1. A Portrait of Miss Lillian
Lillian Gordy Carter, the president’s mother, lived life firmly on her own terms.
She was famously accompanied by Andy Warhol, at age 79, to a party in 1977 at Studio 54. Mr. Warhol made this portrait of her, one of three that have been displayed in the Carter Center in Atlanta.
In her early 20s, she started a long career in nursing. And she gave birth to Jimmy at the hospital where she worked, not at home, making him the first president to be born in a hospital.
Ms. Carter flouted the racist customs of the Jim Crow era in rural southwest Georgia, imprinting her four children with broad-minded social views.
She plunged herself into the family-farm business after being widowed at 54. In her late 60s, she applied to the Peace Corps and was sent to India for two years, assigned to work on family-planning efforts. On the side, she bent the rules to bring medical treatments to destitute people in her village.
Americans came to know their presidential mother as Miss Lillian, a telegenic celebrity with a quick, sometimes salty, wit.
During the 1976 presidential campaign, she became a favorite of reporters for her reliably colorful remarks. The Times found her sitting in a rocking chair and holding forth at the Carter campaign headquarters: “Someone asked me the other day, do I ever tell a lie? And I said, ‘Yeah, I make up for Jimmy.’”
After the inauguration, a reporter asked: “Miss Lillian, aren’t you proud of your son?” She answered, “Which one?”
In “White House Diary,” Mr. Carter’s book of annotated journals from his presidency, he wrote that his mother had made more than 500 speeches. She was a frequent United States emissary abroad, all the while spurning White House efforts to write scripts for her.
She joked about her frequent deployments to state funerals: “I have a long black dress and a short black dress, because whenever a foreigner dies it seems like everybody’s busy but me.”
Ms. Carter also expressed disgust with the anti-gay crusade of the singer Anita Bryant.
Life as the future president’s mother upended expectations, both large and small, from the start. In her commemorative baby book, under the inscription “James Earl Carter Jr.,” she wrote, “‘Jimmy’ now — but later of course t’will be ‘Jim.’”
2. A Homestead in the Jim Crow South
When Jimmy was not quite 4, his father purchased a farm about two and a half miles outside Plains, Ga., in a predominantly African American hamlet called Archery.
The family’s farmhouse lacked running water and electricity in the early years, but it was far more comfortable than the threadbare homes of Black tenant farmers working for Mr. Earl, as Jimmy’s father was known.
Jimmy’s childhood was heavily influenced by people of color, including Rachel Clark, who, with her husband, Jack, was a senior laborer on the farm.
After his mother and father, Rachel was the closest person to young Jimmy. “Much more than my parents, she talked to me about the religious and moral values that shaped a person’s life. Without seeming to preach, she taught me how I should behave,” Mr. Carter wrote in “An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood” (2001).
“My own life was shaped by a degree of personal intimacy between Black and white people that is now almost completely unknown and largely forgotten.”
This is the Clark homestead on the grounds of the Carter family farm, now open to the public. “As often as possible,” Mr. Carter recalled in another memoir, “I spent the night in the Clarks’ home, where I slept on a pallet on the floor. Rachel moved it close to the fireplace on cold nights.”
Mr. Earl believed in segregation. Still, he abided his wife’s empathetic treatment of their Black workers and neighbors, who were the focus of much of her nursing duties after the move to Archery. They were even split on welcoming Black guests into their home. Lillian Carter would accept them through the front entrance and into the living room, prompting her husband to quietly exit the house until the visitors were gone.
“Without any fanfare,” Mr. Carter wrote in his biography of Ms. Carter, “Mother just ignored the pervasive restraints of racial segregation.”
3. In a Courtship, a Compact
When Eleanor Rosalynn Smith was born, the Carters, including young Jimmy, lived next door to her family in Plains. (It is ROSE-a-lynn, not ROZ-a-lynn, the mispronunciation that is frequently heard outside of Plains.)
During their courtship, Jimmy gave Rosalynn this compact, inscribed with a favorite Carter family endearment represented by the initials “ILYTG”: “I love you the goodest.”
As a young military couple, with three of their eventual four children, they had lived away from their tiny hometown for about six years. Then, in 1953, they learned that Mr. Carter’s father was gravely ill with pancreatic cancer. His death led Mr. Carter to abandon a promising naval career and return to Plains, a decision he made without consulting his wife.
Rosalynn was furious. “I argued. I cried. I even screamed at him,” Ms. Carter wrote in her 1984 memoir, “First Lady From Plains.” “I loved our life in the Navy and the independence I had finally achieved. Surely, we would never travel anymore.”
She added, “I thought the best part of my life had ended.”
For his part, Mr. Carter later expressed regret. “I cannot understand in retrospect why I didn’t at least consult her concerning decisions that affected all our family,” he wrote in “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety” (2015).
Ms. Carter eventually embraced life back in Plains. (“I had to admit, yes, I was enjoying this life,” she wrote in her memoir.) But her husband’s meteoric rise to the White House remade her world once more.
She would become the most politically involved first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, giving speeches, serving in diplomatic roles and advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment. After the Carter presidency, the couple spent decades devoted to causes that spanned the globe and affected millions — this time, on a more equal footing.
Rosalynn died in Plains on Nov. 19, 2023, at age 96.
4. Certified: an ‘Atomic Submariner’
As a boy, the future president was captivated by accounts of his uncle, Tom Gordy, a career Navy man. No Carter family ancestors had finished high school, and the Naval Academy seemed the surest way to reach his goal of a college degree.
After graduation, Mr. Carter spent several years serving on the submarine fleet. While on night watch during a storm in the Pacific, he was swept off the bridge of the U.S.S. Pomfret. The fierce seas dropped him onto another section of the deck, where he grabbed hold of a mounted gun — surviving, against all odds, “my first experience with impending death.”
Mr. Carter was chosen to help develop the Navy’s first nuclear-powered submarines, a secret effort directed by Capt. Hyman Rickover. Mr. Carter, one of the first atomic submariners, received this certificate upon completion of his training, which included graduate studies in theoretical nuclear physics. (Years later, President Carter would become Admiral Rickover’s commander in chief.)
In 1952, the Chalk River reactor in Ontario, Canada, experienced a catastrophic partial meltdown. Experts in atomic power were few, so Captain Rickover dispatched Mr. Carter, age 28, and his team to help dismantle the stricken plant. After practicing on a mock-up of the damaged reactor, Mr. Carter and the others, sealed in protective suits, entered the radioactive wreckage, disassembling it piece by piece. Remarkably, Mr. Carter wrote, none of them had any permanent aftereffects.
Mr. Carter was president when the Three Mile Island nuclear accident occurred. He and Rosalynn visited the plant’s control room in an effort to calm public fears.
In 2005, the Navy commissioned the nuclear-powered U.S.S. Jimmy Carter submarine. It was the first sub named for a living former president.
5. A Governor for the ‘New South’
Mr. Carter’s early political career was a tightrope walk between his belief in racial equality and the need to win votes in a region and state dominated by segregationists. The peanut farm he ran endured threats from white racists, but at times he was not above courting them.
Mr. Carter lost his first race for the governorship of Georgia in 1966, running as a moderate. He placed third in the Democratic primary, splitting the centrist vote and clearing a path for Lester Maddox, a notorious segregationist, to eke out a win. Mr. Maddox, who owned a whites-only restaurant in Atlanta, was known for chasing away Black would-be customers while brandishing an ax handle. (The handles were sold as souvenirs in the restaurant, sometimes autographed.) In 1964, he waved a pistol at three Black students who tried to enter his restaurant.
Now he was in charge of the state.
Mr. Carter ran in the next election, this time to the right of his main primary opponent. He cultivated everyone, tailoring his message to radically different audiences, but there was no question which was largest. A poll in April 1970 found that 54 percent of Georgians believed that integration was moving too fast.
Mr. Carter sought the support of the former head of Georgia’s White Citizens Council; after they met, the segregationist announced that he was in the Carter camp. Years earlier, council members had pressured Mr. Carter to join the Plains chapter. When he refused, they organized a boycott of his business.
Black voters were skeptical of any campaign that was associated with racists, but as Mr. Carter told Vernon Jordan, the president of the National Urban League: “You won’t like my campaign, but you will like my administration.” He won the 1970 election handily.
His fixation on government efficiency had a rich target in Georgia’s patronage-heavy bureaucracy. This editorial cartoon by Clifford H. Baldowski, known as Baldy, which illustrated the task ahead, hangs in the Georgia Capitol.
Having finally won the office, Mr. Carter was free to deal more forthrightly with race matters.
“I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he declared in his inaugural address. This shocked many white Georgians, who felt betrayed, but the speech earned him plaudits as a leader of a more modern “New South.”
In a vexing twist, Mr. Maddox was simultaneously elected — by a greater margin — as his lieutenant governor, and the two were largely at war for the next four years.
6. An Evangelical Life
Mr. Carter’s Baptist upbringing was a political curiosity: He was the first born-again Christian to become president. During his administration, his progressive wing of Baptists would begin to give way to an ascendant conservative movement — in today’s shorthand, the evangelical vote — that played a key role in his 1980 defeat.
This imposing cross, hanging in the sanctuary of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, was made by Mr. Carter, as were the congregation’s collection plates. The modest red-brick church was the setting for most of Mr. Carter’s post-presidential Sunday school lessons, drawing overflow crowds on weekends when the teacher was in town.
Jimmy was dedicated to his faith from an early age, even more so than his father, who was a deacon and a Sunday school teacher at Plains Baptist Church.
After the loss in his first run for Georgia governor, Mr. Carter was shaken and deeply depressed. His sister Ruth Carter Stapleton, who would become famous for her evangelical ministry, counseled a renewed commitment to his faith and inspired him to pursue missionary work while succeeding in politics.
Religious life in southwest Georgia was also tainted by racism. In 1965, Plains Baptist, long the family’s church, was under pressure to admit Black congregants, but Mr. Carter’s fellow deacons wanted none of it. When the issue came up for a vote, 54 congregants opposed integration and only six supported it — five of them Carters, including Jimmy, Rosalynn and Lillian.
The church’s ban lasted 11 years and was an embarrassment to Mr. Carter during his first presidential campaign. Days before the election, church deacons voted to oust their pastor for finally supporting the admission of a Black worshiper. After mediation by Mr. Carter, a vote by the congregation reversed the ban, 120 to 66.
During the Carter presidency, a breakaway, integration-friendly flock established Maranatha Baptist Church across town. The Carters attended both churches when visiting from Washington; in 1981, resettling in Plains, they chose Maranatha.
7. A Sharp Rebuke to Georgia’s Elites
Governor Carter and his supporters were mulling a presidential run as early as 1972. But they could not have foreseen the crucial boost he got in May 1974, when he was a third-tier speaker at the University of Georgia’s annual Law Day ceremonies.
Mr. Carter’s prepared text turned out to be similar to the keynote address delivered by Senator Ted Kennedy, so he abandoned it in favor of largely extemporaneous remarks: an unsparing takedown of Georgia’s privileged class, corrupt officials and ossified Southern legal customs, especially those deployed against African Americans. The speech stunned his audience of lawyers and judges. Much of his criticism was aimed squarely at them.
“The powerful and the influential have carved out for themselves, or have inherited, a privileged position in society,” in a sense locking in an unjust status quo, he said. He went on to assail literacy tests “used with a great deal of smirking” to prevent Black people from voting; schemes by corrupt judges and lawyers to cheat African Americans out of money and land; and rampant sentencing disparities.
After upsetting a social order rigged solely to benefit white people, the governor pointedly noted, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “was perhaps despised by many in this room.”
Also in the room: the journalist Hunter S. Thompson, possibly the lone reporter to show up. He was not, he wrote later, especially interested in what the governor had to say. But when Mr. Carter remarked that his ideas had been influenced by a close personal friend, “a great poet named Bob Dylan,” Mr. Thompson wrote, he was roused from a whiskey-induced fog.
He spent the next two years extolling the Law Day speech and playing recordings of it, culminating in a lengthy and influential “endorsement” (a term he later said was used in error) of Mr. Carter on the cover of the June 3, 1976, edition of Rolling Stone magazine. Intended or not, his account of Mr. Carter’s Law Day address had the effect of an endorsement in the midst of a fiercely fought presidential race.
“It was a king hell bastard of a speech,” Mr. Thompson wrote, adding that it was “the heaviest and most eloquent thing I have ever heard from the mouth of a politician.”
8. From ‘Jimmy Who?’ to Commander in Chief
When Mr. Carter told his mother he was going to run for president, she replied, “President of what?”
In 1975, he was virtually unknown outside Georgia. The next year he was president-elect.
His national anonymity was confirmed by an appearance on a television game show called “What’s My Line?” in which celebrities would try to establish a guest’s occupation through a series of questions and guesswork. Governor Carter, nameless but visible to the panel and beaming his soon-to-be-famous grin, nearly stumped them.
His remarkable rise over better-known rivals was due in large part to the tireless work of family members and friends from Georgia who were dispatched to frigid Northern states in the winter of 1976 to evangelize for their peanut farmer. They came to be known as the Peanut Brigade and generated a steady following among the news media.
Rosalynn was an especially effective ambassador, having honed her skills in their earlier Georgia campaigns.
The peanut became a potent emblem for an unusual candidate. In Iowa, it was a reminder that an actual farmer was running for president. Indiana supporters built a 13-foot tall version sporting their candidate’s megawatt smile, now located at a roadside spot in Plains.
The strategy to win the party’s nomination set a template for future campaigns: Contest every state and win the early caucuses and primaries, especially in Iowa and New Hampshire. Mr. Carter’s rivals had conserved resources for later states they felt they could win. His early momentum, and the wall-to-wall news coverage it generated, swamped them.
9. A Powerful Vice President
Before Walter Mondale, American vice presidents were a forlorn lot, occupants of a vaguely defined, often thankless job who were sometimes humiliated by their own presidents.
Jimmy Carter modernized the role in ways that were radical at the time. Mr. Mondale, known as Fritz, was thoroughly briefed on the same sensitive intelligence the president received; he was treated with the same authority as the president by others in the administration; he had regularly scheduled time with the president, alone, to strategize.
Perhaps the most visible upgrade was his new office in the West Wing, the center of executive power. His five most immediate predecessors had been headquartered in the Executive Office Building next door; before that, most had been kept in isolation from their bosses on Capitol Hill. (Mr. Mondale kept all three offices.)
“If you’re in the Executive Office Building, you might as well be in Baltimore!” he told the Carter biographer Stuart E. Eizenstat.
This Carter button, in the campaign’s signature green, summed up their politically balanced ticket: Deep South partnered with far North, appealing to liberal and conservative Democrats alike.
Mr. Mondale and his president were indeed close. He inscribed a photo of them on the White House grounds this way:
“To My President — From the first Vice-President in history who came to love the President he served. I shall be forever grateful.”
10. The Energy President
Mr. Carter made energy policy one of his top concerns. His presidency arrived after several years of oil shortages and price spikes that had roiled the economy.
He established the Department of Energy, which was also responsible for managing the nuclear weapons stockpile, and famously installed 32 solar panels on the West Wing of the White House to promote renewable sources. To his disappointment, Ronald Reagan had them removed. (The National Park Service quietly added new panels for secondary buildings on White House grounds in 2002, and the Obama administration revived solar power on the main structure in 2014.)
The Carter family got the Marvel Comics treatment by the artist John Tartaglione to encourage — along with Captain America — energy conservation. This illustration, signed by Stan Lee, Marvel’s publisher, is on display at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta.
In 2017, Mr. Carter oversaw the installation of 3,852 solar panels on family farmland in Plains. Across 10 acres, where peanuts once grew, the panels can produce enough energy to power more than half of the town.
11. Artisan and Activist
After Mr. Carter’s 1980 election loss, his staff gave him this set of woodworking tools, knowing their boss would soon have far more free time on his hands and that he had an interest in carpentry, sparked by a boyhood fascination with his father’s wood shop.
Hobbies were the least of his famed post-presidential life, perhaps the most active in American history. But it didn’t start out that way. There was no plan, save for an abrupt return to Plains at age 56. “When we came home I had no idea what I would do with the rest of my life,” Mr. Carter wrote.
In 1984, the Carters began their long association with Habitat for Humanity, the Christian nonprofit that builds low-cost housing for the poor, with headquarters in Americus, just down the road from Plains. For decades, during the couple’s annual weeklong Carter Work Project, the two helped build homes across the country and around the world alongside thousands of volunteers.
The Carters’s first Habitat project outside Georgia started that year: The rehab of an abandoned tenement at 742 East Sixth Street in Manhattan. The couple and a corps of three dozen volunteers from Georgia traveled about 27 hours by Trailways bus from Americus and slept dormitory-style in a Hell’s Kitchen church. “Carpenter Named Carter Comes to New York,” read the front-page headline in The Times. New Yorkers crowded the site, eager to see their recent president swinging a hammer in work clothes.
The project required a second visit in 1985, via the same bus, with the former first couple startling people at churches and at other unannounced stops along the way. The building, Mascot Flats, remained home to some of its first residents decades after its renovation.
12. Campaigns Against Disease
After leaving office, Mr. Carter founded the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting peace, fighting disease and combating social inequality around the world.
The center has worked for years to eliminate devastating diseases affecting millions of people, including elephantiasis and river blindness, which it has helped eradicate in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Guatemala.
When the Carter Center began eradication efforts against Guinea worm disease in 1986, about 3.5 million people across 21 countries were afflicted with the excruciating condition. The worms, transmitted by drinking larvae-infested water, grow to up to three feet long inside their hosts. After a year, the worm emerges, slowly, through an extremely painful skin blister; victims spread the disease by seeking pain relief in waterways, where the worm releases more larvae, spreading infections.
By November 2024, a provisional count of Guinea worm disease cases stood at seven worldwide, in only two countries. It appears to be on track to become the second human disease (after smallpox) and the first parasite to be vanquished.
The vial above contains the last known Guinea worm in Nigeria, along with a pipe filter that allows people to drink contaminated water without ingesting parasitic larvae. Millions of the filters have been distributed by the Carter Center and its partners.
Asked about his hopes for the future after his 2015 cancer diagnosis, Mr. Carter said: “I’d like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do.”
13. American Emissaries for Democracy
The Carter Center has monitored more than 100 elections abroad, often with the Carters themselves observing the vote. These identification badges are from missions in Liberia, Ethiopia and Tunisia.
Citizen Carter’s involvement in foreign affairs was not always welcomed, even by his successors. In 1994, he recalled in “A Full Life,” during a diplomatic crisis with North Korea and after being refused permission to travel there by the Clinton administration, Mr. Carter announced he would go anyway. President Bill Clinton eventually gave his blessing. Despite conflicting statements between the two American presidents on whether sanctions against North Korea were still on the table, Mr. Carter was credited with defusing the crisis and winning curbs on the North’s nuclear weapons program.
The related agreements lasted eight years, until they were canceled by the Bush administration in 2002 during a new dispute with North Korea. That same year, Mr. Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work and peacemaking.
14. A Friendship With a Presidential Rival
The 1976 campaign between Mr. Carter and President Gerald R. Ford was — for its era — a ferocious contest. Five years later, the two rivals had formed a bond.
As Mr. Ford told a White House audience in 2000, “Certainly few observers in January 1977 would have predicted that Jimmy and I would become the closest of friends.” Mr. Carter liked to say that they had enjoyed the deepest presidential friendship in American history.
Mr. Ford was regularly briefed by the Carter administration, not least because he had done the early work for some of its top achievements, including the Panama Canal treaties and the Camp David accords.
Their long friendship took root when they served in the American delegation to the 1981 funeral of Anwar el-Sadat, the Egyptian president. They also made headlines on the return flight by agreeing that the United States should negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The two ex-presidents would eventually lead more than 25 projects together, including the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, which was prompted by the disputed 2000 presidential election. Above, a note from the 39th president thanking the 38th for agreeing to help Habitat for Humanity.
Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter also grew close, lobbying together on health care, drug and alcohol policies and mental health issues and in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Mr. Carter was taken aback when Mr. Ford asked him in 2006 to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. Mr. Carter agreed — if Mr. Ford would make the same pledge for him.
Just a few months later, at the service for Mr. Ford in East Grand Rapids, Mich., Mr. Carter began his eulogy with “the first words I spoke as president,” the opening sentence of his Inaugural Address:
“For myself, and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”
15. A Prolific Author
Together, the Carters have written more than 30 books, including four by Rosalynn and one they co-wrote in 1987, “Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life.”
Mr. Carter typed his 1982 presidential memoir, “Keeping Faith,” on this Lanier word processor in his home office.
Mr. Carter has also written books on policy; a poetry collection; a Revolutionary War novel; a children’s tale illustrated by his daughter, Amy; a biography of his mother; several reflective works on religion; and the acclaimed account of his childhood in segregated rural Georgia, “An Hour before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood.”
His book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” (2006) drew the ire of some pro-Israel groups, in part because its title evoked parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and that of Black people under white rule in South Africa. His national book tour, at times contentious, was chronicled in a documentary, “Jimmy Carter Man From Plains,” by the filmmaker Jonathan Demme.
16. Plains, the Family Anchor
Aside from their Navy years and life in temporary political quarters, the Carters were firmly rooted in the farming crossroads of Plains from birth through all of their post-White House years.
Upon returning from Washington in 1981, they were shocked to discover that their farm business, which had been placed in a trust that allowed no involvement from the president, had gone deeply into debt. The business was sold at a small loss, but the Carters kept their farmland and continued to grow peanuts and other crops.
They settled back into the modest ranch-style home they had built in 1961 on the edge of town. This 2011 painting by Mr. Carter depicts the house in an unusual blanket of snow.
Downtown Plains consists largely of a row of 19th-century commercial buildings, and a former train depot that served as Mr. Carter’s symbolic 1976 campaign headquarters. There are fewer than 600 people living in the mile-wide diameter around the town’s main intersection.
The former first couple regularly strolled the quiet sidewalks of Plains, to and from gatherings and meals at the homes of friends. They were fixtures at public events well into their 90s, like the annual square dance for supporters of the Carter Center. Life in their tiny hometown made them perhaps the most accessible of modern-era first couples, and the least tethered to the trappings of high office.
“Our friends are here, and we are just Jimmy and Rosalynn to them, as though we have never been gone,” Rosalynn wrote in “First Lady from Plains.” “It is refreshing.”
17. Against the Odds, a Long Life
The Carter family has been devastated by pancreatic cancer to an extreme degree. It took the lives of Mr. Carter’s father, at age 58, and all of his siblings: sisters Ruth, at 54, and Gloria, at 63, and brother, Billy, at 51. His mother also had it, in addition to breast cancer.
Recent science suggests genetics could be to blame. Mr. Carter often pondered his longevity amid the family’s losses.
“The only difference between me and my father and my siblings was that I never smoked a cigarette,” he told The Times in 2007. “My daddy smoked regularly. All of them smoked.”
In August 2015, at age 90, Mr. Carter revealed that a cancerous tumor had been removed from his liver and that tests showed the melanoma had spread to his brain.
Soon, throughout Plains, residents displayed campaign-style signs, in familiar Carter green, in support of their favorite son. This one was in the yard of Rosalynn’s childhood home.
On Dec. 6, 2015, after about four months of treatment, Mr. Carter announced to his Sunday school audience at Maranatha Baptist Church that he was cancer free. He and Rosalynn returned to work on their varied causes.
On March 22, 2019, at 94, he became the longest-living president in American history. He died on Dec. 29 at age 100.
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