President Jimmy Carter example essay topic

James Earl Carter, Jr. was born on October 1, 1924 in Plains, Ga. The Carters lived in a three bedroom farmhouse in a remote region of Southwest Georgia. Jimmy (which became his nickname) was the eldest of two sisters, Gloria and Ruth, and a brother named William Alton. Carter's father was both a farmer and a businessman. He ran a store selling farm products on their property in Archery, which was just a few miles from Plains.

Carter's mother Lillian Gordy Carter was a registered nurse. Carter's father would not receive black people into his home, while his mother was more liberal on racial and social issues. Carter's mother made a greater impact on Carter's social conscience. The Carters lived in Plains when Jimmy was born. Four years later, they moved to the farm in Archery (Jimmy Carter American Moralist).

As a child Jimmy Carter would always help with the chores on their farm. He also developed an early interest in business at a fairly young age. When he was only 5 years old he would sell boiled peanuts on the streets of Plains. He earned about $1 a day on weekdays, and about $5 on a Saturday afternoon. At age 9 Carter bought five huge bales of cotton for 5 cents a pound, and sold it a few years later when the priced had more than tripled.

(Jimmy Carter American Moralist) Carter attended a public school in Plains. His favorite hobby was to read, and he received good grades. "A schoolmate later remembered that Carter 'was always the smartest in the class. ' " Some of Carter's favorite classes were history, literature, and music. As a teenager he played on the high school basketball team. In 1941 after graduating high school, Carter started school at Georgia Southwestern College in nearby Americus. (web) Then in 1942, "a boyhood dream came true" when Carter received an appointment to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Carter entered the Academy in 1943, after having to fulfill the requirements of mathematics which he completed at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Carter excelled in electronics, gunnery, and naval tactics. He graduated in 1946, ranking 59th in a class of 820. (World book) In the Navy Carter became a submariner, where he served in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. He later was raised to the rank of lieutenant. He was then chosen my Admiral Hyman Rickover for a nuclear submarine program, where Carter took graduate work at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

There Carter was working with reactor technology and nuclear physics, and also served as a senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Sea wolf. (web) On July 7th, 1946, Jimmy Carter married Rosalyn n Smith. His father later died in 1953, and Carter resigned from his naval commission and head back to Plains, Georgia with his family. In Plains, Carter took over the family farms, and himself and his wife owned and operated Carter's Warehouse, a farm supply company. He soon became a leader in the community, where he soon found himself serving on county boards, supervising education, the hospital authority, and the library. It was only natural that in 1962 he won the election to the Georgia Senate, where he served two consecutive two-year terms. In the senate, Carter built the reputation of "fiscal conservatism and social liberalism", and was particularly concerned with improving education, although his positioning with race was not quite clear.

In 1966, Carter lost the first gubernatorial campaign, but then won the next election. He became Georgia's 76th governor on January 21st, 1971. Carter surprised many Georgians and also was able to gain national attention with his inaugural address in 1971, "in which he called for an end to racial discrimination". He held the position of campaign chairman to the Democratic National Committee for the 1974 congressional elections. (web) Carter became viewed by the national press as a forerunner of the more moderate social and racial attitudes emerging in the "New South". While at his term as governor, there was a large increase of black citizens to state boards and agencies, and Carter placed a portrait of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., in the state capitol building, a move that would have been astonishing in earlier years. Carter managed to reorganize the state government by abolishing approximately 300 offices, commissions, and boards.

He consolidated their purpose into 22 brand new agencies. He also instituted a new zero-based budgeting system, which required state officials to theoretically justify ever budget request. He supported re institution of the death penalty in Georgia, and also worked for there to be stiffer sentences for drug violations. (web) Jimmy Carter was not eligible to serve a second term as governor, so he decided to run for president almost directly after his term expired in January 1975. His campaign was mostly built on moderate positions on major issues.

Carter also set a moral tone for the election, promising never to lie to the American people (this election came after the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, when the American public became increasingly skeptical in government politics). Carter needed to prove himself as a "vote-getter", and so he entered nearly all of the 30 presidential primaries. Carter soon began to win many of his primaries, winning his first in New Hampshire and soon after beating out Alabama Governor, George Wallace in the Florida primary. With his immense support of blacks and whites in the South, "Carter was able to gain a foothold in the Northern liberal and moderate areas of the nation". He was able to eliminate all of the other candidates, and went on to a first-ballot selection at the national convention in New York. It was there that Carter chose Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate, which allowed him to get more of a balance which the Northern liberals. (web) Jimmy Carter was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1977, "and immediately began to take symbolic actions to demonstrate his dislike for what he considered to be 'the imperial presidency'".

President Carter immediately began to do away with many of the "ceremonial trapping" of the presidency, which included selling the presidential yacht. (The Carter Presidency: A Re-Evaluation) In political affairs, Carter took it upon himself to formulate human rights as a "tenet of American policy". Carter often criticized nations that violated human rights, and his indications toward the Soviet government soon angered them, viewing Carter's statements as "intervention in its internal affairs". Despite these differences, Carter and the Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev signed the strategic arms limitation treaty in Vienna in June, 1979.

This treaty set the limits on numbers of U.S. and Soviet nuclear- weapon systems. Although Carter made a tremendous campaign, the treaty was not ratified by the Senate, and was eventually placed in a state of uncertainty by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. This invasion was also the result of Carter's assertion on a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games held in Moscow. (The Carter Presidency: A Re-Evaluation) Carter managed to bring to completion the lengthy negotiations over the treaties of the Panama Canal by convincing the Senate to ratify them.

It had been more than eighty years after the first official ocean-to-ocean transit of the Panama Canal, and now the United States and Panama finally decided on a partnership for the management, operation and defense of the Panama Canal. "The ratification of the Panama Canal treaties was an important step involving a decrease in Third World hostility toward the United States". The majority of the United States citizens had overlooked the money spent on the canal and saw it as a great opportunity to improve relations with Panama. Conservative forces strictly criticized the treaties as a "sellout of vital American interests", and the issue had a major impact in some areas of the South and West in the 1980 congressional and presidential campaigns. (The Carter Presidency: A Re-Evaluation) One of the most significant events of Carter's foreign policy was the signing of a peace treaty by Israeli Premier Men ahem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat on March 26, 1979.

The supposed Camp David agreement represented a high point in the Carter presidency, "although later negotiations to implement it foundered". (web) During Carter's presidency, after four years inflation and unemployment had grown considerably worse. Although Carter had pledged to eliminate federal deficits, the deficit had nearly doubled from 1979 to 1980. There were also problems for Carter internationally, "a drastic erosion of the value of the U.S. dollar in the international money markets", and many analysts had blamed the decline on a persistent trade deficit, which was due largely to the U.S. dependence on foreign oil. (web) Carter was not able to successfully gain support for his national health-insurance bill or proposals for welfare reform and controls on hospital costs. He was also ineffective in gaining congressional approval of plans to consolidate natural-resource agencies within the Department of the Interior and the expansion of development units in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His attempts on tax-reform proposals were never willingly received by Congress...

(The Carter Presidency: A Re-Evaluation) The two very different foreign policy perspectives in which President Jimmy Carter brought to his presidency was a fearlessness to refute and resolve a number of difficult and eventful problems. The ratification of the Panama Canal treaties was an important step in this fierce and objective determination. Jimmy Carter's had the willingness to address such issues that Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford had considered too tricky (The Carter Presidency: A Re-Evaluation). Jimmy Carter always had courage, and made the most of his opportunities and did what was best, which in turn was always for the general public of all United States.

There are still some unanswered questions about the Carter presidency, which may very well never be fully answered or understood, such as to why Jimmy Carter became so unpopular with not only the media, but also politicians and the general public. Carter also stayed fairly unpopular even during the presidency of his successor. With maybe just some more political skills, and a little bit of luck, Jimmy Carter and the rest of the United States might have seen a second successful term of presidency.