Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the United States, turns 91 years old tomorrow.
Anyone who visits Plains, in southwest Georgia, and especially the Carter farmstead three miles down the road in Archery, cannot fail to be impressed by the simplicity of Carter’s background. The Carter farmhouse lacked indoor plumbing during Jimmy Carter’s childhood, and it wasn’t until Carter was 14 years old that Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Agency brought the wonders of electricity to Archery.
Carter walked three miles to school and back, often barefoot. He was acutely conscious of his status as a “country boy,” but he studied hard and read diligently. His favorite teacher, Julia Coleman, often remarked that one of her students might be president of the United States someday. Young Jimmy Carter was listening.
Carter attended the U.S. Naval Academy and after returning to Plains in 1953, he embarked on a political career: the Georgia State Senate, governor of Georgia, then his improbable run for president of the United States.
The country was in a mess when Carter took office in 1977: the lingering scars of Vietnam and Watergate, the Arab Oil Embargo, runaway inflation and soaring interest rates.
Carter’s presidency is not generally considered a successful one, but historians have a way of revisiting the past, and now they are beginning to appreciate some of his accomplishments: the Camp David Accords, renegotiation of the Panama Canal treaty, emphasis on human rights, his calls for energy independence. Carter appointed more women and minorities to office than any president before him, and many conservationists consider him the best environmental president ever.
Carter’s devastating loss in his bid for a second term in 1980 might have persuaded a lesser person to retire quietly to Plains. But Carter had other ideas. The Carter Center, founded in 1982, has compiled a remarkable record of averting military conflicts and eradicating disease.
“Jimmy Carter is the only person in history,” says James Laney, the former president of Emory University, “for whom the presidency was a steppingstone.”
Carter is generally regarded as the best ex-president in American history. And now that the partisan gloss his political adversaries have painted is beginning to fade, historians are coming around to view his presidency more favorably.
That’s not a bad birthday present for someone turning 91.
