Jimmy Carter’s Improbable Journey from Defeated One-Term President to Our Greatest Ex-President: Analysis

For everyone, celebrating a century of life is a rare milestone. For Jimmy Carter, the nation’s 39th president, such longevity is an exclamation point on an unparalleled life of public service.

Some might argue that the presidency itself is the pinnacle of public service. But Carter’s departure from the White House, after what many critics saw as a largely ineffective single term, marked the beginning of what would become the most consequential post-presidency in US history – made even more remarkable by its inauspicious start .

Jimmy Carter had lost his 1980 bid for re-election by ten percentage points, receiving just 41 percent of the vote compared to his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan’s 51 percent. Soon after, he discovered that the prosperous farming business he had built earlier in his career had been destroyed by a blind trust, leaving him millions in debt, on top of the $1.4 million in debt he had accrued as part of his failed re-election. campaign, with no cash reserves to pay it off.

Then there was the unresolved issue of the Iranian hostage crisis, which had paralyzed Carter’s presidency, leading critics to accuse him of being weak and ineffective. When Reagan succeeded him as president on January 20, 1981, Carter had already been awake for more than two full days as he oversaw negotiations to release the 52 American hostages held by the Iranian government for 444 days. A final thumb in Carter’s eye: they would be released in the first minutes of Reagan’s presidency.

After relinquishing the White House, Carter briefly returned to his native Plains, Georgia, which had a population of just 640 at the time, where he was welcomed home with a covered meal by friends and neighbors in a pouring rain. The rainy homecoming did not last long. Just hours later, Carter flew to Wiesbaden, Germany, to greet the freed hostages, but was met with anger by many of those who believed he had failed to secure their liberation earlier.

On January 22, 1980, Carter returned to Plains, to the ranch-style home he and his wife Rosalynn had built in 1961, but where they had not lived in ten years. Exhausted and exhausted, the now former president slept for 24 hours before waking up in what he described as “a totally unwanted life” – and with no idea what he would do next.

Twenty-one years later, in that same house, in that same small town, Carter would be awakened early in the morning by a phone call with the news that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize for, as the Nobel Committee wrote, “his decades of service.” of tireless efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to promote democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

Along the way, Carter reinvented the post-presidency, manifesting its possibilities and potential and providing a playbook and discouraging standard for activist former presidents. He showed how a president can use “former” status to advance a philanthropic agenda while simultaneously strengthening his overall legacy and strengthening the American brand.

The improbable journey from newly defeated president to Nobel laureate reflected a pattern in Carter’s prolific life of achieving outsized ambitions by defying great odds. Carter began his career in politics in 1962 by challenging the political machine in Southwest Georgia, successfully contesting 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 came back to win office in 1970 and became one of the new leaders who ushered in a new post-segregation South.

After leaving the governor’s mansion in 1975 over a state law that subsequently banned 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. that even the Atlanta Constitution newspaper in his home state published a story with the headline: “Jimmy, who’s running for what?”

“Nobody thought I had a chance in God’s world of being nominated,” Carter told me in 2013.

His unlikely nomination as Democratic presidential candidate and subsequent victory over incumbent President Gerald Ford in the 1976 election were a sign of Carter’s ruthless drive and preternatural self-confidence.

Those same qualities would prove useful in his post-White House efforts. Just over a year into his term, as he pondered his future, Carter had an epiphany: that he could create a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization that could focus on persistent problems around the world that challenged the international community and the United Nations would like to address. were not speaking. The Carter Center, attached to his presidential library in Atlanta, did just that, becoming an outlet for the former president’s activism and vision for a better world.

Since its founding in 1982, under the close supervision of Carter himself, the Carter Center has monitored more than 100 elections in 39 countries and helped peacefully resolve disputes around the world—including in Haiti, Sudan, and Bosnia—while working to the eradication of these conflicts. of Guinea worm disease and river blindness, insidious ailments that have gone largely unchecked among the world’s poor and developing countries. Recognizing his skill at conflict resolution, President Bill Clinton enlisted the ex-president in the 1990s to represent the U.S. in negotiations to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and avert a U.S. military invasion of Haiti.

As wonderful as they were, Carter’s activities were not limited to the Carter Center. Shortly after his post-presidency, Carter took up the hammer for Habitat for Humanity, providing both labor and inspiration for work projects bearing his name over the next four and a half decades. Somehow he also found time to teach Sunday school almost every week at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains — and then pose for photos with congregation visitors — and to do woodworking, fly-fishing, painting and become our most prolific presidential author.

Carter sometimes reacted angrily when called “our best ex-president,” a backhanded compliment that ignored a presidential term he viewed as largely successful. “I don’t know of any decision I made in the White House that was factually 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 any achievement he could have written in the White House.

In 2014, I asked Carter in an interview at the LBJ Library how he wanted to be remembered.

“I think a lot of people will say, ‘He only served one term and was defeated (for re-election),’” he responded. “I would like people to remember that I kept the peace and that I promoted human rights… That would be my preference.”

He will get his wish.

Mark K. Updegrove is a presidential historian and an ABC News political contributor. He’s the president & CEO of the LBJ Foundation, and author of “Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House.”