Jimmy Carter dead at 100: Inside his life and legacy

Jimmy Carter, the one-term Democratic president who presided over a period of economic sluggishness and social malaise but who distinguished himself with the longest and one of America’s most admirable post-presidencies, has died at the age of 100. He was the longest-lived president in American history.

Carter, a single-term former governor of Georgia, was considered a long shot for the Democratic nomination in 1976. But he defeated a crowded field in the primary and incumbent Gerald Ford in the general. His lack of national experience proved to be a liability once in office, as he had an antagonistic relationship with congressional Democrats and failed to make progress on major domestic priorities like universal health insurance and a job guarantee program.

On foreign policy, he was initially successful, making peace between Egypt and Israel and negotiating the return of the Panama Canal to Panama. But the seizure of 52 Americans as hostages in Tehran in 1979 came to dominate the end of his term.

Carter inherited a serious inflation problem from Ford, which only got worse during his administration, peaking at over 14 percent by 1980. The US fell into recession that year, and a tough primary challenge from Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and the ongoing Iranian hostage crisis further weakened Carter. He lost reelection to former California Gov. Ronald Reagan that fall in a landslide, a defeat worsened by a strong centrist third-party run by Rep. John Anderson (R-IL).

After his defeat, Carter mostly abandoned electoral politics in favor of philanthropy, founding the Carter Center in his native Georgia. Among his most famous charitable endeavors were his support for housing charity Habitat for Humanity, his campaigns to eradicate guinea worm and other diseases worldwide, and his work in monitoring elections abroad to guard against fraud. His charitable work won him the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, at a time when Carter was fervently criticizing the Bush administration’s push for war with Iraq.

Carter’s pro-Palestinian views, expressed in his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), made him a more polarizing figure in the mid-’00s. But that didn’t dull the public’s general affection — a 2015 poll found him to be Americans’ most common choice for best ex-president; he was in second place even with Republicans.

As the lone Democratic president between Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter served a transitional role. His fiscally conservative, deregulatory policies and his loss in 1980 paved the way for the flourishing of Reagan-style conservatism in the 1980s and Democrats’ turn to the center in the 1990s.

But his legacy in office is arguably less important than the role he played in establishing a norm for post-presidencies in which ex-presidents take a leading role as statesmen and philanthropists.

Carter’s rise to the presidency

James Earl Carter Jr. was born in 1924 in the small farming town of Plains, Georgia.

His father was a successful peanut farmer who also owned a peanut-shelling company and a general store. After graduating from the Naval Academy and serving seven years on active duty — much of it working with nuclear submarines — the younger Carter returned to Plains to revive the family’s peanut business upon his father’s death in 1953.

Carter’s father, James Earl Carter Sr. (who went by “Earl”), was a local politician and held a seat in the Georgia House when he died. Carter followed him into elected office, first in 1955 when he won a seat on the Sumter County Board of Education, and then when he was elected to the state Senate in 1962.

Georgia politics at the time was consumed by the issue of civil rights and the question of desegregation. Carter was no segregationist — famously, he declined to join the local White Citizens’ Council, surviving a brief boycott of his peanut business afterward — but he was hardly an uncompromising supporter of civil rights, either. Carter supported a school consolidation that would have furthered integration during his time on the board of education. But in his failed 1966 run for governor, and his successful 1970 bid, he campaigned at all-white schools and attacked rivals as overly integrationist.

In his inaugural speech as governor in 1971, Carter told Georgians that “the time for discrimination is over” and “no poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever again have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job, or simple justice.”

The new rhetorical commitment to social justice — and his declaration of becoming a “born again” Christian — had been inspired by what Kenneth Morris and other biographers describe as a kind of spiritual awakening, brought on by reading the works of theologians and philosophers like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Søren Kierkegaard. In a 1974 speech while governor, he cited Niebuhr and Bob Dylan as profound influences on his sense of morality, citing Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” in discussing conditions for farmworkers.

Biographer Randall Ballmer argues that this newfound deep commitment to civil rights was sincere, citing Carter’s record-breaking appointments of African Americans to important posts in the state government, his role in integrating Macon’s and Sparta’s schools, and symbolic gestures like unveiling a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the state capitol building, over protests from the Ku Klux Klan.

But his gubernatorial record on race was hardly spotless. In 1971, he and Alabama Gov. George Wallace both supported adding an anti-busing plank to the Democratic platform, and in 1973 expressed support for a constitutional amendment to forbid busing as a means of school integration, saying, “The rest of the nation is now saying, ‘Maybe those folks down in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi were right after all.’”

He was also at the center of the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision to ban the death penalty, and the 1976 decision to revive it. After the Court struck down the state’s death penalty statute in 1972’s Furman v. Georgia, Carter and the legislature enacted a new law that would pass constitutional muster. In 1976’s Gregg v. Georgia, the court ruled the amendments sufficient. Later, Carter would express remorse for his role in reviving capital punishment.

Carter would face Wallace in the 1976 primaries, which had a crowded field of 12 serious candidates. He rode early wins in Iowa and New Hampshire to victory, beating back late challenges from Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) and Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA).

The incumbent, Republican Gerald Ford, very narrowly won his party’s nomination after a highly successful primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. By the time of the party conventions, Carter was ahead in the polls by some 33 points.

Despite solidly besting Ford in the second presidential debate — where Ford made a gaffe by insisting against all evidence that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” — the race narrowed dramatically and Carter eked out a 2 percent popular vote win over Ford, winning the Electoral College by sweeping every Southern state but Virginia and Oklahoma.

Carter entered the presidency at a time when liberals had been poised and ready to pass major, transformative legislation.

There was wide support in the party — including from Carter on the campaign trail — for single-payer health care, and while ultimate passage was unlikely, the odds of some kind of major expansion of coverage passing were significant.

Under Nixon, a guaranteed minimum income plan had passed the House, and universal day care had passed both houses of Congress, only to be vetoed. Momentum was also growing for the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, a proposal to guarantee a government job to anyone who wants one so long as unemployment is above 3 percent. Carter endorsed it during the campaign, as did the leading figures and institutions of the civil rights movement (including Coretta Scott King) and the labor movement.

But Carter bungled his relationship with Congress from the beginning. The original sin of his presidency was his handling of a water bill.

A month after taking office, Carter decided to eliminate 19 water projects from the budget. Louisiana’s Russell Long, the conservative Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee, saw multiple projects of his gone. A project connecting two rivers on the border between Mississippi and Alabama was canceled, despite being sponsored by Rep. Tom Bevill (D-AL) and Sen. John Stennis (D-MS), who controlled the appropriations subcommittees in charge of water projects in their respective chambers.

“The way in which many members of Congress found out about their endangered projects was as harmful to the White House as the proposed deletion of the projects themselves,” Scott Frisch and Sean Kelly write in Jimmy Carter and the Water Wars: Presidential Influence and the Politics of Pork. “Some members of Congress learned of the status of their projects in the newspaper rather than hearing from the president or the Office of Congressional Liaison.”

Under pressure from lawmakers, Carter chose to sign a water bill that included all the projects he had wanted to eliminate. His brave stand against pork had accomplished nothing except alienate key legislative allies. Carter’s first budget director, Bert Lance, called the decision to fight the water projects “the worst political mistake he made … its effects lasted the rest of his term and doomed any hopes we ever had of developing a good, effective working relationship with Congress.”

Carter did not wind up signing a law guaranteeing full employment, or expanding health care, or establishing universal day care, or providing a minimum income. He faced heavy pressure from the United Auto Workers and other unions, as well as congressional liberals like Ted Kennedy, to introduce a national health insurance plan, but he kept delaying before ultimately deciding he had totally different priorities on health care than the rest of his party did.

”Given his fiscal conservatism,” historian Martin Halpern writes, “Carter’s health care focus in 1977 was on legislation to control hospital costs. Only if fiscal prudence were established first would it be sensible to move forward and spend money on a new program, Carter thought.”

Full employment was a similar story. “In March 1977, just a few months after taking office, the Carter administration privately reached the conclusion ‘that the Humphrey-Hawkins bill is both unnecessary and undesirable,’” historian Jefferson Cowie writes. Carter chief economist Charles Schultze was a particularly influential opponent, arguing that ensuring 3 percent unemployment would trigger unacceptable levels of inflation.

Carter and Schultze demanded that senator and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Rep. Augustus Hawkins (D-CA) water down the bill until it was functionally meaningless. The sponsors ultimately caved. And so it was that the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 was signed into law. Today, it’s mainly remembered for its requirement that the Federal Reserve submit a biannual report on monetary policy to Congress, with the chair of the Fed testifying before the House and Senate on its contents.

Where Carter did have legislative success was in pushing for deregulation, both of the energy sector and through the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, which paved the way for budget airlines like Southwest to flourish but which critics argue hasn’t lowered fares appreciably. Arguably his greatest domestic achievement was the signing of the Food Stamp Act of 1977, which transformed the nutrition program from a burdensome coupon scheme to a basic safety net for the poor.

Initially, Carter had more success on foreign policy. His greatest achievement came in 1978, when two years of efforts to broker a peace deal between Israel and its Arab neighbors resulted in a historic accord between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He reached an agreement with Panama to cede American control of the Panama Canal Zone, and successfully lobbied the Senate to ratify it.

Carter made a point of emphasizing human rights, writing a sympathetic letter to Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, for instance. But he was inconsistent in applying this principle, and avoided economic sanctions targeting, and divestment from, South Africa, for instance. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter, at the urging of national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, had the CIA begin funding armed Afghan resistance groups fighting the Soviets.

Foreign affairs got the better of Carter by the end of his presidency. The Afghanistan invasion scuttled his efforts at détente and killed the SALT II arms control treaty.

More importantly, though, after the Iranian revolution deposed the American-based authoritarian regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi, Carter reluctantly, under pressure from American allies of the shah like Henry Kissinger, agreed to admit him to the US for medical treatment. In retaliation, Iranian students took 52 soldiers, diplomats, and other Americans hostage in the American embassy.

The crisis would last until the end of Carter’s presidency. While at first he gained a bump in the polls as he became a pseudo-wartime leader (helping him defeat Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge), as the crisis wore on and Carter tried and failed to negotiate a release for the hostages, his political fortunes flagged.

On April 24, 1980, against the advice of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, the US launched Operation Eagle Claw, a special forces mission designed to rescue the hostages. The mission was aborted due to technical problems, and a US helicopter crashed into a transport plane, killing eight men. As the crisis dragged on and humiliations like Eagle Claw mounted, Carter’s Gallup approval ratings collapsed from their January high of 58 percent to 31 percent by the end of June.

More symbolic events also hurt Carter. On April 20, 1979, Carter had an infamous run-in with a feral swamp rabbit while fishing in Georgia. The story prompted so much mockery that the administration declined to release the official White House photographer’s documentation of the incident, though it would eventually surface:

It seemed like a metaphor for the Carter administration’s failures more generally, with presidential candidate Bob Dole saying, “I’m sure the rabbit intended the president no harm. In fact, the poor thing was simply doing something a little unusual these days — trying to get aboard the president’s boat. Everyone else seems to be jumping ship.”

On July 15, 1979, in a speech meant to address the ongoing inflation and energy crises, Carter declared that the nation was undergoing “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.”

Dubbed the “malaise speech” (despite the word not appearing), the remarks actually improved Carter’s polling at first. But a week later he undid any progress by firing his whole Cabinet. Vice President Walter Mondale was so aggravated at the speech and its aftermath that he threatened to resign (he’d later claim he was just venting).

Facing both a surging Reagan — who batted off challenges from Dole and George H.W. Bush to win the GOP nomination — and John Anderson, a liberal Republican who also fielded a losing GOP primary bid, Carter lost the 1980 general election in a nearly 10-point landslide. He carried only six states and Washington, DC.

Carter’s historic post-presidency

Carter returned to Plains after his defeat. In 1986, he launched the Carter Center and the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta.

Starting with a 1989 mission to Panama, at the request of the George H.W. Bush administration, he and the center began monitoring elections in emerging democracies. Carter’s stand against Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s election-rigging earned him bipartisan plaudits. Carter, again at Bush’s request, assisted in monitoring the 1990 elections in Nicaragua, and counseled leftist Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega to hand over power peacefully after his party lost.

Thus, Carter’s post-presidential reputation as a neutral, respected international diplomat was born. Bill Clinton turned to him to negotiate a nuclear deal with North Korea in 1994. While the effort ended with bad blood and accusations that Carter ignored Clinton’s directives, the work did help lead to a 1994 deal that temporarily blocked the country from nuclearizing. Carter would later return for talks in 2010 and 2011.

Carter also became known for his charity work, at home and abroad. Domestically he was most closely identified with Habitat for Humanity. Perhaps the most remarkable feat of Carter’s post-presidency was his role in eradicating the guinea worm, a nonfatal but debilitating parasitic infection that affected millions of people as recently as the 1980s. After announcing that his cancer had spread to his brain in 2016, a year after it was first diagnosed, Carter declared, “I hope the last Guinea worm dies before I do.” That hasn’t happened yet, but the worm’s reach has fallen from 3.5 million people a year in 1986 to only 13 people in 2022 — a decline for which the Carter Center deserves a huge amount of credit.

His enduring legacy in our politics may well be his approach to the post-presidency. Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama have all followed his lead as emissaries for later presidents, foundation heads, and fundraisers for apolitical charities. More than Carter’s conduct as president, his record after leaving office has durably changed American life and the expectations of our leaders.

Carter is survived by his children Jack, Chip, Jeff, and Amy; 11 living grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife Rosalynn, to whom he was married for 77 years, from when he was 21 and she was 18 to her death on November 19, 2023 at the age of 96.