging the creation of jobs through increased federal spending and the expansion of business. Carter also campaigned on promises of pardon for the draft evaders of the Vietnam War period, the reorganization of the federal government bureaucracy, and the development of a national energy policy.

When Carter defeated the incumbent, Gerald Ford, by 1,678,069 popular votes, winning 297 electoral college votes to Ford's 240, he became the first president from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor in 1844. Carter's victory was definitely regional and was definitely based on social and economic class as his winning margin came from African-Americans, those with low incomes, and others who thought that they were being hurt by the policies of the Ford administration. Four out of five African-Americans voted for Carter and he also did well among white southerners, receiving the highest number of votes for a Democratic candidate since Roosevelt, but lost over one-half of Catholic voters and 55 percent of the Italian vote. One of the challenges to Carter was to ease the regional and ethnic splits evident in the election and to create a unified support for his presidency.

His Record as President

The year 1977 began well for the new president with a series of quick victories for Carter-backed programs. These included congressional approval of his plans to eliminate or consolidate federal agencies which duplicated services and of legislation aimed at lowering federal income taxes. In August of 1977 Congress adopted Carter's proposal to establish the Department of Energy as a new executive department. At the same time, Carter used his executive powers to make good on campaign pledges, including the pardoning of Vietnam War draft evaders and ending production of the B-1 bomber, which he felt was wasteful.

The Carter Administration was not without its problems though. In 1977 economic conditions had improved somewhat and unemployment had fallen, but by 1978 inflation had, despite a variety of approaches to stabilize it, continued to rise, reaching 15 percent by mid-1980. Due largely to these economic problems, Carter's approval rating in a July 1980 poll measured only 21 percent, the lowest recorded for any American president.

Carter's term was also marked by mixed success in foreign affairs. In 1977 Carter attracted worldwide attention and praise for his strong support of human rights wherein he limited or banned entirely any United States aid to nations believed to be human rights violators, but mixed reviews came for two 1977 treaties dealing with the Panama Canal. The first of these gave control of the canal to Panama on December 31, 1999 and the second gave the United States the right to defend the neutrality of the canal. Carter was influential in the Camp David Accords as well as in the creation of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979 and in the negotiation of SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) II with the Soviet Union, although these negotiations were ultimately delayed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Carter's most dramatic moments in foreign policy affairs began in November 1979 when Iranian student militants seized the United States embassy in Teheran and took 52 U.S. citizens hostage. The hostages were to be held, their captors said, until the deposed Shah, who was in the United States for medical treatment, was handed over. Carter responded first by cutting diplomatic relations with Iran and stopping all imports from that country. When these measures failed he, in April 1980, ordered an attempt at armed rescue, which failed and led to the death of eight marines and the resignation of Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance. In the end the crisis lasted for a total of 444 days with the hostages finally being released on January 20, 1981, the last day that Carter held office.

The hostage crisis overseas and economic difficulties at home left Carter vulnerable but still vying for the top spot in the 1980 presidential elections. Running again with Vice President Walter Mondale, Carter was defeated by former California governor and actor Ronald Reagan by a wide margin. He received only 35 million votes to Reagan's 44 million and lost the electoral college vote 489 to 44.

The Right Things to Accomplish Post Presidency

While seen as a somewhat lame-duck immediately following his departure as president in 1981, recent historical revisionism has cast him in a more favorable light, especially in lieu of his successor's later improprieties during the Iran-Contra scandal. Viewed as a basically honest man, not a small commodity in this age of popular mistrust of government, Carter has devoted his post presidential career to an array of peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts.

In 1981 Carter established the Carter Center which, with its sizable budget, has sponsored programs from promoting human rights in third world countries to maintaining databases of immunization for local Atlanta children. The Carter Center has also monitored elections in newly democratized countries, fought such diseases as polio and river blindness, and helped eradicate the harmful African Guinea worm in Pakistan. In addition to these humanitarian efforts, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, have volunteered their summers building low-income housing through the Habitat For Humanity organization.

The international relations front has also been no stranger to Carter since his defeat to Ronald Reagan. In 1990 he persuaded Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega to step down and let an elected president, Violeta Chamorro, step in, something that without the relative neutrality of Carter's position probably would not have been possible. Carter has also served as somewhat of a mediator between President Bill Clinton and various leaders of non-democratic nations. In the early 1990s Carter brought messages from Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid to President Clinton which helped avoid a military confrontation and in June 1994 Carter negotiated with North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung to freeze his country's nuclear program and allow inspection of their nuclear facilities. Interestingly enough, sometimes Carter's efforts haven't been completely appreciated. President Clinton was reportedly incensed at Carter going over his head in foreign matters and making statements that he wasn't authorized to make.

One further mixed victory from Carter came when in September 1994, he, with the help of former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, negotiated an agreement with Haitian revolutionary leader Lt. Gen. Raoul Cédras. Haiti, since the ouster of their first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991, had been a cesspool of violence and poverty since the revolution. Boatloads of Haitians seeking an escape from the myriad human rights abuses were arriving on U.S. shores daily and the situation was pointing towards a military invasion. President Clinton called on Carter to help, which he did with an agreement wherein military leaders relinquished power and handed it over to American forces until democracy could be restored. The downside of the agreement being Cédras and his cronies being given permission to stay in Haiti instead of being exiled which drew much criticism.

Whatever flak Carter has received for his methods of handling foreign affairs they fade from view when compared to the tireless work he has done for humanity since the end of his presidency. No other former president has worked so hard in the public arena while still maintaining personal pursuits which in Carter's case involve hunting, fishing, teaching adult Sunday school, and writing several books including one of his own poetry. As Carter's former speech writer, James Fallows, put it in 1990, "…what becomes … admirable is precisely the idealism of (Carter's) vision, the energy and intelligence and morality he has put into figuring out what is the right thing to accomplish."

Further Reading

There are several books that tell Jimmy Carter's story. Carter himself has written a number of books which include: Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (1982), The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East (1985), An Outdoor Journal: Adventures and Reflections (1988), Turning Point: A Candidate, A State, and a Nation Come of Age (1993), and his volume of poetry Always a Reckoning (1995). Edna Langford and Linda Cox have done a biography of Carter's wife, Rosalynn, entitled Rosalynn, Friend and First Lady (1980) and Rosalynn tells her own story in First Lady From Plains (1985). Hamilton Jordan's book, Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency (1982) deals largely with the Iranian hostage crisis, while Jack Germond and Jules Witcover's Blue Smoke and Mirrors: How Reagan Won and Why Carter Lost the Election of 1980 (1981) analyzes Carter's defeat in his bid for reelection. Carter's greatest diplomatic success - the 1978-1979 agreement between Israel and Egypt - is detailed in Camp David (1986) by William Quandt, a member of the Carter administration. Other accounts of Carter's life can be found in Peter G. Bourne's Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography (1997) and Rod Troester's Jimmy Carter as Peacemaker: A Post Presidential Biography (1996). For those inclined to go online, the Carter Center's Web site address is .

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Jimmy Carter. (credit: Courtesy: Jimmy Carter Library)

(born Oct. 1, 1924, Plains, Ga., U.S.) 39th president of the U.S. (1977 – 81). He graduated from Annapolis and served in the U.S. Navy until 1953, when he left to manage the family peanut business. He served in the state senate from 1962 to 1966. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1966; depressed by this experience, he found solace in evangelical Christianity, becoming a born-again Baptist. In 1970 he ran again and won. As governor (1971 – 75), he opened Georgia's government offices to African Americans and women and introduced stricter budgeting procedures for state agencies. In 1976, though lacking a national political base or major backing, he won the Democratic nomination and the presidency, defeating the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford. As president, Carter helped negotiate a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, signed a treaty with Panama to make the Panama Canal a neutral zone after 1999, and established full diplomatic relations with China. In 1979 – 80 the Iran hostage crisis became a major political liability. He responded forcefully to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, embargoing the shipment of U.S. grain to the Soviet Union and pressing for a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. The poor state of the economy, which was plagued by high inflation and high unemployment, contributed to Carter's electoral defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980. He subsequently became involved in numerous international diplomatic negotiations and helped to oversee elections in countries with insecure democratic traditions; he also became the first sitting or former American president to visit Fidel Castro's Cuba. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002.

For more information on Jimmy Carter, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: Oct. 1, 1924, Plains, Ga.
• Political party: Democrat
• Education: U.S. Naval Academy, B.S., 1946
• Military service: U.S. Navy, 1947–53
• Previous government service: chair, Sumter County, Ga., Board of Education, 1955–62; Georgia Senate 1963–66; governor of Georgia, 1971–75
• Elected President, 1976; served, 1977–81

Promising a “government as good as the people,” Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976 as a Washington outsider by voters fed up with the Watergate scandal and the weak economy. Carter shed many of the trappings of the “imperial” Presidency and pursued a foreign policy emphasizing human rights and peaceful solution of international conflict. But his unpopular Panama Canal Treaty and rocketing inflation and interest rates made him a one-term President.

Born in the small town of Plains, Georgia, James Earl Carter, Jr., was the first American President to be born in a hospital. He graduated from Plains High School as valedictorian in 1941, and in 1946 he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in the top tenth of his class. He served as an ensign on an experimental nuclear submarine with Captain (later Admiral) Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy. In 1953, after the death of his father, Carter resigned his commission to take over his family's peanut farm, which he turned into a thriving business.

Carter became a deacon and Sunday school teacher in the Plains Baptist Church, then chairman of the Sumter County School Board, where he peacefully promoted racial desegregation of the schools. As a state senator, Carter fought local segregationist groups, and he defeated racist opponents to win reelection to the senate. He encouraged blacks to join the Plains Baptist Church.

In 1966 Carter ran for governor but lost to arch-segregationist Lester Maddox. Carter's loss led him to become a born-again Christian. In the 1970 Democratic gubernatorial primary Carter declared his opposition to busing as a means of overcoming racial segregation in schools, leading the Atlanta Constitution to call him an “ignorant, racist, backward, ultraconservative, rednecked South Georgia peanut farmer.” With evangelical and fundamentalist Christian support, he won the election.

Although elected with segregationist support, Carter was a progressive, especially on race relations. Carter reorganized the state government and consolidated many independent agencies into a few efficient departments. He increased minority hiring in state government by 50 percent, and he promoted environmental and educational programs. But he worked poorly with traditional politicians in the state legislature, gaining a reputation as an arrogant and isolated governor.

Carter began a steady rise in national Democratic politics, however. He became chair of the Democratic Governors’ Campaign Committee in 1972 and campaign chair for the Democratic National Committee in 1974—a year in which the party scored major successes in congressional elections. By 1975 Carter was spending most of his time making speeches and traveling from one state to another seeking financial support and media attention.

Carter portrayed himself as an outsider who could clean up the mess in Washington. He promised never to lie to the American people, implicitly contrasting himself to politicians like Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. He called for “a government that is as honest and decent and fair and competent and truthful and idealistic as are the American people.” Carter won the lowa Presidential caucuses on January 19, 1976, and propelled himself to the forefront of the Democratic field. He won the New Hampshire primary a few weeks later, and funds poured into his campaign. He won a number of other primaries and gained sufficient votes for a first-ballot nomination at the national convention. He defeated the incumbent President, Gerald Ford, in the general election by a narrow margin, due in large measure to a split in the opposition ranks between moderate Republicans and conservatives who had favored Ronald Reagan. The high unemployment rate and Ford's pardon of Nixon also worked in Carter's favor.

Although Carter took office with large Democratic majorities in Congress, he was unable to get them to support much of his program. His opposition to some rivers and harbors projects early in his term was fiercely resisted by his own party's congressional leaders, as was his 1978 veto of a public works measure on the grounds that it would be inflationary. Although Congress passed his proposal to create a department of energy, his comprehensive energy program was revised. When it did pass, it proved unpopular with the public because it emphasized conservation and higher prices. He cut back on federal aid to urban areas, causing a backlash among liberal Democrats. His decision to cancel the B-1 bomber upset party conservatives. When Congress transformed his tax reform plan into new favors for special interests, Carter referred to them as “a pack of ravenous wolves.” Carter did have some successes: he got Congress to divide the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two new departments, one for education and the other for health and human services; the minimum wage was raised; and Congress deregulated the airline, trucking, and railroad industries. It also established a “Superfund” to clean up toxic waste sites.

In foreign affairs, too, Carter took actions that were unpopular. In 1977, although more than three-fourths of the American people wanted to keep the Panama Canal Zone, Carter negotiated two treaties with Panama that called for the United States to give up sovereign rights in the Panama Canal Zone and to turn over operation of the canal to Panama by the turn of the century. The Senate consented to the treaties by only a bare margin. In 1978 Carter presided over the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt, which resulted in a treaty between the two nations the following year. In 1979 Carter recognized communist China and canceled a defense treaty with the anticommunist government on Taiwan—actions that upset Southern conservatives. He began an emphasis in American foreign policy on human rights, cutting off foreign aid to certain Latin American nations with repressive regimes. The second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union was signed on June 18, 1979, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan put Senate consent to the treaty in doubt and Carter withdrew it from the Senate. Nevertheless, both governments adhered to its terms.

Carter's popularity fell during much of his term, as inflation increased to more than 15 percent and the unemployment rate, after dropping early in his term, rose again to more than 6 percent. Interest rates rose to the 20 percent range, which made it difficult for people to purchase homes and consumer goods. The seizure of American diplomats in the embassy in Iran by “student” militants on November 4, 1979, and Carter's inability to obtain their release by diplomatic means also caused his popularity to sink. An April 1980 attempt to rescue the hostages ended in failure with the death of eight U.S. servicemen in a helicopter crash in the Iranian desert. The abortive mission seemed to many Americans to symbolize U.S. military weakness in the post-Vietnam era. In July 1980 Carter's popularity slid to 20 percent in the polls–lower even than Nixon's during the Watergate scandal.

In the 1980 Democratic nominating contest, Senator Edward M. Kennedy almost defeated Carter, and much of Kennedy's liberal platform was adopted by the convention in a repudiation of the Carter Presidency. With the Democrats split, Republican conservative Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in a three-way race that also involved independent candidate John Anderson. On the day Carter's successor was inaugurated, the Iranian government released the 52 hostages they had held for 444 days. President Reagan asked Carter to fly to Germany to greet the returning hostages.

After his election defeat, Carter returned to Georgia. He gave courses in public affairs at Emory University, participated in the creation and work of the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, an organization devoted to human rights and humanitarian causes around the world. Carter became involved in monitoring elections in a number of foreign nations, which aided in their transformation from dictatorship to democracy. ;

See also Camp David peace talks; Ford, Gerald R.; Mondale, Walter F.; Reagan, Ronald

Sources

• Douglas Brinkley, The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House (New York: Viking, 1998).
• Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam, 1982).
• Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham, The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).
• Betty Glad, Jimmy Carter, In Search of the Great White House (New York: Norton, 1980).
• Erwin C. Hargrove, Jimmy Carter as President: Leadership and the Politics of the Public Good (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
• Kenneth E. Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
• Kenneth W. Thompson, The Carter Presidency: Fourteen Intimate Perspectives of Jimmy Carter (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990)

(1924- ), thirty-ninth president of the United States. When Carter took the oath of office in 1977, he inherited a nation divided by the social turmoil of the 1960s and disillusioned by the cynical political practices of the Nixon White House. Within minutes after his inauguration, Carter left his heavily armored limousine and, holding hands with his wife, Rosalyn, walked the parade route to the cheers of spectators. Carter's stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to symbolize the end of one era and the beginning of another. In retrospect, however, the Democratic victory in 1976 was a historical anomaly in an era of Republican domination of the presidency.

Carter, the son of a Georgia landowner and businessman, was part of the first generation of moderate southern politicians who emerged in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. His term as Georgia governor (1971-1975) was a modest success, marked by an emphasis upon governmental reorganization and aggressive actions to end racial discrimination. Still, it hardly seemed a springboard to the White House, and his announcement in December 1975 that he would seek the presidency evoked incredulity or amusement from most knowledgeable political observers.

But they underestimated Carter. American voters were disgusted by the Watergate revelations of corruption, and they responded warmly to the soft-spoken southerner with his perpetual smile and his often repeated promise: "I'll never lie to you." His moderate economic views, his commitment to civil rights, and his background as a southerner helped him assemble a coalition of traditional Democrats, blacks, and southern whites who had become increasingly alienated from the Democratic party. Carter narrowly defeated incumbent Gerald Ford with 50.1 percent of the vote.

Carter's administration was not without achievements. The drive and focused intelligence that carried him to the White House made it possible for him to push through (by one vote) the Panama Canal Treaty in 1978 and to broker a peace agreement between Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat in the fall of 1978.

But failures in domestic and foreign policy overshadowed these accomplishments. He had been elected as an outsider, and he often proved inept in dealing with his own party. He also seemed unable to mobilize public support for his policies of restraint and sacrifice.

He was dogged, too, by events beyond his control: the energy crisis that triggered double-digit inflation, the fall of the shah and the seizure of hostages in Iran, and the chill in Soviet-American relations following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In retrospect, many of the crises Carter confronted were insoluble, but his style of hands-on management led a restive American public to hold him personally responsible for failure. The seizure of American hostages proved his final undoing. Americans' increasing frustration over the nation's inability to effect their release focused upon Carter. When an attempted rescue ended in ignominious failure in 1980, his fate as president was sealed. He went down to a smashing defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan.

In 1986 Carter founded the Carter Center of Emory University, an institution devoted to mediating international conflict and ameliorating health problems in the world's developing nations. In a departure from the usual quiet retirement of presidents, Carter has played an active role in numerous diplomatic and domestic efforts after leaving office. In this, he is especially known for his successful international mediations in countries such as North Korea and Haiti.

Bibliography:

Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (1982); Erwin C. Hargrove, Jimmy Carter as President: Leadership and the Politics of the Public Good (1988).

Author:

Dan T. Carter

See also Elections: 1976 , 1980. For events during Carter's administration, see Camp David Accord; Iran Hostage Crisis; Middle East-U.S. Relations; Panama Canal; Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.

Carter served in the navy, where he worked with Admiral Hyman G. Rickover in developing the nuclear submarine program. Resigning his commission (1953) after his father's death, he ran his family's peanut farm, which he built into a prosperous business. In 1962 he was elected as a Democrat to the first of two terms in the Georgia Senate. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1966, then succeeded in 1970, replacing Lester Maddox. As governor, Carter proclaimed that the time had come to end racial discrimination and formed alliances with such civil-rights leaders as Andrew Young.

Although little known outside Georgia, Carter announced that he would run for president at the end of his gubernatorial term, and through sustained and diligent campaigning won the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. With Minnesota Senator Walter F. Mondale as his running mate, Carter defeated incumbent President Gerald R. Ford. But Carter never established good relations with Congress and, with Republican successes in the 1978 midterm elections, his difficulties increased.

In foreign policy, Carter had some initial success. He secured congressional ratification—by a single vote after extended and rancorous debate—of his two Panama Canal treaties (1977), establishing a timetable for passing control of the canal to Panama. Then, in 1979, at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, Carter personally persuaded Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel to sign the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state (see Camp David accords).

Although he and Leonid Brezhnev signed the Salt II treaty (see disarmament, nuclear), it had uncertain chances for Senate ratification, and Carter shelved the treaty in Jan., 1980, as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (see Afghanistan War). When the USSR refused to withdraw, Carter also initiated a trade embargo and a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympic Games. In the last year of his administration, Carter's foreign policy was overshadowed by the Iran hostage crisis, in which Iranian students invaded the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking 55 hostages. When attempts to negotiate their release failed, Carter authorized a military rescue mission in Apr., 1980, that failed ignominiously.

Domestically, Carter had difficulties controlling inflation, which rose in each year of his administration—in part because of oil price increases after the Iranian revolution. The Federal Reserve Board's drastic remedies for curtailing inflation led to interest rates of more than 20% by 1980. Inflation and the unresolved hostage crisis put Carter in a weak position as the 1980 presidential election campaign began. He won the Democratic nomination only after a bitter challenge from Sen. Edward Kennedy. In the general election he was decisively defeated by Ronald Reagan.

Since leaving office, Carter has been active in international human-rights efforts, often as an impartial observer of first-time free elections. He has served as an international mediator in North Korea, Haiti, Bosnia, Venezuela, and elsewhere, and has worked to focus world attention on epidemics in Africa. He made a highly publicized trip to Cuba in May, 2002, becoming the most prominent American to visit the nation since Castro came to power. The Carter Center in Atlanta, founded in 1986, became an important arena for the discussion of international affairs. Carter also has been deeply involved with Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that helps working-class people in North America and abroad build and finance new homes. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his efforts to advance peace, democracy, human rights, and economic and social development.

Jimmy Carter married Rosalynn Smith in 1946; they have four children. During his term of office Carter published Why Not the Best? (1975) and A Government as Good as Its People (1977). After it, he wrote more than a dozen works of poetry and nonfiction, including The Blood of Abraham (1985); Everything to Gain (1987, written with his wife); Turning Point (1992); The Hornet's Nest (2003), a novel set in the South during the Revolutionary War; and Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), which some critics accused of one-sided, anti-Israeli views.

Bibliography

See his memoirs, Keeping Faith (1982) and An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood (2001); J. Wooten, Dasher: The Roots and the Rising of Jimmy Carter (1978); E. C. Hargrove, Jimmy Carter as President (1988); P. G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter (1997); D. Brinkley, The Unfinished Presidency (1998).

1924 -

U.S. president who mediated the Camp David Accords.

James Earl Carter, Jr., was born on 1 October 1924, in Plains, Georgia. After serving as governor of Georgia for one term (1971 - 1975) he rose from relative obscurity to win the Democratic nomination and defeat incumbent president Gerald Ford in 1976.

Carter came into office stressing the role of human rights in U.S. foreign policy and rejecting the Cold War perspective of previous administrations, particularly as embodied in the policies of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Carter argued that constructive engagement with the Soviet Union, rather than a hostile policy of containment, would advance U.S. interests by reducing Soviet inclinations to play the spoiler role in U.S. policy initiatives. Ironically, it was an early cooperative effort with the Soviets - a plan to cosponsor an Arab - Israeli peace conference in Geneva, announced in a joint communiqué on 1 October 1977 - that contributed to Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat's surprise decision to travel to Jerusalem in November 1977 for direct peace negotiations with Israel. Neither Sadat nor Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin wanted to harness the relatively straightforward Egyptian - Israeli issues (Israel's return of the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty) to the more difficult Palestinian and Syrian conflicts with Israel, and they effectively derailed Carter's Geneva idea by inaugurating bilateral Egyptian - Israeli talks.

When those negotiations threatened to break down, however, Carter invited Sadat and Begin to the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland. After thirteen days of intense discussions personally mediated by Carter, on 27 September 1978 the three heads of state signed the Camp David Accords, which in turn led to the Egypt - Israel Peace Treaty, signed on 26 March 1979 in Washington, D.C. The Egyptian - Israeli agreements constituted Carter's greatest foreign-policy triumph, though he later expressed regret that some aspects of the agreements went unfulfilled. The Egyptian - Israeli breakthrough made Israel and Egypt, respectively, the number one and two recipients of U.S. aid.

The Middle East brought success to Carter with Egypt and Israel, but it proved to be his undoing, with Iran. In January 1979 Islamic radicals inspired by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the shah of Iran, a long-time ally of the United States. On 4 November 1979 militant Islamic students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage. Carter's attempts to negotiate their release failed, and on 8 April 1980 the United States broke diplomatic relations with Iran and focused on a series of international legal and economic maneuvers designed to pressure Iran into letting the hostages go. On 24 April 1980 a commando attempt to free the hostages failed when U.S. helicopters crashed in a desert staging area 200 miles outside Tehran. The Iranian hostage crisis dominated the U.S. media and Carter's agenda throughout his failed reelection campaign against the Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan. Carter continued to work for the hostages' release until the very last day of his presidency, when Algerian mediation finally secured their freedom in exchange for the unfreezing of Iranian assets in the United States and a U.S. pledge of nonintervention in Iranian affairs. Carter received word that the hostages had been freed on 20 January 1981, several hours after Reagan took the presidential oath of office.

Despite losing the 1980 presidential election, Carter continued his career of public service. He published widely - memoirs, political observation and analysis, poetry, and fiction - and established the Carter Presidential Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He has remained an active statesman, working through the Carter Center to help resolve international crises around the globe.

Bibliography

Carter, Jimmy. Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993.

Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.

Carter Center web site. Available at http://www.cartercenter.org.

Jordan, Hamilton. Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Post-Presidency. New York: Scribner, 1997.

— MIA BLOOM UPDATED BY LAURA Z. EISENBERG

A political leader of the twentieth century; the president from 1977 to 1981. In 1976, Carter was a peanut farmer who had been a naval officer and the governor of Georgia; he stood outside the main power groups of the Democratic party. He gained the party's nomination, however, and defeated President Gerald Ford in the election of 1976. As president, Carter brought the heads of government of Israel and Egypt together to sign a historic peace treaty in 1979, reestablishing diplomatic relations between their two countries (see Arab-Israeli conflict). He responded to an invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979 by putting an embargo on grain sales to the invader and by keeping the United States out of the 1980 summer Olympic Games, which were held in the Soviet Union. Many Americans found Carter's leadership too cautious, however, and blamed him for a lack of improvement in the economy. His most striking loss of popularity came when revolutionaries in Iran stormed the United States embassy there in 1979 and held several dozen Americans as hostages for over a year (see Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini). The Iranians agreed to release the hostages only in the last minutes of Carter's presidency in early 1981, after Carter had lost the election of 1980 to Ronald Reagan. After leaving the presidency, he visited several nations, including Haiti and North Korea, as a peacemaker. He also participated in projects to refurbish housing for the poor.

As the thirty-ninth president of the United States, Jimmy Carter represented a historical change in national politics. He was the first modern president to be elected from the Deep South. Following a successful career in Georgia—where he was a peanut farmer, state senator, and then governor—Carter entered the White House in January 1977 as a political outsider at a time of distrust in elected officials. His Baptist upbringing guided him in his vision of the office as a post to be used for the nation's moral leadership. However, his presidency was one of only limited success in both its domestic and international endeavors, and voters rejected him for a second term in 1980 by electing Ronald Reagan in a landslide that marked a new era of Republican control of the executive branch. After leaving Washington, D.C., Carter began a revitalized public life as a prominent human rights activist and diplomat, addressing problems of war, famine, and repression around the globe.

The small farming town of Plains, Georgia, was Carter's birthplace on October 1, 1924. James Earl Carter, Sr., a veteran of World War I, farmed cotton and had a general store. He was conservative, strict, and a firm believer in his son, whom he nicknamed Hot, for Hotshot—because, Carter said, "Daddy never assumed I would fail at anything." Lillian Gordy Carter was a registered nurse. As devout Baptists, the parents expected much from Carter and their three other children. Religion meant steadfastness and a call to charity, as Carter's mother demonstrated by caring for patients without charge. Archery, their community, was predominantly African American. The young Carter worked and played with his black neighbors and, like them, lived without household plumbing or electricity. The experience, along with the virtues of hard work, frugality, and aspiration taught by his parents, shaped the politician he later became. After graduating at the top of his high school class, Carter paid for college with money he had earned and invested by selling peanuts as a boy.

Carter's ambition was naval service. Preparing to enter the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, he studied mathematics at Georgia Southwestern College and then the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1943 he entered Annapolis; he graduated in the top tenth of his class with a bachelor of sciences degree. Soon he married a long-time acquaintance, Rosalynn Smith, and began in earnest to pursue his career in the Navy. He worked as an instructor, saw battleship and submarine duty, and ultimately qualified as a sub commander. He served as senior officer aboard the Sea Wolf, the Navy's second atomic submarine. He left the Navy in 1953 after attaining the rank of lieutenant.

The decision to walk away from a promising career came when Carter faced a personal crossroads. His father had died, leaving a powerful legacy: the one-time cotton farmer had become a successful warehouse operator, peanut seed seller, and, finally, member of the Georgia House of Representatives. Carter now followed his father's example in business and politics. In his first year as a peanut farmer, he scratched out an income of $200, yet soon the business flourished. Success in political life took longer. Carter quickly became active in civic affairs. He opposed segregation, scorned the local White Citizen's Council, and tried to integrate his church. In the 1950s South such views spelled trouble. When he ran for the Democratic nomination for the state senate in 1962 his opponents stuffed ballot boxes to defeat him. Only after a long legal fight did a court invalidate the nomination because of fraud and turn it over to Carter. He won the election.

State politics established Carter nationally. In two terms as a state senator, from 1962 to 1966, his political philosophy was traditionally liberal yet also bore the mark of a technocrat: he advocated civil rights, welfare, and open government, while insisting on careful budgeting to ensure fiscal responsibility. In 1966 his first run for the governor's office failed but he won the election in 1971. Representing broad political and social changes shaping the region, Carter's governorship helped shake Georgia out of its segregationist past; he appointed African Americans to state government and fostered biracial cooperation through citizens groups. As an administrator he specialized in micromanagement, ordering frequent, strict review of all publicly funded programs. By 1974 Carter was rising within the national Democratic party. His exposure grew as he served as chairman of its campaign committee, and, fulfilling an ambition that began with his election as governor, announced his candidacy for president.

Carter's campaign message was integrity. The United States had just suffered through Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, producing widespread cynicism concerning elected officials. Carter's opponent, Gerald R. Ford, had pardoned Nixon, the man behind Watergate. Carter positioned himself as an honest, openly religious man beyond the political intrigues of Washington. The peanut-farmer-turned-governor seemed to promise a new voice in government and a new set of ideals. At the start of the campaign voters responded eagerly: Carter and his running mate, Walter F. Mondale, led the incumbent, Gerald R. Ford, and his running mate, Bob Dole, by 30 percentage points. But by election day the race was a dead heat. Carter won by the smallest margin since the first World War—57 electoral college votes. The new president walked along Pennsylvania Avenue in his inaugural parade, making a symbolic gesture that would be repeated in the thoroughly populist trappings of the Carter White House—fireside chats and radio call-in shows, simple furnishings, and fewer limousines. "We must adjust to changing times," he said in his inaugural speech, "and still hold to unchanging principles."

Carter's domestic policies for the United States were those of Georgia writ large. He promoted civil rights, welfare, tax reform, and budgetary control. Almost immediately, however, two major domestic concerns began to dictate his agenda. One was the nation's energy supply. In the late 1970s a severe energy crisis produced the worst fuel shortage in U.S. history coupled with rising international prices for oil. Congress cooperated with Carter's remedies by approving fuel conservation policies, deregulating natural gas prices, and passing a windfall tax on oil company profits. He did not get everything he wanted: a federal court blocked his attempt to decontrol domestic oil prices and Congress denied him authority for gasoline rationing. The second major problem was the economy, which worsened over the course of his term. His efforts to fight inflation—especially controls on consumer credit— produced a recession. Voters grew disgruntled. His approval rating fell and a July 1979 speech in which he blamed the nation's problems on a spiritual "malaise" was disastrous: afterward, a New York Times poll showed that for the first time ever, U.S. citizens, who traditionally had responded 2-1 that they were optimistic about the future, now said nearly 2-1 that they were pessimistic.

Foreign policy gave Carter triumphs and failures. He made human rights a top priority in the relationships between the United States and foreign nations, directing Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance to set a new standard: social and economic rights were to be as important as political and civil rights. Liberals praised the policy; conservatives attacked it as muddled and inconsistently applied. Critics were divided over a controversial treaty with Panama to relinquish control of the Panama Canal by the year 2000, a move the U.S. Senate barely approved. Carter's indisputable triumph was a peace treaty he secured between long-time enemies Israel and Egypt. But he took much of the blame for a seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by Iranian militants in November 1979. A military rescue mission in 1980 failed and the fifty-two U.S. hostages were released only after Carter left office.

Further weakening the presidency were scandals within the administration. Andrew Young, his ambassador to the United Nations, resigned amid revelations that he had secretly met members of the Palestine Liberation Or-ganization, in violation of U.S. policy. Bert Lance, director of the Office of Management and Budget, also resigned in disgrace; he was charged with unethical conduct in his former banking career. And Carter's brother, Billy Carter, caused the president embarrassment. Often seen as a comical figure who had cashed in on Carter's fame by lending his name to a drink called Billy Beer, Billy was revealed to have conducted business with Libya, an enemy nation. A Senate subcommittee report on the incident blamed Carter for not reining in his brother.

By late 1980 Carter had the lowest approval rating of any U.S. president in modern history. Even after an extensive cabinet shake-up, his administration was in disarray. Critics lambasted his policies and, particularly, his methods: he was considered to be too mired in details to execute bold decisions. Editorial cartoonists frequently lampooned him as either a country bumpkin or a hapless, childlike figure, echoing the prevailing sentiment that Carter was incapable of running the country. To make matters worse the Democratic party effectively deserted him. Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) nearly captured the party's presidential nomination and his supporters gained control of the party's platform over Carter's objections. Republicans sensed a bloodbath, and they got it in Ronald Reagan's landslide victory.

Typical of the post-Carter-era assessments was that of historian Burton I. Kaufman, whose 1993 book, The Presidency of James Earl Carter scathingly judged Carter as "lacking in leadership, ineffective in dealing with Congress, incapable of defending America's honor abroad, and uncertain about its purpose, priorities and sense of direction." Carter's defenders have largely chosen to blame his 1980 loss on intractable national problems that he did not create as well as on the overwhelming popularity of his opponent. "He didn't have the charisma of a Reagan," Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, Jr., former Democratic Speaker of the House, observed. "He couldn't pull it off." Some inside observers saw Carter's presidency as less a failure than a poor match of his abilities. The author Hendrik Hertzberg, a former Carter speechwriter, argued, "He was, and is, more of a moral leader than a political leader."

Although Carter's return to Georgia after his 1980 defeat might have been ignominious, it proved otherwise. After his departure from Washington, Carter immersed himself in scholarly and humanitarian pursuits. His work as a professor at Emory University in Atlanta and his prodigious literary output—a memoir and five other books ranging from politics to poetry— were intellectual achievements enough. But he also personally built housing for the poor in the United States and abroad through the nonprofit group Habitat for Humanity. "This is the kind of thing I enjoy doing. The alternative is to loaf around the house and spend my time playing golf or fishing," he told a Canadian newsweekly. He remained a force in world affairs. Human rights were his focal point in this rare second act in public life. His accomplishments in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s seemed the work of a tireless and selfless man: he monitored elections in Central America; negotiated further peace in the Middle East; supervised inoculation programs for children in Africa and elsewhere; and traveled on diplomatic missions to North Korea, Bosnia, and Haiti.

Quotes:

"You can do what you have to do, and sometimes you can do it even better than you think you can."

"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense... human rights invented America."

"We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon."

"I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times."

"We've uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business."

"We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams."

See more famous quotes by Jimmy Carter