James Earl Carter, Jr., popularly known as “Jimmy,” served as the 39th president of the United States. He was just the type of political outsider, representing integrity and reform, that the public eagerly wanted after the Watergate scandal and America’s loss in the Vietnam War. In 1976, with the help of his running mate, Senator Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, Carter narrowly defeated Republican incumbent Gerald R. Ford. Once in office, however, Carter’s political inexperience hampered his efforts at lasting reform; his administration was frustrated by high inflation and unemployment rates, a debilitating energy crisis, and a weakened military and diplomatic presence overseas.
Renominated by the Democratic Party in 1980, Carter was soundly defeated by Republican challenger Ronald W. Reagan. In his later service as a private citizen, he earned international respect as an elder statesman, selfless humanitarian, and nonpartisan mediator.
Jimmy Carter was the first president elected from the Deep South since before the Civil War. He was born to James Earl Carter, Sr., and Lillian Gordy Carter on October 1, 1924, in the small farming town of Plains, which was little more than a railway stop located in southwestern Georgia. His father was a peanut farmer and a small store owner who later became involved in local politics and eventually won a seat in Georgia’s House of Representatives, where he served until he died. His mother was a registered nurse and proved to be the stronger influence in Jimmy’s life as a model of public service, including volunteering for two years’ work for the Peace Corps in India at the age of 68.
While still in high school, Jimmy decided to attend the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. He received an appointment in 1942 and later graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. Shortly thereafter, he married his hometown sweetheart, Rosalynn Smith. During the six years that Carter served as a naval officer, they added three sons to the family: John William (born 1947), James Earl III (born 1950), and Donnel Jeffrey (born 1952). A daughter, Amy Lynn, was born much later in 1967. While in the navy, Carter worked as a training officer aboard the USS Mississippi and volunteered for submarine duty for two years aboard the USS Pomfret. In 1951 Carter was assigned to the first vessel built after World War II and earned his qualifications for submarine commander. The next year, he joined the nuclear submarine program under Admiral Hyman Rickover. After attending graduate-level courses in nuclear physics at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Carter returned to the Naval Reactors Branch of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D. C., where he assisted in the design and development of the power plant in the nation’s first nuclear submarines, including the USS Seawolf. When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his commission and returned to Georgia to take over the family business.
Racial segregation loomed as the most pressing issue facing southerners during the 1950s, and Jimmy Carter took a courageous stand against it. Carter suffered social and economic backlash when he became the only white man in Plains who refused to join the pro-segregation White Citizens’ Council; his white neighbors organized a temporary boycott of his business. In 1962 Carter ran for a seat in the Georgia State Senate but lost the primary by a few votes. He appealed the results, arguing that election fraud, including stuffed ballot boxes, robbed him of his true victory. Carter won the appeal and eventually won the election. Along the way, he also made a name for himself as a reformer opposed to corruption and government waste. He advocated more efficient government planning and bureaucracy, and more critical consideration of the budgets.
After winning reelection in 1964, he immediately set his sights on higher posts. In 1966 Carter announced his plans to run for Georgia governor. The decision was ill timed, and Carter lost the gubernatorial nomination during the primaries, far behind the popular segregationist, Lester Maddox, who eventually became governor.
Carter later said that the 1966 defeat caused him to be disillusioned with politics and life in general. His sister Ruth, who was a Christian missionary, helped him get over the disappointment and further guided Jimmy toward a deeper religious experience. From that point on, Carter freely referred to his faith, “born-again Christian,” as an integral part of his political decision making. He returned to the campaign trail in 1970 to run for governor, this time with much more caution. After a hard-fought campaign, Carter won the election by appealing to rural conservatives, but in so doing he alienated his black constituents and carried less than 10 percent of the state’s black voters in the general election.
Once in office, however, Governor Carter quickly returned to his social liberalism and actively spoke against segregation, promoted civil rights by specifically appointing women and minorities to bureaucratic positions in the state
James Earl Carter, Jr. (James E. Carter Presidential Library)
Government, and even displayed a portrait of the recently martyred civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., in the state capital. He also pushed for strict banking regulations and stronger consumer protection laws, state-sponsored health care, increased funding for education, and wide-reaching reforms of the state’s prisons and mental health facilities. His most highly praised achievement, however, was the reorganization of the state’s 300 agencies into 22 larger departments, which earned him an antiwaste reputation. He publicly announced his candidacy for the president for the 1976 election shortly thereafter.
The pool of Democratic presidential hopefuls included nine other candidates with considerably more national experience than Carter had. Yet Carter presented the fresh image of an honest, down-to-earth politician, a born-again Christian, and gentleman planter. This appealed to many Americans who had become weary of the Watergate scandal. Moreover, Carter’s emphasis on domestic reform, economic security, and moral values provided welcome change for those discouraged by American involvement in Vietnam. Furthermore, many Democrats, anxious about the threat posed by George Wallace, sought a southern politician who could take away voters from the former governor of Alabama. Carter won the Iowa caucuses by organizing a grassroots campaign, which also mobilized evangelical voters. He then went on to win the primary in New Hampshire and finished first in 17 of the 30 primaries he entered, winning the Democratic nomination. He also chose Walter F. Mondale, senator from Minnesota, as his running mate. The combination resounded with the public, and Jimmy Carter enjoyed a 30-point lead immediately following the Democratic convention.
It did not last, however, and by the time President Gerald Ford accepted his party’s nomination, Carter’s lead had dwindled significantly. Carter promised to bring an outsider’s perspective to the White House, as well as promising a more muscular defense and foreign policy. Carter also criticized Ford for failing to address the problems of an economic recession and high inflation.
Ford took advantage of Carter’s tendency to rely on ambiguities in his campaign speeches by shifting the national debate away from the public image of integrity toward a more specific discussion of the issues. Ford argued Carter’s platform was dangerous to the economy because it would produce higher inflation and require higher taxes. By November, Carter barely edged out Ford with 49.9 percent of the popular vote to Ford’s 47.9 percent.
Carter took a decidedly populist agenda to the office, which he put into effect immediately; he stripped the White House of many of its traditional formalities, including suspending the playing of “Hail to the Chief” in his presence, and restricting the use of his portrait in government offices. He also sold the presidential yacht, limited White House limousine service, discontinued long-standing traditions of presidential balls and state dinners, and significantly reduced the White House staff. He also tried to streamline the federal agencies in much the same way he had redesigned Georgia’s state agencies. The federal bureaucracy, however, held such a great constituent base that Congress was reluctant to act, and Carter was unable to force the changes. He fulfilled his campaign promise by creating a Department of Energy and a Department of Education. Congress, however, rejected his proposal for a new department for consumer protection.
Despite Democratic control of Congress, Carter suffered a strained relationship with both houses. Though Carter’s status as a Washington outsider helped elect him to the White House, it served to undermine his presidency in the long run; he had little success in his political relations with Congress. These administrative handicaps were magnified by the especially severe winter in 1977, which prompted serious shortages of natural gas. Carter responded with a number of emergency measures, including asking Congress for temporary authority to regulate prices and oil supplies; enactment of special “windfall” taxes on oil companies to discourage allegations of price gouging; economic incentives for research into alternative energy sources; and a national conservation campaign. Despite the flurry of federal enactments, the energy crisis produced a dramatic rise in inflation. Carter also imposed additional credit restraints, which some critics blamed for causing declines in auto and housing sales. An unusual combination of high inflation and market recession, which became known as “stagflation,” ensued, and the public sentiment turned strongly against Carter’s administration. By July 1980, Carter received the lowest approval rating of any president to that date.
In FOREIGN POLICY, Carter found mixed success. Foreign policy under Carter was marked by two shifts. Initially Carter, through his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, pursued a policy of making human rights and democratic principles the basis and measure of American foreign policy. As a consequence, anticommunism in foreign policy was downplayed. Escalating confrontation with the Soviet Union, especially after its invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, led Carter to take a more aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union. Still, Carter enjoyed a number of foreign policy successes.
In 1977 Carter replaced the 1903 Panama Canal Treaty with a new version that recognized Panama’s complete sovereignty over the Canal Zone within 20 years. The treaty was controversial, since many Americans feared this forfeiture would leave the United States vulnerable. Pointing to this, as well as to Carter’s earlier decision to pardon all Vietnam-era draft evaders and his refusal to approve development of the neutron bomb and a B-1 bomber plane, critics accused Carter of being soft on defense matters.
Carter’s greatest success in foreign policy came when he brokered an unprecedented peace agreement between Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin that later resulted in the signing of a peace treaty on March 26, 1979.
This was arguably the high point in Carter’s foreign policy. In the summer of 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and U. S.-Soviet relations deteriorated rapidly afterward. In response, he discontinued the second round of Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT II) with the Soviet Union and accelerated the military arms buildup that he had begun earlier. He also boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow (which led to the Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984). Carter tried to improve relations with China by formally recognizing their revolutionary Communist government and by severing ties with the traditionally American-supported Nationalist regime in Taiwan.
Carter’s foreign policy came under further criticism when militant Islamic revolutionaries, led by fundamentalist Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, overthrew the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had ruled for 37 years. After the shah fled to the United States, a group of Iranian supporters of the ayatollah stormed the U. S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and took 66 American hostages. Negotiations for the release of the hostages moved slowly and were aggravated by an abortive military rescue attempt in April 1980. The hostages remained captive throughout the remainder of Carter’s administration and plagued his campaign for reelection.
Further damaging Carter, the president’s brother, Billy, was discovered to have received $220,000 from Libya for unknown reasons. Even though a later congressional investigation found that American foreign relations were unaffected by the payment, the appearance of impropriety involving a Middle Eastern government hostile to the United States undermined Carter’s credibility.
President Carter received his party’s nomination for the 1980 presidential election, but only after a formidable challenge by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) who had rallied the party’s liberal wing to his side. The fight with Kennedy left the Democrats bitterly divided. After winning the nomination, Carter told aides that he believed he could easily defeat the Republican nominee, Ronald W. Reagan. His underestimation of Reagan proved his undoing on election day. Reagan won in a landslide, winning 50 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41 percent of the vote, and third-party candidate John Anderson’s popular vote of 9 percent. The Republicans also gained control of the Senate for the first time in 26 years.
Carter’s approach to social problems proved more effective after he left office than it had been while he was president. In 1982 he founded the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he also taught. The center dedicates itself to championing human rights and to peaceful resolution of conflicts around the globe. During the 1980s, Carter and his wife became known as spokes-people for numerous charitable causes, including Habitat for Humanity, which is a nonprofit organization that builds houses for the poor in several countries. By the 1990s, Carter had assumed the role of elder statesman; he was asked to monitor elections in South American countries in 1989-90 and in Haiti in 1994. He also served as mediator for the United Nations after North Korea’s violation of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1994. He was repeatedly called upon during the many armistices of the Balkan conflicts of the late 1990s. Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
See also Camp David accords; economy; evangelical Christians; Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; Iranian hostage crisis; Taiwan.
Further reading: James Earl Carter Jr., Keeping Fai-th: Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam Books, 1983);
--, The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle
East (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985);-,
Turning Point: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of
Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993);-,
Talking Peace (New York: Random House, 1993); Kenneth E. Morris, Jimmy Carter, American Moralist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
—Aharon W. Zorea
World History
