The Unexpected Life and Times of Jimmy Carter: An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural, Southern, and White, and Black, in America

Carter was the 39th president of the United States. His term was filled with remarkable highs, like leading peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt, and irreversible lows, like his inability to repair a failing American economy. But, true to form and unlike other presidents, Carter excelled after his presidency, winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian and peace initiatives.

Those impulses recur in distant moments. As a boy, for instance, he spent a lot of time with the African American families who worked as tenant farmers or day laborers on his father’s land. He played with their children, went for dinner with them, absorbed their values and even tried to duplicate their manner of speech. Carter felt that it was only natural for him to be the outsider and try to emulate their habits and language, as he wrote in “An Hour before Daylight: Memories of a Rural.” He took pride in helping his mother and their Black neighbors understand each other, and hoped that he could help them with their personal and financial issues. “I usually found a way to bring up these issues at home when I thought it might help,” he wrote.

In 2002, having been nominated many times for the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Carter finally won it for his “vital contribution” to the Camp David agreement, which set the stage for peace between Israel and Egypt, as well as for his commitment to human rights, his work fighting tropical diseases and for furthering democracy everywhere.

Mr. Carter’s own party was largely responsible for his ascendance to the presidency. Assembling a formidable coalition of small-town and rural voters, white blue-collar voters and African Americans, he surprised everyone in America — except perhaps himself and his wife, Rosalynn — when he beat Gerald Ford in the 1976 election.

He could not have been at a better time. The previous decade had been brutal for the United States. One president, Lyndon Johnson, chose not to seek another term because of rising public anger at an unwinnable war in Vietnam. Another, Richard Nixon, resigned to avoid impeachment. Kennedy, Bobby and Martin Luther King Jr. died in the line of duty, as well as another Kennedy. The war ended in failure.

He opposed the Gulf War and the US invasion of Iraq, but he was criticized when he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the oppression of black people in South Africa. Heriled many Americans by suggesting the opposition to President Barack Obama was not based on race. He gained new admirers and detractors alike with his public disapproval of Donald Trump.

As former president, Carter did not shy from controversy, particularly when it came to the Middle East, the region that gave him his greatest foreign policy achievement and also his most damaging setback as president.

Carter’s own performance in his post-presidential career made a big difference in his reputation. He worked with Habitat for Humanity to rehabilitate homes for low-income families. The Carter Center was established by him as a nonprofit and he taught at the university. Over the years, he published more than two dozen books and became an advocate for peace, democratic reforms and humanitarian causes.

Historians have generally not rated Carter’s presidency highly, and he left office with his Gallup poll approval rating in the low 30s. His Gallup approval rating has been climbing back up to 50% since the start of the year, but he hasn’t lost his appeal with the public.

The polls broke sharply in the final days, and in November, Reagan captured nearly all the Southern states that Carter had carried four years earlier and won the 1980 presidential election with 489 Electoral College votes. Carter conceded before the polls had even closed on the West Coast.

The election looked close at Labor Day and even into October. But the single debate the two camps agreed to, held on Oct. 28, 1980, the week before the election, was a clear win for the challenger. Carter was unsuccessful in painting Reagan as an Extremist. Even as the Republican continued his attacks on the economy and Carter’s record he was still reassured and upbeat.

Reagan went on to win New Hampshire and the Southern primaries. His victory at the RNC in Detroit set the scene for his campaign.

Ronald Reagan was a former two-term governor of California who had sought the nomination twice before, and he did not begin 1980 as the consensus choice of his party. But he wove a complex set of issues into a fabric with broad appeal. He called for more defense spending, a more aggressive foreign policy, and a return to the traditional values of family, work and neighborhood in his proposal. He also opposed abortion and busing for racial integration and favored school prayer — the three hottest buttons in social policy at the time.

Carter was able to use the hostage crisis to his advantage in suppressing the challenge to his nomination mounted by Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Carter refused to debate Kennedy and made the primaries a kind of referendum on the Iranian situation. Enough Democrats rallied to his side that Kennedy’s bid, a favorite cause of liberal activists and organized labor, fell far short. Still, it contributed to the weakness of Carter’s standing in the general election. And what had worked against a challenger from the Democratic left did not work when Carter faced one from the Republican right.

Carter’s standing was damaged by the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. Opposing that aggression was popular, but Carter’s decision to retaliate by having the U.S. boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow was less so.

The Iranian crisis had worse consequences. The Shah was overthrown in a revolution that brought about the installation of a stern theocratic regime led by a critic of the U.S. The United States Embassy in Tehran was overran by the Shah’s followers, after Carter granted him a visa to attend cancer treatments in the United States. Fifty-two Americans were taken hostage. Carter’s efforts to free them were unavailing. An airborne raid intended to free them ended in catastrophe in the Iranian desert, leaving eight U.S. service members dead after a collision of aircraft on the ground.

Carter and the Democrats paid a price, suffering more than the usual losses for the president’s party in the 1978 midterm elections, which greatly reduced Democratic margins in both the House and the Senate.

Although his name recognition nationally was only 2% at the time of his announcement, Carter believed he could meet enough people personally to make a strong showing in the early presidential caucuses and primaries. He embarked on a 37-state tour, making more than 200 speeches before any of the other major candidates had announced.

He served as a president for four decades, the final one in his hometown of Plains, Ga. He was 100 and had lived longer than any other U.S. president, battling cancer in both his brain and liver in his 90s.

Ronald Reagan defeated him in the race for reelection in 1980. Thereafter, he worked with Habitat for Humanity and traveled the globe as an indefatigable advocate for peace and human rights. He was given the U.N. Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 1998 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Carter was the first president from the Deep South elected since the Civil War. At the time when Democrats were still dominant in his home state, he entered politics. He had begun his career as a naval officer in the submarine corps, but in 1953 he left the service to take over the family peanut business when his father died. He made his first bid for governor in 1966 after four years in the legislature.

In that contest, he finished behind another Democrat, Lester Maddox, a populist figure known for brandishing a pickax handle to confront civil rights protesters outside his Atlanta restaurant.

Carter was part of the traditional white Southern cultural identity. But he was also noted for his support for integration and the Civil Rights Movement led by fellow Georgian Martin Luther King Jr. Four years after losing to Maddox, Carter was elected his successor and declared in his inaugural speech that “the time for racial discrimination is over.”

Time magazine made him a symbol of the “New South” when he was featured on its cover four months later. He was all in for a presidential bid after leaving the job as governor. He appeared before small groups in farming communities and far away from the big media centers as he crept up onto the national stage.

He connected with both rural voters and evangelicals wherever he went because he was able to do well in big cities but also in the less populated parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Almost immediately upon taking office, Carter encountered difficulties with various power centers in Congress. He and his tight circle of aides brought along from Georgia and the campaign were not attuned to congressional customs or prerogatives, and a variety of their agenda priorities ran afoul of their own party’s preferences.

Carterites regarded as unnecessary pork barrel spending the “hit list” of Western water projects. For a raft of Democratic senators and representatives facing reelection in thirsty states and districts, the list came as a declaration of war. Although Congress fought Carter to a draw on the projects, many of these Western seats would be lost to Republican challengers in 1978 and 1980.

Carter had taken office amid historically high inflation and energy prices that had persisted since the Arab oil embargo of 1973. Paul Volcker, Carter’s new chair of the Federal Reserve, was responsible for triggering the greatest unemployment rate since the Great Depression and tamed inflation but also created inflation and caused a recession. Along the way, there was more grief on the oil front as Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 caused not only a price spike but long lines at the pump — worse than in 1973.

I think history will judge Jimmy Carter as a president well ahead of his times. I think he’s the most decent man to have been in the Oval Office in the 20th century.

A Bird’s View of American Identity and Politics: A Memoir of Carter Carter and the Age of Rasal Discrimination in the United States

A bird. Yes. He said in the famous speech, “Too many of us now tend to worship self-absorption and consumption.” Now, he’s taking a page straight out from Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, which he had just recently read. But this also spoke to his Southern Baptist sense of morality and righteousness. And it was a sermon. I think it’s very wise today, because we’re still living in a culture of politics that is too egotistical.

Inskeep: In 1979, he gave a famous speech about a crisis of confidence in America, doubt about the meaning of our own lives. I’m quoting his words now, ‘A loss of unity, of purpose for our nation, the erosion of our confidence in the future.’

Bird: Yes. You know, he grew up in deep segregation, a time when the South and much of the country was still dealing with racial segregation. He was sympathetic with the Black people that he grew up with. When he was governor, he said that the time for racial discrimination is over. It was shocking to his audience.

I know from your book that he was raised in an elite family in the rural part of the country and his father had a group of Black workers who he was trying to change or improve the patriarchal society in which he lived.

Carter was often followed his instincts and did what he believed was right despite society’s pressure to follow the rules, according to Kai Bird, biographer and author of The Outlier.

Even in the last year of his life, Carter continued to mark milestones. He turned 100 this year, which is when he became the oldest living former president and voted for Harris in the presidential election.

Carter Carter: A Little Girl Who Could Have a Fun Life, but Not a Little Girl. A Little Story About Racial Segregation in the United States

Bird said that the boy was the smartest in the room. He thought he was the smartest person in the room. He had an ambition, so he was faced with a dilemma.

Carter grew up without running water and an outhouse, because he was raised on humble farmlands in southern Georgia. He played with the Black children in his community during a time of intense racial segregation in the U.S.