Jimmy Carter, 39th president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, dies at 100

Jimmy Carter, a no-frills and steel-willed Southern governor who was elected president in 1976, was rejected by disillusioned voters after a single term and went on to an extraordinary post-presidential life that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, according to his son James E. Carter III, known as Chip. He was 100 and the oldest living U.S. president of all time.

His son confirmed the death but did not provide an immediate cause. In a statement in February 2023, the Carter Center said the former president, after a series of hospital stays, would stop further medical treatment and spend his remaining time at home under hospice care. He had been treated in recent years for an aggressive form of melanoma skin cancer, with tumors that spread to his liver and brain.

His wife, Rosalynn, died Nov. 19, 2023, at 96. The Carters, who were close partners in public life, had been married for more than 77 years, the longest presidential marriage in U.S. history. His final public appearance was at her funeral in Plains, where he sat in the front row in a wheelchair.

Carter, a small-town peanut farmer, U.S. Navy veteran, and Georgia governor from 1971 to 1975, was the first president from the Deep South since 1837, and the only Democrat elected president between Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Bill Clinton’s terms in the White House.

As the nation’s 39th president, he governed with strong Democratic majorities in Congress but in a country that was growing more conservative. Four years after taking office, Carter lost his bid for reelection, in a landslide, to one of the most conservative political figures of the era, Ronald Reagan.

When Carter left Washington in January 1981, he was widely regarded as a mediocre president, if not an outright failure. The list of what had gone wrong during his presidency, not all of it his fault, was long. It was a time of economic distress, with a stagnant economy and stubbornly high unemployment and inflation.

“Stagflation,” connoting both low growth and high inflation, was a description that critics used to attack Carter’s economic policies. In the summer of 1979, Americans waited in long lines at service stations as gasoline supplies dwindled and prices soared after revolution in Iran disrupted the global oil supply.

Carter made energy his signature domestic policy initiative, and he had some success, but events outside his control intervened. In March 1979, a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pa., suffered a core meltdown. The accident was the worst ever for the U.S. nuclear-energy industry and a severe setback to hopes that nuclear power would provide a safe alternative to oil and other fossil fuels.

Carter’s fortunes were no better overseas. In November 1979, an Iranian mob seized control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans as hostages. It was the beginning of a 444-day ordeal that played out daily on television and did not end until Jan. 20, 1981, the day Carter left office, when the hostages were released.

In the midst of the crisis, in April 1980, Carter authorized a rescue attempt that ended disastrously in the Iranian desert when two U.S. aircraft collided on the ground, killing eight American servicemen. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who had opposed the mission, resigned.

“I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” Carter said in a 2018 interview with The Washington Post in Plains. “But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.”

A month after the Iranian hostage crisis erupted, an emboldened Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter ordered an embargo of grain sales to the Soviet Union, angering American farmers, and a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, a step that was unpopular with many Americans and was widely seen as weak and ineffectual.

As the years wore on, the judgment on Carter’s presidency gradually gave way to a more positive view. He lived long enough to see his record largely vindicated by history, with a widespread acknowledgment that his presidency had been far more than long lines at the gas station and U.S. hostages in Iran.

Near the end of Carter’s life, two biographies argued forcefully that he had been a more consequential president than most people realized – “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history,” author Jonathan Alter wrote in his 2020 book, “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”

Both books – the other was Kai Bird’s 2021 volume, “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter” – said Carter was often ahead of his time, especially with his early focus on reducing fossil fuel use and his efforts to mitigate the nation’s racial divide, including by expanding the number of people of color in federal judgeships.

The biographies concluded that Carter’s reputation as a poor president was unfair and came largely from his stubborn insistence on doing what he thought was correct even when it cost him politically.

“He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better,” Bird wrote. “And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.”

Carter, noted for his mile-wide smile in public, was also tenacious and resolute, and those qualities were critical to achieving the Camp David Accords, a signature success of his presidency. He spent 13 days at the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains in September 1978, shuttling between cabins that housed Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In a process that almost collapsed several times, Carter was instrumental in brokering a historic agreement between bitter rivals.

The Camp David Accords led to the first significant Israeli withdrawal from territory captured in the Six-Day War of 1967 and a peace treaty that has endured between Israel and its largest Arab neighbor. In 1978, Begin and Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor conferred on Carter 24 years later for a lifetime of working for peace.

Against fierce conservative opposition, Carter pushed through the Panama Canal treaties, which ultimately placed the economically and strategically critical waterway under Panamanian control, a major step toward better U.S. relations with Latin American neighbors. He signed a nuclear-arms-reduction treaty, SALT II, with the Soviets, but he withdrew it from Senate consideration when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan.

Taking advantage of the opening made by President Richard M. Nixon, Carter granted full diplomatic recognition to China. He made human rights a central theme of U.S. foreign policy, a sharp departure from the approach of Nixon and his national security adviser and second secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger.

Two Cabinet-level departments – Energy and Education – were created under Carter, as was the Superfund to clean up toxic-waste sites. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act more than doubled the size of the national park and wildlife refuge system.

Carter was ahead of his time on environmental issues. In June 1979, he installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the West Wing of the White House, telling reporters that the point was to harness “the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people,” Carter said. Reagan removed the panels in 1986.

His relations with Congress were often strained, even though it was controlled by his party, but he had more success than most modern presidents at winning passage of his legislative proposals.

With the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, Carter set in motion a movement that picked up steam under Reagan and his conservative allies. The military buildup under Reagan was often credited with hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that buildup began under Mr. Carter.

Inflation was a constant scourge to his administration, but it was Carter who appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker was later hailed as the man who broke the back of inflation in the early 1980s, when Reagan was president.

In the 2018 Post interview, Carter said he had “a lot of regrets” from his time in office, mainly over the Iran hostage crisis and his not having done more to unify the Democratic Party. He said he was most proud of the Camp David Accords, his work to normalize relations with China and his focus on human rights.

“I kept our country at peace and championed human rights, and that’s a rare thing for post-World War II presidents to say,” he said, adding that he was also proud that he “always told the truth.”

Roving ambassador

Carter was a former president for more than four decades – longer than anyone else in history – and he was only the second to live to 94, after George H.W. Bush, who died in 2018.

He dedicated his post-presidential life to public service at home and supporting democracy and human rights abroad. It was a career that even some of his supporters said seemed better suited to him than being president.

“Nothing about the White House so became Carter as his having left it,” historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in “The Unfinished Presidency,” a 1998 account of Carter’s life after the presidency.

Carter lived more modestly than any ex-president since Harry S. Truman, whom Carter called his favorite president. He and Rosalynn lived in Plains until the end in the ranch house that they built for themselves in 1961, and where Carter will be buried with her next to a shady willow tree near a pond that he helped dig.

Carter declined the corporate board memberships and lucrative speaking engagements that have made other ex-presidents tens of millions of dollars. He said in the 2018 interview that he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the White House.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Carter said. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

Instead, he wrote 33 books on topics ranging from war to woodworking, which gave him a comfortable retirement income. He also won three Grammy Awards for his recordings of audio versions of his books.

For decades, the Carters spent a week a year building homes with Habitat for Humanity, the Georgia-based nonprofit organization that constructs housing for low-income people. Wearing their own tool belts, they helped build or renovate about 4,300 homes in 14 countries.

In 1982, the Carters founded the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta. It became the base from which they traveled widely on peacemaking and other humanitarian missions. The Carter Center sponsors programs in education, agricultural development and health care and supports fair elections in countries around the world.

Carter became an unofficial roving ambassador, monitoring elections, mediating disputes and promoting human rights and democracy. In 1994, at the request of President Clinton, he helped forge an agreement that removed a brutal military regime in Haiti and averted a possible U.S. invasion of that country.

Carter’s missions required meeting with some of the world’s most notorious despots, including Kim Il Sung of North Korea and Moammar Gaddafi of Libya. Fledgling democracies trusted him, and he was asked to monitor elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Zambia, the West Bank and Gaza. The Carter Center has monitored 115 elections in 40 countries, according to its website.

He was not always successful, but Carter never seemed discouraged about his efforts to resolve conflicts. He spent the days leading up to the 1994 Christmas holiday in the Balkans, engaging in negotiations that included a shouted conversation by shortwave radio with Serbian strongman Radovan Karadzic, who in 2016 was convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Carter’s efforts resulted in a four-month cease-fire in the bloody conflict.

From Atlanta, the Carter Center coordinated dozens of initiatives, including a decades-long effort that helped to virtually eradicate Guinea worm disease, a painful and disabling condition that once afflicted millions of people in some of Africa’s poorest countries.

Carter’s freelance diplomacy, which at times included outspoken criticism of U.S. policies, could provoke outrage. He angered Clinton in 1994 by thrusting himself into a dispute over U.N. inspections of North Korea’s nuclear facilities. In his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” (2006), Carter set off a storm of criticism by seeming to equate Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories with the former apartheid regime in South Africa.

Over the years, Carter was a constant source of irritation to conservative critics. In a book about Carter’s life after the White House – a book whose subtitle called him “Our Worst Ex-President” – conservative political commentator Steven F. Hayward accused him of engaging in “usually embarrassing and often disastrous peace missions around the world.”

The far more common judgment was that Carter’s tireless pursuit of peace and human rights was admirable and set a new standard for ex-presidents. In awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the Nobel committee lauded him “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

Introducing the 2002 Peace Prize laureate in Oslo, Gunnar Berge, a member of the Nobel committee, said: “Jimmy Carter will probably not go down in American history as the most effective president. But he is certainly the best ex-president the country ever had.”

The Carter image

That Carter became president was something of a historical accident, one that followed an unprecedented chain of events. The progression began in 1973 with the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who was caught in a web of corruption dating from his time as a Maryland politician. That led to the appointment of then-Minority Leader Gerald Ford, a respected but relatively little-known U.S. House member from Michigan, as Agnew’s successor. And, finally, in 1974, there was the resignation of Nixon to avoid impeachment stemming from the Watergate scandal.

Two years later, Carter narrowly defeated Ford, but the person he really campaigned against was Nixon. Carter was the peanut farmer from Georgia, the candidate who carried his own garment bag off the aircraft and promised to bring an open and honest style of leadership to the nation’s capital. It later became commonplace for presidential candidates, and most challengers to incumbents, to run “against Washington.” Carter was among the first of the modern era to do so.

Carter signaled his disdain for the “imperial” trappings of the presidency on Inauguration Day in 1977, when he, Rosalynn and their daughter, Amy, stepped out of the presidential limousine on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked the parade route to the White House.

“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said in 2018.

While that seemed refreshing to many people after the Nixon years, it ultimately grated on those who thought that Carter’s style – refusing, for example, to have “Hail to the Chief” played when he entered rooms – demeaned and diminished the presidency.

Eizenstat said Carter’s order eliminating drivers for top staff members was meant to signal a more frugal approach to governing. Instead, he said, it meant that busy officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day.

Two years later, in 1979, Americans were in a sour mood, and Carter’s response to events seemed to make matters worse. In July, he abruptly canceled a speech on energy and retreated to Camp David, where he held a series of intense discussions with a cross section of guests. When he emerged July 15, he delivered a nationally televised address that was soon dubbed the “malaise” speech, although Carter never used that word in his address.

In the speech, Carter spoke of a “crisis of the American spirit” and, before setting out a series of energy policy proposals, warned that “we are at a turning point in our history.”

“There are two paths to choose,” he continued. “One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”

The speech, initially well received, was soon turned against Carter, who was accused of blaming the American people for the failures of his administration. Carter did not help his cause when, two days later, he demanded the resignation of his entire Cabinet and fired five of the secretaries. Then came the takeover of the U.S. Embassy by Iranian student protesters.

By the early 21st century, Carter’s warning about the fragmentation of American society leading to political paralysis appeared prescient to many. So, too, did his emphasis on concerns then only dimly perceived as threats – foremost among them, the spread of nuclear weapons to unfriendly and unstable regimes. But hindsight was of no benefit to him then.

Carter’s dignity was ruthlessly assailed by reports in August 1979 of his encounter with a “killer rabbit” a few months before while fishing in Georgia. “President Attacked by Rabbit,” a front-page headline in The Post proclaimed. His use of a paddle to fend off a rabbit swimming toward his small boat was widely lampooned as a desperate struggle. The story, inconsequential in itself, reinforced an impression, cultivated by his political opponents, that Carter was a hapless bumbler unequal to his office.

He also had been mocked for wearing a cardigan in February 1977 while sitting next to a fire to deliver his first speech on energy, in which he called the nation’s response to a growing energy crisis “the moral equivalent of war.” But his energy policies led to a reduction in U.S. consumption of foreign oil.

Long after he left public office, there was a public outcry over congressional “earmarks” and other forms of pork-barrel spending because of the soaring federal budget deficit. One of Carter’s first acts as president was to veto a bill authorizing a number of federal water projects he considered wasteful, incurring the lasting enmity of some of the Democratic barons of Capitol Hill.

“If you are president and you’re going to diagnose a problem, you better have a solution to it,” journalist Hendrik Hertzberg, who as a White House speechwriter worked on the “malaise” speech, later observed. “While he turned out to be a true prophet, he turned out not to be a savior.”

To many who were sympathetic to Carter and considered his presidency underrated, his shortcomings stemmed largely from the way he defined the role more in moral than political terms, which reflected his deep religious faith.

He craved political power to do good as he saw it, and he was adept at gaining power. But he was not a natural politician, and he was never at home in the messy world of politics and governing in an unruly democracy.

He was always far more at home in Plains, the speck of a town in South Georgia that he never really left. Until late in their lives, he and Mrs. Carter frequently were seen walking hand in hand along Church Street on their way home from Saturday dinners at the home of their friend Jill Stuckey.

Carter was a champion for the town, which is essentially a living museum of his life, with old-fashioned storefronts and shops selling everything from Carter Christmas ornaments to campaign memorabilia. He helped woo a Dollar General store to Plains, then shopped for his clothes there.

In the 2018 interview, Carter said he and Mrs. Carter wanted to be buried in Plains partly because they knew their gravesite would draw tourists and provide a much-needed economic boost to their hometown.

They celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in 2021 with a party for more than 300 people at Plains High School, which they both had attended about eight decades earlier. The guests included country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, a married couple who had worked with the Carters for years building homes for Habitat for Humanity. (Brooks and Yearwood quietly presented the Carters with a 1946 Ford Super Deluxe convertible, in honor of the year they were married.)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came to the party, as did billionaire and CNN founder Ted Turner, who was Carter’s longtime friend and fly-fishing buddy, and civil rights leader Andrew Young, whom President Carter appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and who later served as mayor of Atlanta.

Also there was Mary Prince, an African American woman who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1970. She met the Carters when she was a prisoner assigned to work at the Georgia governor’s mansion. Rosalynn Carter was convinced of her innocence and hired her to be Amy Carter’s nanny.

After he became president, Carter persuaded the parole board to let him be Prince’s parole officer. She moved into the White House and lived there for all of Carter’s presidency, looking after Amy. She later received a full pardon. She still lives in Plains and sometimes cares for the Carters’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Most notably, Bill and Hillary Clinton made the long trip to Plains. The Carters and the Clintons had tense relations for decades but seemed ready to set their differences aside in the twilight of Carter’s life.

Onstage, Carter, who was then 96, spoke haltingly, showing the combined effects of his age and many health problems, including brain cancer that appeared to have been treated successfully in 2015.

Seated next to his wife, Carter expressed “particular gratitude” to her for “being the right woman.” Then he flashed his trademark toothy grin, looked out at an auditorium jammed with family and friends, many of them choking up, and declared, “I love you all very much.”

Friends said it felt like a goodbye.

The next morning, an exhausted Carter was wheeled into the Baptist church where he had until recently taught Sunday school. He kissed Pelosi’s hand when she walked in.

“I thought he was a great president because he was a president of values, and he acted upon the values,” Pelosi said later. She admired him for his vision, for his striving to help free the world of nuclear weapons, and for the way he inspired people by his good works in his post-presidency. “He went from the White House to building houses for poor people,” she said. “He glorified that work. Others wanted to do it because he did it. That’s powerful.”

Despite the feeling of farewell in Plains that summer weekend, Carter did not fade completely from public view. Nearly five months later, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times decrying “unscrupulous politicians” who guided the mob and the “lie” that the 2020 election had been stolen.

He called on Americans to reject political violence, polarization, disinformation and embrace “fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law.”

“Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss,” Carter warned. “Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy. Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.”

Survivors include their four children, John W. “Jack” Carter, James E. “Chip” Carter III, Donnel J. “Jeff” Carter and Amy Carter; 11 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren.

The man from Plains

James Earl L. “Buddy” Carter Jr., the eldest of four children, was born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, a farming town about 150 miles south of Atlanta.

The Carters lived on the family farm in Archery, Ga., about two miles west of Plains, in a house with no electricity or running water. But that was not uncommon in the rural South of the time, and the Carters, though not wealthy, were not poor. As they prospered, the Carters eventually moved to a larger and more modern, although still modest, home in Plains.

Carter’s father, who was known as Earl, was ambitious, hard-working and shrewd. Over the years, he enlarged his farm holdings in the region and branched into other business ventures, including a peanut warehouse.

Running for president, Jimmy Carter was often described, and described himself, as a peanut farmer, but that label did not capture the full extent of the family’s business interests. By the time he entered state politics in the early 1960s, Carter was an affluent agribusinessman, the head of a sizable and thriving commercial enterprise.

It was his mother who probably had the most influence on the future president. A nurse by training, Lillian Gordy Carter was talkative, outgoing, at times irrepressible. In 1966, at the age of 68, “Miss Lillian,” as she came to be known, decided to join the Peace Corps, and she spent nearly two years serving in India. She slipped quietly out of town to begin her training because, she said later, the family thought her joining the Peace Corps might arouse conservative suspicions about her son’s campaign for governor.

Carter grew up in the rigidly segregated South of the 1920s and ’30s. But unlike in much of the North, which was segregated in fact if not in law, contact between Black and White people was part of everyday life in much of the South. There was only one other White family in Archery, and many of Carter’s boyhood friends were Black.

His mother turned the family home into a social center where Black and White people were welcome and where she dispensed medical treatment and advice to the sharecropper families who worked the Carter land.

In his youth, Carter made no attempt to conceal his ambition. Perhaps influenced by an uncle, Tom Watson Gordy, a Navy enlisted man who sent messages to the family from exotic places, he declared at an early age that he intended to enter the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and eventually become chief of naval operations. He also told a friend that one day he would be governor of Georgia.

Carter graduated from Plains High School in 1941. To qualify for the Naval Academy, he enrolled at Georgia Southwestern College in nearby Americus, and he later spent a year studying at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In 1943, as World War II raged, he was admitted to the Naval Academy.

He was a good student, a quick study who seemed to move through the academy’s rigorous academic schedule with ease. He was also popular with his classmates, viewed as a “nice guy,” but not necessarily destined to be a leader. He was officially a member of the Class of 1947, but under the Navy’s accelerated wartime schedule, he graduated in 1946, ranking 59th in a class of more than 800.

Shortly after his graduation, Carter married Eleanor Rosalynn Smith of Plains, a close friend of his sister Ruth’s. The new Mrs. Carter, three years younger than her husband, was from a respectable Plains family and shared Carter’s values and outlook.

After graduating from the Naval Academy, Carter spent two compulsory years on Navy surface ships and then applied for the submarine service. He was accepted and soon won entry to the Navy’s newest and most glamorous program, which was developing the nation’s first nuclear-powered submarines under the iron-fisted direction of a captain (later admiral) named Hyman G. Rickover.

Rickover was a cold man who drove his subordinates relentlessly. He never praised his men; he signaled his approval by allowing them to remain in their jobs. Years later, Carter would say, “I think, second to my own father, Rickover had more effect on my life than any other man.” The title of his 1975 presidential campaign autobiography, “Why Not the Best?” was based on his first encounter with Rickover, who asked him whether he had always done his best at the Naval Academy.

The young lieutenant junior grade answered honestly that, no, he had not always done his best. After a long pause, Rickover asked icily, “Why not?”

Rickover was not a man who cultivated friendships, and his influence on Carter might have reinforced the same tendency in the future president. Supremely self-confident, Carter, too, was a taskmaster, and he was not a favorite president among those who served on the permanent White House staff and saw chief executives come and go.

When Carter came to Washington as the newly elected “outsider” president, he had few real friends in the capital, even among members of his own party. In four years, he did little to forge the bonds of friendship and loyalty that can help carry a president through times of turmoil. He alienated potential allies, and the engineer in him was given to micromanagement. Early in his term, Carter personally controlled access to the White House tennis court.

“Although most considered Carter a kind, amiable man, he could turn nasty in an instant,” Brinkley wrote in “The Unfinished Presidency.” He added, “At times he was downright vicious; in fact, his trademark steely, laser-sharp stare usually preceded a hurtful put-down. Even in the most informal settings, Carter had to let everybody know he was in charge.”

Carter, however, did develop deep friendships. One of them, surprisingly, was with Ford, the man he defeated in 1976. Out of office, the two men saw each other frequently and collaborated on various projects. Carter delivered a eulogy at Ford’s funeral in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 2007.

Carter never stopped taking positions on personally and politically difficult issues. He cut ties with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000, citing its “increasingly rigid” views, especially on the role of women in society.

“I’ve made this decision with a great deal of pain and reluctance,” Carter told the Associated Press at the time. “For me, being a Southern Baptist has always been like being an American. … My father and his father were deacons and Sunday school teachers. It’s something that’s just like breathing for us.”

But he added: “I personally feel the Bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God. I personally feel that women should play an absolutely equal role in service of Jesus in the church.”

The political life

By 1952, promoted to lieutenant and assigned as the engineering officer on the USS Sea Wolf, the fleet’s second nuclear submarine, Carter’s Navy career was off to a good start.

But his father died in July 1953, leaving the farm and other family business interests in shaky financial condition. As the oldest of the Carter siblings, the young naval officer felt a duty to return to Georgia and take his place as head of the family. And his mother wanted him at home to hold things together through a challenging time. He resigned from the Navy on Oct. 9, 1953, and headed home.

His return to Plains reunited him with his sisters, Gloria and Ruth, and his brother, Billy, who became a well-known figure during the Carter presidency. Always the family rebel, Billy Carter reveled in the role of Georgia good ol’ boy at the gas station he owned in Plains. He also marketed a beer – Billy Beer – under his own name. But he became an embarrassment to his brother when it was disclosed that he had accepted a $220,000 loan from Libya and registered as a foreign agent of the Libyan government. Carter’s siblings all died before him – all from pancreatic cancer.

Carter’s Navy resignation was a difficult decision, especially for Rosalynn. She enjoyed the adventure and security of military life, and as a young girl, she had yearned to leave the confines of Plains for the wider world. Now, at 26, with three small children, she headed back to the small town amid the dusty farm fields of southwest Georgia and a life she thought she had escaped.

But the Carters soon found their footing in their native region. They formed an effective business partnership, with Rosalynn handling the bookkeeping and other managerial duties at the warehouse and her husband immersing himself in the technical and scientific details of modern farming. They began to prosper.

The Carters remained partners in all facets of life. At the White House, Rosalynn Carter was an unusually activist first lady, regularly attending Cabinet meetings and policy sessions and serving as a trusted adviser to the president. She placed special emphasis on mental health issues and served as the active honorary chairman of the President’s Commission on Mental Health. After the White House years, she accompanied her husband on his global missions.

Like his father before him, Carter became an active member in community institutions – Plains Baptist Church, the Lions Club, the local school and library boards, and the county planning commission.

Earl L. “Buddy” Carter had been elected to the Georgia legislature the year before his death, and in 1962, his elder son embarked on a political career. He ran for a state Senate seat representing Sumter and six other counties.

Carter ran an energetic campaign for the Democratic primary, the only election that counted at that time in the Deep South, but he came up just short against the incumbent. On the day of the primary, however, his operatives in the small city of Quitman witnessed widespread voting irregularities, including ballot stuffing. It was the way things had been done in Quitman for years.

Carter convinced John Pennington, a young investigative reporter for the Atlanta Journal, that there was a good story to be had in Quitman. Pennington’s subsequent stories exposed the extent of voter fraud in the county and brought Carter statewide attention.

Through intermediaries, including Griffin Bell, who became attorney general in the Carter administration, Carter made contact with Charles Kirbo, a partner in a prestigious Atlanta law firm. Kirbo, who had never met the Georgia peanut farmer, agreed to represent him in a challenge to the primary election’s outcome. Kirbo remained a friend and trusted adviser.

Carter prevailed, and in January 1963 he took his seat in the Georgia Senate. He served four years, his only legislative experience, generally keeping a low profile while achieving a reputation for diligence and hard work. He promised to read every bill introduced in the legislature, and when he had trouble keeping up, he took a speed-reading course.

In 1966, Carter announced that he was running for the congressional seat held by Howard “Bo” Calloway, a wealthy Republican and graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When Calloway unexpectedly dropped his reelection bid and entered the race for the Republican nomination for governor, Carter jumped into the race for the Democratic nomination.

His primary opponents included Ellis Arnall, a former governor who was regarded as a progressive, and Lester Maddox, an Atlanta restaurant owner who dispensed ax handles to patrons as a symbol of his resistance to the civil rights advances of the 1960s. Carter finished third in the primary, which was won by Maddox.

The 1966 defeat affected Carter profoundly. It was then, he later wrote, that he underwent a deep religious transformation, a “born-again” experience that guided him for the rest of his life. From then on, he pursued a moral as much as a political agenda and tended to define issues in terms of right and wrong. When he ran for president, he described himself as a “born-again Christian,” at the time a new and somewhat jarring term in the lexicon of presidential politics.

He almost immediately began planning to run a second campaign for governor in 1970. His main rival in the Democratic primary was Carl Sanders, a well-regarded former governor with a moderate record on race.

Carter had taken courageous stands on the issue of race, although he was never in the forefront of the civil rights movement, which was gathering momentum and tearing the South apart.

In the 1950s, he withstood intense pressure from his neighbors and threats to the family business as one of the few White men in Plains who would not join the local chapter of the White Citizens Council, an organization whose thinly veiled purpose was the continued subjugation of Black people. In 1965, he and other members of his family stood virtually alone in opposing a resolution barring Black people from Plains Baptist Church.

But in the 1970 campaign, Carter aggressively courted the state’s conservative, rural voters, kept his distance from the African American community and relentlessly attacked Sanders as the wealthy crony of the “bigwigs” of Atlanta’s business establishment. Sanders had refused to allow Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace (D), the most prominent segregationist politician in the country, to address the Georgia legislature. Carter promised repeatedly to invite Wallace to the state.

Carter was endorsed by some of Georgia’s leading segregationists, but the 1970 campaign cost him the support of some old allies.

Carter defeated Sanders in a primary runoff and easily won the general election. He then executed a stunning political pivot. On Jan. 12, 1971, Carter delivered his inaugural address in front of the Georgia Capitol, declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over. … No poor, rural, weak or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.”

The speech was probably the most important of his life, including those he delivered as president. It brought him national attention and soon landed him on the cover of Time magazine. Carter became a leading figure in a generation of young New South politicians who were seen as determined to move their region beyond the rancorous politics of race.

As governor, Carter largely lived up to his lofty words. He appointed more women and minorities to state government positions than all of his predecessors combined. He also continued efforts, begun in the state Senate, to upgrade Georgia’s public schools, and he overhauled the prison system and judiciary.

Eye on the presidency

Carter was constitutionally limited to one term as governor (Georgia governors can now serve two consecutive terms), but his ambitions were not similarly constrained. He began to think of running for president, a goal that might seem wildly out of reach even for a bright young governor with a progressive reputation. As late as October 1975, a public-opinion poll on possible 1976 Democratic presidential contenders did not include his name.

By the 1970 gubernatorial campaign, Carter had acquired the services, and the fierce loyalty, of two young Georgians who would be at his side through his presidency. One was Hamilton Jordan, a political science student who volunteered to work for Carter in 1966 and became his closest political strategist and White House chief of staff. The other was Jody Powell, who began as Carter’s driver in the 1970 campaign and went on to be his chief spokesman and White House press secretary. Jordan died in 2008; Powell died in 2009.

While still governor of Georgia, Carter quietly pursued the presidency with the same determination that marked all of his endeavors. He managed to get appointed to an important Democratic National Committee campaign post, providing a vehicle to meet Democratic politicians and activists around the county. Jordan, his executive assistant, left Atlanta for a job with the DNC in Washington, where he served as the unannounced candidate’s eyes and ears at national party headquarters.

Jordan also wrote a long memo setting out the changing contours of the nomination process and a strategy that would lead to victory. Carter, with Powell at his side, crisscrossed the country tirelessly, impressing the people he met and gradually building a foundation of support.

It all came together on a cold January night in Iowa. Carter did not win the Iowa caucuses in 1976 – the most votes were cast for uncommitted delegates – but he finished first among those who competed. That gave him a burst of publicity and momentum that carried him to victory in the New Hampshire primary and eventually to the nomination as his rivals dropped out of the race one by one. It was the 1976 Carter campaign that firmly established Iowa as the starting point of the road to the White House.

After Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration, it was a good year to be a Democrat. Carter chose Sen. Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, a Northern liberal with strong ties to organized labor, as his running mate, and they headed into the fall campaign with a 30-point lead in the polls over their Republican opponents.

They almost lost. Ford ran a disciplined campaign that made maximum use of his status as the incumbent, and Carter’s lead in the polls steadily dwindled. Shortly before Election Day, Playboy magazine published a long interview with the Democratic nominee. As a final question, Carter was asked whether he thought that he had reassured people who were uneasy about his religious beliefs and fearful that he would be a rigid, unbending president.

In the midst of a long, rambling response, Carter said: “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

Public doubts about the born-again peanut farmer and one-term governor deepened. Carter won the election by two percentage points.

His steep slide during the 1976 campaign was an early warning signal of his political vulnerability. Four years later, Carter was the incumbent, but that was hardly an advantage. One July 1980 poll put his approval rating at 21 percent, one of the lowest ever recorded for a president.

Carter was the first president to openly embrace rock-and-roll music, and he credits the Allman Brothers and other musicians with helping him win election in 1976. “I was practically a nonentity, but everyone knew the Allman Brothers,” Carter said in a 2020 documentary, “Jimmy Carter: Rock-and-roll President.” “When they endorsed me, all the young people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers like him, we can vote for him.’”

Carter was challenged for his party’s nomination by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a hero to Democratic liberals who had come to detest Carter for what they considered his conservative policies. The Kennedy campaign badly damaged Carter’s reelection chances, but it also exposed weaknesses in Kennedy’s presidential aspirations. Carter won the nomination, and the youngest of the Kennedy brothers never again sought the presidency.

In the fall, Carter faced Reagan, the hero of a rising conservative movement. As he had in the 1970 campaign for governor of Georgia, Carter played to win. He mounted a negative assault that depicted Reagan as a right-wing ideologue who was too dangerous to entrust with the nation’s future.

In the only nationally televised debate of the fall campaign, Reagan disarmed that portrayal. “There you go again,” he said in his avuncular, optimistic style, responding to Carter’s accusations. Reagan won by almost 10 percentage points, sweeping 44 of the 50 states.

For years, people in Carter’s orbit believed that Reagan supporters had been in contact with Iranian officials and urged them to delay the release of the U.S. hostages in Tehran until after the 1980 election. The purpose, allegedly, was to make sure that Carter didn’t pull off an “October surprise” that could swing the election in his favor. Investigations by the U.S. House and Senate concluded that there was no credible evidence of any such plot.

In March 2023, while Carter was in hospice care, the New York Times reported allegations made by Ben Barnes, a longtime politician and operative from Texas, that supported those suspicions. Barnes said that he had accompanied his mentor, former Texas governor and former U.S. treasury secretary John B. Connally Jr., to several Middle East countries in the summer of 1980 and that Connally urged leaders there to pass a message to Iranian officials that they should wait until Reagan was president to release the hostages.

Connally and most other key players had died, and Barnes’s allegations could not be independently confirmed. But the Times story felt like a vindication to Carter’s allies. Gerald Rafshoon, Carter’s White House communications director, told the Times that the allegations were “pretty damn outrageous.”

After the Times story was published, grandson Jason Carter told The Post that he believed that Carter remained alert enough to know about the article and that the family was gratified by what it added to the historical record, but “my grandfather had moved on.”

Jason Carter said he never once – despite all that had been written about dirty politics played at the expense of the hostages and Carter – heard his grandfather talk about it. “I think that tells you a lot,” Jason Carter said. “He believed there were other things more important than politics.”

In his first act as a former president, performed at the request of the new president, Carter flew to a U.S. air base in Germany to greet the American hostages who were returning from Iran. He was 56 and could not know how much time he had left or how he would use it.

But in a farewell address a week earlier, Carter suggested that although he had lost an election, he was not finished with what he saw as his life’s work.

“In a few days,” he said, “I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of ‘citizen.’”