Carter, Jimmy

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Jimmy Carter

Born October 1, 1924
Plains, Georgia

U.S. president, governor,
humanitarian, and farmer

I naugurated as the thirty-ninth U.S. president in January 1977, Jimmy Carter came to the White House with little experience in foreign affairs. Yet Carter's presidency coincided with an important period of the Cold War, the longstanding economic and political rivalry between the communist Soviet Union and the democratic United States. After two-and-a-half years of often rocky negotiations, Carter signed a new arms control agreement with the Soviets, SALT II. He granted formal diplomatic recognition to communist China. In response to a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter punished the Soviets by boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980; U.S. athletes were not allowed to participate in the Games.

Carter's brightest success in foreign policy was the peace agreement he helped negotiate between Egypt and Israel. The most difficult situation he faced as president was the American hostage crisis in Iran that began in November 1979 and did not end until the very day he left office. Carter's greatest accomplishment, overshadowing all else in his presidency, was the promotion of human rights on a global scale.

Young Jimmy

James Earl Carter Jr. was born in Plains, Georgia. His parents—James Earl Sr., or "Earl" for short, and Lillian Gordy Carter—were middle-income landowners who farmed peanuts and cotton and operated a warehouse and store. When Jimmy was four years old, they moved to their new home in a small community known as Archery, four miles from Plains along U.S. Route 280. Jimmy's father was a highly efficient farmer, a businessman, and a civic leader. At his death in 1953, he was a member of the state legislature. Jimmy's most memorable moments were the times his father took him on trips around their farmlands, all of which were within a few miles of Plains. Earl instilled the business ethic in Jimmy early in life. As a five-year-old, Jimmy pulled peanut plants, boiled the peanuts, and took them into Plains in his wagon to sell.

Jimmy's mother, known as "Miz" Lillian, was a trained nurse. She broke the color barrier in their segregated community by caring for black families as well as whites. (Segregate means to separate or set apart; segregated communities were places where there were separate hospitals, schools, and other public facilities for blacks and whites.) Miz Lillian was an avid reader and encouraged her children to read. The Carters had four children: Jimmy, the oldest, and Gloria, Ruth, and Billy.

As a boy, Carter worked with black farmhands on the land or tended his dad's store, where townspeople bought supplies. Many neighbors were black tenant farmers, that is, black farmers who did not own their land but instead worked the land for the landholders. Carter observed firsthand how careful with money the tenant farmers were, always buying the least expensive food and supplies. In his book An Hour Before Daylight (2001), Carter writes, "More than anyone else in my family, perhaps even including my father, I could understand the plight [difficult situation] of the black families because I lived so much among them."

Carter grew up in the 1930s during the Great Depression (1929–41), when up to 25 percent of Americans lost their jobs and many rural folk lost their farms and livelihood. Carter witnessed how his mother never turned anyone away who came to their door for food or a drink of water. These early experiences shaped Carter's attitudes, making him sensitive to the suffering of others and helping him understand the value of all human beings. This was the beginning of Carter's development as a great promoter of human rights.

By the time Carter was in high school, he knew the farming operation well. He could perform all the chores on the farm, knew the animals and the machinery, and had acquired skills in carpentry and blacksmithing. However, Carter was destined to move beyond Plains. Miz Lillian's brother, Tom Watson Gordy, had joined the navy at a young age. He traveled the world and sent letters to his nephew Jimmy about the exotic places where his ships docked. Because of his Uncle Tom's influence, Carter dreamed of attending the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, and becoming a naval officer. As Carter's high school graduation date neared, Earl Carter set about helping his son request an appointment to Annapolis through their local congressman Stephen Pace (1891–1970).

A naval officer

Jimmy graduated from Plains High School in the spring of 1941; he was class valedictorian, the student with the highest grade point average. In September, he enrolled in Georgia Southwestern College in Americus, where he took courses recommended by the Annapolis guidebook. For his second year, Jimmy moved to Georgia Tech in Atlanta to study engineering. At the completion of his second year of college, Jimmy received his appointment to Annapolis. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 in the top 10 percent of his class. He returned to Plains that summer to marry Rosalynn Smith on July 7. They would have four children: John William, known as Jack; James Earl III, known as Chip; Donnel Jeffrey, known as Jeff; and Amy Lynn.

Carter began his naval career in 1946 and two years later volunteered for submarine duty. Graduating third out of a class of fifty-two in submarine training school, he received his first sub assignment on the USS Pomfret, then later, the USS K-1. In 1952, Carter served as an officer on the nuclear-powered submarine Sea Wolf. Carter served under navy captain Hyman G. Rickover (1900–1986), who headed the development program for the nation's first nuclear-powered submarines. Carter later said that except for his parents, no one had a greater impact on his conduct in life than Rickover, who demanded excellence and then gave as much as or more than he demanded of others. With his early success in the navy, Carter seemed on track to become an admiral, the navy's highest rank. Then a call from Plains came.

Return to Plains

Carter's father was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 1953. This affliction would also take the lives of all of Jimmy's siblings while they were in their fifties. Carter took a week's leave to be with his dad. During their last time together, Carter realized even more fully the accomplishments of his father and how important his father had been to his rural Georgia community. Much to his wife Rosalynn's dismay, Carter soon resigned from the navy and returned to Plains to take over for his father on the family farm.

By 1960, the farm was prospering, and Carter was also immersed in civic duties. He was a member of the Sumter County Board of Education from 1955 to 1962, served on the local hospital and library boards, and taught Sunday school at the Plains Baptist Church. When the church voted on whether to admit black families, the Carter family and one other church member cast the only favorable votes. Similarly, when a chapter of the segregationist organization White Citizens' Council came to Plains, Carter was the only white male in the community who refused to join.

In 1962, Carter was elected to the Georgia state senate. He was reelected in 1964, then won the Georgia governorship in 1970. In his inaugural address, Carter attracted national attention by declaring that it was time for racial discrimination to end. Carter increased job opportunities for blacks in the state government and began to hang portraits of prominent black leaders in the state capitol. He increased the efficiency of state government by reorganizing about three hundred state agencies into approximately thirty agencies. Carter also became involved in the national political scene. In 1972, he headed the Democratic Governors' Campaign Committee and in 1974 served as chairman of the Democratic National Campaign Committee. As early as 1973, Carter had decided to make a run for the U.S. presidency in 1976.

In Georgia, no one can serve two consecutive terms as governor. So when Carter left office in January 1975, he began campaigning for the presidency nationwide. He attracted little attention, but he continued tirelessly and won the early Iowa caucus, where a group of people gather to select candidates. By the August 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York City, Carter had gained enough support to win the nomination. He chose U.S. senator Walter F. Mondale (1928–) of Minnesota as his vice presidential running mate. Carter and Mondale defeated their Republican opponents, President Gerald Ford (1913–) and his running mate, U.S. senator Robert Dole (1923–) of Kansas.

Carter's appeal stemmed from the fact that he was an outsider, not part of the Washington, D.C., political scene. In the minds of the American public, Ford was permanently tied to his predecessor, Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994; served 1969–74; see entry), who had resigned from the presidency in disgrace following the Watergate scandal, which involved administration officials participating in the burglary of a Democratic National Committee office and a subsequent cover-up. In one of his first acts as president, Ford pardoned Nixon, a very unpopular move among many citizens. Carter promised to take America toward different goals than Ford and Nixon had pursued. However, concerning relations with the Soviet Union, Carter hoped to continue the policy of détente (decreasing international tensions) that Nixon and Ford had established.

The White House years

Carter appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928–) as his national security advisor and Cyrus Vance (1917–2002) as secretary of state. Brzezinski and Vance held opposing views on how to deal with the Soviets. Vance strongly supported diplomacy (talking out problems), whereas Brzezinski favored military responses to any Soviet activities that were carried out with the goal of expanding communism. Carter at first favored Vance's approach. In January 1977, Carter sent a warm letter to Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982; see entry), general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. In the letter, Carter expressed his desire to improve relations with the Soviet Union and to end the nuclear weapons arms race. With this letter, Carter also intended to establish friendlier relations with the Soviets so the United States could focus more on leading the world in promoting human rights rather than being so consumed with the Cold War rivalry.

Carter's human rights campaign

Carter, a devout Christian, believed in promoting human rights on a global scale. The term human rights refers to certain rights that all people, simply by being human, deserve. Examples of human rights include economic opportunities, political freedoms, and an existence free from oppression, unlawful imprisonment, and torture. In March 1977, Carter increased funding for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America, radio stations that beamed programs about basic human freedoms into the Soviet Union and into Eastern Europe, which was under tight communist control. Andrey Sakharov (1921–1989; see entry), a Soviet nuclear physicist-turned-dissident, or an individual who disagrees with the ideas of those in power, encouraged Carter to pursue his human rights campaign.

In November 1977, at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United States accused the Soviets and Eastern European countries of violating their citizens' human rights. Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders charged the United States with interfering in Soviet domestic affairs. In response, through the late 1970s, Brezhnev jailed hundreds of dissidents—anyone in the Soviet Union critical of communist rule. Brezhnev also increased oppression of Soviet Jews who were critical of communist rule. Soon détente was pushed aside, and U.S.-Soviet relations became frosty and hostile. Carter changed course in his foreign policy approach and favored U.S. national security advisor Brzezinski's hard-line attitude toward the Soviets.

Latin America

Carter also focused his human rights campaign on Latin American countries and South Korea. Latin America includes all countries in the Western Hemisphere south of the United States. Carter believed the Soviet Union was no longer a strong threat to Latin American countries, so he halted the U.S. policy of supporting oppressive dictatorships just because they were anticommunist. Argentina, Brazil, and Chile were countries known to suffer from human rights abuses. In an attempt to influence government leaders there, Carter blocked U.S. loans to these countries. He also halted other economic assistance and ended arms deals. Carter's policies resulted in chilled relations with Latin American countries that had previously been friendly to the United States.

Domestic policies

Carter's first action on the home scene was to pardon all those who had evaded the draft during the Vietnam War (1954–75). The draft was a process in which all eighteen-yearold U.S. men had to register to enter the military. Some illegally avoided being drafted by packing up and moving to Canada, where they stayed for many years. Carter's pardon of draft evaders was a popular move with some Americans, but it was very unpopular with many war veterans.

During his term, Carter won congressional approval of two new cabinet-level executive departments: the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy would regulate energy suppliers and fund research into additional energy sources. Some of Carter's energy policy successes helped reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil. By the time Carter left office in 1981, his energy programs had reduced U.S. dependence on foreign oil from 48 percent to 40 percent. The United States had also stored large amounts of oil and a surplus of natural gas; domestic production of oil and gas had increased substantially. By the mid-1980s, Carter's policies would lead to reduced prices for energy products. However, in the short term, during the late 1970s, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) nearly tripled its oil prices from $13 a barrel to above $34 per barrel. Inflation (the rise in the cost of goods and services) soared to above 15 percent, and Carter's popularity plummeted. Carter worsened his public image by giving what became known as his "malaise speech," in which he expressed concern over the American people's malaise (though he never actually used that word in his speech), or lack of confidence and purpose, in the future of the United States. To the public, to the media, and to Congress, Carter seemed distant and arrogant. His chances for reelection grew smaller and smaller.

Successes in foreign affairs

While domestic economic troubles plagued his administration, Carter found success abroad—in relations with China, an arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, and a peace treaty that he helped negotiate between Egypt and Israel. Carter also succeeded in negotiating treaties to return control of the Panama Canal to the country of Panama, effective December 31, 1999; the United States had constructed the canal and controlled it since the early 1900s. The Panama Canal treaties were in keeping with Carter's policy of scaling back U.S. involvement in other countries.

The Carter administration continued the efforts of Presidents Nixon and Ford by strengthening U.S. ties with communist China. The countries granted each other full diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979. Communists interested in China's economic growth replaced many hard-line communists in China. The United States began importing finished consumer goods from China and exporting lumber and food products to China.

After six years of talks during the terms of three U.S. presidents (Nixon, Ford, and Carter), the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) was completed. President Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed SALT II on June 18,1979. SALT II put a ceiling on the number of nuclear delivery vehicles each country could possess and on the number of ballistic missiles the two countries could have in their offensive weapons systems. It did not require the countries to reduce their stockpiles of weapons. On the night of June 18, 1979, Carter addressed a joint session of Congress. In the address, as noted in the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United

States: Jimmy Carter, 1979, Book I, Carter stated, "SALT II is very important, but it's more than a single arms control agreement. It is part of a long, historical process of gradually reducing the danger of nuclear war—a process that we in this room must not undermine.… And, of course, SALT II is the absolutely indispensable precondition for moving on to much deeper and more significant cuts under SALT III."

Unfortunately for U.S.-Soviet relations, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979 and early 1980 to support an unpopular communist government there. U.S.-Soviet relations nose-dived. Carter refused to allow U.S. athletes to go to the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. He also withdrew SALT II from the Senate ratification process. Nevertheless, Brezhnev and Carter and, later, President Ronald Reagan (1911–; served 1981–89; see entry), agreed to abide by the provisions of the treaty.

Carter's greatest foreign policy success came with the so-called Camp David Accords. Camp David is the presidential retreat outside Washington, D.C., in the hills of Maryland. Carter invited Israel's prime minister, Menachem Begin (1913–1992), and Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), to Camp David to negotiate a peace treaty. Between September 4 and September 17, 1978, Carter effectively mediated between the two bitter enemies until a peace agreement was worked out. The agreement was formally signed in Washington, D.C., on March 26, 1979. Begin and Sadat received the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.

Iranian crisis

In 1979, the shah, or ruler, of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980), was forced to flee Iran when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (c. 1900–1989), the leader of the Shiites, a radical Muslim group, took control. Exiled, the shah journeyed to Panama in December 1979. Suffering from cancer, he asked for permission to enter the United States for treatment. President Carter agreed to the shah's request. Greatly angered by this action, Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran's capital city, and took sixty-six Americans hostage, fourteen of whom were soon released. The Iranians demanded that the shah be returned to Iran for trial on charges of crimes against the Iranian people before the hostages would be released. All negotiations failed, and Carter ordered a military rescue in April 1980. A desert sand-storm downed several of the American rescue helicopters. One helicopter crashed into a transport plane, killing eight. Finally, on the very day Carter left office, January 20, 1981, the fifty-two hostages were released. The Republican candidate, former California governor Ronald Reagan, had easily defeated Carter in the presidential race by charging that Carter had been ineffective in his handling of the hostage crisis and was equally ineffective in reducing inflation and unemployment at home.

Second return to Georgia

Jimmy Carter returned to Plains in January 1981 and immediately began to write his memoirs, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, first published in 1982. (An engaging author, Carter has written many other books in his postpresidential years; see side-bar.) In his postpresidential life, Carter became a model for future ex-presidents by maintaining a substantial involvement in worthwhile causes, particularly human rights issues. Considering Carter's accomplishments after 1980, it seems the U.S. presidency was not the pinnacle of his career, but a stepping-stone on a path to further greatness.

In October 1984, construction began on the Jimmy Carter Library. The library is located on a 35-acre campus near downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Completed in October 1986, the facility includes the presidential library, the Carter Museum, privately maintained offices for Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and the staff of foundations supported by the Carters, and the Carter Center. The Carter Center operates in partnership with Emory University and is governed by an independent board of trustees chaired by the former president. According to the Center's Web site, its mission "is guided by a fundamental commitment to human rights and the alleviation of human suffering; it seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health."

Through the Carter Center Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have been involved in many dispute resolution activities, especially in civil war situations in Third World countries. They have also monitored elections in countries where open and honest elections are difficult to carry out and given advice to government officials on a variety of issues. Jimmy Carter has served as an unofficial ambassador for several administrations. President George Bush (1924–; served 1989–93; see entry), Reagan's successor, sent Carter to Panama in 1989 to oversee presidential elections there. Then in 1990, Carter led a team that monitored presidential elections in Nicaragua. President Bill Clinton (1946–; served 1993–2001) sent Carter to North Korea in 1994 to defuse a nuclear weapons dispute. For all his efforts, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.