Jimmy Carter: Unwavering

You can argue over whether Jimmy Carter was America’s greatest president, but he was undoubtedly one of the greatest Americans to ever become president. He and Rosalynn eliminated fatal diseases, championed human rights, and literally negotiated world peace. He still believes in us.

Words by Jim Barger Jr.

Jimmy Carter’s eyes are piercingly blue — transfixing, unnerving, fiercely intentional. When he sets them upon you, you dare not look away. Caricatures of him have always focused on his toothy smile.  But now, as he completes his one hundredth trip around the sun, it’s not his smile that comes to my mind.  It’s his eyes.

The first time I met Jimmy Carter I was 6 years old, and he was visiting with family friends in my hometown of St. Simons Island, Georgia, in 1977, not long after his presidential inauguration. The next time was during the summer of 2022, when I spent time with the Carters in their home in Plains, discussing our shared love of fly fishing with our mutual fishing buddy, Dr. Carlton Hicks.  Both times, I was struck dumb by Jimmy Carter’s eyes. They were the color of the sky on a clear day. They cut right through me. They asked silent, probing questions I was too afraid to ask myself and too afraid to answer. His gaze — when fixed upon you — makes you want to do better. It makes you know you can do better. It makes you ask yourself why you haven’t done better all along.   

When I heard the news of his terminal diagnosis and of his decision to receive end-of-life hospice care in the late winter of 2023, I sat down at my writing table and tried to process the specter of his death. I stared blankly out the window at shadows of live oaks stretching across golden spartina grass in the midafternoon sun out to the Altamaha River estuary where Jimmy Carter loved to fish for speckled trout. Palmettos waved gently in the breeze. An indigo bunting alighted in a thicket of wax myrtles. The arresting little bird preened his blue feathers and whistled his joyful song so proudly and so loudly that I heard it through the windowpane. The diminutive migrant songbird wasn’t due for another month at least, maybe more. It had come too soon. I wasn’t ready for it. It wasn’t time yet. My dog, Buster, wandered in and looked up at me with sad brown eyes. He walked around in a circle twice and flopped down on the old pine floor in a pool of February sunshine.

Jimmy Carter ran for office on the singular promise that he would never tell a lie; he admitted his mistakes, accepted his losses, and accomplished more in defeat to benefit humanity and the Earth than most other presidents accomplished in victory. Rather than serving the rich and powerful, Jimmy Carter spent his life following the primary tenet of his faith — to serve “the least of these,” people his well-worn Bible defined as: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the prisoner. Throughout the course of my life, Jimmy Carter has served as an unwavering example of the impact one person can have for good in the world if they put the needs of others above themselves.

Then, on November 19, 2023, Rosalynn died. When I learned of her passing, I was reminded of sitting in their living room in Plains, marveling at her beauty. Even in her late nineties, it was easy to see how her husband had been so captivated by her. “She’d smile, and birds would feel that they no longer had to sing,” he wrote in a poem he titled simply, “Rosalynn.” The former first lady and I discussed our shared impulse to protect the endangered monarch butterfly, our mutual love for cultivating wildflowers, and our fondness for mystery novels, which she read to her father on his deathbed when she was a younger woman. Rosalynn championed caregivers and made it her mission to remove the stigma associated with mental illnesses.  She battled gracefully through her own struggle with dementia at the end of her life and died leaving behind a devoted husband who already had accepted that he, too, was in the process of dying. Other than his deployments on surface ships and submarines as a naval officer between 1946 and 1953 and at various points along the campaign trail and during their separate diplomatic trips abroad, the two of them had spent relatively few nights apart in their over 75 years of marriage.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter at his home in Plains, Georgia.

Together Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter promoted peace, democracy, and healthcare around the globe. With Habitat for Humanity, they personally built more than 4,000 houses over nearly four decades, laboring well into their 90s — lifting lumber and driving nails — shoulder to shoulder with people who eventually would call those houses home. Their shared journey took them from their small Southern hometown to the White House and back again and to some 75 percent of the world’s countries. Far and away, they were the nation’s most well-traveled presidential couple, personally acting out America’s greatest impulse to serve as a beacon of hope to the world, manifesting our country’s founding principle that all people everywhere are created equal. Now, after all those many adventures together, the former president and global humanitarian confronts his greatest challenge of all — facing the end of his extraordinary life without Rosalynn by his side.

In August of 2024, as well wishes poured in from all over the globe, the president’s son Chip asked his father if he was looking forward to celebrating his forthcoming 100th birthday. With characteristic resolve, Jimmy Carter responded, “I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris.” With every breath he takes, Jimmy Carter remains determined to live a life of purpose, using his voice and his vote to shape a better nation and a better world. Like every other challenge in his life, he has chosen to face death head-on. As he explained in 2018 after battling brain and liver cancer, “I was surprised and pleased to discover that I was not afraid, but overwhelmingly grateful for my long and good life while sad to be leaving the people I loved. I had found the ability to face the uncertainty of extended life with equanimity, and commitment to a higher calling was my best source of strength.”

Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, on October 1, 1924, and the days are drawing ever nearer to the inevitable moment when he will die in Plains, Georgia, in the same modest ranch-style home where Rosalynn and he raised their four children before running for political office. In the century-long span between, Jimmy Carter has left an indelible mark upon the world and the people and creatures who live here. His legacy and life’s work will reverberate through generations to come.

A Southern white boy born on the eve of the Great Depression into a nearly all-Black community when white supremacy unapologetically ruled the land, Jimmy Carter was raised by a father whom he admired and adored and who taught him that racial segregation was the natural order of the world. At the same time, he was raised by a mother whose life’s work was to nurture the poor and the infirm and who taught young Jimmy that segregation was an abomination before God.

When he was a boy, many of Jimmy Carter’s neighbors lived a hand-to-mouth existence that most people in the United States can hardly comprehend today. Journalists visiting southwest Georgia during Carter’s youth reported that conditions there were worse than those they’d seen in czarist Russia before the Bolshevik revolution, where decades of food shortages resulted in the starvation of hundreds of thousands of people. The tenant farmers Jimmy Carter knew in the 1930s owned little more than the clothes on their backs and a few pots and pans for boiling hominy grits, the staple of their diet. They scratched their living directly from the dirt, tilling the soil with a hoe by hand or — for the fortunate few — by mule and plow. 

Jimmy Carter always maintained that his father treated sharecropping families better than other Southern landowners did at the time, recalling that his father dealt honestly with everyone and took pride in providing well-maintained tenant houses. But he also recognized the gross inequities of the sharecropper system under which his family prospered, essentially a feudal economy not far removed from the institution of slavery that spawned it. “As I grew older,” he confessed in his childhood memoir, An Hour Before Daylight, “I came to understand the personal consequences of this self-destructive scramble for a few small fields on which a family could work as sharecroppers.”

In 1932, Georgia native Erskine Caldwell wrote Tobacco Road, a raw, descriptive novel that shocked the conscience of the nation about the sharecropping system in Depression-era Georgia, a place he later described as somewhere people “hungered in shacks miles deep in remote woods.” The novel’s protagonist, Jeeter Lester, becomes so desperate to feed his starving family that he offers to exchange his 12-year-old daughter’s virginity for a sack of turnips. Many sought to censor the novel at the time as vulgar and offensive, but Caldwell countered that he only wrote about “the world as I knew it to be during that particular era for the white and Black people who lived difficult lives together in the rural South, and it told about the hard sharecropper system which was an often ignored though dominant element of Southern life.”

The Carters were by far the most prosperous family in their tiny community of Archery, Georgia, just outside of Plains, and yet — like their neighbors — they had no electricity and no running water. They used an outdoor privy and kept chamber pots under their beds at night. They drew their water from an outdoor well, and almost everything they ate came from their farm. Compared with others in their community, the Carters were quite wealthy, but they lived in relative poverty by 21st-century standards.

Young Jimmy was industrious and ambitious. He picked cotton, hauled produce, and sold boiled peanuts by the side of the road — earning, saving, and eventually amassing enough money by the time he was 13 to buy five houses that he quickly turned to profit by collecting rents from sharecroppers. When he graduated high school and left home for college, Jimmy realized a threefold profit through the sale of the properties in addition to almost a decade of rental income. For the future politician, this anecdote often served as evidence of his shrewd business acumen, and yet the injustice of a young boy profiting from starving tenant farmers seemed lost on a man who otherwise was characterized by honest self-reflection. Nevertheless, from an early age Jimmy modeled his tireless work ethic and entrepreneurship — traits that served him well throughout his lifetime — after his demanding father, James Earl Carter Sr., who amassed large tracts of farmland, an icehouse, a peanut warehouse, and a general store, all of which he would eventually leave to the care of his firstborn son.

In contrast, Jimmy modeled his empathy after his mother, Bessie Lillian Carter, a registered nurse who ministered to the community of Archery and the nearby town of Plains. Known fondly as “Miss Lillian” to her patients, she delivered generations of babies as the local midwife, including Eleanor Rosalynn Smith, who eventually would grow up to marry her son. Most of Miss Lillian’s patients were Black, and their bodies were ravaged by unforgiving work conditions and unrelenting malnutrition, infection, and disease. The average life expectancy of a Black person in rural southwest Georgia in the 1930s was less than 50 years. 

Against the strict mores of the time, Miss Lillian invited Black people into her home, welcoming them at the front door, President Carter recalled in An Hour Before Daylight.  Young Jimmy watched curiously as his mother entertained her Black guests in the front parlor and as his father retreated to the barn, sulking until the forbidden visitors went home.

As a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy, Jimmy used both the resolve and the empathy that he learned from his father and his mother, respectively, to guide him.  He endured grueling hazing, as was typical of the time, without flinching or complaint and graduated in the top 7 percent of his class. At the same time, when it became his privilege to haze others, Carter’s classmates remembered him encouraging plebes rather than harassing them. Wesley Brown, the first Black graduate of the Naval Academy, was a freshman when Jimmy Carter was a junior and suffered brutal abuse from many classmates who were forthcoming in their resolve that no Black person ever would graduate from the prestigious institution in Annapolis. Brown recalled Carter’s dorm room as a rare haven where Jimmy would put his arm around him and implore Brown to “hang in there.” Jonathan Alter, author of His Very Best — the only full-life biography of Carter — wrote that some of his classmates considered Jimmy Carter a “traitor” for supporting his Black schoolmate and that, later, Wesley Brown vividly recalled hearing Jimmy branded as a “Goddamn n----- lover.”  In the years to come, detractors would hurl that same sneering epithet again and again at Jimmy Carter. Ironically, Carter’s unwavering love for others ultimately became the primary personal trait that defined him.

Carter in his study at his Woodland Drive home in Plains.

In 1971, when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as governor of Georgia, he proclaimed to the outrage and fear of the white power structure of the day: “The time for racial segregation is over.” As a symbolic gesture demonstrating his intention to make good on that promise, Carter installed a portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Capitol gallery where legislators — almost all of whom despised King — would be reminded before each session that the only path for Georgia was forward. 

While other Southern politicians languished in our region’s tortured past, proclaiming slogans like “Segregation now … segregation forever,” Governor Carter worked to eliminate the inequality baked into our systems of power. He appointed more than 50 Black people to state boards where previously there had been only three, and by the end of his term, nearly half the public servants in his administration were Black. Jimmy Carter was a new breed of white Southerner — fiercely proud of his rural heritage yet despising its violent, racist history. 

As president, Jimmy Carter expanded his efforts to create a more level field where Black people could share in access to justice, power, influence, and financial independence. He signed Executive Order 12232 to support and provide more federal funds to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), was a proponent of affirmative action, and created initiatives to back Black-owned businesses. President Carter appointed powerful Black leaders to serve in his administration, including the first Black Secretary of the Army, Clifford Alexander Jr.; the first Black Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young; and the first Black woman to hold a Cabinet position and serve in the line of succession to the presidency, Patricia Roberts Harris. He appointed five times as many women and people of color to the federal bench as all other former presidents combined, transforming the judiciary and attempting to deliver on the nation’s long unfulfilled promise of “justice for all.”  

President Carter’s policy toward righting our nation’s significant wrongs against Native Americans initially was less robust, however. In the more than 500 pages of abbreviated and annotated diary notes taken during his presidency, only a few entries concern issues specifically facing Native Americans. Even so, as president he advocated and signed into law groundbreaking legislation that affirmed the civil rights of Indigenous people, including the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, recognizing the fundamental right of Native Americans to worship and express traditional religions; and the Indian Child Welfare Act, protecting Native American children and promoting stability and security of Indigenous tribes and families.

We know Jimmy Carter was acutely aware of our nation’s abuse of Native Americans, because he was raised on land seized from the Muscogee Creek Nation under fraudulent treaties and redistributed to white settlers in a series of land lotteries during the early 1800s. From as early as age 5, a young Jimmy Carter was “fascinated by Indian artifacts and the lives of Native Americans,” who once had lived on the Carter farm. He later confessed in An Hour Before Daylight that he understood from an early age “that our family’s farmland had once been theirs and that our ancestors had confronted and replaced them.”

Jabbed and prodded with bayonets by federal troops, Native American families were herded west from Georgia and Florida, and as far north as Michigan, as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. During the forced exodus, an estimated 100,000 adults and children were made to march as refugees, and nearly 20 percent died along the way. Almost certainly among them were people who had once inhabited President Carter’s cherished childhood farm, and that fact wasn’t lost on him. Jimmy Carter’s keen interest in Native American history also informed his sense of duty to be a good steward of the environment.

In 1980, Carter defied the powerful oil and gas lobby by establishing the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, preserving over 150 million acres of wilderness sacred to First Alaskans. No president before or since has come close to protecting as much land, more than 30 percent of our nation’s wilderness. As Carter’s landmark environmental bill was being hotly debated in the Senate, Native Americans gathered in droves in the nation’s capital to support it.  In a sacred ceremony, the Tlingit tribe welcomed Jimmy Carter as an honorary member into the Raven Beaver Clan, renaming him “Haa Hoo Woo,” a traditional title describing a chief who protects the natural world. Back in Alaska, angry opponents of the president’s conservation efforts hung and burned Jimmy Carter in effigy. Today, the Alaskan wilderness preserved by Carter is widely considered to be one of our nation’s greatest assets, an area of global significance not unlike the Amazon rainforest, providing a baseline ecosystem for wildlife populations, sequestering carbon, and mitigating the ongoing warming of our planet and the mass extinction of species. 

Jimmy Carter’s unparalleled environmental legacy has stood firm for more than half a century, helping safeguard the Earth for future generations despite relentless attacks by politicians and corporate backers who would treat the Earth as just a temporary commodity for immediate profit. As a young state senator, he supported passage of Georgia’s Marshlands Protection Act, a seminal piece of legislation that protects the 100 miles of Georgia’s threatened coastline. He was a charter member of the Georgia Conservancy, and he created the Georgia Heritage Trust, protecting — among many other wild spaces — the ancient stand of native cypress at Lewis Island near the Altamaha Delta that contains some of the oldest living trees in the country, dating back to the early Middle Ages. He prevented the Flint River from being dammed, safeguarding thousands of acres in the southwest portion of the state. During his four years as governor, he rejected numerous applications to drain Georgia swamps, protecting one of the state’s most vital but unsung resources: our freshwater wetlands. His efforts first as governor and later as president safeguarded the Chattahoochee River all the way from its headwaters in the southern Appalachians down to metro Atlanta, where it was in danger from contamination by proposed sewer lines and unchecked urban sprawl.

During his four-year presidency, Carter designated 56 million acres of wilderness for protection under the Antiquities Act. The only president to protect more land in that manner was Teddy Roosevelt, who originally signed the act in 1906. Carter’s example inspired future presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to expand use of the Antiquities Act to the world’s oceans, together preserving over half a billion acres of marine habitat. President Carter established our nation’s Superfund, which continues to mandate cleanup of hazardous waste sites throughout the country in the ongoing fight for environmental justice and has saved untold numbers of lives of Americans who otherwise would have been poisoned by pollution. He more than doubled the size of our national park system, created 39 new national parks scattered throughout the country, and passed the Surface Mining Control & Reclamation Act to prohibit mining within or adjacent to our national parks. Carter saved California’s redwood forest and giant sequoias, national treasures that have stood for thousands of years but were threatened in the 1970s by unbridled adjacent clear-cutting. He signed the National Energy Act and established the Department of Energy, two of the most important ongoing initiatives to diversify our nation’s energy supply and prioritize alternative fuel sources.

Jimmy Carter was among the first world leaders to consider the impending threat of climate change. Far ahead of his time, he pushed legislation to encourage the research and use of alternative fuels and even installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. After the Carters vacated the presidential residence, Ronald Reagan had the solar panels removed, and his Chief of Staff told the press the panels were “just a joke.” During his eight-year tenure, Reagan cut funding for alternative energy research by two-thirds, and his failure to heed Carter’s warnings doomed the country to rely on fossil fuels and remain beholden to oil-rich nations in the Middle East while the Earth steadily continued to warm and sea levels steadily continued to rise.

Many of Carter’s environmental efforts attempted to address an impending energy crisis that crippled the economy in 1979, tarnished his presidency, and crushed his hopes for re-election. But his environmentalism wasn’t just political agenda; it was a lifelong commitment to safeguarding a world he believed both mysteriously created by a watchful God and also the complex product of billions of years of evolution, shaped by and shaping the humans and other creatures that inhabit it. Jimmy Carter anguished over our abuse of the planet; yet with his signature optimism tempered by realism, he maintained hope and faith in its resilient potential. “I am confident that the earth itself will remain basically the same, continuing to shape the lives of its owners, for good or ill, as it has for millennia,” he wrote in An Hour Before Daylight.

On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian college students stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran, taking dozens of U.S. diplomats hostage and holding them for 444 days — an event that haunted Jimmy Carter for the rest of his life.

The previous year, President Carter had achieved the two signature diplomatic feats of his political career. First, with the Torrijos-Carter treaties, he returned control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian people, significantly curtailing U.S. imperialism in Central and South America and preventing unnecessary U.S. entanglement in decades of war and conflict that almost certainly would have resulted in the deaths of many U.S. soldiers and civilians. While the treaties were politically unpopular at the time, people across the entire political spectrum now agree that relinquishing control of the Panama Canal was one of the boldest and wisest presidential decisions of the late 20th century.

To accomplish the Panama Canal treaties, President Carter relied upon his ability to build coalitions across party lines. Although every politician on Capitol Hill knew that relinquishing the Panama Canal was the best long-term strategy for the country, they all understood that it was short-term political suicide. Tennessee Republican Senator Howard Baker was one of Carter’s primary allies in pushing the measure through, but doing so ultimately cost him the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. In fiery campaign rallies and television ads, Ronald Reagan used the Panama Canal treaties as a political bludgeon against first Baker and then Carter, even though privately he praised the measures and declined to repeal them during his ensuing eight years in the White House. At the time, Carter thanked Howard Baker for “doing the right thing,” according to Jonathan Alter in His Very Best.  To which the weary senator retorted “that with any more ‘right things,’ he’d lose his seat in the Senate.”

Decades later, after Senator Baker retired from a distinguished career in public service, my first job as a young lawyer was working with the elder statesman in his law firm. I asked Senator Baker then about his experiences with President Carter. I will never forget how sternly he looked at me as he said the word “relentless,” chewing on the adjective like it was an overdone piece of meat as he described Jimmy Carter’s refusal to surrender the greater good even when it meant possibly sacrificing his own political future and the political futures of those around him. Senator Baker’s deep admiration for Jimmy Carter was clear to me in that moment, but so too was his acute frustration — even those many years later — at the thought of what President Carter’s principled stand had cost him.

With the Camp David Peace Accords, Carter improbably convinced Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to end the near-constant warfare and antagonism that had plagued their nations since 1948. The treaty signed at Camp David and brokered and witnessed by President Carter earned Begin and Sadat a joint Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 and remains the longest-running peace treaty in the Middle East. As the world continues to reel from Israel’s brutal and relentless bombing in Gaza ignited by Hamas’ murderous kidnapping raid on October 7, 2023, it bears noting that the ongoing peace between Israel and Egypt continues to hold and that, without it, the entire Middle East region and quite possibly much of the world now would be plunged into war.

For over 40 years, President Carter was one of a few lonely voices imploring the world to take notice of the unjust treatment of people in Gaza, ceaselessly advocating for Israeli and Palestinian leaders jointly to design and implement a fair and peaceful compromise in the hopes of preventing the horrors we see unfolding today. In 2010, Jimmy Carter wrote in the notes to his diary that he believed it was the unique responsibility of the United States to mediate “a peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors” and that our nation’s continued failure to do so would have ongoing consequences for our nation and the world. “This failure is one of the most obvious reasons for the deep animosity toward us within the Arab world and is the root cause of many despicable terrorist acts,” he wrote. “As a result, Israel is deprived of assured peace and acceptance within the world community, and Palestinians lack basic human freedoms, including the right of self-government.” Fourteen years later, as he approaches his 100th birthday, the only thing more pressing upon Jimmy Carter than the impending U.S. presidential election is each daily report coming out of Gaza, his grandson Jason Carter indicated to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in August. 

 President Carter’s peace treaties are inarguably the most impactful diplomatic achievements of any U.S. president since World War II. Jimmy Carter’s joy over accomplishing them was short-lived, however. He had no time to boast. Instead, while fighting for his political life — first against a lateral primary challenge by Democratic spoiler Ted Kennedy and then during the general election against a ruthless Republican adversary, Ronald Reagan — President Carter spent most of his long days from 1979 to 1981 fighting for the actual lives of the hostages suffering from psychological abuse, malnourishment, and crippling isolation in Iran.

At the time, many people blamed Carter for the prolonged hostage crisis; and after authorizing a failed rescue attempt resulting in the deaths of eight U.S. soldiers, the president might well have begun to blame himself. Yet we now know that other nefarious forces were working shadowy deals to prevent the hostages’ release. After President Carter was admitted to hospice in 2023, lifelong political operative Ben Barnes had a crisis of conscience. He called New York Times reporter Peter Baker and openly confessed to accompanying his mentor John Connally — a Republican heavyweight and key adviser to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — on a trip to the Middle East to meet with Arab leaders in the summer of 1980. Barnes soon learned that the secret purpose of the trip was to lobby Iran to continue imprisoning the U.S. hostages until after the presidential election in order to sabotage the Carter campaign. Upon their return, Connally immediately briefed Reagan’s campaign chair and future CIA director, William Casey, who Barnes acknowledges was behind the effort to prolong the hostage crisis. Barnes didn’t insinuate that Ronald Reagan personally was aware of the scheme, but he also didn’t deny it. “History needs to know that this happened,” he admitted in the Times article. “I think it’s so significant, and I guess knowing the end is near for President Carter put it in my mind more and more.”

For years, there had been conjecture that the Reagan campaign colluded to prevent the hostages’ release. But even after Barnes confirmed it, Jimmy Carter never once mentioned it or made excuses or publicly held anyone responsible for the return of the hostages except himself. While his fellow countrymen covertly worked against him, Jimmy Carter remained singularly focused on securing the freedom, health, and safety of the hostages while protecting the United States from being blackmailed by terrorists. Even after being soundly defeated by Reagan, Jimmy Carter continued negotiating for their release right up until Inauguration Day. Just days before, President-elect Reagan asked Jimmy Carter to fly to Iran as his emissary for the United States if the hostages were not freed before the transition in power took place — an example of interparty confidence and cooperation among fierce political rivals that is unfathomable today.

On the morning Reagan was to take the Oath of Office, President Carter hadn’t slept a wink in over 48 hours; he was too busy agonizing over and planning the hostages’ return. Minutes before the Reagans arrived at the White House to ride with the Carters in the motorcade to the Capitol, Rosalynn brought a razor and shaving cream to her husband, begging him to get ready for the Inauguration.

“Jimmy,” she said,  “you have forgotten to shave, and you need a haircut.”  His rented formalwear was still on the hanger, wrapped in plastic. A barber came in to cut his hair while he continued to talk on the phone. 

Finally, the call came in from the Tehran airport: “The planes are now at the end of the runway.”  The hostages were on their way home. “Jimmy,” Rosalynn implored, “the Reagans will be here in 15 minutes. You will have to put on your morning clothes and greet them.” As he hurriedly dressed himself in the stiff rented suit, he looked in the mirror and wondered whether he’d aged so much as president or whether he simply was exhausted. Breathing a sigh of relief, he rushed to the ceremony to accept his defeat.

In his diary that day, he wrote the following: “On the inaugural platform, my feelings were of regret that I had lost the election but a sense of relief to be free of the responsibilities for a while.  Persistent, though, was my concern that at the last minute the hostages might not be released.”

When it was all over, Jimmy and Rosalynn finally returned to Plains. During the years they’d been gone, the Carters’ previously prosperous farm had fallen into crippling debt, and there was much to do to rebuild their lives. But it was good to be home. Anxious for the future, Jimmy slipped away to the family’s old cotton gin to be alone. When he got there, though, he was surprised to find several of his most trusted former staff and advisers waiting to present him with a gift of some fine woodworking equipment he had always dreamed of owning. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the former president began to contemplate what he might build in the next chapter of his life.

Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter, 1979. Photo by Ansel Adams.

In 2002, Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize for his “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

From the day he left office, Jimmy Carter never wasted a moment. He set lofty goals for himself and for the people around him. He traveled the globe with Rosalynn promoting human rights and the rule of law. With the indefatigable staff and directors of the Carter Center, Jimmy and Rosalynn monitored elections and mediated disputes between people and nations. Jimmy Carter believed that world peace wasn’t just a slogan, but a possibility, and that the attainment of peace was dependent upon all people having the freedom to enjoy their lives with dignity, bodily integrity, and equal access to justice and basic healthcare. 

Guinea worm once was among the world’s most devastating diseases, ravaging people without access to safe drinking water. When the Carters learned that the disease was preventable, they made it their goal to eradicate it. At that time, Jimmy Carter had been out of office for just five years, and more than 3.5 million people annually suffered from the painful, crippling disease. At the end of 2023, the Carter Center reported that there were only 14 people in the world with Guinea worm. Now, just in time for Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday, the Carter Center’s most recent report indicates that the number of reported human cases of Guinea worm worldwide has been reduced to four. At some point, it will be zero.

In addition to tackling Guinea worm, the Carters set similar goals to eliminate other preventable diseases, such as river blindness and leprosy.  Because of their efforts and the work of others they have inspired, the Carter Center’s International Task Force for Disease Eradication will continue the fight until all the world’s preventable diseases are gone.

Contemplating the audacity of Jimmy Carter’s vision, the tenacity with which he tackled it, and the way he never wavered from the simple but strict tenets of his faith to nurture the poor and heal the sick, I’m reminded of the intensity of his bright blue eyes, how they seemed to look right through me and ask questions I dared not ask myself: What will you do to ease the suffering of your fellow human beings? How will you live out your faith? What lasting mark will you leave on the earth?

Carter on St. Simons Island, Georgia, November 1977. Photo by Bernard Gotfryd.

The sun rises over the marsh, and the sky turns pale pink and blue. The house is quiet. A white-tailed deer prances behind a clump of palmettos and disappears into semidarkness. Birdsong begins. I’ve been on a near-constant jag of reading and writing about Jimmy Carter for three weeks straight. I’m wiped. My writing table and the old pine floor around me are littered with his books: Living Faith; A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power; An Outdoor Journal; Always a Reckoning and Other Poems; Our Endangered Values; A Remarkable Mother; A Government as Good as Its People.

I could keep listing the titles; they just go on and on. The man wrote 32 books. Year after year, Jimmy Carter wrote and shared lessons learned during his impactful life. Reflections at Ninety testified to his prolificacy as a writer. The audio version won him his ninth Grammy nomination and third win for Best Spoken Word Album. If you haven’t had the pleasure of listening to Jimmy Carter read his books in his distinctive southwestern Georgia drawl, you should go to your local library or streaming service and download one right now and start listening. I’m overwhelmed by the sheer volume of his words. Leafing through his final book, Faith: A Journey for All, written when he was 95 and a particular favorite of mine, I find this passage that renews my hope and inspires me to do better: 

What are the goals of a person or a denomination or a country?  They are remarkably the same: a desire for peace; a need for humility, for examining one’s faults and turning away from them; a commitment to human rights in the broadest sense of the words, based on a moral society concerned with the alleviation of suffering because of deprivation or hatred or hunger or physical affliction; and a willingness, even an eagerness, to share one’s ideals, one’s faith, with others, to translate love in a person to justice.  ◊