What turned out to be the biggest post-presidential fallout in US history began as infamously as it did.
Jimmy Carter lost his 1980 re-election bid by ten percentage points, receiving just 41% of the popular vote, compared to 51% for his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan. Soon after, he found that the thriving agribusiness he had built earlier in his career had been driven into the ground by a blind trust, leaving him millions in debt, adding to the $1.4 million in debt he incurred as part of his failed re-election bid. campaign, with no cash reserves to pay.
Then there was the unresolved issue of the Iran Hostage Crisis, which crippled Carter’s presidency, leading critics to accuse him of being weak and ineffective. When Reagan took office on January 20, 1981, Carter stayed awake for two full days as he oversaw negotiations for the release of 52 American hostages held by the Iranian government for 444 days. One last thumb in Carter’s eye: they would be freed in the first minutes of Reagan’s presidency.
After resigning from the White House, Carter briefly returned to his native Plains, Georgia, with a population of only 640 residents at the time, where friends and neighbors welcomed him home in a pouring rain with a covered plate. The rain-soaked homecoming didn’t last long. A few hours later, Carter flew to Wiesbaden, Germany, to greet the freed hostages, who were met with anger from many of them, many of whom believed he had failed to secure their release earlier.
On January 22, 1980, Carter returned to the Plains to the ranch-style home he and his wife, Rosalynn, had built in 1961, but hadn’t lived in for ten years. Exhausted and exhausted, the now-former president slept for 24 hours before waking up to what he described as a “completely unwanted life” and no idea what to do next.
Twenty-one years later, Carter would be awakened by a phone call early in the morning in the same house, in that small town, with the news that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, as the Nobel committee wrote, “in his decade.” It is a tireless effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Former President Jimmy Carter awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 2002, in Oslo (Norway).
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Along the way, Carter reinvented the post-presidency, revealing its possibilities and potential and offering a book and a formidable standard to former presidential activists. It showed how a president can leverage the status of being “first” to advance a philanthropic agenda while enhancing his overall legacy and strengthening the American brand.
The unlikely journey from newly defeated former president to Nobel laureate reflected a pattern throughout Carter’s prolific life, one spent achieving great ambitions in the face of long odds. Carter began his political career in 1962 by challenging the political machine in southwest Georgia, facing a rigged election and winning a seat in the Georgia state legislature. While he lost a race for governor of Georgia four years later, he returned to win office in 1970, becoming one of a wave of new leaders to usher in the new post-segregation South.
After leaving the governor’s mansion in 1975 because of a state law then barring governors from serving consecutive terms, Carter set his sights on the distant presidency, a former governor of a deep Southern state with little or no name recognition, so much so. even his state newspaper the Atlanta Constitution asked “Jimmy who’s running for what?”
“Nobody thought I had a chance in God’s world of running,” Carter told me in 2013.
His 1976 election victory over incumbent Gerald Ford spoke of Carter’s relentless drive and natural self-assurance.
President Jimmy Carter during a televised address in the Oval Office, April 18, 1977.
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He would have those same qualities in his post-White House endeavors. A little more than a year out of office, considering his future, Carter had an epiphany: that he could create a non-governmental, non-profit organization that could focus on the intractable problems of the international community and the United Nations. they were not corrected. The Carter Center, attached to Atlanta’s presidential library, did just that, becoming an outlet for the former president’s activism and vision for a better world.
Since its launch in 1982, the Carter Center, closely overseen by Carter himself, has monitored more than a hundred elections in 39 countries and helped resolve conflicts around the world peacefully, including in Haiti, Sudan and Bosnia, while working to eradicate them. Guinea worm disease and river blindness, insidious diseases that had gone largely unchecked among the world’s poor and developing nations. Recognizing his ability to resolve conflicts, President Bill Clinton tapped the former president in the 1990s to represent the United States in negotiations to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and to prevent a US military invasion of Haiti.
Despite his prodigies, Carter’s activities were not limited to the Carter Center. Soon after his presidency, Carter took up the gavel for Habitat for Humanity, providing work and inspiration for the next four and a half decades on the work projects that bear his name. Somehow, he also found time to teach Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church on the Plains almost every week, and then take pictures with visitors to the congregation, as well as woodworking, fly fishing, painting, and being our most prolific presidential author.
Former President Jimmy Carter works on one of the homes of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project for Habitat for Humanity on July 10, 2017 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
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Carter sometimes blushed when he was called “our best ex-president,” a compliment that ignored a presidency he saw as largely successful. “I don’t know of any decisions I made in the White House that were fundamentally wrong,” he told me in 2005.
But he didn’t spend much time worrying about his place in the presidential pantheon. The things Jimmy Carter wanted to be remembered for went beyond his accomplishments in the White House.
In 2014, during an interview at the LBJ Library, I asked Carter how he wanted to remember.
“I think a lot of people will say, ‘He served one term and was defeated (for re-election)’,” he replied. “I would like people to remember that I have kept the peace and promoted human rights… That would be my priority.”
He will get his wish.
Mark K. Updegrove is a presidential historian and political contributor for ABC News. He is the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation and the author of “Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House.”
