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Also Known As James Earl Carter Jr, Carter
39th U.S. President
James Earl Carter Jr. is an American politician and humanitarian who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 76th governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975, and as a Georgia state senator from 1963 to 1967.
Carter was born and raised in Plains, Georgia, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 and joined the U.S. Navy's submarine service. Afterward he returned home, where he revived his family's peanut-growing business. He then manifested his opposition to racial segregation, supported the growing civil rights movement, and became an activist within the Democratic Party. He served in the Georgia State Senate from 1963 to 1967 and then as governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975. As a dark-horse candidate not well known outside of Georgia, Carter won the Democratic nomination and narrowly defeated incumbent Republican president Gerald Ford in the 1976 U.S. presidential election.
Carter pardoned all Vietnam War draft evaders. He created a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, and new technology. He successfully pursued the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, and the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. He also confronted stagflation. His administration established the U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of Education. The end of his presidency was marked by the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the Three Mile Island accident, the Nicaraguan Revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In response to the invasion, Carter escalated the Cold War by ending détente, imposing a grain embargo against the Soviets, enunciating the Carter Doctrine, and leading the multinational boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. He lost the 1980 presidential election in a landslide to Republican nominee Ronald Reagan.
After leaving the presidency, Carter established the Carter Center to promote and expand human rights, earning him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He traveled extensively to conduct peace negotiations, monitor elections and further the eradication of infectious diseases. He is a key figure in the nonprofit housing organization Habitat for Humanity and wrote numerous books, ranging from political memoirs to poetry, while continuing to comment on global affairs, including two books on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, in which he criticizes Israel's treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. Polls of historians and political scientists generally rank Carter as a slightly below average president, although his post-presidential activities are considered exceptional. He is both the longest-lived American president and the one with the longest post-presidency. He is also the third-oldest living person to have served as a nation's leader.
From 1946 to 1953, the Carters lived in Virginia, Hawaii, Connecticut, New York and California, during his deployments in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. In 1948, he began officer training for submarine duty and served aboard USS Pomfret.[23] He was promoted to lieutenant junior grade in 1949, and his service aboard Pomfret included a simulated war patrol to the western Pacific and Chinese coast from January to March of that year. In 1951 he was assigned to the diesel/electric USS K-1 (SSK-1), qualified for command, and served in several positions, to include executive officer.
In 1952, he began an association with the Navy's fledgling nuclear submarine program, led then by captain Hyman G. Rickover. Rickover had high standards and demands for his men and machines, and Carter later said that, next to his parents, Rickover had the greatest influence on his life. He was sent to the Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C. for three-month temporary duty, while Rosalynn moved with their children to Schenectady, New York.
On December 12, 1952, an accident with the experimental NRX reactor at Atomic Energy of Canada's Chalk River Laboratories caused a partial meltdown, resulting in millions of liters of radioactive water flooding the reactor building's basement. This left the reactor's core ruined. Carter was ordered to Chalk River to lead a U.S. maintenance crew that joined other American and Canadian service personnel to assist in the shutdown of the reactor. The painstaking process required each team member to don protective gear and be lowered individually into the reactor for 90 seconds at a time, limiting their exposure to radioactivity while they disassembled the crippled reactor. When Carter was lowered in, his job was simply to turn a single screw. During and after his presidency, Carter said that his experience at Chalk River had shaped his views on atomic energy and led him to cease development of a neutron bomb.
In March 1953, Carter began nuclear power school, a six-month non-credit course covering nuclear power plant operation at the Union College in Schenectady. His intent was to eventually work aboard USS Seawolf, which was planned to be the second U.S. nuclear submarine. His plans changed when his father died of pancreatic cancer in July, two months before construction of Seawolf began, and Carter obtained a release from active duty so he could take over the family peanut business. 100 Deciding to leave Schenectady proved difficult, as Rosalynn had grown comfortable with their life there. She said later that returning to small-town life in Plains seemed "a monumental step backward." Carter left active duty on October 9, 1953. He served in the inactive Navy Reserve until 1961, and left the service with the rank of lieutenant.[40] His awards include the American Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal, China Service Medal, and National Defense Service Medal. As a submarine officer he also earned the "dolphin" badge.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, at the Wise Sanitarium, where his mother worked as a registered nurse. Carter thus became the first American president born in a hospital. He was the eldest son of Bessie Lillian Gordy and James Earl Carter Sr.: 70 Carter is a descendant of English immigrant Thomas Carter, who settled in the Colony of Virginia in 1635. Numerous generations of Carters lived as cotton farmers in Georgia. Plains was a boomtown of 600 people at the time of Carter's birth. His father was a successful local businessman, who ran a general store and was an investor in farmland. Carter's father had previously served as a reserve second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps during World War I.
During Carter's infancy, his family moved several times, settling on a dirt road in nearby Archery, which was almost entirely populated by impoverished African American families. His family eventually had three more children: Gloria, Ruth, and Billy. He got along well with his parents. His mother was often absent during his childhood, working long hours. Although his father was staunchly pro-segregation, he allowed Jimmy to befriend the Black farmhands' children. Carter was an enterprising teenager who was given his own acre of Earl's farmland, where he grew, packaged, and sold peanuts. He also rented out a section of tenant housing that he had purchased.
Education :
Carter attended Plains High School from 1937 to 1941, graduating from the eleventh grade, since the school did not have a twelfth grade. By that time, Archery and Plains had been impoverished by the Great Depression, but the family benefited from New Deal farming subsidies, and Carter's father took a position as a community leader. Carter himself was a diligent student with a fondness for reading. 8 A popular anecdote holds that he was passed over for valedictorian after he and his friends skipped school to venture downtown in a hot rod. Carter's truancy was mentioned in a local newspaper, although it is not clear he would have otherwise been valedictorian. As an adolescent, Carter played on the Plains High School basketball team, and also joined a youth organization named the Future Farmers of America, which helped him develop a lifelong interest in woodworking.
Carter had long dreamed of attending the United States Naval Academy. In 1941, he started undergraduate coursework in engineering at Georgia Southwestern College in nearby Americus, Georgia. 99 The following year, he transferred to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and earned admission to the Naval Academy in 1943. 38 He was a good student but was seen as reserved and quiet, in contrast to the academy's culture of aggressive hazing of freshmen. 62 While at the academy, Carter fell in love with Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister Ruth. The two married shortly after his graduation in 1946.He was a sprint football player for the Navy Midshipmen. Carter graduated 60th out of 821 midshipmen in the class of 1947[a] with a Bachelor of Science degree and was commissioned as an ensign.
Carter and his wife volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, a Georgia-based philanthropy that helps low-income working people around the world to build and buy their own homes and access clean water. His hobbies include painting, fly fishing, woodworking, cycling, tennis, and skiing. He also has an interest in poetry, particularly the works of Dylan Thomas. During a state visit to the UK in 1977, Carter suggested that Thomas should have a memorial in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey; this later came to fruition in 1982.
Carter was a personal friend of Elvis Presley, whom he and Rosalynn met on June 30, 1973, before Presley was to perform onstage in Atlanta. They remained in contact by telephone two months before Presley's sudden death in August 1977. Carter later recalled an abrupt phone call received in June 1977 from Presley who sought a presidential pardon from Carter, to help George Klein's criminal case; at the time Klein had been indicted for only mail fraud, and was later found guilty of conspiracy. According to Carter, Presley was almost incoherent because of barbiturates; although he phoned the White House several times again, this was the last time they spoke. The day after Presley's death, Carter issued a statement and explained how he had "changed the face of American popular culture".
Carter filed a report with both the International UFO Bureau and the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena, stating that he sighted an unidentified flying object in October 1969.
Carter received the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award in 1984. The Jimmy Carter Library and Museum was opened in 1986. The following year, the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park was established as a National Historic Site and in 2021, renamed as a national historical park. In 1991, Carter was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Kansas State University, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In 1998, the U.S. Navy named the third and last Seawolf-class submarine honoring Carter and his service as a submariner officer.
He received the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights, given in honor of human rights achievements, and the Hoover Medal, recognizing engineers who have contributed to global causes. Carter's 2002 Nobel Peace Prize was partially a response to president George W. Bush's threats of war against Iraq and Carter's criticism of the Bush administration. In 2009, the Souther Field Airport in Americus, Georgia, was renamed Jimmy Carter Regional Airport.
Carter has been nominated nine times for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for audio recordings of his books, and has won three times—for Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2007), A Full Life: Reflections at 90 (2016) and Faith: A Journey For All (2019).
