As the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter struggled to respond to formidable challenges, including a major energy crisis as well as high inflation and unemployment. In the foreign affairs arena, he reopened U.S. relations with China and made headway with efforts to broker peace in the historic Arab-Israeli conflict, but was damaged late in his term by a hostage crisis in Iran. Carter’s diagnosis of the nation’s “crisis of confidence” did little to boost his sagging popularity, and in 1980 he was soundly defeated in the general election by Ronald Reagan. Over the next decades, Carter built a distinguished career as a diplomat, humanitarian and author, pursuing conflict resolution in countries around the globe.
Jimmy Carter’s Early Life and Start in Politics
Born in Plains, Georgia, on October 1, 1924, James Earle Carter Jr. attended the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, graduating in 1946. Shortly thereafter he married Rosalynn Smith, a fellow native of Plains; the couple would have four children: Amy Carter, Donnel Carter, Jack Carter and James Carter. Carter’s seven-year career in the Navy included five years on submarine duty. In 1953, he was preparing to serve as an engineering officer on the submarine Seawolf when his father died. Carter returned home and was able to rebuild his family’s struggling peanut warehouse business after a crippling drought.
Did you know? Iran finally released the hostages on January 21, 1981, the day after Ronald Reagan's inauguration. Reagan invited former President Carter to greet the freed hostages in Germany.
Active in community affairs and a deacon at the Plains Baptist Church, Carter launched his political career with a seat on his local board of education. In 1962, he won election to the Georgia State Senate as a Democrat. He was reelected in 1964. Two years later, he ran for the governor’s office, finishing a disappointing third. The loss sent Carter into a period of depression, which he overcame by finding renewed faith as a born-again Christian. He ran again for the governorship in 1970 and won. A year later, Carter was featured on the cover of Time magazine as one of a new breed of young political leaders in the South, known for their moderate racial views and progressive economic and social policies.
Carter and the Presidential Election of 1976
In 1977, Carter brokered two U.S. treaties with Panama; the following year, he presided over a tough round of meetings between Egypt’s President Anwar el-Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David. The resulting Camp David Accords ended the state of war between the two nations that had existed since Israel was founded in 1948. Carter also reopened diplomatic relations between the United States and China while breaking ties with Taiwan, and signed a bilateral strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Throughout his presidency, Carter struggled to combat the nation’s economic woes, including high unemployment, rising inflation and the effects of an energy crisis that began in the early 1970s. Though he claimed an increase of 8 million jobs and a reduction in the budget deficit by the end of his term, many business leaders as well as the public blamed Carter for the nation’s continuing struggles, saying he didn’t have a coherent or effective policy to address them. In July 1979, Carter called a special summit with national leaders at Camp David. His televised speech after the meeting diagnosed a “crisis of confidence” occurring in the country, a mood that he later referred to as a “national malaise.”
Hostage Crisis and Carter’s Defeat
In November 1979, a mob of Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took its diplomatic staff hostage as a protest against the arrival in the United States of the deposed Iranian shah, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, in order to receive medical treatment. The students had the support of Iran’s revolutionary government, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Carter stood firm in the tense standoff that followed, but his failure to free the hostages during the Iran hostage crisis led his government to be perceived as inept and inefficient; this perception increased after the failure of a secret U.S. military mission in April 1980.
With his wife Rosalynn, Carter established the nonprofit, nonpartisan Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta in 1982. In the decades that followed, he continued his diplomatic activities in many conflict-ridden countries around the globe. In 1994 alone, Carter negotiated with North Korea to end their nuclear weapons program, worked in Haiti to ensure a peaceful transfer of government and brokered a (temporary) ceasefire between Bosnian Serbs and Muslims.
