Jimmy Carter
- This article is about the former United States president. For the boxer, see Jimmy Carter (boxer).
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Carter was born in the town of Plains, Georgia. Before entering politics, he was a peanut farmer in Plains (after serving as an officer and nuclear engineer in the U.S. Navy, serving under Admiral Hyman Rickover). With his Georgian accent, his peanut farmer roots would always be remembered.
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2 Presidency 3 Foreign Policies 4 Post Presidency 5 Related articles 6 External links |
In the 1960s he served 2 terms in the Georgia State Senate.
In his 1970 campaign Carter was elected governor on a pro-George Wallace platform. Carter’s campaign aides handed out thousands of photographs of his opponent, liberal former Gov. Carl Sanders, associating with black basketball players. On the stump, Carter pledged to reappoint an avowed segregationist to the state Board of Regents. He promised as his “first act” to invite former Alabama Gov. George Wallace into the state to speak. Old-line segregationists across the state endorsed Carter for governor.
But following his election, Carter said in speeches that the time of racial segregation was over, and that racial discrimination had no place in the future of the state. He was the first white southern politician to say this in public (such sentiments would have signaled the end of the political career of white politicians in the region less than 15 years earlier), so his victory attracted some attention as a sign of changing times. Carter served as governor of the state of Georgia from 1971 to 1975 but failed in his re-election bid, having alientaed both the voters and the state legislature through what has been described as an imperial style of governing.
When Carter entered the Democratic Party Presidential primaries in 1976 he at first was considered to have little chance against nationally better-known politicians. However the Watergate scandal was still fresh in the voters' minds, so his position as an outsider distant from Washington, DC became an asset. He ran an effective campaign, did well in debates, and won his party's nomination and then the election.
Government reorganization was the centerpiece of his campaign platform.
He was the first candidate from the Deep South to be elected president since the American Civil War.
As part of his government reorganization efforts, Carter separated the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. He also elevated the Energy agency into a new cabinet-level department, the United States Department of Energy.
Carter's administration is best remembered for the peace treaty brokered between the states of Israel and Egypt with the Camp David Accord, the SALT II treaty brokered with the Soviet Union, the Panama Canal treaty which turned the canal over to Panama, and an energy crisis. He was much less successful on the domestic front, having alienated both his own party and his opponants through what was perceived as a lack of willingness to work with Congress- much as he had in his term as Governor.
In 1979, Carter gave a nationally televised address in which he identified what he believed to be a crisis of confidence among the American people. This has come to be known as his "malaise" speech, even though he never actually used the word "malaise" anywhere in the text. Rather than inspiring Americans to action as he had hoped, the speech was perceived by many to express a pessimistic outlook which may have further damaged his reelection hopes. At the time the country was in the worst recession of the Post-WWII era, with both inflation and unemployment at record levels.
Carter promoted his foreign policy as being one that would place "human rights" at his presidency's forefront. This was intended to be a break from the policies of the Nixon administration, in which human rights abuses were often overlooked if they were committed by a nation that was allied to the United States. The Carter administration ended support to the historically US-backed Somoza dictatorship in Nicuragua, and gave millions of dollars in aide to the nation's new regime.
The main conflict between human rights and US interests came in Carter's dealings with the Shah of Iran. The Shah had been a strong ally of America since World War 2, and was one of the few US-friendly regimes in the Middle East. However, his regime was also quite brutal and opressive. Though Carter praised the Shah as a wise and valuable leader, when a popular uprising against against the monarchy broke out in Iran, the Carter administration did not intervene.
The Shah was deposed and exiled. Many have sonce connected the Shah's dwindling US support as a leading cause of his quick overthrow. Carter was initially prepared to recognize the revolutionary government of the monarch's successor, but his efforts proved futile.
In 1979, Carter reluctantly allowed the former Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into the United States for political asylum and medical treatment. In response to the Shah's entry into the US, Iranian militants seized the American embassy in Tehran taking 52 Americans hostage and demanded the Shah's return to Iran for trial and execution. Though later that year the Shah would leave the US and die in Egypt, the Iran hostage crisis continued, and dominated the last year of Carter's presidency. The subsequent responses to the crisis, from a "Rose Garden strategy" of staying inside the White House to the botched attempt to rescue the hostages, were largely seen as contributing to defeat in the 1980 election.
Although the Carter team had pursued the release of the hostages tirelessly, an agreement for their release was not signed until January 19, 1981, after the election of Ronald Reagan. In what many observers have seen as a slight against Carter, the Iranians waited to release the captives until minutes after Reagan was sworn-in as president the next day. The hostages had been held captive for 444 days.
Since that time members of the Reagan-Bush campaign and administration (most notably Barbara Honegger, in her book October Surprise) and the president of Iran in 1980 (Abu Al-Hasan Bani-Sadr, My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals With the U.S.) have alleged that a secret agreement between the Reagan campaign (orchestrated by George H. W. Bush) was responsible for destroying a deal between the Carter administration and the Iranian government that would have had the hostages released in October 1980 (worriedly known as "The October Surprise" by the Reagan team). Some unnamed sources also are alleged to have claimed that it was blackmail over the deal that led to the U.S. involvement in the later Iran-Contra scandal as Iran demanded to be sold weapons to use in its war against Iraq if the Reagan administration wanted it to keep quiet.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was a response to the US military presence there, according to Carter's National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. After the invasion Carter announced the Carter Doctrine, according to which the US would not allow any outside power to gain control of the Persian Gulf. Also in response to the events in Afghanistan, Carter prohibited Americans from participating in the 1980 Summer Olympics, which were held in Moscow, and he reinstated registration for the draft for young males.
In order to oppose the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski started a $40 billion programme of training Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but, ironically, also to the creation of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and to the creation of violent Islamic fundamentalist groups, of which one is now called Al-Qaida. It had not been expected that people trained in guerrilla techniques and Islamic theology might use these against their mostly non-Islamic paymasters. (In all fairness though it should be pointed out that with 12 years of Reagan and G. H. W. Bush presidencies between Carter's involvement and the take over of Most of Afghanistan by the Taliban, his contribution to that event was not the sole one.)
Carter has been accused of ordering a cover-up of the events at Three Mile Island following the near meltdown of that nuclear plant. He has also been criticized for not doing enough to promote his stated human rights foreign policy stance in his administration, such as continuing to support Indonesia even while they were committing genocide in their occupation of East Timor.
Since losing his bid for re-election, Carter has been involved in a variety of human rights and charitable causes, largely through Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center. Habitat works for affordable housing throughout the world and the Carter Center also focuses on world-wide health care including the campaign to eliminate guinea worm disease. Another major focus of his work has been providing election observers to help ensure free and fair elections in a variety of countries. On May 12, 2002 Carter arrived in Cuba for a five-day visit with Fidel Castro becoming first President of the United States, in or out of office, to visit the island since Castro's 1959 revolution. Not all Carter's efforts have gained him favor in Washington; Presidents Clinton and both President Bushes were said to have been less than pleased with Carter's "free-lance" diplomacy in Iraq and elsewhere. Some cynics have accused Carter of having spent his post-presidential years campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in fact the Nobel Prize committee awarded Carter the Nobel Peace Prize for his human rights and mediation work. Other presidents to have received the Peace Prize were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
The submarine USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23) was named on April 27, 1998, making it one of the very few US Navy ships to be named for a person still alive at the time of the naming. (The first was
USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70); others include
USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76),
USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51),
USS Hyman G. Rickover (SSN 709), and
USNS Bob Hope (T-AKR-300).)
Southern Start
Presidency
Foreign Policies
Post Presidency
Related articles
External links
Preceded by:
Gerald R. FordPresidents of the United States
Succeeded by:
Ronald Reagan
