Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency is remembered for the events that overwhelmed it—inflation, energy crisis, war in Afghanistan, and hostages in Iran. After one term in office, voters rejected Jimmy Carter's honest but gloomy outlook in favor of Ronald Reagan's telegenic optimism. Since then, there has been a growing recognition that Carter confronted challenging problems in the late 1970s with steadiness, sacrifice, and idealism. Along with his predecessor Gerald Ford, Carter is now given credit for restoring respect and balance to our constitutional system after the turmoil of the Vietnam War and Watergate, and after the excesses of the "imperial presidencies" of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Carter was raised on his family's farm in Archer, just outside the small town of Plains, Georgia. The family home lacked electricity and indoor plumbing. Jimmy was named after his father, a successful businessman who grew peanuts and operated a small store. Carter's mother, "Miz" Lillian, was a nurse by training, and Jimmy was the first American president born in a hospital. Carter’s father, “Mr. Earl,” was a strict adherent to the laws and customs of the segregated South. His mother was more eccentric and progressive, often treating black guests and neighbors with levels of respect and equality that were rare in rural Georgia. According to Rosalynn Smith, who grew up in Plains and later married Jimmy, Lillian was the only adult she knew in her childhood whoever said a good word about Abraham Lincoln. Carter acquired his father’s penchant for hard work and frugality, and his mother’s independence and moral courage.

Jimmy graduated valedictorian of the class at Plains High School. Captivated by the stories of exotic lands that his uncle visited in the US Navy, Carter set his sights on earning admission to the US Naval Academy. He graduated in 1946 in the top tenth of his class and was selected to serve under the tough but inspirational Captain Hyman Rickover, the leading advocate for the Navy's emerging nuclear submarine fleet.

Sowing Seeds of Change

In 1953, Carter and his wife Rosalynn faced a difficult decision. Carter’s father, Earl, had died of cancer, and the family farm and his mother's livelihood were in danger. Resigning from the Navy, Carter returned to Georgia to save the farm. After several difficult years, the farm began to prosper. Carter became a deacon and Sunday school teacher in the Plains Baptist Church and began serving on local civic boards before being elected to two terms in the Georgia state senate. There he earned a reputation as a tough, independent legislator who resisted lobbyists seeking favor and attacked wasteful government practices.

On civil rights, the great issue of the 1960s, Jimmy Carter had a calculated and complicated personal and political response. He did not openly advocate integration of local schools when he served on the school board in Plains, but he also refused to join the White Citizens Council, an organization that vigorously fought against the Supreme Court desegregation decisions. He did not participate in the civil rights demonstrations in Americus, Georgia, a city close to Plains, but he and his family voted against a resolution to block African Americans from attending services at their Baptist church. Never an activist in the civil rights movement, he was nevertheless thought to be sympathetic to the cause by his neighbors who sometimes boycotted the peanut warehouse and painted racial slurs on Carter property.

When Carter decided to seek higher elected office, he ran for governor in 1966. Though a little-known state senator from a small town in the southwest of the state, he surprised the Georgia political establishment by winning a solid third place in the Democratic primary. That success triggered a runoff election between a moderate former governor and Lester Maddox, an avowed segregationist who won the race. Carter was despondent about his failed campaign and the subsequent Maddox governorship.

After soul searching and a recommitment to his Christian faith, he launched a second bid to become governor. In the 1970 election he cautiously presented himself as a moderate man of the people running against a wealthy Atlanta lawyer and businessman. He won support from conservative rural voters with endorsements from leaders of several segregationist organizations. When he won the election, he surprised many Georgians, and some of the people who had voted for him, by declaring in his gubernatorial inaugural speech that the era of segregation was over!

Presidential Politics: Scandal, Conflict, and Crisis

Governor Carter watched the defeat of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972 and began to consider his own prospects in national politics. A southern candidate who had endorsed the success of the civil rights movement but remained moderate on other issues might be able to craft a unique path to the nomination and the White House. When he started thinking about a presidential run, Carter was unknown on the national political stage. In the aftermath of President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal, however, that became an advantage. It also helped Carter that the disgraced Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew were replaced on the Republican ticket by Gerald Ford, a political insider with little charisma and an uncanny knack for falling down on camera. Despite an ill-advised interview in Playboy magazine, which hurt him in the polls, Carter squeaked out a narrow victory in the 1976 presidential election.

Carter's newcomer status in Washington soon showed itself in his struggles to make deals with Congress. Members of the legislature, including Democrats, shot down key portions of his consumer protection bill and objected to his cancelation of unnecessary federal water projects. Determined to free the nation from dependency on foreign oil, Carter encouraged conservation, alternate energy sources, and the deregulation of domestic oil pricing. But the creation of OPEC, a cartel of the major oil producing countries, sent oil prices soaring, caused rampant inflation, and serious economic problems. Carter was also deeply troubled by public scandals involving his family, including a payment by the government of Libya to Carter's brother Billy.

Foreign affairs during the Carter administration were equally troublesome. Critics attacked both Carter's plans to relinquish control of the Panama Canal and his response to Soviet aggression in Afghanistan by pulling out of the Olympics and ending the sale of wheat to the Soviets. Conservatives in the Republican Party criticized his recognition of communist China, which expanded on Nixon's China policy, and his negotiation of new arms control agreements with the Soviets.

But the most serious foreign crisis of Carter's presidency involved Iran. After the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power there, the United States offered sanctuary to the ailing Shah who was ill with cancer, angering the new Iranian government. Student militants in Tehran stormed the American embassy and took sixty-six American hostages. Carter's ineffective handling of the much-televised hostage crisis, and the failed attempt to rescue them in the spring of 1980, doomed his presidency, even though he negotiated their release shortly before leaving office.

Carter is positively remembered for the historic 1978 Camp David Accords, where he mediated a historic peace agreement between Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat. This vital summit revived a long-dormant practice of presidential peacemaking, something every succeeding chief executive has emulated to varying degrees. Nevertheless, because of perceived weaknesses as a domestic and foreign policy leader, and because of the poor performance of the economy, Carter was easily defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

After leaving office, Carter remained active, serving as a freelance ambassador for a variety of international missions and advising presidents on Middle East and human rights issues. The work of the Carter Center in Atlanta—fighting disease and poverty in developing countries while supporting democratic reforms and elections—earned Carter a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 and the admiration of people in the United States and around the world.