Outside the Beltway

Jimmy Carter Turns 100

The 39th President hits the century mark.

James Joyner · Tuesday, October 1, 2024 · 4 comments

AP (“Jimmy Carter and hometown of Plains celebrate the 39th president’s 100th birthday“):

Jimmy Carter is preparing to celebrate his 100th birthday on Tuesday, the first time an American president has lived a full century and the latest milestone in a life that took the son of a Depression-era farmer to the White House and across the world as a Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian and advocate for democracy.

Living the last 19 months in home hospice care in Plains, the Georgia Democrat and 39th president has continued to defy expectations, just as he did through a remarkable rise from his family peanut farming and warehouse business to the world stage. He served one presidential term from 1977 to 1981 and then worked more than four decades leading The Carter Center, which he and his wife Rosalynn co-founded in 1982 to “wage peace, fight disease, and build hope.”

“Not everybody gets 100 years on this earth, and when somebody does, and when they use that time to do so much good for so many people, it’s worth celebrating,” Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson and chair of The Carter Center governing board, said in an interview.

“These last few months, 19 months, now that he’s been in hospice, it’s been a chance for our family to reflect,” he continued, “and then for the rest of the country and the world to really reflect on him. That’s been a really gratifying time.”

The former president was born Oct. 1, 1924 in Plains, where he has lived more than 80 of his 100 years. He is expected to mark his birthday in the same one-story home he and Rosalynn built in the early 1960s — before his first election to the Georgia state Senate. The former first lady, who was also born in Plains, died last November at 96.

The Carter Center on Sept. 17 hosted a musical gala in Atlanta to celebrate the former president with a range of genres and artists, including some who campaigned with him in 1976. The event raised more than $1.2 million for the center’s programs and will be broadcast Tuesday evening on Georgia Public Broadcasting.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, Habitat for Humanity volunteers are honoring Carter with a five-day effort to build 30 houses. The Carters became top ambassadors for the international organization after leaving the White House and hosted annual building projects into their 90s. Carter survived a cancer diagnosis at age 90, then several falls and a hip replacement in his mid-90s before announcing at 98 that he would enter hospice care.

Townspeople in Plains planned another concert Tuesday evening.

The last time Jimmy Carter was seen publicly was nearly a year ago, using a reclining wheelchair to attend his wife’s two funeral services. Visibly diminished and silent, he was joined on the front row of Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church in Atlanta by the couple’s four children, every living former first lady, President Joe Biden and his wife Jill and former President Bill Clinton. A day later, Carter joined his extended family and parishioners at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, where the former president taught Sunday School for decades.

Jason Carter said the 100th birthday celebrations were not something the family expected to see once his grandmother died. The former president’s hospital bed had been set up in the same room so he could see his wife of 77 years and talk to her in her final days and hours.

“We frankly didn’t think he was going to go on much longer,” Jason Cater said. “But it’s a faith journey for him, and he’s really given himself over to what he feels is God’s plan. He knows he’s not in charge. But in these last few months, especially, he has gotten a lot more engaged in world events, a lot more engaged in politics, a lot more, just engaged, emotionally, with all of us.”

Jason Carter said the centenarian president, born only four years after women were granted the constitutional right to vote and four decades before Black women won ballot access, is eager to cast his 2024 presidential ballot — for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat who wants to become the first woman, second Black person and first person of south Asian descent to reach the Oval Office.

“He, like a lot of us, was incredibly gratified by his friend Joe Biden’s courageous choice to pass the torch,” the younger Carter said. “You know, my grandfather and The Carter Center have observed more than 100 elections in 40 other countries, right? So, he knows how rare it is for somebody who’s a sitting president to give up power in any context.”

USA Today‘s David Jackson argues, “Jimmy Carter’s presidency changed politics: Here’s how it still echoes in 2024.” While he stretches a bit to make the point, he’s largely right.

Former President Jimmy Carter is now the first White House occupant to make it to his 100th birthday – and one of the very few leaders with a political legacy that has lasted nearly a half-century.

Vaulting to the presidency in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate year of 1976, Carter changed the way presidential candidates are nominated and elected, embracing a system centered around primaries, caucuses and debates. He became the first modern anti-Washington “outsider” to actually win the presidency, forging a model followed, to one degree or another, by most of his seven successors.

Although he served only one 4-year term, Carter had to deal with issues that continued to challenge many of his successors, including inflation, climate, energy production, health care and Middle East conflicts – Iran in particular.

While lawmakers of all ideological stripes honor Carter’s post-presidential work, from building houses to monitoring elections overseas, the nation’s 39th president in some ways provided a model of what not to do in office. Topping the list: Fighting leaders of your own party, drawing high-profile primary opposition and losing reelection in a landslide.

Carter lost the presidency in 1980 to Republican Ronald Reagan, an election that swept to power a long-gestating conservative movement that remains a major force in the current race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

“He had a much more consequential presidency than many people understand,” said historian Kai Bird, a Carter biographer. “Look at the major issues we’re still dealing with today.”

Carter’s 1976 campaign for the Democratic nomination firmly established primaries as the institution they remain today, the vehicles to win convention delegates and clinch nominations.

Once upon a time, it would have been impossible for a little-known like Carter to ascend to a presidential nomination. There were few primaries and caucuses, and party leaders (and “bosses”) controlled the nomination process at conventions.

That turned upside down when the Democratic Party made rule changes after the tumultuous election of 1968. George McGovern took advantage of those changes to win a surprise nomination in 1972, but he lost the general election to Richard Nixon in a landslide.

Jimmy Carter took full advantage of the enhanced primary system in 1976 and went all the way.

The former one-term governor of Georgia made his bones by running in all primaries and caucuses, which skyrocketed in importance once party bosses were stripped of power. Carter’s initial win in the Iowa caucuses elevated that event to the prominence it still enjoys today.

In the fall race against President Gerald Ford – who had replaced the resigned Nixon because of Watergate – Carter benefitted from another new development that became an institution: General election debates.

Back in 1960, presidential nominees John F. Kennedy and Nixon did debate four times. But candidates avoided face-to-face encounters in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 campaigns. It took Carter and Ford to institutionalize general election debates, right up to the pivotal Trump-Biden and Harris-Trump clashes this year.

“The ’76 debates were really important,” said historian Julian Zelizer, author of a Carter biography. Overall, Carter “really understood how modern campaigns worked,” Zelizer said. “He got the whole thing, how politics had changed.”

But it wasn’t just the literal process of campaigning that Carter helped change. He also shaped how White House hopefuls connect with voters.

The former Georgia state senator created a kind-of model for future candidates by running as an “outsider” who would clean up a corrupted government. He pursued that strategy at a particularly fraught time in the nation’s history, as Vietnam and Watergate had fractured society and politics, opening the door for new faces like Carter.

Most of Carter’s successors ran as “outsiders” who were not part of the so-called “Washington establishment,” including governors or former governors like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; first-term Sen. Barack Obama and maverick businessman Donald Trump.

After his inauguration on Jan. 20, 1977, Carter carried his anti-Washington attitude into the Oval Office. His antipathy to the establishment extended even to his own Democratic Party. He fought with congressional leaders like newly installed House Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., and powerful Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., over items like re-organizing the government (to give the president more power), health care and deregulation.

In his biography of Carter, Zelizer wrote that the outsider president “simply did not like legislative politics.”

“His discomfort caused even more tension than it might have under different circumstances,” Zelizer wrote. “The congressional leadership didn’t particularly trust Carter any more than he did them and didn’t feel that they shared political interests.”

Carter also caught a slate of tough issues that persist. Friction with oil-producing countries created shortages and led to higher gas prices. The combination of slow economic growth, high unemployment and rising inflation generated a new economic term: Stagflation.

The former president set some foreign policy milestones, including the Panama Canal treaty and an emphasis on global human rights. Carter also brokered the Camp David Accords, the seminal treaty between Israel and Egypt that remains a model for Middle East peace negotiations.

But the Carter years also saw the first U.S. confrontation with the government of Iran led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. In late 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and detained more than 50 Americans. The Iranian hostage crisis lasted for 444 days.

Future presidents would also feud with Iran. In the current presidential campaign, intelligence officials have said Iranians are engaging in U.S. election interference, including hacking into Trump campaign computers. And as the Israel-Hamas war rages on, and strife between Israel and Iran mounts, the global challenges during Carter’s term continue to echo today.

But during his presidency, Carter’s disputes were made harder by friction with fellow Democrats.

His plans to deregulate airlines and other industries got him cross-wise with unions, a major sources of Democratic support. Carter’s disagreement with Kennedy over how to handle health care led to a development that more recent presidents have worked to avoid – a major primary challenge in a reelection year.

Carter did defeat Kennedy for the nomination in 1980, but the nasty contest went all the way to the convention and weakened the incumbent ahead of his landslide loss to Reagan.

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Carter remained in the public eye after defeat. From building houses with Habitat for Humanity to election monitoring overseas and fighting global diseases, Carter practically created the new job of “former president.”

He has also been known to speak out against some of the actions of his predecessors, making him one of the less popular members of the “President’s Club” over the years.

Carter’s criticism has been bipartisan. He questioned Clinton’s handling of nuclear negotiations with North Korea and criticized President George W. Bush for the Iraq War and other aspects of the fight against terrorism.

Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, said Carter showed that “sometimes it’s worth doing the right thing, even if it has a political cost.” Still, Zelizer added, “If you don’t hold together your political coalition you could wind up with a successor who could undo everything you’ve done.”

As I’ve often noted over here over the last 21 years, the “Reagan Defense Buildup” was actually a continuation off the so-called “Offset Strategy” initiated under Carter. As was the drive to de-regulation that we most associate with Reagan. So, by no means did he undo everything his predecessor started.

Carter was elected when I was 10 and inaugurated when I was 11, so he’s the first President about whom I had any significant understanding in real time. I distinctly remember watching his inauguration and inaugural parade. I’m a bit older now than he was at the end of his presidency.

While I wasn’t a fan of his politics at the time, I’ve come to appreciate many of his decisions. And one can’t help but admire his post-presidency. He’s certainly given more than he’s taken in this world.