Today, October 1, is the hundredth birthday of former US president Jimmy Carter.
One thinks of Jimmy Carter as an affable, unsuccessful president who talked about human rights during his one-term in office and did some nice things in his extended post-presidential life.
That impression glosses over one of the most eventful lives in American history. In 2015 he published a memoir called A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety – and one can see from reading it how much of an influential President and public figure he has been. There’s a lot in his life to take notice of, he was prescient on many policy questions, and took several important decisions in office which he does not get enough credit for.
From the farm to theoretical physics
Born in 1924, Carter grew up on a farm in Georgia where electricity did not reach their home till he was about 15 years old. Personal industriousness was central to his upbringing. His father, James Earl Carter Sr., a man of “multiple talents”, was a “competent forester, farmer, herdsman, blacksmith, carpenter, and shoemaker.” By the eighth grade, Jimmy could milk cows, plant corn, gather peanuts, hoe weeds, plow a mule, work as a blacksmith, carpenter and construct barns, small homes and storage.
Life on the farm was tough and relentless. His father sold milk, made cream, chocolate and vanilla syrup, fed the hogs, made and sold sugarcane syrup, slaughtered pigs, prepared sausages, ham and cured meat. Carter would, as a school boy, walk two miles on Saturdays to sell salted boiled peanuts in Plains, Georgia, and stay there till they were all sold. Carter bought, on his father’s suggestion, bales of cotton when the prices crashed and, with the profits later, ended up buying five houses from a dead undertaker’s estate which young Jimmy earned rent from.
Carter picked up his progressive values on race from home. He grew up in the Jim Crow South; a great-grandfather fought in the Confederate army and his own father “always treated his African-American customers and employees with meticulous fairness and respect, but he believed completely that the two races should be segregated.” Whites and blacks lived their separate lives in the South, a black person would not enter the house of a white family through the front door.
Carter’s mother, Lillian Gordy, was different. She was a nurse who worked exclusively among African-Americans and broke conventions and nurtured inter-racial friendships that were frowned on socially. “Even when I was a child, my mother was known within our community for her refusal to accept any restraints on her treatment of black citizens as equals.”
Jimmy was especially close to Rachel Clark, a black employee on his farm. Carter would work together in the field with Clark, pick cotton, shake peanuts or go fishing in nearby creeks and “during these excursions…she [would give me] gentle lectures about wildlife and my proper relationship with God and with other people.” Carter wrote that she had “the aura of a queen, but was gentle and modest…As often as possible, I spent the night in the Clarks’ home, where I slept on a pallet on the floor.”
Carter’s sisters were close to the Clarks as well and for Jimmy most of his playmates growing up were African American. There was no sense of ranking among them as they competed at fishing, picking cotton, baseball or wrestling – till the age of fourteen that is, when they were once returning from the field and as they approached a gate they stepped back to let Carter through the opening ahead of them.
Jimmy initially thought it was a prank and but realised that it was a form of “unearned deference” and wrote a poem, ‘The Pasture Gate’, about it later:
This empty house three miles from town
was where I lived. Here I was back,
and found most homes around were gone.
The folks who stayed here now were black,
like Johnny and A.D., my friends.
As boys we worked in Daddy’s fields,
hunted rabbits, squirrels, and quail,
caught and cooked catfish and eels,
searched the land for arrowheads,
tried to fly the smallest kite,
steered barrel hoops with strands of wire,
and wrestled hard. At times we’d fight,
without a thought who might be boss,
who was smartest or the best;
the leader for a few brief hours
was who had won the last contest.
But then—we were fourteen or so
— as we approached the pasture gate,
they went to open it, and then
stood back. This made me hesitate,
sure it must have been a joke,
a trip wire, maybe, they had planned.
I reckon they had to obey
their parents’ prompting. Or command.
We only saw it vaguely then,
but we were transformed at that place.
A silent line was drawn
between friend and friend, race and race.
Carter headed to Georgia Tech for a year on went on to have a remarkable career in the US Navy. He trained to be a naval engineer, learned the “rudiments of electrical power, electronics, mechanical design, seamanship, and the construction and operation of ships and the equipment and armaments on them.” He served on submarines, and went on missions all over the world including to the Philippines, China and Australia and commanded a battleship as well.
He was part of a team that monitored the building of a new submarine with advanced stealth capabilities and secured a coveted position to help design and build a power plant on a nuclear submarine. He had already mastered the “necessary knowledge about and capabilities for submarine construction and operation,” and picked up on theoretical nuclear physics for this role. Carter also led a team to disassemble a Canadian nuclear power plant that had a reactor meltdown.
Returning to Georgia
Carter had been married to Rosalynn Smith by this time, commencing a famously long relationship where she was every bit his partner through his endeavours. Carter decided to leave, much to her dismay, a promising career in the Navy and return to Georgia to handle his father’s business after the latter died (in the arms of Annie Mae Hollis, a former black employee who was caring for him) in 1953.
In one of many thoughtful gestures through his life, Jimmy divided his father’s estate among his mother and siblings, asked them to choose the portion of land they preferred and accepted for himself what was left.
He realized that he forgotten the things he knew about farming and learned afresh to manage woodlands and produce cotton, corn, wheat and peanuts. He bought crops from farmers, collected debts, and provided fertilizer and seed to customers. The transition wasn’t easy. The Carters faced drought, their application for a bank loan was rejected at one juncture but they weathered that phase and went on to become quite successful, in part by selling a new variety of peanut seed to farmers in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. He bought trucks to spread fertilizer on others fields, built warehouses to store 15,000 tons of peanuts and provide any equipment farmers needed; he sampled soils and prescribed specific blends of fertilizer that he himself produced. He had become proficient in farming, forestry, business management and leadership in statewide organisations, and “tried to master as skills as possible including construction with wood, steel, and concrete.”
His social networks grew meanwhile. He wrote: “As the years passed, I achieved the status of an accepted community leader, as a Baptist deacon and Sunday school teacher, Boy Scout leader, chairman of the county board of education, a member of the regional hospital authority, and district governor of fifty-six Lions Clubs in our region. I had also been chosen to fill statewide positions of leadership in my farming and seed business.”
Carter decided to pursue politics in 1962 and became a two-time state senator in Georgia but a lengthy battle over electoral fraud committed by his opponents in his first election, tussles within the Democratic Party and a failed attempt at being a governor left him “deeply disappointed and disappointed with politics and with life in general.”
Taking the advice of his sister, Ruth, to strengthen his faith at this time, Carter became a missionary in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. He travelled with a colleague, and they called everyone in the local phone book and went to meet anyone who was prepared to talk to them. He later went on a similar mission to Massachusetts speaking to poor families from Puerto Rico. This is where he came across a credo to live his life by. Carter was very impressed Eloy Cruz, his travelling partner, a Cuban American refugee and pastor – and once asked him how he was such a gentle and effective Christian.
Cruz said he tried to follow simple rule: “You only have to have two loves in your life: for God, and for the person in front of you at any particular time.”
Duly invigorated, Carter took another crack at being the Governor of Georgia and waged an energetic campaign with modest resources and connections. His family joined him in “meeting people and distributing pamphlets in factory shift lines, at all-night singings, at professional baseball and football games, and along the streets of as many of Georgia’s six hundred towns and cities as possible.” In all, Carter and Rosalynn shook hands with about 600,000 Georgians.
A businessman of Iranian-Jewish origin named David Rabhan flew Carter around Georgia in his Cessna airplane during the campaign and towards the end, Carter asked him how he could repay his generous support. In Carter’s words:
He asked if I had a paper and pencil, and I found an aviator’s map of Georgia with some blank space on it. He dictated, “The time for racial discrimination is over in Georgia,” and said, “This is what I want you to say when you are inaugurated.”
Carter won despite the press portraying him as a racist and said this in his inaugural address in January 1971: “and I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over. No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever again have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”
Carter was to pay a price for his progressive views at different points. He was never truly embraced by Christian conservatives even though he was a committed Baptist all his life. During his spell as a farmer in the 1960s, the owner of a service station refused to put gasoline in his pickup truck for his views. Carter refused to become a member of the White Citizens Council even when his customers offered to pay for his membership. When the Carters went on a two-week vacation to Mexico, members of the John Birch Society spread the view among their business customers that he had been away in a Communist training camp to learn how best to integrate public schools.
The Governor’s office in Georgia is unencumbered by legislative restraint and has more executive power than other states. Carter was able to get a lot done as a result, streamlining the state government and reducing the more than three hundred agencies down to 22 and consolidate nearly 20 bond issuers to one. He added “black state employees and portraits of three prominent black Georgians to the capitol building”, including Martin Luther King Jr – angering the Ku Klux Klan. Carter, however, signed a revised death penalty statue for the state after dealing with the Supreme Court’s objections, a move he was to regret later.
Georgia’s relations with foreign countries expanded during his time. He invited diplomats to visit Atlanta, persuaded foreign businesses to invest in the state, and established trade offices in Canada, Japan, Germany, Belgium and Brazil. There were visits to these and other countries including Israel.
Carter invited presidential hopefuls to Atlanta as the 1972 election approached – and became more involved Democratic politics, taking charge of the party’s national campaign for Congressional and gubernatorial seats. This was a fortuitous opportunity to learn the mechanics of a national campaign, and figures like Dean Rusk, the former Secretary of State to Lyndon Johnson, began to encourage Carter to run for the Presidency. The Democrats did very well in the 1972 campaign, gaining four senators and winning two-thirds majority in the House. Carter was ready for national politics.
The rest of the country barely knew Carter, however. A Gallup poll in the year contained a list of 32 potential presidential nominees. Carter’s name was not among them.
But he had a lucky moment. The celebrated writer Hunter S Thompson was following Ted Kennedy on the presidential campaign trail and was at an event at the University of Georgia’s law school where Carter spoke as well. Thompson has a riveting account of tuning in to the speech, where he writes of Carter’s “king hell bastard of a speech [that] by the time it was over it had rung every bell in the room.”
Thompson said:
I have heard hundreds of speeches by all kinds of candidates and politicians … but I have never heard a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me any more than the speech Jimmy Carter made on that Saturday afternoon in May 1974. It ran about 45 minutes, climbing through five very distinct gear changes while the audience muttered uneasily and raised their eyebrows at each other, and one of the most remarkable things about the speech is that it is such a rare piece of oratorical artwork that it remains vastly impressive, even if you don’t necessarily believe Carter was sincere and truthful in all the things he said. Viewed purely in the context of rhetorical drama and political theatre, it ranks with General Douglas MacArthur’s “old soldiers never die” address to the Congress in 1951 – which still stands as a masterpiece of insane bullshit, if nothing else.
Thompson would say that Carter “beat the hell out of” distinguished law school alumni, “stomped on them in public” and pushed around Ted Kennedy as well. Carter’s speech, marked by light humour and a reference to Maggie’s Farm by Bob Dylan, is brilliant as a call for lawyers to do more to attain the demands of justice in society. It has observations on the structure of power in society, and the incremental nature of social change that are worth reading.
Some critics suggest that that Rolling Stone cover article by Thompson helped Carter win the presidency.
Carter ran a tireless campaign and traversed all 50 states during the primary period. He visited 120 communities in Iowa, arranging meetings in people’s homes and in college classrooms, and reported “being thrilled when as many as twenty people attended. We were always looking for someone with a microphone or even a reporter’s scratch pad, hoping to get some news coverage.” Rosalynn visited 105 communities in Iowa and spent 75 days in Florida. “She drove from one community to another, stopping at courthouses, newspaper offices, livestock sale pens, and especially radio stations. She would spot an antenna, go into a news room or the broadcasting booth, and tell a reporter or disc jockey that her husband was running for president and she wanted to talk about him.”
Carter won in 1976 and the first reception that the Carters hosted was for more than 750 people in whose homes they spent the night on the campaign trail (as they had very little money). “These meetings were emotional because some of the families had taken us in when few people knew or cared who I was. We gave each couple a small brass plaque stating that a member of my family had stayed with them,” he said.
The Presidency and after
Carter’s presidency tends to remembered for the failure to get the 52 American hostages in Iran released. The New York Times reported in 2023 that a Republican politician John B Connally Jr travelled to several Middle Eastern countries to deliver a message to Iran – not to release the hostages before the US election. Connally had hoped to become Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State or Defense and allegedly sabotaged Carter’s re-election bid. It is not clear if the Iranians received the message but they did not release the hostages till Carter left office on January 20, 1981.
Carter had a more influential presidency than critics give him credit for. His administration created the departments of Energy and Education. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) replaced the many federal agencies dealing with emergencies at the time.
Carter rated his administration of land in Alaska to be his most significant domestic achievement. The state is rich in oil, forests and fisheries and there was a debate at the time as to how the land should be divided between indigenous peoples, and the federal and state governments. Carter took the side of environmental groups and used discretionary power under an antiquities law to set aside 56 million acres for preservation as national monuments. Another act doubled the size of national parks, tripled wilderness areas and protected 25 free-flowing streams. His administration clarified ownership of remaining lands and opened all offshore areas to oil exploration. Carter’s decisions were extremely unpopular in Alaska. He reports that at a state fair people threw balls at a clown to dunk it in water. The face of Ayatollah Khomeini was one target, the other was Carter’s.
His administration also drew up a national health plan which “extended comprehensive health coverage to all low-income citizens; gave total coverage to all mothers and babies for prenatal, delivery, postnatal, and infant care; promoted competition and cost containment; and provided a clear framework for phasing in a universal, comprehensive national health plan.” It had the support from chairmen of six key committees and its funding was assured. But it was stymied by Ted Kennedy who had his own plan, “which was so expensive that there was no prospect of congressional support.” It was to be 30 years before Obamacare came along with its partial coverage plan.
On foreign affairs, Carter painstakingly secured 68-32 ratification in the US Senate for a new Panama Canal treaty that gave Panama the control over the canal area, which American politicians were opposed to. Carter broke with the US practice of actively supporting the military juntas in Latin America. He supported “peaceful moves towards freedom and democracy throughout the hemisphere”, and used public statements and pressure from financial institutions “to put special pressure on the regimes that were most abusive to their own people, including Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.”
He famously mediated between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to sign treaty at Camp David, even though the two leaders dealt in “loud arguments” and “vitriolic exchanges” which forced Carter to keep them apart after the first three days of talks. As an interesting principle for conducting talks, Carter got both leaders to agree in advance that should the talks fail, that he, Carter, would make public his final proposal and have each leader explain why they accepted or rejected it.
Carter also had a major impact on relations with China. He paved the way for normalisation with Beijing, by recognising the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government and withdrew diplomatic recognition to Taiwan, overriding the objections of some in the State Department. Carter was to call this the most important diplomatic decision he made, judging by the long-term global impact. Subsequent to this, Deng Xiaoping visited Washington in 1979 where numerous agreements were signed. Jonathan Alter, Carter’s biographer, says that normalisation was to eventually lift a billion people out of poverty in China and generate a trillion dollars in US-China trade, becoming the foundation of the global economy. Alter argues against the view that normalisation would have happened anyway because Gerald Ford wouldn’t have done it and Ronald Reagan was against it – implying that globalisation and China would have had a very different history had it not been for Carter.
Carter may well have changed the course of religion in China as well. At the end of the official state banquet, Deng said to Carter, “President Carter, you have been very helpful to the Chinese people, and I wonder if there is anything special that we may do for you.” Carter thought for a moment and said that Baptist missionaries in China were his heroes and mentioned that as a child he used to give five cents a week to build hospitals and schools for Chinese children. Carter asked if missionaries, the Bible and Christian worship be permitted which were banned in China since 1949. Deng “seemed to be taken aback” by the request but said he would give a decision later. The next morning Deng said he could never permit missionaries to return as they were critical of Chinese culture “and lived in a superior way” but that he would grant the other two wishes. It is tough to correlate this with the spread of Christianity over the last four decades but the number of Christians in China had officially grown to 38 million by 2018.
Carter could not, however, overcome the impact of the hostage crisis (although his administration eventually secured their release). He received negative coverage for 46 of the 48 months that he was president. He was to say that this was a problem he could never understand or resolve. Some could not accept a candidate from the Deep South in Office, others couldn’t decide if he was a liberal or conservative. Carter remembered “most vividly” that the Washington Post had a full page of derisive cartoons showing him, his mother and other members of his family with straw coming out of their ears, frequenting outdoor privies and associating with pigs. Carter also recalled a prominent columnist writing that the Reagans would “restore grace to the White House.”
Carter points out that the Presidency was only four years of his long life, and that they did not dominate the chain of memories. He was only 56 when he left office and busied himself in a variety of endeavours. He became a distinguished professor at Emory University lecturing to students from various disciplines. For 38 consecutive years he addressed the annual Carter Town Hall fielding questions from students.
He established the Carter Center in 1982 that initially focused on resolving conflicts between nations, but went on to work more broadly in the sphere of political reform and democracy promotion and initiatives in health and agriculture. By 2013 the Center had expanded operations into eighty nations; it focused especially on malaria and five other neglected tropical diseases, including river blindness, elephantiasis and guinea worm that affected millions in Africa and Latin America. By 2015, the Center was treating about 35 million working with local governments, training medical staff and delivering medicines and services. Over half of these were for river blindness. The Center was, at the time, responsible for a third of the world’s surgeries to correct trachoma.
Carter teamed with agronomist Norman Borlaug and the Japanese philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa to organise an agricultural program to increase the production of food grains in Africa, eventually teaching 8 million families in 14 nations to double or triple the production of maize, wheat, rice, sorghum and millet.
The Carter Center helped design a large prosthesis factory in Beijing and also trained hundreds of instructors who would teach the teachers “how to address the needs of the approximately 51 million Chinese suffering from disabilities.” The Center worked in the sphere of political reform, playing an active role in the conduct of local elections in China for a period of 12 years, starting in the mid-1990s. It monitored elections, proposed changes to legislation, and established websites which became platforms for debates. The authorities, alarmed by the response, rolled back the Center’s work on promoting elections.
Carter mediated at crucial points, sometimes at the request of the US government, in crises in North Korea, Haiti and Bosnia. The Center’s conflict work has involved engagement with Maoists in Nepal, Castro brothers in Cuba and the Hamas in Palestine.
His most controversial book, by his own reckoning, was Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, published in 2006 which argued that without a two-state agreement “Israel would inevitably become committed to a one-state solution.” The result, in his view, would either be one where Israelis would relinquish Jewish control over government or treat non-Jews as secondary citizens. The book was widely condemned by pro-Israel leaders and organisations, not least for its title. Carter wrote, “Despite my attempts at book signings and other public events to reiterate my lifelong support for Israel and its security, this altercation has been very painful to me.”
His stance on Israel continued to have unexpected consequences. Barack Obama’s campaign requested him not to speak at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, even though he had planned to speak. Carter wrote, “Obama’s top aide, David Axelrod, explained that he didn’t want to endanger his Jewish support.”
There are two politicians who come across unfavourably in this memoir. One is Ted Kennedy who tried to undermine Carter when in office; he scuttled his healthcare plan and “ostentatiously” refused to grasp his hand at the 1980 Convention. Carter was also politely unimpressed with the Obama campaign following the Palestine book and said the “estrangement” continued during the latter’s time in office (at the time of writing in 2015).
Work ethic and thoughtfulness
To read about Carter is to be in awe of his extraction of purpose from time. From being a farmer as a boy to being a nuclear physicist, returning to being a farmer and businessman and going on to politics and eventually visiting 145 countries. He read voraciously, was an avid runner, proficient painter; he wrote poetry and took notes in Gregg shorthand (and tried a speed-reading course to get through the 300 pages of official documents that he was handed each day at the White House).
He was an active carpenter who always enjoyed designing and building chairs, beds, tables, and cabinets, and often made furniture for his family. After the presidency, he built homes for the underprivileged in cooperation with Habitat for Humanity.
Carter writes about his building work in A Full Life:
For thirty-one years, Rosalynn and I have led groups of volunteers for a full week of hard work, building and renovating homes for poor families who have never had a decent place to live. The families are required to pay full price for the houses over a period of twenty years, with no interest charges, and payments are invariably less than rental charges in the same general neighborhoods. The families are also expected to put in several hundred hours of labor on their own or neighbors’ homes.
He lectured at Emory every year for decades, wrote 29 books – one of which, a memoir of boyhood titled An Hour before Daylight, was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2002, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Carter told Brian Lehrer in 2012 that he taught Sunday School in his church for 65 years and turned those lessons into an annotated edition of the Bible featuring his reflections. And yet was a model in balancing the competing pulls of faith and public office. In his youth, he participated in Billy Graham’s evangelistic campaigns in Georgia, and yet as President he stopped the practice of inviting Graham and other prominent pastors to conduct services in the White House — in line with his Baptist convictions of strict separation between religion and state.
He upheld the law on Roe v Wade but said he did everything possible to minimize the number of abortions, through increased availability of sex education and contraceptives, special funding and assistance to poor women and children and making adoption procedures easier. He left his denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention after 70 years, after it rejected calls for women to be priests and leaders.
He also won over his adversaries, establishing a long friendship with Gerald Ford who he beat in the 1976 election. They bonded whilst traveling for Anwar Sadat’s funeral and Carter went on to deliver a moving eulogy for Ford at the latter’s request. He made it a point to brief former Presidents regularly on state matters as is the convention – Nixon found them to be too often and asked for their frequency to be scaled back. In another example of setting a fine example as President, the Carters enrolled their daughter, Amy, in a public elementary school at Washington DC, instead of a private, elite institution. He wrote: “I had been deeply involved in education as a member of the county school board, state senator, and governor, and was committed to the public school system. Rosalynn and I wanted Amy to be deeply involved in the Washington community and with children of diverse backgrounds.”
History will be kind to Jimmy Carter for changing the world through normalization with China, and having all the right instincts and prescriptions on race, faith, Palestine, human rights, energy and climate change or negotiating with adversaries. He will also be an inexhaustible source on a life well-lived. In Carter, the world has got to see what a man at peace with himself and his faith can (restlessly yet) strive for and achieve.
Sushil Aaron is a writer and policy analyst. This piece was originally published on his Substack. He posts on X @SushilAaron.
