Jimmy Carter

James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia — the first US president born in a hospital. He grew up on a peanut farm, graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1946, and served as a submarine officer under Admiral Hyman Rickover in the early nuclear submarine program. After his father’s death in 1953, he resigned his commission and returned to Plains to run the family peanut business. He was elected to the Georgia State Senate in 1962, became Governor of Georgia in 1971, and ran for president as a relatively unknown former governor in 1976 — capitalizing on post-Watergate, post-Vietnam American hunger for a Washington outsider. He defeated Gerald Ford 297–240 in the Electoral College, winning largely on his image as an honest, plain-spoken southerner untouched by the corruption that had defined the Nixon era.

Carter’s greatest achievement came in September 1978, when he personally brokered the Camp David Accords between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin after 13 days of intensive, often near-collapsed negotiations at the presidential retreat in Maryland. The accords produced the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty of 1979 — the first between Israel and an Arab nation — and remain the most significant achievement of his presidency. Carter also established the Department of Energy and Department of Education, negotiated the Panama Canal Treaties returning the canal to Panama, normalized relations with China, and deregulated the trucking and airline industries. His emphasis on human rights as a cornerstone of foreign policy represented a genuine shift in American diplomatic doctrine.

The final two years of Carter’s presidency were dominated by cascading crises. Inflation reached 13.5% in 1979. Gas lines stretched around city blocks as the oil crisis bit hard. His July 1979 speech — which became known as the “malaise speech,” though he never used the word — warned of a “crisis of confidence” in American identity and struck many voters as more accusatory than reassuring. On November 4, 1979, Iranian revolutionary students seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage. They were held for 444 days. A rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, failed catastrophically in April 1980 when helicopters broke down in the Iranian desert, killing 8 servicemen and severely damaging Carter’s image of competence. He also faced a strong primary challenge from Ted Kennedy, which split the Democratic Party. Ronald Reagan defeated him in a landslide — 489 vs. 49 electoral votes. The 52 hostages were released on January 20, 1981 — the minute Reagan was sworn in. Carter died on December 29, 2024, at age 100, the longest-lived president in American history.

Carter’s post-presidential legacy is virtually without parallel in American history. Where most former presidents retreat into relative public obscurity or elder-statesman advisory roles, Carter spent the 44 years after leaving office engaged in a level of direct humanitarian work that transformed how the office’s aftermath is understood. The Carter Center, founded in 1982, has monitored more than 100 elections in more than 40 countries, deploying impartial observers to certify democratic contests from Nicaragua to Zambia. Its health programs led a global campaign to near-eradicate Guinea worm disease — a parasitic infection that afflicted 3.5 million people in 1986; by 2021, fewer than 14 cases were recorded worldwide. The Center has also worked to eliminate river blindness, trachoma, and lymphatic filariasis across Africa and Asia.

Carter’s personal work with Habitat for Humanity — picking up a hammer and building houses with volunteers until he was physically unable to, well into his eighties — became one of the most recognized images of public service in modern American life. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2002. The Nobel Committee explicitly noted his post-presidential work: “In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international co-operation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development.” He was widely described, across partisan lines, as the greatest ex-president in American history — a man whose legacy was built not in the White House but in the decades after he left it. He died at his home in Plains, Georgia, on December 29, 2024, at age 100.

Carter’s presidential rating among historians has shifted substantially over time. For the first decade after his presidency, he was typically ranked low — the hostage crisis, the inflation, the “malaise speech,” and the landslide loss to Reagan all weighed heavily. As the Camp David Accords aged and their durability became apparent, and as his post-presidential work accumulated moral authority, his ratings improved. He is now typically ranked in the middle tier of American presidents, with foreign policy achievements recognized as among the most significant of the post-WWII era.

His presidency is often read as a cautionary tale about the gap between personal integrity and political effectiveness. Carter was widely acknowledged as exceptionally intelligent, knowledgeable, and morally serious — and widely criticized for being unable to communicate a coherent political vision, manage Congress, or project the forceful leadership that American voters expect from the presidency in a crisis. His approval hit 28% in 1979 — among the lowest ever recorded. His electoral loss in 1980, 489–49 in the Electoral College, was one of the most decisive defeats of an incumbent in modern history. The contrast between the presidential and post-presidential records makes Carter one of the most complicated figures in the American political tradition: a man who did some of the most consequential and lasting good in American public life, but not while he was president.