October 1, 1924, 100 years ago: James Earl Carter Jr. is born in Plains, Georgia. He left his family's peanut farm to enter the U.S. Naval Academy. In 1946, he graduated, and married a Plains neighbor, Rosalynn Smith. They went on to have 3 sons and a daughter. In 1953, while he was serving in the Korean War, his father died, and he left the Navy to run the farm.
In 1962, he ran for the U.S. Senate. He lost, due to some good ol'-fashioned Southern political chicanery. A recount was ordered by a court, and he won. In 1966, he ran for Governor against segregationist Lester Maddox, and lost. In 1970 he ran again, and won.
At the time, the Governor of Georgia was not allowed to serve consecutive terms, so he didn't run for re-election in 1974. What he did do that year was give the State's best-known athlete, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves, a special license plate for hitting his 715th career home run, becoming baseball's all-time leader.
Governor Carter, Henry Louis Aaron,
and Aaron's wife, Billye
In 1975, he told his mother, known to all who knew her as "Miz Lillian," "Mama, I'm running for President." Given his background -- only 4 years as Governor, and 4 years as a State Senator, a military background but not one well-known to the public, and the fact that no non-incumbent Southerner had won a Presidential election since 1848 -- her reaction was understandable: "President of what?"
He published a campaign biography, titled Why Not the Best? It attempted to explain why he was the best choice. He told audiences at his appearances, "I will never lie to you." This struck a chord with people who had lived through the last 3 Presidents: Lyndon Johnson had lied about how the Vietnam War was going, Richard Nixon had lied about pretty much everything, and Gerald Ford had pardoned Nixon, so he lied (or, at the least, miscalculated) when he said, "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over."
Carter won the Iowa Caucuses, making them matter for the first time. He outmaneuvered much more experienced Democrats to win the Party's nomination, taking Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate. He had 3 debates against Ford, and handled himself very well in them. Incredibly, the 1st debate with Ford was the 1st time this former Governor of a decent-sized State had ever met a President.
Despite a strong comeback from Ford, Carter won a close election on November 2, 1976, and became the 39th President of the United States. He won a bare majority of the popular vote, 50.1 percent, to Ford's 48.0 percent. He won 23 States, with 297 Electoral Votes, to Ford's 240. He swept the South, except for Virginia, including winning 3 States that have not voted for a Democratic nominee since: Texas, Mississippi and Alabama. Former Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who had previously run for the Democratic nomination in 1968, ran an independent campaign, and got 0.9 percent.
Carter was sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger at the Capitol on January 20, 1977. He began an Inaugural Address tradition of Presidents thanking their predecessors for their service. Despite a tough campaign, he and Ford built a friendship that lasted until Ford's death in 2006. The new President and First Lady walked up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, so the crowds could see them -- and so they could save gas on the Presidential limousine.
Carter created more jobs per year than any President between LBJ and Joe Biden. He made strides in moving America toward energy independence, although that would last, due to the actions of his successor. He appointed a more diverse Cabinet and a more diverse federal judge corps than any President before him, although he never got a chance to replace a Supreme Court Justice, making him the only President since Andrew Johnson in 1865-69 who was denied this chance. (Even James Garfield, who was only President for 6 months in 1881, got to appoint one.)
Most of all, he made the Camp David Accords happen. Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt had already made overtures of peace to each other, following wars against each other in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, all won by Israel. Carter took them to Camp David, the Presidential retreat northwest of D.C., so they could hammer out their differences. At one point, Begin and Sadat weren't speaking to each other, so Carter acted as a go-between. Finally, it was straightened out, and there was a signing ceremony on the White House lawn.
That peace holds to this day. Begin and Sadat each got the Nobel Peace Prize at that time. Carter did not.
Left to right: Sadat, Carter, Begin.
The flags are arranged differently,
because, when paired with others,
the U.S. flag is always placed to the furthest left.
He had special difficulty in getting along with the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts. In his memoir, O'Neill said, "When it came to understanding the issues of the day, Jimmy Carter was the smartest public official I've ever known... He was always willing to listen and to learn.
"With one exception. When it came to the politics of Washington, D.C., he never really understood how the system worked. And although this was out of character for Jimmy Carter, he didn't want to learn about it, either."
And so there would be no big initiatives, no big overall program, like Franklin Roosevelt with his New Deal, Harry Truman with his Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy with his New Frontier, or LBJ with his Great Society. Carter didn't even give his Administration a theme like that.
The economy did well for his 1st 2 years, then slowed in his 3rd year. By mid-1979, all the promise of 1976 seemed to have faded away. It wasn't that he had failed, but it felt like nothing was happening. On July 15, he gave a speech from the Oval Office, where he spoke of "a crisis of confidence":
It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
Apparently, it was Hendrik Hertzberg, Carter's chief speechwriter, who wrote the "Crisis of Confidence Speech," in an interview the next day, who used the word "malaise" to describe what Carter was talking about. So it entered the American lexicon as the "Malaise Speech," and Carter's critics have saddled him with the term "malaise" ever since.
Yes, there was a malaise. But Carter sure as hell didn't cause it. It was brought about by a cumulative effect of things that happened under Presidents of both parties, including, to a degree, Carter himself: The assassination of JFK in 1963, LBJ's seeming abandonment of his Great Society principles to spend on the Vietnam War, the race riots of 1964 to 1969, the riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Nixon's actions in Vietnam and Watergate, Ford's pardon of Nixon, Ford's inability to reduce unemployment and inflation, and Carter's own inability to handle a 2nd round of inflation -- in each case, caused largely by Middle Eastern nations raising the price of oil.
Carter's biggest "failures" were that he was not the President of Saudi Arabia, and thus had no control over the price of oil; and that he was not the President of Iran, and had no control over that nation. It underwent an Islamic Revolution early in 1979, overthrowing the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, an ally of the U.S., but running a repressive regime at home. He had not only lost his country, he was losing his life to cancer.
Two men usually identified as Republicans demanded that Carter let the Shah into America for medical treatment: Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford; and David Rockefeller, head of Chase Manhattan Bank, brother of the late former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and controller of the country's largest family fortune. Closer advisors, such as White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan and Press Secretary Jody Powell, told Carter it would be a huge mistake.
He let the Shah in. Not only did it not work (the Shah was dead in a few months, anyway), but revolutionaries, with the implicit permission of the country's dictator, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, invaded the U.S. Embassy in the capital of Tehran, and took 80 hostages. That number would drop to 52 with some releases. This was soon followed by the Soviet Union, afraid of another revolution in a nation that bordered both them and Iran, invading Afghanistan.
At first, the country rallied around Carter as the nation's leader. But as time went on, and he couldn't get the hostages out, he was seen as weak. His response to the Soviet invasion was to announce that the U.S. would boycott the upcoming Olympics in Moscow. This one act did more to paint the Soviets as an "evil empire" than anything Republicans did over 40 years. But it was seen by the public an insult, not to the Soviets, but to the athletes who had trained so hard for the Olympics.
And the economy was getting worse: Unemployment, inflation and interest rates were rising. Jobs were still being created, so it wasn't officially a "recession" yet. But it felt like one.
On April 25, 1980, a failed attempt to rescue the hostages resulted in the deaths of 8 servicemen. By this point, Carter had pretty much wrapped up the Democratic nomination for re-election. So a lot of Primary voters began voting for his challenger, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, not because they believed in him, but as a protest vote against Carter. That also damaged Carter tremendously.
At the Democratic Convention, again at Madison Square Garden, Kennedy gave a fantastic speech. Two nights later, Carter's speech was not well-received. And it looked like he was chasing Kennedy around the stage, desperate to get the familiar Convention-ending image of the defeated candidates joining the nominee in an arms-raised-in-shared-victory pose. As many Republicans thought 4 years earlier, a lot of Democrats were thinking, "We've nominated the wrong guy."
For the Republicans in 1976, not happy with Ford, the right guy was Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California. He rode concerns over the economy and Carter's handling of foreign policy to a big lead. Carter started to come back, and there even seemed to be progress with the Iranian negotiations.
There was one debate, at the Public Auditorium in Cleveland, just 1 week before the election. Carter accused Reagan of wanting to cut spending on Medicare. Which he did want to do. (And did go on to do.) Reagan laughed, and lied, and said, "There you go again." And the audience applauded.
The closing statements were symbolic of each man. Carter gave a statement that read a lot better than it looked, and inspired nobody. Reagan asked what has become the defining question of every Presidential election since: "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?"
Since, for most people, the answer was, "No," Carter won only 6 States, including his native Georgia. He lost the Electoral Vote, 489-49. The popular vote wasn't close, either: Reagan got 50.7 percent, Carter 41.0, and an independent candidate, Representative John Anderson of Indiana, who had finished 3rd in the Republican Primaries and stayed in the race, got 6.6 percent, though he didn't win a single County or Congressional District. Ed Clark, the nominee of the Libertarian Party, got a shade over 1 percent of the national popular vote.
The fact that Reagan won with only a little over 50 percent against an unpopular incumbent -- as Carter had the year before -- and the fact that the men who finished 3rd and 4th in the race got nearly 8 percent of the vote between them suggested that, while this was a firing of Carter, it was not an enthusiastic embrace of Reagan and his archconservative policies. It wasn't, "Ron, you're wonderful, we have all the confidence in the world in you!" It was more like, "Okay, Ron, the last guy was lousy, let's see what you can do." As Mort Sahl, the great politically-themed comedian of the previous generation, put it, "Reagan won because he ran against Carter. Had he run unopposed, he would have lost."
Carter finally got an agreement to get the hostages home on January 20, 1981, his last day in office. But, in one final insult, the plane that would take them out of Iranian airspace was kept on the ground until after 12:00 Noon, U.S. Eastern Time, and after Reagan was sworn in, so it didn't happen while Carter was still President.
Of course, Carter proved to be better than Reagan at everything, from creating jobs to getting American hostages home from Iran without breaking any laws.
*
Conservatives, desperate to keep up the image of Ronald Reagan as a great President in the wake of the successes of liberal Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the failures of both George Bushes and Donald Trump, are determined to show that Carter was "a failed President." They endlessly described first Clinton, then Obama, and now Biden as "another Jimmy Carter." They still do to this today, even though Carter hasn't been President for 43 years.
They don't understand the irony: Carter was their kind of guy. He was a pioneer in what we now call "agribusiness." And he left the world of business to become what they like to call a "citizen legislator." Even during his own Presidential campaign, he was billed as a "Washington outsider." He created jobs and made a grand peace agreement. If a Republican had done what Carter did, today's Republicans would consider him a saint.
In 1982, Jimmy and Rosalynn established the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta, which also hosts his Presidential Library and Museum, which opened in 1986. The Center's goal is to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering, through election monitoring and medical efforts, having now done so in more than 80 countries.
In 2002, in recognition of a public lifetime of such efforts, not just the Camp David Accords, Carter was finally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Given the reasons, this emphasizes that the Nobel Committee really should split the award, because many of its winners got it through humanitarian efforts, without ever taking an active role in stopping or preventing a war. Carter did both.
The Carters also began working with Habitat for Humanity International, based in Americus, Georgia, only 10 miles from their hometown of Plains. Scenes of the Carters, even into their 90s, working on building houses became more inspirational than anything Jimmy did as President. In other words, unlike Donald Trump, when Jimmy Carter built a wall, he built four of them, and a roof, and did it over and over again, and it actually helped people.
Rosalynn Carter died in 2023, at the age of 96. She trailed only Bess Truman, 98, as the longest-lived First Lady. She is laid to rest in the Carter family cemetery in Plains. This made the Carters the only Presidential couple, other than the Kennedys, for whom this opportunity was not available, not to be buried at their Presidential Library since Calvin Coolidge.
The Carters had the longest Presidential marriage ever, 77 years. To put that in perspective: Only 9 of the 1st 36 Presidents lived as long as the Carters were married. Jimmy Carter is also, by far, the longest-lasting former President, having been out of office for 43 years. He was only the 6th President to reach a 90th Birthday, after John Adams, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. he was the 1st ever to reach a 95th birthday. Today, he became the 1st President ever to reach a 100th birthday.
He has already successfully dealt with cancer once, and, unusually for such patients, has been in hospice care for over a year. His grandson Jason, the family's spokesman, says that there are days when he is unconscious for an entire day, but that, when conscious, he's aware of what's going on in the world.
He says he wants to live long enough to vote one more time, for Kamala Harris, against Donald Trump. Hopefully, given his condition, his absentee ballot has already been marked, and is ready to be mailed in. He's in Georgia, one of the close States that will decide the election, and, as Trump well knows -- he's been indicted for his efforts to get them -- both Trump and Harris need all the votes there that they can get.
Incredibly, despite some achievements that make his mistakes pale in comparison, President Carter is not the most significant political figure born on this day. William Rehnquist was, serving on the Supreme Court from 1972, including as Chief Justice from 1986, until his death in 2005. He led the 5-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore, that changed American history, life and culture, and not for the better, setting the stage for even worse decisions by the Court.
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