Born: October 1st 1924
Died: December 29th, 2024
The death at 100 of the US’s 39th and longest living president, James Earl Carter, a peanut farmer and Baptist preacher, sees the passing of a remarkable Southerner who infused his politics with a rare down-to-earth moralism, sincerity and honesty. A refreshing outsider to Washington politics, he surprised all by sweeping aside the capital’s old post-Watergate elite to leave a legacy that pointed in new directions even if it never quite achieved his promise.
“He decided to use power righteously,” biographer Kai Bird would write, “ignore politics, and do the right thing. He was, in fact, a fan of the establishment’s favourite Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote, ‘It is the sad duty of politics to establish justice in a sinful world’.”
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Although he had notable successes in office from 1977 to 1981, not least the Camp David Accord between Egypt and Israel, he would be the first incumbent president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to lose a re-election bid. Ronald Reagan used the economic challenges and oil crisis faced by his administration, and the disastrously bungled attempted Iran hostage rescue, to successfully portray Carter as a weak and ineffectual leader.
In some ways Carter was a paradox. Although an opponent of segregation in a segregationist state, he played the race card to get elected to governorship in 1971, then announcing that “the time of racial discrimination is over”.
From then on, however, he was an unwavering champion of civil rights, and his presidential bid attracted some 85 per cent support from the black community.
Born on October 1st, 1924, in tiny Plains, Georgia, to Bessie Lillian Gordy and James Earl Carter snr, a shopkeeper and investor in farmland, the young Carter would successfully develop a peanut farm as an offshoot of the family business. His father was a descendant of English immigrant Thomas Carter, who settled in the Colony of Virginia in 1635.
Carter enrolled in the US Naval Academy in 1946 and while there met and married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s. He served in nuclear submarines, and was drafted in to assist in the dismantling of the Chalk River nuclear reactor in Canada following a partial meltdown. His experience, he would later say, shaped his views on atomic energy and led him to end development of the neutron bomb.
The early death of his father saw his return to the family business and a gradual immersion in the Democratic politics of Georgia. Although opposed to segregation – as a member of the Baptist Church he spoke openly against racism and attempts to segregate worship – he tempered his approach when he ran for office, even courting the arch-segregationist Wallace vote.
Still an outsider in national politics, he surprised observers by winning the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination and narrowly defeating incumbent Republican president Gerald Ford.
As the campaign developed in the wake of the still-fresh reverberations of the Watergate scandal, Carter, now with running mate senator Walter Mondale, tirelessly travelled the country projecting himself as an outsider with an easy common touch, not averse to populist slogans. He won the popular vote by 50.1 per cent to 48.0 per cent.
Within two days of assuming the presidency he took the controversial step of pardoning all Vietnam War draft evaders.
Carter was actively engaged on the world stage, from day one, hoping above all to broker peace in the Middle East. He invited Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to the presidential lodge Camp David in September 1978 with the negotiations resulting in an end to the state of war between the two countries, Egypt formally recognising Israel for the first time, and the creation of an elected government in the West Bank and Gaza.
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He oversaw the return of the Panama Canal to Panama, and signed the landmark Salt II treaty on ballistic arms reductions with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. (Although the latter was signed in 1979 in Vienna, the US Senate refused to ratify it in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.)
Following that invasion, Carter allowed the sale of military supplies to China and started talks about sharing military intelligence. He began a programme of what would become hugely controversial covert assistance to the Afghan mujahideen, some of them precursors to today’s Taliban.
He sought closer relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), continuing the rapprochement engaged in by Richard Nixon.
The end of his presidency was blighted by the Iran hostage crisis. Misbriefed by the CIA about the stability of the Shah’s regime, Carter pledged in 1977 that his administration would continue with positive relations between the US and Iran, calling the latter “strong, stable and progressive”. After the surprise revolution installed an Islamist regime in November 1979, a group of Iranian students took over the US embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for the next 444 days. An airborne mission to free them failed, leaving eight American servicemen dead and two aircraft destroyed.
The hostages were freed immediately after Ronald Reagan succeeded Carter as president – leading figures in the Reagan campaign are reported to have signalled to the Iranians not to release the hostages until Carter was defeated, as Reagan would give them a better deal.
Breaking with traditional US unwillingness to step out of line from its closest ally, the UK, Carter in 1977 agreed to issue a declaration on Ireland calling for the establishment in Northern Ireland of a government which would command widespread acceptance and for an overall solution which would involve the support of the Irish government. The US would facilitate any such agreement with assistance in creating jobs, he said.
“The precedent created by Carter has facilitated the enormous involvement in Ireland of his successors,” Ireland’s then-ambassador to the US, Sean Donlon, has written.
It was an engagement and pledge that would be honoured by Reagan in his talks with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and in the establishment of the International Fund for Ireland. The latter has seen close to $1 billion invested in Irish projects since then.
In 1979, Carter invited taoiseach Jack Lynch on an official visit to the US and paid a private visit to Ireland in 1995, fishing in Kilkenny and indulging his woodworking skills by helping to build a house in Ballyfermot for Habitat for Humanity, an NGO he worked closely with.
Domestically, Carter had an uneasy relationship with both his own party and Republicans in Congress. His tenure in office was marked by an economic malaise, a time of continuing inflation and recession, and the 1979 energy crisis.
His administration established the department of energy and the department of education. He also created a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, and new technology. He installed solar water heating panels on the White House and wore sweaters to offset turning down the heat.
He deregulated the airline industry, paving the way for middle-class Americans to fly for the first time in large numbers, and deregulated natural gas, laying the groundwork for the country’s current energy independence. He forced through the Alaska Land Act, tripling the size of the nation’s protected wilderness areas.
The battle for renomination loomed. Carter had to run against his own stagflation-ridden economy, while the hostage crisis in Iran dominated the news every week.
He alienated liberal college students, who were expected to be his base, by reinstating registration for the military draft.
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Though initially trailing Carter by several points, Reagan saw a surge in polling after the TV debate, in which he practised the patronising put-down – “there you go again” – that became his election mantra. Carter’s defeat was a landslide.
After leaving the White House, he became an activist former president, ploughing a largely solitary but effective furrow. In the view of many it is his retirement that will be seen as his singular legacy.
In 1982, he established the Carter Center to promote and expand human rights. Its work would earn him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. In July 2007, he joined Nelson Mandela to announce his participation with former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, among others, in The Elders, a group of independent global leaders who work on peace and human rights issues.
He travelled extensively to conduct peace negotiations, monitor elections and further the eradication of infectious diseases. He played a key role in the NGO Habitat for Humanity, and wrote books and memoirs, often sharply critical of US policy, not least over the Iraq War. In a work on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict he controversially labelled the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians “apartheid”.
Though he praised Barack Obama in the early part of his tenure, Carter attacked the use of drone strikes against suspected terrorists and the decision to keep Guantánamo Bay detention camp open. His blunt critiques of his Democrat successors meant they would all keep him at arm’s length until Joe Biden latterly re-engaged with him enthusiastically.
To the end he worked tirelessly. Biographer Bird, who insists that Carter “remains the most misunderstood president of the last century”, described one recent meeting: “He was in his early 90s yet was still rising with the dawn and getting to work early. I once saw him conduct a meeting at 7am at the Carter Center where he spent 40 minutes pacing back and forth onstage, explaining the details of his programme to wipe out Guinea worm disease. He was relentless. Later that day he gave me, his biographer, exactly 50 minutes to talk about his White House years. Those bright blue eyes bore into me with an alarming intensity. But he was clearly more interested in the Guinea worms.
“Carter devoted his life to solving problems,” Bird says, “like an engineer, by paying attention to the minutiae of a complicated world. He once told me that he hoped to outlive the last Guinea worm. Last year there were only 13 cases of Guinea worm disease in humans. He may have succeeded.”
Rosalynn Carter died in November 2023 and Jimmy Carter emerged from hospice care to mourn her. They had three sons, Jack, Chip and Jeff; one daughter, Amy; nine grandsons (one of whom is deceased), three granddaughters, five great-grandsons, and eight great-granddaughters.