Former President Jimmy Carter in 2019. Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto/Getty

From the Collection: The President’s

“James Earl Carter” redirects here. For his father, see James Earl Carter Sr. For other uses, see James Carter.

Jimmy Carter
Official portrait, 1978
39th President of the United States
In office January 20, 1977 – January 20, 1981
Vice President	Walter Mondale
Preceded by	Gerald Ford
Succeeded by	Ronald Reagan
76th Governor of Georgia
In office January 12, 1971 – January 14, 1975
Lieutenant	Lester Maddox
Preceded by	Lester Maddox
Succeeded by	George Busbee
Member of the Georgia State Senate from the 14th district
In office January 14, 1963 – January 9, 1967
Preceded by	James M. Dykes
Succeeded by	Hugh Carter
Personal details
Born	James Earl Carter Jr. October 1, 1924 Plains, Georgia, U.S.
Died	December 29, 2024 (aged 100) Plains, Georgia, U.S.
Resting place	209 Woodland Drive, Plains, Georgia
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Rosalynn Smith(m.1946; died 2023)
Children	4, including Jack and Amy
Parents	James Earl Carter Sr.Bessie Lillian Gordy
Relatives	Carter family
Education	United States Naval Academy (BS)
Civilian awards	Full list
Signature
Military service
Branch/service	United States Navy
Years of service	1946–1953 (active)1953–1961 (reserve)
Rank	Lieutenant
Battles/wars	World War II
Military awards	American Campaign MedalWorld War II Victory MedalChina Service MedalNational Defense Service Medal
Jimmy Carter’s voiceDuration: 5 minutes and 26 seconds.5:26Carter speaks on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan Recorded January 4, 1980

James Earl Carter Jr. (October 1, 1924 – December 29, 2024) was an American politician and humanitarian who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the longest-lived U.S. president and the first to reach 100 years of age.

Born and raised in Plains, Georgia, Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 and joined the U.S. Navy‘s submarine service. He returned home after his military service to revive his family’s peanut-growing business before beginning a career in Georgia politics, where he supported the civil rights movement as a state senator and later as governor. Carter won the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination as a dark horse candidate before defeating incumbent president Gerald Ford of the Republican Party in the 1976 election.

Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders on his second day in office and successfully pursued the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, and the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. His administration established the U.S. Departments of Energy and Education.

The end of his presidency was marked by the Iran hostage crisis, an energy crisis, and the end of détente after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (leading to a grain embargo, the declaration of the Carter Doctrine, and the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycott). Carter defeated a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic primaries, but lost the general election to Republican Ronald Reagan.

After leaving the presidency, Carter established the Carter Center, with the goal of advancing human rights and alleviating human suffering. The Carter Center has since assisted in election monitoring, peace negotiations, and deworming and disease eradication efforts, becoming the driving force behind the campaign to end dracunculiasis (a neglected tropical disease). Carter’s post-presidency writings include political memoirs, commentary on global affairs, and books of poetry. Scholars and historians generally rank Carter as a somewhat below-average president, but his post-presidency period (the longest in U.S. history) is viewed highly favorably and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Early life

The Carter family store, part of Carter’s Boyhood Farm, in Plains, Georgia

James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, at the Wise Sanitarium, where his mother worked as a registered nurse.^[1] Carter thus became the first American president born in a hospital.^[2] He was the eldest child of Bessie Lillian Gordy and James Earl Carter Sr., and a descendant of English immigrant Thomas Carter, who settled in the Colony of Virginia in 1635.^[3][4] 

In Georgia, numerous generations of Carters worked as cotton farmers.^[5] Plains was a boomtown of 600 people at the time of Carter’s birth. His father was a successful local businessman who ran a general store and was an investor in farmland.^[6] Carter’s father had previously served as a reserve second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps during World War I.^[6]

During Carter’s infancy, his family moved several times, settling on a dirt road in nearby Archery, which was almost entirely populated by impoverished African American families.^[2][7] His family eventually had three more children, Gloria, Ruth, and Billy.^[8] 

Carter had a good relationship with his parents, even though his mother was often absent during his childhood since she worked long hours. Although his father was staunchly pro-segregation, he allowed Jimmy to befriend the black farmhands’ children.^[9] Carter was an enterprising teenager who was given his own acre of Earl’s farmland, where he grew, packaged, and sold peanuts.^[10] Carter also rented out a section of tenant housing he had purchased.^[2]

Education

Carter attended Plains High School from 1937 to 1941, graduating from the 11th grade as class valedictorian;^[11] the school did not have a 12th grade.^[12] By that time, Archery and Plains had been impoverished by the Great Depression, but the family benefited from New Deal farming subsidies, and Carter’s father became a community leader.^[10][13] 

Carter was a diligent student with a fondness for reading.^[14] According to a popular anecdote, he was passed over for valedictorian after he and his friends skipped school to venture downtown in a hot rod. Carter’s truancy was mentioned in a local newspaper, although it is not clear he would otherwise have been valedictorian.^[15] As an adolescent, Carter played on the Plains High School basketball team and joined Future Farmers of America, which helped him develop a lifelong interest in woodworking.^[15]

Carter had long dreamed of attending the United States Naval Academy.^[10] In 1941, he started undergraduate coursework in engineering at Georgia Southwestern College in nearby Americus, Georgia.^[16] The next year, Carter transferred to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where civil rights icon Blake Van Leer was president.^[17] 

While at Georgia Tech, Carter took part in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.^[18] Van Leer encouraged Carter to join the Naval Academy.^[19] In 1943, he received an appointment to the Naval Academy from the U.S. Representative Stephen Pace, and Carter graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1946.^[20][18] He was a good student, but was seen as reserved and quiet, in contrast to the academy’s culture of aggressive hazing of freshmen.^[21] 

While at the academy, Carter fell in love with Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister Ruth.^[22] The two wed shortly after his graduation in 1946, and were married until her death on November 19, 2023.^[23][24] Carter was a sprint football player for the Navy Midshipmen and a standout freshman cross country runner.^[25][26] He graduated 60th out of 821 midshipmen in the class of 1947^[a] with a Bachelor of Science degree and was commissioned as an ensign.^[28]

Naval career

Carter with Rosalynn Smith and his mother at his graduation from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, June 5, 1946

From 1946 to 1953, the Carters lived in Virginia, Hawaii, Connecticut, New York, and California, during his deployments in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.^[29] In 1948, he began officer training for submarine duty and served aboard USS Pomfret.^[30] 

Carter was promoted to lieutenant junior grade in 1949, and his service aboard Pomfret included a simulated war patrol to the western Pacific and Chinese coast from January to March of that year.^[31] In 1951, Carter was assigned to the diesel/electric USS K-1 (SSK-1), qualified for command, and served in several positions, to include executive officer.^[32]

In 1952, Carter began an association with the Navy’s fledgling nuclear submarine program, led by then-Captain Hyman G. Rickover.^[33] Rickover had high standards and demands for his men and machines, and Carter later said that, next to his parents, Rickover had the greatest influence on his life.^[34] Carter was sent to the Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C., for three-month temporary duty, while Rosalynn moved with their children to Schenectady, New York.^[35]

On December 12, 1952, an accident with the experimental NRX reactor at Atomic Energy of Canada‘s Chalk River Laboratories caused a partial meltdown, resulting in millions of liters of radioactive water flooding the reactor building’s basement. This left the reactor’s core ruined.^[36] Carter was ordered to Chalk River to lead a U.S. maintenance crew that joined other American and Canadian service personnel to assist in the shutdown of the reactor.^[37] 

The painstaking process required each team member to don protective gear and be lowered individually into the reactor for 90 seconds at a time, limiting their exposure to radioactivity while they disassembled the crippled reactor. When Carter was lowered in, his job was to turn a single screw.^[38] During and after his presidency, Carter said that his experience at Chalk River had shaped his views on atomic energy and led him to cease the development of a neutron bomb.^[39]

In March 1953, Carter began a six-month nuclear power plant operation course at Union College in Schenectady.^[29] His intent was to eventually work aboard USS Seawolf, which was intended to be the second U.S. nuclear submarine.^[40] His plans changed when his father died of pancreatic cancer in July, two months before construction of Seawolf began, and Carter obtained a release from active duty so he could take over the family peanut business.^[41][42] 

Deciding to leave Schenectady proved difficult, as Rosalynn had grown comfortable with their life there.^[43][44] She later said that returning to small-town life in Plains seemed “a monumental step backward.”^[45] Carter left active duty on October 9, 1953.^[46][47] 

He served in the inactive Navy Reserve until 1961 and left the service with the rank of lieutenant.^[48] Carter’s awards include the American Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal, China Service Medal, and National Defense Service Medal.^[49] As a submarine officer, he also earned the “dolphin” badge.^[50]

Farming

After debt settlements and division of his father’s estate among its heirs, Jimmy inherited comparatively little.^[51] For a year, he, Rosalynn, and their three sons lived in public housing in Plains.^[b] Carter was knowledgeable in scientific and technological subjects, and he set out to expand the family’s peanut-growing business.^[53] 

Transitioning from the Navy to farming was difficult as his first-year harvest failed due to a drought, and Carter had to open several bank lines of credit to keep the farm afloat.^[54] Meanwhile, he took classes and studied agriculture while Rosalynn learned accounting to manage the business’s books.^[55] Though they barely broke even the first year, the Carters grew the business and became quite successful.^{[52][55]    Source:} Jimmy Carter – Wikipedia

Former President Jimmy Carter in 2023.Photo: 

ALEX BRANDON/POOL/AFP via Getty

Jimmy Carter Cancer Treatment – Search

The former president — who holds the record for the nation’s longest-lived president —  has spent 19 months in hospice care but has overcome many health issues over the years, most notably his battle with cancer.

Carter was 91 years old in August 2015 when he announced that melanoma had been discovered during surgery to remove a small mass in his liver. At that point, the disease had spread to other parts of his body, including four “very small” spots in his brain.

But within months, the Nobel Peace Prize winner revealed that the cancer was completely gone following a successful surgery and innovative immunotherapy treatments. 

“For the public, Carter put immunotherapy on the map, period,” Drew Pardoll, director of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins, told the Washington Post. “Patients started asking for it.” It was called “the Jimmy Carter effect.”

Here’s what to know about the immunotherapy treatment that extended his life.

Jimmy Carter Officially Ends Treatments Months After Revealing That He’s Now Cancer-Free

“Immunotherapy is now considered a standard pillar of cancer therapy alongside surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy,”  Dr. Jedd Wolchok, director of the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine, tells PEOPLE. 

“The particular kind of immunotherapy that President Carter and many other people receive is called checkpoint blockade, which is essentially a treatment that cuts off molecular breaks that usually keep our immune system under control,” he explains. “And the idea is that by cutting off these molecular breaks, we let the immune system run at a higher level than it otherwise could, and therefore overcome some of the ways in which cancer can cloak itself from the immune system.” 

Following his diagnosis, Carter’s melanoma was treated with immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, which had only been FDA-approved the previous year. 

Wolchok — a member of the American Association for Cancer Research’s Board of Directors — says that the entire class of medication “transformed” the treatment of melanoma. There had been no previous drugs to treat the disease and improve survival time.

Wolchok recently published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that analyzed these immunotherapies and improving survival rates after a decade of treatment.

Survival times for brain metastases, which is what President Carter had, were even shorter than that six and a half months, Wolchok notes. Although immunotherapy was fairly new when Carter was treated, Wolchok adds that it is now crucial in almost every patient’s treatment plan for metastatic melanoma.

In Carter’s case, he was able to stop treatment after about six months. Nine years later he is still cancer-free at 100 years old. 

Wolchok tells PEOPLE that this is one of the benefits of immunotherapy.

“President Carter has been off treatment for many years, and I think that’s an advantage of immunotherapy because the drugs are not directly targeting the tumor cells. The drugs are actually enabling immune cells to do the heavy lifting and controlling the cancer,” he explains. “So if the drugs are working well, you shouldn’t need to continue them for very long periods of time because the job of the medicines is to really invigorate the immune cells and recognize the cancer in a more forceful way.”

“We know that the immune system has a memory and it remembers those educating events for decades,” Wolchok continues. “Now, it is true of course, that the immune system can become less effective as we get older, but thankfully we have seen that this kind of treatment can help people even when they reach an advanced age.”

“With 10 years of follow-up in the groups in the trial, nearly half of the patients were free from dying from metastatic melanoma. This is a disease where the average survival as recently as 2010 was six and a half months. Now the average survival is actually about six years,” he shares.

Film Description

Jimmy Carter’s story is one of the greatest dramas in American politics. 

In 1980, he was overwhelmingly voted out of office in a humiliating defeat. Over the subsequent two decades, he became one of the most admired statesmen and humanitarians in America and the world. Through interviews with the people who know him best, Jimmy Carter traces his rapid ascent in politics, dramatic fall from grace and unexpected resurrection, including Carter family home movies and a rare film sequence of Carter’s final hours in the Oval Office, when he and his advisors waited in vain for the release of the Americans who had been held hostage in Tehran for 444 days.

Carter was the first president to confront the challenge of militant Islam, then embodied by Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian revolution. Carter was also the first president to embark on what would prove to be the excruciating road to peace in the Middle East. But in the end, his presidency was undone by his failure to secure the hostages’ release and by a plummeting economy.

Yet the memories of his presidency — gas lines, inflation, recession, the Iran hostage crisis, an ineffectual and fractured administration, and the so-called national malaise — would be eclipsed, finally, by his post-presidential successes as a peacemaker in the world’s most troubled areas, and his emergence as a champion for the poor in his own country.

Pence reveals words exchanged with President-elect Trump at Carter funeral

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/carter/#part01

Watch Jimmy Carter | American Experience | Official Site | PBS