Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth President of the United States, was a soft spoken man of exceptional integrity and intelligence. Energetic, determined, and passionately interested in achieving results, Carter worked the people under him hard, but worked himself even harder. With a beaming, full-toothed smile, Carter appealed to voters in the 1976 election as an outsider to the politics of Washington. A new law providing candidates for public office with campaign funds had enabled him to run for the Presidency without incurring a debt to big business or political leaders. With a simplicity and down-to-earth quality reminiscent of his days as a peanut farmer, President Carter disliked the pomp and ceremony of Washington society and did away with most of it during his years in the White House. When Jimmy Carter arrived in Washington he had nothing but the most noble of intentions: he wanted to reconnect the Presidency to the people, reform the federal government to make it more efficient, provide better funding for education, and increase opportunities for the nation's poor. He also wanted to set up an energy program to help the environment and eliminate the United States' dependence on foreign oil. Ironically, however, the very things that made Carter an attractive candidate in 1976 rendered him virtually ineffective as a President. With a distaste for political games and favors, many of Carter's best programs were not put to the right people, the right way. Ultimately the version of President Carter's domestic program that did get approved by Congress failed to reverse the down trend of the economy. This, combined with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which resulted in the suspension of all U.S./Soviet relations and the embarrassing hostage crisis in Iran, enabled Republican challenger Ronald Reagan to defeat President Carter by a landslide in the election of 1980.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born October 1, 1924 in Plains, Georgia. He was the first child of four born to Lillian Gordy Carter, a registered nurse, and James Carter, a storekeeper, farmer, and insurance broker. Jimmy received his elementary education from public schools in Plains. During his early teens he became a member of the evangelical First Baptist Church of Plains, Georgia, which provided the basis around which he would construct his personal philosophy. In high school Jimmy Carter excelled in history, literature, and music, and played on the basketball team. He was ranked in the top ten percent of his class when he graduated in 1941. After a year at Georgia Southwestern College in Americus, Carter began taking courses at Georgia Institute of Technology to fulfill the math requirement at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, which he entered in 1943. Carter graduated Annapolis 59th in a class of 820 in 1946 and received a commission as an instructor on the U.S.S. Wyoming, a battleship which was anchored at Norfolk, Virginia.
On July 7, 1946 Jimmy Carter married Rosalynn Smith, the daughter of an auto mechanic who had died when his daughter was only thirteen. The couple had three sons and one daughter.
See Rosalynn Carter: First Lady Rosalynn Carter co-authored with her husband the book, Everything to Gain (1987).
In 1948 Carter applied for submarine duty. He spent two years stationed in the Pacific, first as a member of the crew on the U.S.S Pomfret, and then on the U.S.S. K - 1, before being selected for the Navy's nuclear submarine program in 1951. While taking classes in nuclear physics at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Carter served as an engineer on the project to build Sea Wolf, one of the first atomic submarines ever built. Carter's father died in 1953, and Jimmy decided to return to Georgia and run the family's peanut farm. Jimmy Carter had reached the rank of lieutenant senior grade when he retired from the Navy in 1953.
During the nine years it was under Jimmy's management, the Carter farm grew in size and wealth, enabling the family to move into other areas of the farming industry. The Carters constructed a peanut shelling plant and established a farm equipment supply business. While working on the farm, Jimmy Carter became interested in politics and community service. He became a deacon at the First Baptist Church of Plains, and began teaching Sunday school. In 1955 Carter became a member of the Sumter County School Board and chairman of the Sumter County Hospital Authority.
Jimmy Carter made a bid for the Democratic nomination to the Senate in 1962. He lost in the primaries, but contested the election results on the grounds that the he had seen voters in Georgetown casting ballots openly in front of the ballot supervisor, a known supporter of his opponent. Carter's objection was upheld, he secured the Democratic nomination and went on to win the general election. In the Senate Jimmy Carter became a champion of educational reform.
In 1970 Jimmy Carter made a bid for governor of Georgia. In an upset victory, Carter defeated former Governor Carl E. Sanders for the Democratic nomination in the primaries and went on to defeat his Republican opponent, a popular television newsman by the name of Hal Suit, in the general election. Carter's campaign platform opposed mandatory racial quota bussing as a means of offering minority children a better education. In a speech declaring a need for racial equality, Carter revealed his plan to fund all schools with equal state aid, regardless of whether that school was in a poor or a wealthy neighborhood. During the campaign, Carter promised to make Georgia's government smaller and more cost efficient. Once in office, Governor Carter eliminated numerous state agencies which provided services no longer needed and combined agencies that provided duplicate services. By the end of his term Governor Carter had reduced Georgia's 300 state agencies down to 30. Governor Carter was also responsible for instituting legislation which provided greater state aid programs benefiting the old and the mentally ill. In an effort to make government more accessible to the common citizen, He opened government meetings to the general public. The Carter Administration continued to work for racial equality by raising the number of African American government appointees from 3 to 53. Governor Carter was also personally responsible for a movement to add portraits of famous African American Georgia residents to the portrait gallery in the states capital. A portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., the first of many portraits of famous African American Georgians to be hung in the state gallery, was hung in 1974.
Governor Carter could not run for a second term in 1974 because of a Georgia state law that prohibited governors from running for consecutive terms. One month before he left office, Governor Carter announced his candidacy for President of the United States. Virtually unknown outside the state of Georgia, Carter spent the next two years campaigning. A new federal law which provided campaign funds for candidates for federal office enabled Carter to concentrate on campaigning rather than on raising funds. He won an unexpected victory in the Iowa Democratic primary and went on to win the New Hampshire primaries. By the time he arrived at the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1976, he had already won enough delegates to secure the nomination, which he did on the first ballot. Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota won the Democratic nomination for Vice President. The Republicans nominated Vice President Gerald R. Ford for President and Senator Robert J. Dole of Kansas for Vice President. Carter promised to condense and consolidate the federal government the same way he condensed and consolidated the state government in Georgia. He criticized President Ford's handling of rising inflation and unemployment and promised to create new jobs by increasing federal spending. Carter promised to institute a national energy program that would protect the environment and eliminate the United States' dependence on foreign oil. He also promised to grant a Presidential pardon to draft dodgers of the Vietnam War. Carter was the front-runner primarily because of the bad economy under President Ford, and also because of the fact that Ford had granted Nixon a Presidential pardon. Voters were also attracted to Carter's "outsider" status in regard to the Washington political system. The Carter/Mondale team beat the Ford/Dole team by 297 to 240 in the electoral college. Jimmy Carter became the thirty-ninth President of the United States on January 20, 1977.
Jimmy Carter's first official action as President was to grant a Presidential pardon for all draft dodgers of the Vietnam War. Later that year he signed a bill to upgrade the dishonorable discharges received by deserters and other criminals of the war. In March of 1977 President Carter received the approval he needed from Congress to begin his reorganization of government agencies. Soon after, Congress passed his legislation to cut federal income taxes. The Department of Energy was established in August of 1977. In 1978, the Energy Department successfully passed a tax on cars that used an excessive amount of gas, but the plan did not reduce the United States' dependency on foreign oil by a significant amount. In defense, President Carter discontinued the B-1 bomber program in favor of cruise missiles which the President felt were more versatile and effective. The economy picked up during President Carter's first year in office, but the trend did not last.
In August of 1977, a government investigation into the affairs of President Carter's budget director, Burt Lance, revealed some questionable financial dealings which had taken place during Lance's years as a private banker. Public pressure forced Lance to resign on September 21, 1977. Lance was later acquitted of the charges, but the stigma of corruption hurt the President's image, and the tide of public opinion began to turn.
President Carter asked for the resignations of his entire cabinet in July of 1979. After reviewing the performance of all of his cabinet members, the President decided to replace six members. In the restructuring of his cabinet, President Carter created the position of White House Chief of Staff to which he appointed Hamilton Jordan. The following September President Carter created a cabinet level office of the Department of Education.
The President revealed a new plan to fight inflation in March of 1980. It called for a tax on oil imports, cuts in federal spending, restrictions on credit cards, and voluntary restraints on wages and prices. The plan did not bring a significant improvement to the state of the economy and was criticized heavily by President Carter's opponent Ronald Reagan in the election of that year.
President Carter affirmed his commitment to civil rights on an international level when he signed legislation which discontinued economic aid to nations in Asia, southern Africa, and Latin America, which the United Nations had condemned for their violation of human rights. President Carter achieved great success as a third-party mediator in the war between Egypt and Israel. His meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Menachen Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sedat culminated in the Camp David Accords of 1979, which established peace between the two long-standing enemies. In 1978 President Carter signed a treaty with Panama that set the expiration date of the United States' Panama Canal lease at December 1, 1999. The treaty, which also contained measures which provided for a loosening of the United States' hold on Panama, re-established the United States' commitment to defending Panama against foreign aggressors other than itself.
On January 1, 1979 President Carter continued the diplomatic efforts of President Nixon when he signed a treaty which formalized the United States' relations with the People's Republic of China. President Carter had also intended to continue efforts begun by President Nixon in regard to the Soviet Union, but was not as successful. In June of 1979 President Carter traveled to Vienna were he met with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev for the second round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II). Congress hesitated to pass the resulting treaty which limited strategic nuclear weapons, and President Carter withdrew the treaty in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The Carter Administration viewed the Soviet invasion, which was an attempt to save Afghanistan's crumbling communist government, as a brutal violation of international law. The President instituted a grain embargo against the Soviet Union and refused United States athletes permission to attend the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.
On November 4, 1979 the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran was invaded by a Muslim extremist group, and 53 embassy employees were taken hostage. A revolution in Iran a year earlier had brought the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power, causing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to flee to the United States. The terrorists wanted to exchange the American hostages for the return of their deposed shah. Believing that meeting the group's demands would be a condoning of terrorist tactics and set a precedent for similar future attacks on the United States, President Carter refused to deliver the Iranian Shah. After numerous diplomatic efforts failed, President Carter ordered a helicopter rescue mission in April of 1980. The helicopter rescue mission was a miserable failure, and eight American soldiers were killed before the mission was finally aborted. The hostage crisis and the embarrassing rescue attempt ensured President Carter's defeat in the 1980 election. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, a few minutes after President Carter had left office. The seemingly deliberate timing in regard to the hostages' release led to later speculation that succeeding President Reagan had orchestrated a deal with the terrorists that enabled him to use the hostage crisis to his political advantage. Charges against Reagan, which came before Congress a few months after he had left office following his second term, were never proven.
Jimmy Carter retired to his home in Georgia where he became a prolific writer and a champion of humanitarian causes. Keeping the Faith: Memoirs of a President was published in 1982; The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East was published in 1985; Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, which the former President co-authored with his wife Rosalynn, was published in 1987; and Turning Point: A Candidate, a State and a Nation Come of Age was published in 1992. Since 1984 former President Carter has done volunteer work as a carpenter for the Habitat for Humanity, an organization which builds housing for the poor. The Carter Center of Emory University, a forum for the discussion of domestic and world affairs, and the Jimmy Carter Library both opened in Atlanta, Georgia in 1986. Since the late 1980's former President Carter has frequently traveled to developing countries to monitor free elections. In 1989 he mediated peace talks which brought an end to the civil war in Ethiopia. In 1991 he founded the International Negotiation Network Council, an organization for the mediation of disputes between nations. The Atlanta Project, an organization to coordinate private and public social reform efforts, was established by Carter in 1992.
