Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 20:00, 18 October 2002

James Earl Carter, Junior (born October 1, 1924) was the 39th (1977 to 1981) President of the United States, a Democrat. He is better known as Jimmy Carter, and sued for the right to have his name appear on the ballot in that form.

Carter was born in the town of Plains, Georgia. Before entering politics, he was a peanut farmer in Plains (after serving as an officer and nuclear engineer in the U.S. Navy, serving under Admiral Hyman Rickover).

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.

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 was perceived by many to express a pessimistic outlook which may have damaged his reelection hopes.

Also in 1979, Carter allowed the former Iranian dictator Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlevi into the United States for poltical asylum and medical treatment. Although Carter had ostensibly promoted human rights as a hallmark of his foreign policy, he had been a staunch supporter of the Iranian strongman during his reign. In response to the Shah's entry into the US, Iranian militants seized the American embassy in Tehran and demanded the Shah's return to Iran. The hostage crisis dominated the last year of his presidency, and his 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.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he announced the Carter Doctrine, according to which the US would not allow any other single power to gain control of the Persian Gulf.

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 also been criticized not doing enough to promote his stated human rights stance in his administration, such as continuing to support Indonesia even while they were commiting 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 is involved in 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. In 2002, in a deliberate dig at the Bush administration, the Nobel Prize committee awarded Carter the Nobel Peace Prize for his human rights and mediation work.

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 living person. (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).)

See also:

• U.S. presidential election, 1976
• U.S. presidential election, 1980

This article is about the US President. For the boxer, see Jimmy Carter (boxer).