Dec. 31, 2024, 11:09 a.m.
Jimmy Carter never planned to be the greatest ex-president in American history. When he woke up the morning of Nov. 5, 1980, that didn’t even cross his mind. In fact, for perhaps the first time in his adult life, Carter, who only a month earlier had celebrated his 56th birthday, had no plan at all for how he was going to spend the rest of his life.
Until his landslide loss the day before to Ronald Reagan, the president’s plan was to serve four more years in office, plenty of time to complete his White House goals and still plan for a post-presidency that he hoped wouldn’t begin until 1985. Now, suddenly, that post-presidency was upon him. And he didn’t know what he was going to do. For a man trained as an engineer and famous for his meticulous planning, that was a new and frightening sensation.
As it turned out, neither Carter nor anyone in the country could have known that over the next 43 years, 11 months, and nine days until his death on Sunday at age 100, he would blaze a trail and amass achievements beyond anything seen from any former president since World War I.
Carter wrote more books, traveled to more countries, fought more diseases, built more homes, and monitored more elections overseas than any of his predecessors. And he did it all without moving from his simple home in Plains, Georgia, without enriching himself by joining corporate boards as Gerald Ford had, without giving million-dollar speeches like Ronald Reagan, and without buying an $11 million vacation home like Barack Obama.
Alone among modern ex-presidents, Carter clung to a simple life—but with grand ambition.
Immediately after his defeat, though, he didn’t have time for that grand ambition. That would come later. He was worried about paying his bills. Four years after leaving what had been a “flourishing” agricultural-supply business and farms in a blind trust and ordering the trustee not even to give him reports, Carter was stunned at what he found.
“When I was preparing to leave the White House I learned that, because of inept management and three years of severe drought, we had accumulated a very large debt, with no business assets to be used for payment,” he wrote in A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety. “I was afraid we might lose our farmland and even endanger ownership of our home.”
He needed a plan to save his home, pay his debts, and bring in money for however long he had left to live—which, he understood, may not have been long. At the time, only four of the previous 37 presidents had lived longer than 20 years after leaving office. And his family history didn’t offer much reason for optimism; his father had died at age 58. He knew his genes may not permit him to outlive Reagan’s presidency.
The first decision he made in those early days was to review the diary notes he had dictated every day of his presidency and write a memoir. He discovered that those notes ran to more than a million words over 21 volumes. It would take him more than a year to review them and write Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President.
Yet what began as a desperate way to make money to tackle his debts became, much to his surprise, an intellectually stimulating and pleasing—almost fun—avocation for both Jimmy and his wife, Rosalynn. “Somewhat to our surprise, our books were quite successful,” he wrote in The Virtues of Aging. “And publishers requested that we write additional ones.” Even more surprisingly, it was something he wanted to do. “I found that I enjoyed writing,” he wrote in A Full Life.
Between 1982 and 2018, Carter, who had written two books before leaving office, wrote an additional 30 books, smashing Theodore Roosevelt’s long-held record of 18 books written as a former president. (Roosevelt still holds the record for most books authored in a president’s life span. But 28 of those came before he became president.) Carter’s books ranged from serious looks at Middle East tensions and world peace to memoirs of hunting and fishing with his father as a boy, a collection of poems, and meditations on scripture.
Carter's natural 'Habitat'
One book, in particular, crossed lines with one of his passions—teaching Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church. Tourists often made the trek to Plains just to catch him in class. By 2011, he had recorded more than 600 Bible lessons. He placed 366 of them, with a religious lesson for each day of the year, in Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.
His view on how to follow biblical precepts also was obvious in the work he did that drew the most attention in the United States—his time building houses for Habitat for Humanity, a charitable group which got its start in nearby Americus, Georgia. He began small. But in 1984, with a project building houses in New York City, he initiated what became known as the Carter Work Project, a weeklong building binge. According to the group, from 1984 to 2019 the Carters traveled 167,279 miles and worked with 106,100 volunteers to build or rehabilitate 4,417 homes in 14 countries.
Carter, his wife, Rosalynn, and his mother-in-law, Allie Smith, walk through Plains, Ga., on Jan. 23, 1981, after he left Washington. (AP Photo/Wayne Perkins, File)
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While he was working out of the headlines and often out of the country, Carter’s rise in public regard was steady—and surprising to Republican politicians who continued to use “Carter” as an insult decades after it had lost its sting with most Americans. Too many politicians didn’t grasp that the old views of Carter had softened with every picture of him in work clothes hammering away at a worksite, rehabilitating a part of his reputation with every nail he drove.
In 2004, Republican pollster Frank Luntz was surprised at a focus group he conducted in Des Moines before the Iowa caucuses. When he asked the assembled voters about former Vice President Al Gore’s endorsement of then-Democratic front-runner Howard Dean, they unanimously dismissed it as irrelevant. Luntz followed up by asking them if there was any endorsement that would influence them. “Jimmy Carter,” said one voter. Hands shot up around the room in agreement.
When he left office in 1981, Carter had a miserable 34 percent approval rating in the Gallup Poll. He went on to have the most top 10 finishes in Gallup’s polling of the most admired man in the United States. His 29 finishes in the top 10 put him third behind only the Rev. Billy Graham and Reagan, the man who defeated him.
A different kind of foreign policy
The passion Carter brought to his many endeavors came from his determination, as Rosalynn Carter said, to complete the “unfinished business” of his presidency.”
“Instead of abandoning his agenda when he lost badly to Ronald Reagan in 1980, he chose to continue working toward programs and policies he believed in, in office or out of it,” wrote historian Douglas Brinkley, whose book on Carter, appropriately, was titled The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House.
Carter also wanted something different for his presidential library. He did not want, he told The New York Times, “a monument to me.” If he was going to continue the work of his presidency, that would have to include conflict resolution among rivals abroad and a continued championing of human rights and democracy. To that end, adjacent to the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta is the Carter Center, dedicated to peace and disease-mitigation efforts. That work was cited by the Nobel Committee in its 2002 award: “Through his Carter Center ... Carter has since his presidency undertaken very extensive and persevering conflict resolution on several continents.” The center currently has efforts underway in Syria, Mali, Sudan, and Israel/Palestine. Since 1989, the Carter Center has observed 115 elections in 40 countries.
In one sense, he felt liberated by his political exile to Plains and the way so much of the political world—particularly in his own party, which wanted to move past his big defeat—shunned him. “Carter defiantly took unpopular stands about foreign affairs, but stands that he fervently believed in, displaying almost no concern about who would dislike him as a result,” wrote historian Julian Zelizer in his 2010 book Jimmy Carter. “Freed from the need to build political alliances, Carter seemed more comfortable in his post presidential role than when he was in the White House.”
“Pariah Diplomacy” was the headline on a memorable op-ed he wrote for The New York Times in 2008 defending his approach and arguing that no Middle East peace was possible without talks with Hamas.
It was an approach, argued Zelizer, that made Carter “an enormously powerful figure on the international stage.” He added that it also turned what were personal weaknesses for a president into strengths for an ex-president. He “was again able to play on his strengths as a person willing to make difficult and politically unpopular choices. … He did not stop getting in trouble for his controversial positions, but, after 1981, his maverick tendencies were less of a hindrance as he no longer had to answer to voters, Congress or the Democratic Party.”
In his farewell address, Carter outlined his post-presidential ambition, promising to “take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of citizen.” Hendrik Hertzberg, who wrote those words as Carter’s chief White House speechwriter before going on to a career editing The New Republic and writing for The New Yorker, later observed that Carter's post-presidency helped others “see which of the qualities he projected as president were authentic and which were fake, which of his strengths and weaknesses were inherent in his character and which were products of chance and circumstance.”
To Hertzberg, Carter’s actions out of office helped demonstrate that “Carter’s style of leadership was and is more religious than political in nature.”
Americans weren't the only ones paying attention. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for what the Nobel Committee called “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.”
Carter greets Southern Sudanese men waiting to cast their vote at a polling station in Juba, Southern Sudan, in 2011. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
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Ending preventable disease
Carter was proud but almost always businesslike when he discussed his center’s election monitoring and other work promoting democracy. But his eyes lit up when he talked about his efforts to eliminate six preventable diseases—Guinea worm, river blindness, trachoma, schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, and malaria in Hispaniola. This focus on global health was, he wrote, “the most unanticipated development” in his post-presidential life.
In 2016, Carter told NBC, “I am hoping that I will live longer than the last Guinea worm. That is one of my goals in life.” His years of work in Africa were dedicated to making Guinea worm the second human disease in history to be eradicated, joining smallpox.
At a 2014 forum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation, he was asked what he considered his proudest accomplishment since leaving the presidency. His answer, while long, revealed the high priority he put on that goal.
“Since leaving office? Well, what the Carter Center does in 80 countries. … Our primary goal now is to deal with what the World Health Organization calls neglected tropical diseases, and we deal with diseases that are not even known by medical doctors in our country—dracunculiasis, onchocerciasis, trachoma, schistosomiasis, and so forth. These are diseases that afflict hundreds of millions of people, in Africa particularly, and sometimes in Latin America. And we have at the Carter Center the only international task force on disease eradication. We have a task force that analyzes every human illness constantly to see which ones can be eliminated from a country or eradicated from the whole world. So we targeted Guinea worm, dracunculiasis, as a major disease to be eradicated. We found it in 20 countries in Asia and in Africa and three-and-a-half million cases, 26,500 villages. We started working on it, and we dedicated it to be eradicated. We now have reduced the three-and a-half million cases to 116 cases.”
In the decade since that statement, the numbers have improved even more, falling to 13 in 2022. In the first nine months of 2023, only 11 cases were reported.
In the end, he did not outlive the last Guinea worm. Like his hopes for a second term in office, it ranks with one of the few goals unrealized for the 39th president and the most consequential modern ex-president. But the prediction he made to his wife in the depths of defeat in 1980 did prove out. “When I lost a second term, I told Rosalynn we could have just as fulfilling and good a life outside of the White House,” he told The Washington Post when he turned 88. “And we have. I am very positive.”
He was positive to the end. When it came on Sunday, concluding a remarkable life and an even more extraordinary ex-presidency that started without a plan, Jimmy Carter knew that things over the last four decades went far better than any plan he could have conceived. From small villages in Africa to the halls of power in Washington, he made a difference.
