Jimmy Carter

The house at Archery had no electricity and no running water until Carter was a teenager. Nearly every neighbor was a Black tenant farmer, and his closest childhood friend, A.D. Davis, was one of their sons. His mother Lillian was a nurse who treated Black patients in a county where that was noticed. He sold boiled peanuts on the street in Plains at five and owned rental houses before he finished high school. Annapolis took him in 1943. By his own account Hyman Rickover, interviewing him for the nuclear submarine program, asked whether he had always done his best, and Carter had to admit he had not. In 1952 he joined the American team sent into a partly melted Canadian reactor at Chalk River, in shifts measured in seconds.

His father died in 1953 and Carter left the Navy for a peanut warehouse that cleared almost nothing — the family qualified for public housing in Plains, and he is the only president who has lived in it. State senator, then governor at 46, then the least likely nomination of the modern era. Four years in office produced Camp David, the Panama Canal treaties, two cabinet departments, airline deregulation, and 444 days of hostages in Tehran. BriefHistory runs that record from inauguration to concession. Begin here with what came before, and with the 44 years afterward.

Pancreatic cancer had taken his father. It later took his brother Billy and both his sisters, and Carter spent decades being studied by researchers who wanted to know why his family carried it at a rate no other family on record matched. That family also embarrassed him while he was in office — Billy registered as a foreign agent for Libya in 1980 and took 220,000 dollars from the Qadhafi government, and the Senate held hearings. Then Carter left the White House in debt. The peanut business he had put in a blind trust had lost about a million dollars while he was away, and he had to sell it to cover the loss. He was 56, unemployed, and mortgaging a house in a town of fewer than 700 people.

Rosalynn died in November 2023, after 77 years of marriage. Carter, who had entered hospice care that February and remained in it 22 months, came to her memorial in a wheelchair. He was buried beside her in the yard of the ranch house they built in 1961 and never left, assessed at roughly 167,000 dollars. The presidency is being reread. Scholars point to the deregulation, the first national energy policy, human rights installed as a stated standard of American foreign policy, and a federal bench to which he appointed more women and more non-white judges than every president before him combined. The rankings have crept upward. The post-presidency is still what most people mean when they say his name.

Jimmy Carter's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Department of Energy company
  Created in his first year, with the Department of Education following in 1979 1977
• Camp David Accords law
  Thirteen days of mediation between Egypt and Israel 1978
• Airline Deregulation Act law
  It ended federal control of routes and fares, and remade air travel 1978
• Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act law
  Protected 104 million acres — the largest land conservation act in US history 1980
• The Carter Center company
  Election monitoring and disease eradication, run out of Atlanta 1982
• An Hour Before Daylight book
  His account of the Archery farm — one of more than 30 books he wrote 2001

• October 1, 1924 aged 0 Born at the Wise Sanitarium in Plains The first American president born in a hospital.
• 1943 aged ~19 Enters the United States Naval Academy
• July 7, 1946 aged 21 Marries Rosalynn Smith The marriage lasted 77 years.
• 1952 aged ~28 Joins the crew dismantling a damaged reactor core at Chalk River, Ontario
• 1953 aged ~29 His father dies and he leaves the Navy to run the peanut business The first year cleared so little that the family moved into public housing.
• January 12, 1971 aged 46 Sworn in as governor of Georgia and says the time for racial discrimination is over
• 2002 aged ~78 Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
• February 18, 2023 aged 98 Enters hospice care at home in Plains He stayed in it for 22 months.
• December 29, 2024 aged 100 Dies at 100, the longest-lived American president

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020
  Supreme Court Justice whose advocacy for gender equality made her a cultural icon. appointed
• Paul Volcker 1927–2019
  Broke 1970s inflation as Federal Reserve chairman through sustained high interest rates. appointed
• Ted Kennedy 1932–2009
  Massachusetts senator who shaped decades of health care and civil rights legislation. challenged in the primary by