Jimmy Carter was arguably the most enigmatic president of America’s post-World War II era. He died on Sunday afternoon in Plains, Ga., the Carter Center said.
Leaders who reach the pinnacle of power are usually complicated individuals. But Carter was a man whose outward image was often the opposite of what lay underneath. He strove to convey simplicity and humility, yet he was a highly sophisticated man with ego and ambition that burned hotter than most.
“Don’t pay any attention to that smile. That don’t mean a thing,” said Ben Fortson, Georgia’s secretary of state for a period of 33 years that included Carter’s tenure as governor. “That man is made of steel, determination and stubbornness.”
Carter’s own wife, Rosalynn, once said that her husband “appears kind of meek or something. People always underestimate him.”
More on Jimmy Carter’s life and presidency
Carter has been widely considered an unsuccessful president who was overwhelmed by events. And compared with the presidencies of, say, Johnson, Nixon or Reagan, Carter’s single term is a period that historians and the public showed very little interest in revisiting, though that began to shift in his last few years. Yet he lived a compelling, exemplary life, and he was beset by challenges in office that would have stymied most leaders.
During Carter’s term, he was unable to resolve the major problems that confronted America in the late 1970s. He could not tame inflation or unite the Democratic Party, and he couldn’t free the Americans who were held captive in Iran for more than a year. It’s not well known, however, that the agreement that led to freedom for the 52 American hostages in Tehran was negotiated by Carter and his administration during his final weeks in office. Ronald Reagan had little if anything to do with it, even though he is commonly given credit, since the Iranians released the hostages moments after he was inaugurated.
In 1979 Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve; Volcker’s policies brought down inflation, which was running in double digits by the end of the decade, though it took time for that to happen, and Reagan reaped the political benefits. Some critiques of the Volcker appointment have come from the left, who said his policies benefitted Wall Street at the expense of the working class.
Reagan is also given all the credit for the fall of the Soviet Union and communism. But Carter’s one-two punch — he increased defense spending and made human rights a core plank of American foreign policy — put pressure on the Soviets fiscally and morally, and Carter has been creditedfor forcing the USSR onto an unsustainable trajectory.
It was Carter’s style that rubbed many Americans the wrong way. When Teddy Kennedy decided to run against him in 1980, challenging the incumbent president of his own party, he made Carter’s lack of leadership his central argument. “Only the president can provide the sense of direction needed by the nation,” Kennedy said when he announced his candidacy in November 1979. “For many months, we have been sinking into crisis, yet we hear no clear summons from the center of power.”
Over the years, Carter has been commonly remembered as a kind of Mister Rogers figure, a soft-spoken man wearing a sweater who was good but not strong. Yet Carter’s strength was on display all his life. He grew up in rural poverty and worked his way into the Naval Academy. He had few political connections in Georgia and yet willed his way to the governorship. And he won the presidency with few insider party credentials.
And then, after a devastating and overwhelming loss to Reagan in 1980, Carter revolutionized what it means to be an ex-president. He won the release of political prisoners around the world, resolved conflicts in war zones, monitored elections in fledgling democracies and helped eradicate disease. He wrote or published more than 30 books in the years after his presidency, including a novel (the first by a U.S. president), a book of poetry, a children’s book, a book on fishing and other outdoor sporting activities, two on making the most of older years (one of which he co-wrote with Rosalynn), a few on the Middle East, a few personal history books focused on different periods of his life, and a handful of religious devotional books. And finally, he remained married to Rosalynn for 77 years — until her death in 2023 — and he lived to the age of 100. Carter’s father and his three siblings had all died in their 50s or early 60s of pancreatic cancer, and yet he overcame brain cancer at age 90. He never lost his intense zeal for life.
He certainly wasn’t overly nice. In fact, one of the biggest criticisms of Carter during the 1980 campaign against Reagan was that Carter was too mean. He consistently, throughout his political career, made the mistake of personally attacking his opponents in ways that backfired with the electorate. He painted Reagan as an unstable warmonger and said that if the Republican were elected, “Americans might be separated, Black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban.”
Carter had, in fact, made a deliberate decision at the beginning of his political career — which consumed less than a fifth of his entire life — that he could participate in the morally nebulous world of campaigns and governance and still retain his personal integrity. He once compared being a state senator to being a pastor with 80,000 parishioners. He was deeply influenced by Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote that “man is the kind of lion who both kills the lamb and dreams of when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together.” Carter called a collection of Niebuhr’s essays his “political bible.”
Jimmy Carter was born Oct. 1, 1924, in a small local hospital in the southwest Georgia town of Plains. He was the first U.S. president born in a hospital. Carter was the first child of James Earl Carter, a World War I veteran and an industrious peanut farmer, and Lillian Carter, a nurse. He would become known as the “man from Plains,” but he actually grew up in a place called Archery, 2.5 miles west of Plains. This was Carter’s term for it: not a town or a village, but a “place.” Archery “was never quite a real town,” Carter wrote. It’s no longer even on any maps. But “it’s where I grew up,” he said.
There was no running water in Carter’s home until he was 9 years old, and he and his family would relieve themselves either in one of the “slop jars” that were in each of the three bedrooms or out back in the outdoor privy. They did not have toilet paper. When his father bought a small windmill in 1935, it powered a toilet, a sink and a rudimentary shower. The showerhead was a can with holes poked in it. Electricity would not arrive on most farms until President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration made headway, so artificial light came from kerosene lamps.
And until the 1940s, the farming process in the Deep South was largely the same as during colonial times nearly 200 years before. Tractors or any form of mechanized power were rare, so plowing was done with mules. Harvesting was done by hand and depended on manual labor, usually from Black tenant workers who lived in shacks on the farm property in exchange for a job, and who had little prospect of ever earning much money. The Southern farm population actually grew from 1930 to 1935, as city workers lost jobs and moved to places like Archery.
Carter’s father, Earl, owned 350 acres. It was a good-sized farm, especially since many other family estates were in a multi-decade process of being subdivided by descendants of Southern plantation owners after the Civil War. And Earl made the most of it. He was smart, thrifty, and a good businessman.
Earl could be stoic and restrained, and was sometimes severe. The family did not speak at the dinner table, although they were allowed to bring books to read while they ate. Jimmy strove to please his father and rarely felt he succeeded. But he had a happy childhood, roaming through creeks and forests with friends, shirtless and shoeless. But he also engaged in demanding physical labor from a young age. He picked cotton alongside field hands. He learned how to guide the mules in plowing the fields. He had two younger sisters, Gloria and Ruth. His only brother, Billy, was not born until Jimmy was 12 years old.
Earl Carter’s politics were segregationist and white supremacist, as were most white Georgians’ at the time. But Jimmy’s mother, Lillian, was a progressive on racial questions from a young age. Earl “was tolerant if not supportive of Lillian’s views,” Carter wrote in “Turning Point,” his 1992 memoir of growing up in Georgia. Earl was “above all, a Talmadge man,” meaning he was a devoted supporter of Eugene Talmadge, the arch-segregationist governor of Georgia in the 1930s and ’40s.
When Earl died in 1953, Jimmy was a naval officer stationed in Schenectady, N.Y., on a track that would have put him in position to potentially take command of a nuclear submarine in the near future. But he abandoned his naval career to come home and take over his parents’ farm, overriding Rosalynn’s strong opposition to the move.
He ran for state Senate in 1962. A corrupt local official stood in a polling place telling residents how to vote, intimidating Carter supporters and stuffing the ballot box. Yet Carter mounted a drive to have the vote recounted and the corruption investigated. He succeeded, largely thanks to a series of articles in the Atlanta Journal, and was seated in the legislature.
When his church, the First Baptist Church in Plains, voted in the summer of 1964 to formalize its practice of preventing Black worshippers from attending services, Carter stood and spoke against the resolution. Many in the congregation abstained from voting out of fear, but of those who did vote, only Carter’s family and one other farmer opposed the proposal. It passed 54 to 6. He was not outspoken on some racial hot-button issues. But he pointedly refused to join the segregationist White Citizens Council, despite threats and intimidation.
Carter ran for governor in 1966 but came in third in the Democratic primary, behind former Gov. Ellis Arnall and Lester Maddox, a committed segregationist who won a runoff with Arnall and then the governorship in the fall.
Carter turned his attention quickly to running for governor again in 1970. He also experienced an existential crisis at the age of 42, questioning the direction and meaning of his life. He began reading the Bible more closely and questioning how his faith applied to modern life and to politics.
During this time, Carter discovered Niebuhr. He traveled with three other men to Lock Haven, Pa., a coal-mining town in the center of the state, to proselytize for a new Southern Baptist church that was coming to the town. He spent 10 days knocking on doors. At each home, Carter or another man would talk about their personal faith in Jesus Christ and invite anyone interested to nightly services that they organized at the local YMCA. Carter later described his time in Lock Haven as a “miracle.” It was, he said, “where I first experienced in a personal and intense way the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life.” This was an early precursor to the “born again” dynamic of Christians in the 1970s whose revivals created the “Jesus movement.”
In his 1970 campaign against former Gov. Carl Sanders, Carter sought the support of African American pastors and had the endorsement of Martin Luther King Jr. But his campaign also made covert appeals to white bigotry. Campaign aides distributed fliers with a photo of Sanders, a part owner of the Atlanta Hawks, celebrating a victory with a Black player, Lou Hudson.
Carter also made numerous overtures to supporters of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, one of the staunchest defenders of segregation, and attracted the support of the most notorious white supremacists in Georgia. “I never made a racist statement,” Carter told me in a 2015 interview. “But I did get the more conservative country votes there in Georgia because I never did anything to alienate them.”
In his inaugural speech in 1971, Carter recast himself once again as a racial progressive. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he said. To the Black leaders in Georgia he promised, “You’re going to like me as governor.”
Carter’s main achievement as governor was a major reorganization of the state government, to consolidate agencies and introduce more efficiency. But his limitations as an executive were already clear during his time in Atlanta. He had no use or appreciation for the human and relational side of politics, which is crucial to working with a legislature. “He had very few personal relationships, in my opinion,” said Bert Lance, a friend and adviser who ran Georgia’s powerful transportation department under Carter. “I like people. I like to be around them. I try to be cordial to them. Not that he doesn’t, but he’d just rather be by himself.”
E. Stanly Godbold noted in his biography of Carter that during his time as governor, “Apart from Rosalynn, he saw as few people as possible. … Usually he ate lunch alone in his office, ordering the food from the cafeteria. … In the afternoons he studied serious academic books about politics and society.”
The first recorded instance of Carter discussing the presidency was in the summer of 1971, less than a year after he was elected governor. By the fall of 1972, he and his close circle of advisers had begun to openly talk about it and began planning for a run in 1976. Few took him seriously. When Carter first raised the topic of running for president with his mother, Lillian, she responded, “President of what?” But even before Watergate, Carter and his advisers discussed the need for “moral leadership” in the country in the wake of the Vietnam War’s divisive effect. A national leader was needed, they thought, who would be more transparent and open with the country and say things that might be unpopular.
Adviser Ham Jordan argued that a Carter candidacy should “encompass and expand on the Wallace constituency and ‘populist’ philosophy by being a better qualified and more responsible alternative.” Carter would represent a “New South” and could help the Democrats hold on to their fracturing coalition, which included large swaths of the South along with big-city machines across the Rust Belt, organized labor and minorities.
Carter pioneered a new approach to primaries, campaigning hard in every state, aided by young advisers who had closely studied the way the nominating system had changed, and who also understood the growing importance of television as a way to project an image that superseded political ideology.
He benefited from an organized effort by Democratic activists in Florida who lobbied and pressured other Democrats to stay out of the state’s primary in 1976 to give Carter a clean one-on-one matchup against Wallace, who was running for president a fourth time and had won the primary in Florida in 1972 with 41% of the vote.
Carter is remembered as an inept communicator, but in person, he converted followers with the success — and the methods — of a traveling preacher. “A strange calm came over the audience as he talked of America’s basic goodness,” Jules Witcover, a reporter for the Washington Post, observed early in the campaign. “His speeches are mostly received with a strange quietness,” Charles Mohr wrote in the New York Times.
Carter said the nation’s decency had only been “temporarily obscured by the debasings perpetuated by [former President Richard] Nixon.” “I want a government that is as good, and honest, and decent, and truthful, and fair, and competent, and idealistic, and compassionate, and as filled with love as are the American people,” he said, over and over. Witcover, who compared Carter to Christian evangelist Billy Graham, called this phrase Carter’s “personal rosary” and noted that “in crowd after crowd, it worked.”
The country was not only disillusioned by Nixon and Watergate. Americans were disquieted and made anxious by the rise of inflation in the early ’70s, by the energy crisis of 1973 that created lines of cars at gas stations and by a slowing economy. Wages were flatlining. Jobs were disappearing. The cost of living was going up. People may have wanted someone to redeem the country, but they also wanted someone who could restore their confidence and ease their economic pain.
There were no themes to Carter’s candidacy except “faith in Jimmy Carter and the sense of hope he sought to inspire in the American people,” wrote Carter adviser Peter Bourne. Witcover picked up on this as well. “He asked of voters the same ‘leap of faith’ that is at the core of religious belief,” he wrote. The electorate was ripe for this approach, as Carter pollster Pat Caddell had discovered. Voters wanted “non ideological change and the restoration of values.”
He came out of nowhere to win the Iowa caucuses, and by the time he defeated Wallace in Florida, Carter had a head of steam that carried him to the nomination. He narrowly defeated President Gerald Ford in the popular vote, 40.8 million votes to 39.1 million, and in the Electoral College, 297 to 240. It was the smallest margin of victory in electoral votes for a president since 1916. In addition, the negative tone of the campaign had taken a toll. The election saw the lowest voter turnout for a presidential race in 28 years, at only 54%.
Carter entered Washington as an outsider, and the presidency without much of a mandate. He was the first presidential candidate to win control of the government while running against government. Barry Goldwater had attempted it in 1964 and was crushed. Carter told audiences in 1976 that “our government in Washington now is a horrible bureaucratic mess. It is disorganized, wasteful, has no purpose, and its policies — when they exist — are incomprehensible or devised by special interest groups with little regard for the welfare of the average American citizen.”
Carter was not a part of the Washington establishment, and he was proud of it. But his outsider status left him exposed when events began to undermine him. He didn’t understand the presidency or have the help of anyone who did.
Carter showed signs early on of the myopic, obsessive managerial style that would cause him trouble later. It emerged that the president would sometimes scrutinize the list of government officials scheduled to accompany him on a foreign trip and scratch out the names of those he did not think needed to come. And any staff who wanted to use the tennis court on the White House grounds had to receive permission from the president himself. “He has his eye on anything that moves,” said an aide.
As the summer of 1977 arrived, there were more serious warning signs. The House had passed most of Carter’s energy plan, but polling showed declining public support for the legislation. Carter and his administration were pushing the Senate to ratify the treaty they had negotiated with Panama over transfer of the canal, but Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd was in no rush, and the right was in an uproar over the move. Former California Gov. Ronald Reagan was denouncing the Panama deal on his daily radio commentary, which reached 40 million people. And the president’s relations with the Jewish community were declining as a result of his focus on peace talks and his prickly relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
In the fall of 1978, Carter achieved what would be the high-water mark of his presidency, drawing on all his powers of persuasion, all his determination and stubbornness, to keep Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at the Camp David presidential retreat for 13 days, long enough for them to agree to a Middle East peace deal. But Carter’s charisma and grit weren’t doing much for the American people at home. Inflation climbed in 1978, from 6.8% at the beginning of the year to 9% in November. By May 1979, it was at 11% and still climbing, headed to 13% at the end of the year. The purchasing power of the middle class had been under strain for years, and now it was being obliterated.
The economy was stuck in neutral, with the industrial sector in full collapse, roiling the middle portion of the country, where jobs and pensions had been easy to come by for years. The Soviet Union was building up its military. And there was great concern about the rise of Japan as an economic superpower. Violent crime had been increasing in the nation for over a decade, with murders doubling since 1966 to the highest point in American history in the late ’70s.
In late April 1979, former Carter speechwriter James Fallows unleashed a barrage of criticism at the president in the Atlantic magazine. “For the part of his job that involves leadership, Carter’s style of thought cripples him. He thinks he ‘leads’ by choosing the correct policy; but he fails to project a vision larger than the problem he is tackling at the moment,” Fallows wrote. He felt that Carter’s weakness was that he approached problems as “technical, not historical” and that he had a “lack of curiosity about how the story turned out before.”
Around that same time, gas shortages caused in part by the Islamic Revolution in Iran created gas lines in parts of the country. People waited for hours to fill up, and violence began to mount. Adding to the chaos, independent truckers went on strike to protest the rising price of diesel and began blocking highways and filling stations with their rigs. There were violent attacks on truck drivers who sought to break ranks with the strikers. In late June, frustration over the gas lines and the trucker protests came to a boiling point in the Philadelphia suburb of Levittown, where widespread rioting broke out. Police arrested 200 people over two nights, and 44 officers were injured.
Carter was scheduled to give an energy speech on July 5 to calm the country’s frayed nerves. But one day before the speech, he canceled it and remained at Camp David. For the first 24 hours, most of the White House staff didn’t even know what the president was doing. Eventually, he stayed there 10 days, hosting groups of governors, religious leaders, economists, members of Congress and other assorted people, talking through the nation’s challenges. He hoped to help the American people think of the energy crisis in the same way they had approached the space race with the Soviets, the same way JFK had inspired the country by setting a goal in 1961 of getting a man on the moon before the end of the decade.
Carter’s eventual response became known as his notorious “malaise” speech, even though he never used the word “malaise.” The speech, in actuality, was one of the best of his presidency. It was a remarkable address that was extremely well received by the press and the public.
The reason the speech is now considered a failure is because two days after he gave it, Carter — seeking to project strength and boldness — asked for the resignations of every one of his major Cabinet officers. Though he did have some long-standing frustrations with the performance or loyalty of most of these officials, the firings were mostly a political and public relations ploy conceived of and encouraged by Ham Jordan. The changes backfired horribly and came off as chaotic and weak.
By the summer of 1979, polls showed Ted Kennedy leading Carter by 2 to 1 among likely Democratic voters, and the last of the Kennedy brothers was preparing to take the dramatic step of running against a president of his own party. “I’m going to whip his ass,” Carter told a group of Democratic congressmen at the White House.
It didn’t look that way as Kennedy prepared to run against Carter. But then on Nov. 4 the world changed. Iranian radicals in Tehran seized the U.S. Embassy and took 66 Americans hostage. Along with a disastrous Kennedy interview with CBS News’ Roger Mudd, the hostage crisis turned Carter’s political fortunes around, and he was able to defeat Kennedy in the primary, though it was a long and costly battle.
Carter’s presidency had been derailed time and again by the impression that he was powerless and inept, especially as inflation raged on and the hostage crisis dragged out. And yet as he faced off with Reagan in the general election, Carter’s Achilles’ heel would be his penchant for aggressive campaigning, not some perception of weakness.
Jimmy Carter’s own mother, Lillian, once described him as “a beautiful cat with sharp claws.” Journalist Hunter S. Thompson called Carter “one of the three meanest men I’ve ever met.” The other two were boxer Muhammad Ali and Sonny Barger, leader of the Hells Angels. Carter, Thompson said, “would cut my head off to carry North Dakota. He’d cut both your legs off to carry a ward in the Bronx. … He will eat your shoulder right off if he thinks it’s right.”
After a series of comments about Reagan that implied the Republican was catering to racism in some voters, Carter was portrayed by the political press as going too far. He did a damage-control interview with Barbara Walters. Her first question pointed out to him that he had, in recent days, “been characterized as mean, vindictive, hysterical and on the point of desperation.”
On Oct. 22, a week before the first and only debate between Carter and Reagan, comments from Iranian leaders suggested that a resolution — and a release of the 52 remaining Americans in Tehran — could be imminent. This raised the prospect of a dramatic turnaround for Carter’s fortunes. He had been saved from the Kennedy challenge by the seizure of the hostages. Would his response to the crisis now help him win a second term?
There were still tense moments in the final weekend before the election as it appeared the hostages might be released. But it was not to be. The hostages were not released, and Carter went down to a historic defeat. Reagan beat him in 44 out of 50 states and crushed him in the Electoral College 489 to 49.
The 1980 election was marked by apathy. Reagan beat Carter amid the lowest turnout in a presidential election since 1948. Only 52.4% of eligible voters went to the polls. But it was a historically significant election because the coalition that Democrats had relied on for decades since FDR’s presidency — combining union members in the big cities, poor rural voters, racial minorities, Catholics and the South — had splintered for good. It was a realigning event. Carter’s total loss of support among white Baptist voters in the South demonstrated how badly his coalition from 1976 had been turned upside down.
Carter finished out his term working obsessively to release the hostages. He signed a series of executive orders executing a deal with the Iranian government and spent his last weekend in office waiting for word on whether the deal would go through. He announced its completion at 4:44 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 19, the day before Reagan’s inauguration. Carter aides hoped the deal would be done so quickly he could go to meet the hostages in Germany that evening and be back in Washington on Inauguration Day to transfer power to Reagan. But it was not to be. In one final indignity, the Iranians released the hostages only after Reagan had been sworn in as the nation’s 40th president.
Carter, years later, would imply that he believed Reagan had made a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, to wait until the inauguration to free the hostages, in exchange for military equipment that Tehran needed to fight Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops. Gary Sick, an Iran expert who served on Carter’s National Security Council staff, published a book in 1991 titled “October Surprise,” which made the case that Reagan had colluded with the Iranians. Carter told author Douglas Brinkley in 1995 that “if you try to dig further into Gary’s ‘October Surprise’ revelations, and are successful, you may not like what you find.”
After an initial period of depression and searching, Carter became a major factor in international relations in the late ’80s and ’90s. He was helped by his close friendship with fellow Georgian Ted Turner, who owned the fledgling 24-hour cable news network CNN, launched during Carter’s final year in office.
Carter spent decades in a frenetic and often freelancing pursuit of global peacemaking and healing. Rosalynn was always at his side and as much a partner as ever. Though he became even more active in the Middle East peace process, he grew more radical in his support for an independent Palestinian state and his outspoken criticism of Israel. He was a regular presence in Latin America, convened arms control experts at his Carter Center in Atlanta and launched efforts to eradicate disease in Africa. In 1986, he set a goal of eradicating the painful Guinea worm disease from the Earth. Also called dracunculiasis, it afflicted roughly 3.5 million people at that time, most of them in central Africa, and the United Nations estimated that 100 million people were at risk of the disease. In 2015, there were only 22 cases in Africa.
On his last Sunday as president, Carter — a defeated politician — taught Sunday school at First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and talked about Jesus’s remark that “it is the one who is least among you all who is the greatest.” Carter said, “Is greatness being a president? An emperor?” No, he said. “The foundation of greatness is service to others.”
By that definition, the always ambitious Carter achieved greatness in his post-presidency. He was not a central player in the biggest story of the late ’80s and early ’90s: the fall of communist governments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But he did enter the public eye as a key figure in some internationally known conflicts during that time. He stood up to Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in 1989. After observing elections there, Carter compiled evidence that Noriega had stolen the election, and he vigorously denounced the Panamanian ruler during a 45-minute press conference in Panama City.
In 1994, Carter was again an influential force. He helped prevent a U.S. invasion of Haiti through last-minute negotiations, headed off a conflict with North Korea and helped secure a four-month ceasefire in the bloody Balkan conflict between Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. But in the latter two cases, Carter alienated himself from the first Democratic president to take office since he had left it, Bill Clinton. Carter’s freelancing on CNN — announcing details of a deal without consulting Clinton — limited the president’s choices and was viewed as deeply disloyal. It was similar to the way he had ruined a healthy relationship with President George H.W. Bush’s administration by publicly and privately seeking to undermine the administration’s coalition building as it prepared to send troops to Kuwait in 1991 to throw Iraqi invaders out.
Carter’s lone attempt at urban renewal, labeled the Atlanta Project and launched in 1991, achieved subpar results in helping reduce poverty. But he led a robust and energetic life even into his 90s. In addition to his relentless book writing, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. In August 2015 he underwent surgery for brain cancer. Miraculously, he was declared cancer-free three months later. He continued to teach Sunday school in Plains on a regular basis.
Carter was often criticized and belittled by the right. But many of his once unpopular stands looked better over time. He spoke out against the invasion of Iraq when doing so was unpopular. He spoke out against the war on drugs in 2011 before it was really all that fashionable to do so. He saw the importance of housing in fighting poverty. He helped make Habitat for Humanity, a community service organization, a globally known charity and continued to build houses with the group into his 90s.
Carter’s presidency was beleaguered by external challenges and his own weaknesses. He was hindered by his tendency to judge others by the same incredibly high standards he set for himself. He felt it was beneath him to trade favors with lawmakers or cajole them into supporting his ideas. He preferred to persuade them through pure reason. This obtuseness about how politics actually worked undermined him.
But he was an extraordinary individual who came from the dirt of a southwest Georgia farm during the Great Depression and accomplished more in a life than most would ever dare or dream, ending his life as one of the greatest humanitarians of our time.
