Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 symbolised the success of his post-presidential career (Image: AP)
President Jimmy Carter was widely perceived as an epic failure when he lost his bid for a second term in the White House in 1980.
The former peanut farmer from Georgia had seemed bewildered as he wallowed in the Seventies energy crisis amid crippling oil shortages, failed to win the release of 52 Americans held hostage for more than a year in Iran, and was bludgeoned by Soviet aggression and their invasion of Afghanistan.
He had failed to persuade Congress to reform the welfare state, health care and taxation, while presiding over soaring unemployment, rampant inflation and a collapsing economy.
He was ignominiously swept out of office, crushed beneath a landslide victory by charismatic Republican former movie star Ronald Reagan.
For many years Carter, who died on Sunday aged 100, was widely considered one of the worst presidents in American history.
Yet even before Donald Trump emerged in 2016 with a strong claim to that dubious honour, Carter had improbably become one of America’s most beloved and respected elder statesmen.
While most retired US presidents pen a bestselling if self-serving memoir, accept a few big-bucks corporate directorships and join the lucrative speaker circuit, Carter was the rarity who used his platform for the betterment of humankind across the globe.
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Liberated from the White House and guided by his unswerving Southern liberal morality and deep Christian faith, Carter tirelessly worked behind the scenes to help resolve international conflicts, advance democracy and human rights, and promote economic and social development.
With hammer, nails and sweat, he laboured to build affordable housing for the underprivileged and fought to erase tropical disease.
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, Carter refused to rest on his laurels, continuing to broker peace deals in global trouble spots.
“Jimmy Carter was probably the most intelligent, hard-working and decent man to have occupied the Oval Office in the 20th century,” says his biographer, Kai Bird.
America’s voters eviscerated Carter, but history has been kind to him, now re-evaluated as a man of peace and humility who made America and the world a better place.
“Carter thought politics was sinful,” said his vice-president, Walter Mondale. “The worst thing you could say to Carter if you wanted him to do something, was that it was politically the best thing to do.”
Distrusting other politicians, Carter had few allies in Congress. President Joe Biden, then a first-term senator in 1977, said: “Nixon had his enemies list and President Carter has his friends list. I guess I’m on his friends list – and I don’t know which is worse.”
Carter’s own Democratic Party helped to kill several of his key legislative priorities in Congress, including health care and tax reform.
Under Carter’s administration the US slipped into an economic and spiritual malaise. With cars lined up for hours outside petrol stations, interest rates approaching 12%, and austerity measures tightening belts, Americans were in no mood to celebrate Carter’s foreign policy successes.
When he ran for re-election in 1980, the only international issue that voters cared about was the 52 American hostages seized in Tehran after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. A 1979 US rescue mission ended in disaster, aborted before reaching the hostages, with the loss of a helicopter, a transport plane and eight servicemen.
Jimmy Carter concedes defeat in the 1980 presidential election (Image: AP)
James Earl Carter Jr was an unlikely choice for president. Born in Plains, Georgia, in 1924, he grew up running barefoot around his family’s struggling peanut plantation.
After a stint in the US Navy serving on submarines he returned home to revive the peanut farm and became a civil rights activist, serving in the Georgia State Senate before being elected governor in 1970.
In an America disillusioned after the failures of the Vietnam War, haunted by the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that saw president Richard Nixon ousted and succeeded by his unelected vice-president Gerald Ford, public trust of politicians was at an all-time low.
Carter’s homespun honesty was the antidote voters craved. Promising America “I’ll never lie to you”, he was elected in 1976 on a wave of public revulsion at politics-as-usual.
Yet Carter’s aw-shucks down-home image also led him into trouble.
He raised eyebrows when telling Playboy magazine in 1976: “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” He was mercilessly mocked after a “killer swamp rabbit” tried to attack his fishing boat in 1979.
Many Americans blamed Carter’s failed administration for their woes, but in an infamous speech in 1979 Carter turned the tables, chastising Americans for “a crisis of confidence” that he warned “strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation”.
Too few Americans cared that Carter had achieved monumental successes overseas. He presided over the historic Camp David peace accord between Egypt and Israel, brokered the SALT II arms control agreement between the USSR and America, normalised diplomatic relations with China, returned the Panama Canal to Panama, and laid the groundwork that led to the end of the Cold War.
At home, Carter deregulated the airline industry, lowered prices to open air travel to middle-class Americans, regulated natural gas and set the US on the path to energy independence.
He warned of global warming’s dangers, launched American research into solar power, reformed the civil service, appointed more Black, Hispanic and female judges, tripled the size of the nation’s protected wilderness, and made seatbelts mandatory in cars, saving at least 9,000 lives a year.
But when the election rolled around in November 1980, voters saw a recession staring them in the face and swept an unpopular Carter from office. His legacy: Twelve years of Republican presidents.
Jimmy Carter fell into depression after his election defeat, but soon found a new cause for his life (Image: AP)
In ignominious defeat, Carter plunged into depression. He endured a year of sleepless nights before having an epiphany, telling his wife, Rosalynn: “I know what we can do: We can develop a place to help people who want to resolve disputes.”
The ensuing Carter Centre went on to resolve conflicts across the globe, drove public health initiatives, and monitored elections worldwide.
His campaign against Guinea worm disease virtually eradicated the blight, plunging from 3.5million cases in 1985 to only 14 last year.
An impassioned supporter of Habitat for Humanity, Carter often slaved for days helping to construct low-income housing.
He dedicated his remaining years to pursuing world peace, with missions to hotspots including North Korea, Sudan and the West Bank – though his influence often antagonised his Oval Office successors, and his criticisms of Israel undermined his image as an impartial peace broker.
He penned more than 30 books on subjects ranging from the Middle East to faith, fly fishing, government and America’s endangered values.
The longest-lived president, surviving cancer in 2015 and a broken hip in 2019, Carter endured a series of short hospital stays in 2022, and in February 2023 began hospice care to “spend his remaining time at home” with his wife of 77 years Rosalynn and their family, rather than attempt any further medical intervention. Rosalynn died in November 2023, aged 96.
Carter will be buried beside her at their Georgia home – set to become a museum – as his nation mourns.
“The man was not what you think,” his biographer Kai Bird told The New York Times. “Mr Carter remains the most misunderstood president of the last century.”