Jimmy Carter

Long after the event, Jimmy Carter described his final hours in the White House in 1981 as he desperately sought the release of 52 American hostages held in revolutionary Iran for the previous 14 months. For two days he had barely left the Oval Office. He continued the tortuous, indirect negotiations with Iran’s new theocratic regime until the very moment he had to leave for Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on Capitol Hill. Then, as the incoming president completed his address, the news came through: after 444 days in captivity, the hostages had been freed.

“It is impossible for me to put into words how much the hostages had come to mean to me, or how moved I was that morning to know they were coming home,” Carter recalled. On the very day that he surrendered the most powerful office in the world, “I was overwhelmed with happiness.”

The Iran crisis did much to define Carter’s presidency. His protracted failure to secure the hostages’ release fostered an impression of impotence that he could not dispel. A shambolic attempt to rescue them through an aborted helicopter raid in which eight US servicemen died completed the nation’s humiliation.

Elected in 1976 as an outsider who would clean up Washington after the Watergate scandal, Carter simply could not compete with the sunny optimism and confidence of Reagan’s campaign four years later. He was the first elected president to lose his attempt at re-election since Herbert Hoover in 1932, carrying just six of the 50 states in an electoral rout.

What nobody anticipated at the time, however, was that Carter would go on to become, by common consent, the “best former president America has ever had”. A dogged, driven, deeply devout man possessed of an almost missionary zeal, he lived longer after leaving the Oval Office than any previous occupant and arguably achieved more as a private citizen during those post-White House decades than he did in office.

While other former presidents enriched or enjoyed themselves, Carter became a sort of one-man United Nations. He strove to resolve some of the world’s most intractable conflicts, mediate international disputes, foster nascent democracies, eradicate diseases in the developing world and champion the marginalised. His presidency may be remembered as a failure, but his subsequent conduct won him worldwide admiration and a Nobel peace prize. “Nothing about the White House so became Carter as his having left it,” Douglas Brinkley, his biographer, observed. He “used the White House as a stepping stone to greater global achievement”.

In all Carter’s endeavours — political, humanitarian and personal — his wife, Rosalynn, stood by his side, her inner toughness earning her the sobriquet the “steel magnolia’’. Like her husband, she was brought up in the tiny, backwoods town of Plains, Georgia, which was little more than a railroad stop. She married Carter when she was 18. They had four children — Jack, Chip, Jeff and Amy, who was the only one young enough to join them in the White House. “We were full partners in every sense of the word,” Carter said. “We have shared almost every experience of our adult lives.”

James Earl Carter was born in 1924, the son of a local businessman. The Deep South was still dirt poor and racially segregated, and Carter grew up during the Great Depression, but his high school teacher, Julia Coleman, is said to have inspired in him dreams of greatness.

Carter won a place at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, married Rosalynn after graduating, and eventually joined the navy’s fledgling nuclear submarine programme under the legendary Admiral Hyman Rickover, whose insistence on excellence also shaped the young lieutenant. Carter played a heroic role in dismantling a Canadian nuclear reactor after an explosion. It was so radioactive that he and others had to be lowered in for just a few minutes at a time to dismantle it.

Carter’s 11-year naval career ended when his father died in 1953. He returned to Plains to run the family peanut business, despite Rosalynn’s strenuous objections. They and their three young children briefly had to live in public housing, making Carter the only US president to have done so.

The emerging civil rights movement was inflaming racial tensions in the south at that time. Carter supported racial equality and joined the fray, winning a seat in Georgia’s state senate in 1962. In 1966 he ran for governor, losing to the arch-segregationist Lester Maddox in the Democratic primary. In 1970 he ran again and won, thanks to some overtly negative campaigning and pandering to white segregationists: Carter was a “good” man but could be ruthless when necessary.

In office, he proved a bitter disappointment to those segregationists because he increased the number of black employees, placed portraits of Martin Luther King Jr in the state capitol and declared that “the time of racial segregation is over”.

Carter’s national profile remained so low that when he appeared on the television game show What’s My Line? in 1973 it took the panellists several rounds to guess he was a state governor. Undeterred, he launched a quixotic campaign for the presidency after stepping down in 1974.

Against all odds he won the Democratic nomination by starting earlier, travelling further and speaking more than any of his better-known rivals. He picked his battlegrounds shrewdly, focusing on the little-known Iowa caucuses that preceded the first traditional trial of strength — the New Hampshire primary. For months, he recalled, he and Jody Powell, his spokesman, “drove rented cars, flew in borrowed single-engine planes, and slept on couches or in spare rooms of supporters”. Often he found himself addressing audiences of ten or 20 people, but he did whatever it took — once demonstrating his favourite fish recipe on breakfast television in Iowa while dressed as a chef.

In November 1976 Carter defeated Gerald Ford, the Republican incumbent, who had damaged his standing by pardoning Richard Nixon for the crimes of Watergate. He did so by portraying himself as an unsullied outsider to a nation disgusted by the scandal. He was the 39th US president, the first from the Deep South since before the Civil War, and politically one of the least experienced. Unfortunately, it showed.

Carter used his inaugural speech to call for a “resurgent commitment to the basic principles of our nation”. He and his family broke with precedent by walking some of the route back to the White House — a gesture he described as a “tangible indication of some reduction in the imperial status of the president”. He stopped Hail to the Chief being played at every event. He gave televised “fireside chats’’ dressed in a cardigan. He and Rosalynn sent nine-year-old Amy to a state school, built her a treehouse on the south lawn, and employed a black woman convict from Georgia’s state penitentiary to look after her.

However, the appeal of Carter’s calculated informality soon wore off. “We began to receive many complaints that I had gone too far in cutting back the pomp and ceremony,” he recalled. He had won the presidency by campaigning as an outsider, but surrounded himself with Georgians who did not understand Washington. He avoided the capital’s social circuit, and failed to cultivate congressmen and journalists. “When it came to the politics of Washington, he never really understood how the system worked,” Tip O’Neill, the Democratic House Speaker, observed. He was an obsessive tinkerer, allegedly even supervising requests to use the White House tennis court during his first few months in office.

Above all he lacked a unifying vision; “Carter has not given us an idea to follow,” James Fallows, his speech writer, once complained. A micromanager who obsessed over detail rather than the bigger picture, he had countless policies, but no overarching philosophy. He was so sure of the rightness of those policies that he failed to sell them properly — most notably his national energy policy designed to counter soaring oil prices caused first by the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and then by the Iranian revolution of 1979.

On July 15, 1979 he delivered what became known as his “national malaise’’ speech in a televised address to the nation. “We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” he said. “We were taught that our armies were always invincible, and our causes always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam … We believed that our nation’s resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.” As part of a campaign to lessen US dependence on foreign oil that he called “the moral equivalent of war”, he urged Americans to drive slower, use public transport and turn their thermostats down.

His words were brave and prescient, but they were not what Americans wanted to hear from a painfully virtuous president who sometimes verged on the sanctimonious. “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times,” he famously told Playboy magazine.

Carter did enjoy some successes. Crowning any list would be the Camp David peace accords, which he brokered during 13 extraordinary days of intense face-to-face talks between President Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, in September 1978. The following March the two Middle Eastern leaders signed the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, ending 31 years of hostility.

He put human rights high on the US foreign policy agenda and pardoned Vietnam draft evaders. He negotiated the Salt II strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union — although Congress refused to ratify it after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — and he orchestrated a 55-nation boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest at that invasion. Although many Americans believed he betrayed US interests in the Panama Canal, he nevertheless renegotiated outdated treaties governing US control of them. As a fiscal conservative, he battled rampant inflation and the budget deficit, but with only limited success.

The nadir of his presidency came in April 1980 when he authorised a daring, clandestine mission to rescue 52 diplomats held hostage after Iranian revolutionaries had seized the US embassy in Tehran the previous November. Operation Eagle Claw went disastrously wrong. Three of the eight helicopters suffered mechanical problems before they reached the desert staging post. Carter aborted the mission, whereupon another helicopter collided with a transport plane. Both caught fire and eight servicemen died. “I am still haunted by that day,” Carter wrote in his memoirs. “It was one of the worst of my life.”

It also set Carter on the road to electoral defeat, although the hostage crisis was hardly the only factor. Edward Kennedy, the senator for Massachusetts, challenged him from the left for the Democratic nomination and John Anderson, an independent, squeezed him from the centre. The economy was struggling. Fidel Castro dispatched a tidal wave of Cuban refugees to Florida, including criminals and the mentally disturbed. Carter’s heavy-drinking younger brother, Billy, signed up as a lobbyist for Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya. In a bizarre incident that cemented the president’s hapless image, he was “attacked” in his boat by a swimming rabbit while fishing in Plains.

It was Reagan’s charm and optimism, his promise to restore American pride and prosperity, that caught the mood of the people in November 1980. He romped home, winning 51 per cent of the vote to Carter’s 41 and Anderson’s 7. The Democrats also lost control of the Senate for the first time since 1952. Carter conceded before the west coast polling stations had even closed. He loathed his successor and his “ridiculous” economic prescriptions. “Allowing Ronald Reagan to become president was by far my biggest failure in office,” he said years later.

Carter was just 56 when he left the White House. He returned to Plains to find his family’s peanut business, which he had placed in a blind trust, a million dollars in debt. “We were in desperate straits,” he said. To outsiders his public life seemed over, but Carter had other ideas. Steely willed and determined to complete the unfinished work of his presidency, he proceeded to invent the concept of the activist ex-president and launched an entirely new phase of his life.

In 1982 he and Rosalynn set up the Carter Center next to his presidential library in Atlanta. It was dedicated to “waging peace” through conflict resolution, promoting democracy, championing human rights and eradicating disease. And in those endeavours, unlike his presidency, Carter enjoyed many successes.

In Nicaragua he persuaded Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader, not to steal the 1989 election. In 1994, at President Clinton’s behest, he helped to defuse a dangerously escalating confrontation between the US and North Korea after the latter expelled international nuclear inspectors. In Bosnia-Herzegovina that same year he brokered a four-month winter ceasefire, and averted a US invasion of Haiti by persuading the junta to step down. In 1999 he helped to end a proxy war between Uganda and Sudan.

Freed of the constraints of office, he met Castro, Kim Il-sung of North Korea, Radovan Karadzic of Bosnia, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and various leaders of Hamas — a US-designated terrorist organisation — in his efforts to promote dialogue. “We select a favourite side in a dispute and [the other] becomes satanic,” he complained of US foreign policy. “This all-white or all-black orientation is usually not true.”

One of Carter’s greatest achievements was the virtual elimination of guinea worm, a hideously painful disease from which three million Africans and Asians suffered when he left office. An enthusiastic carpenter, who was given a set of tools by his staff when he left the White House, Carter helped Habitat for Humanity develop into a global organisation by devoting a week a year to building homes for the poor. He was outspoken in his criticism of the Iraq war, of Israeli treatment of Palestinians, and of US human rights violations, including Guantanamo Bay and the death penalty. He visited developing countries that no US president, serving or retired, had been to before, and his centre has monitored elections in nearly 40 countries.

In 2002 he was awarded the Nobel peace prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development’’. Four US presidents have won the prize, but only Carter has done so for his work after leaving the White House.

Of Carter’s children, Jack ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate from Nevada, while Amy became a political activist in the 1980s and 1990s before marrying and settling down in Atlanta. She took part in protests against apartheid, CIA recruitment on campuses and US policy in Central America, and was arrested four times. Jack’s son, Jason, is a member of the Georgia senate and in 2014 ran unsuccessfully for the job of governor that his grandfather once held.

Carter never settled anywhere other than Plains. When not circling the globe he would retreat to the home he built there to fish, do woodwork, cycle, paint and spend time with his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He wrote memoirs, poetry, fiction, books on politics, faith and the Middle East, even a children’s book that Amy illustrated. On Sundays he went to the Maranatha baptist church. There he would teach Sunday school, greet visitors and pose with them for photographs — a man finally at peace with himself.

That peace was disturbed only by the death of his wife, aged 96, in 2023 after 77 years of marriage. Rosalynn had been receiving hospice care at home together with her 99-year-old husband. Carter attended her funeral in a wheelchair and paid a moving tribute to the woman who was “my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished”.

Jimmy Carter, former president of the United States, was born on October 1, 1924. He died on December 29, 2024, aged 100