Jimmy Carter

James Earl "Jimmy"
Carter, Jr. (born
October 1, 1924) was
the 39th (1977-1981)   Order:           39th President
President of the       Term of Office:  January 20, 1977 - January 20, 1981
United States.
                       Predecessor:     Gerald R. Ford
Carter was born in the Successor:       Ronald Reagan
town of Plains,
Georgia. Before        Date of Birth:   Wednesday, October 1, 1924
entering politics, he  Place of Birth:  Plains, Georgia
was a peanut farmer in First Lady:      Eleanor Rosalynn Smith
Plains (after serving
as an officer and      Profession:      farmer
nuclear engineer in    Political Party: Democrat
the U.S. Navy, serving Vice President:  Walter Mondale
under Admiral Hyman
Rickover). With his Georgian accent, his peanut farmer roots would always be
remembered.

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. CarterÕs 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 Òfirst actÓ
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.

Also in 1979, Carter reluctantly allowed the former Iranian Shah Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi into the United States for political asylum and medical
treatment. Although Carter had ostensibly promoted human rights as a
hallmark of his foreign policy, he continued to support the Iranian
strongman during his reign. His support was much less pronounced than many
of his predecessors, however, and many 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 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 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).)

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