Jimmy Carter, a former peanut farmer who rose from rural Georgia to the White House and went on to a storied post-presidency that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Ga. He was 100.
An outsider, free from the baggage of Washington, Carter defeated President Gerald R. Ford in 1976, a victory seen as representing a clean break with the Watergate era. But the 39th president’s solitary term in office was hamstrung by a sluggish economy and crises at home and abroad. His presidency was also an anomaly, sandwiched between a total of two decades of Republican presidents.
Carter, who was born on Oct. 1, 1924, was predeceased by his wife, Rosalynn Carter, who died on Nov. 19, 2023. The couple was married for more than 77 years. Their son Chip Carter confirmed the former president’s death Sunday to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Carter Center announced in February 2023 that the former president had decided to receive hospice care and spend his remaining time at home with family, rather than seek further medical treatment “after a series of short hospital stays.”
Years before, Carter had been diagnosed with melanoma, which he announced in August 2015 had extended to his brain. He said at the time that he expected to have a short time to live, but after aggressive treatment he was reported free of the melanoma by December of that year.
In what was perhaps the high point of his post-presidency years, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Oct. 11, 2002, for what the Nobel Foundation called “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.”
In his acceptance speech, Carter criticized the very notion of preemptive war as having “catastrophic consequences.” He added: “If we accept the premise that the United Nations is the best avenue for the maintenance of peace, then the carefully considered decisions of the United Nations Security Council must be enforced. All too often, the alternative has proven to be uncontrollable violence and expanding spheres of hostility.”
Relationship with Congress
Scholars have judged Carter’s dealings with Congress critically. Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House for the entirety of his presidency. But many experts have argued that the former agribusinessman was largely disinterested in working directly with lawmakers. After leaving the White House, Carter tried to reverse the conventional wisdom about his relationship with Congress, arguing that lawmakers mostly supported his initiatives.
“Despite the controversial and often unpopular nature of my proposals to the Congress, I had remarkably good success in congressional approval of bills I supported,” he wrote in his 2010 book “White House Diary.”
Carter pointed to congressional vote data compiled by CQ, writing that at the time his book was published it showed he ranked third among all presidents, behind Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, when it came to garnering congressional approval for legislation on which he took a position and was voted on by lawmakers. Congress gave Carter his way 76.6 percent of the time, according to the CQ Almanac data.
But Politifact, an independent fact-checking organization, found the former Georgia governor’s batting average with Congress was “unexceptional.” That’s because few of Carter’s initiatives actually became law; CQ’s methodology handed out successful scores for a positive vote in one chamber, even if a bill never became law.
The roots of Carter’s struggles with Congress can be traced to his time in the governor’s mansion, according to scholars at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which specializes in presidential studies.
“As when he was governor, Carter had an abiding dislike for the backroom dealing that is so pervasive in Washington,” Robert Strong, a politics professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., wrote for the Miller Center. Strong said lawmakers “found the new president hard to deal with.”
Soon after he entered the White House, lawmakers sensed he lacked the support of many Americans — and they pounced.
“Congress asserted its power over the president by shooting down [a] consumer-protection bill and [a] labor reform package,” Strong said. “Carter responded by vetoing a public works package in 1978 on the grounds that it was inflationary. A pattern of mutual distrust and contempt had been set.”
Energy policy
Also complicating his dealings with Congress was his opposition, soon after taking office, to a rivers and harbors bill supported by Democratic leaders that he felt was full of wasteful spending.
Perhaps his biggest achievement was on energy policy, which Carter pushed at a time when U.S. oil imports had risen 65 percent in the four years before he became president. Carter’s advocacy also came when America was heavily reliant on imports from the OPEC cartel.
He convinced lawmakers to pass several measures credited with increasing oil and natural gas supplies and generally lowering prices, as well as others that reshaped mileage standards for cars and American companies’ use of fuel.
Carter faced an economy besieged by so-called stagflation, a combination of high inflation, high unemployment and plodding growth.
His often-troubled presidency was a drag on congressional Democrats — and his own reelection effort — in 1980. Former California Gov. Ronald Reagan walloped Carter, taking 489 of 538 Electoral College votes. Carter won just six states, including Georgia, as well as the District of Columbia. Republicans picked up 34 House seats and 12 in the Senate, enough to take control of that chamber.
After the presidency
Carter revealed during an August 2015 press conference that the Iranian hostage crisis, in which an attempted military rescue of embassy employees ended in the deaths of eight American servicemembers, was among his biggest regrets.
“I wish I had sent one more helicopter to get the hostages, and we would’ve rescued them,” Carter said, “and I would’ve been reelected.”
The New York Times reported in March 2023 that allies of Reagan went on a mission to the Middle East seeking to stop the Iranians from releasing 52 American hostages before Election Day in 1980.
After leaving the White House, Carter was among the most active former presidents of the modern era. He participated in election monitoring around the globe, and regularly worked with Habitat for Humanity. What’s more, the Carter Center in Atlanta studied issues such as mental health and fought lesser-known problems, including Guinea-worm disease.
Before leaving office in 2001, then-President Bill Clinton reportedly told confidants that the Carter Center was the model for the kind of post-presidency pursuits he envisioned.
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