How Jimmy Carter rebuilt his reputation post-presidency
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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter speaks with an Egyptian election official at a polling station in 2012, during the country's first free presidential vote. Carter Center international monitors observed. Photo: Wissam Saleh/AFP/Getty Images.
Jimmy Carter spent just four years in the White House, but the past 40 leading the Carter Center, a nonprofit he and his wife Rosalynn — who passed away in Nov. 2023 — founded in 1982 to keep pushing their political vision.
Why it matters: The nonprofit not only has been "waging peace" across the world, as Carter often said, it rebuilt his public image following his 1980 landslide election loss.
- Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute, which ranks U.S. presidents in numerous categories, tells Axios that Carter ranked 13th for integrity in 1982, but by 2022 had risen to No. 2. That's behind only Abraham Lincoln.
- "[That] certainly owes to his enhanced standing post-presidency," Levy said.
The big picture: The Carter Center's work aims to promote human rights, reduce illnesses and support democracy in places where it is endangered.
- "If the World Bank or Harvard University or whoever is adequately taking care of a problem, we don't get involved," Carter told The Guardian in 2011. "We only try to fill vacuums where people don't want to do anything,"
Details: The center's attention to the "neglected" and painful tropical Guinea worm disease helped drive cases from 3.5 million in 1986 to 13 in 2022.
- In 1994, Carter became the first U.S. president — former or sitting — to visit North Korea, a controversial trip that defused an immediate crisis.
- The former president won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for "decades of untiring effort" to promote democracy, human rights and peaceful solutions to conflict.
- Rosalynn Carter spearheaded the center's mental health program, which has trained clinicians and journalists, building on the work she did as First Lady.
Plus, the center played a vital role in election integrity worldwide.
- It has sent observers to more than 100 elections since 1989, largely in South America, Asia and Africa.
Flashback: Well before the Carter Center monitored a single election, the novice politician Jimmy fought voter fraud.
- In 1962 — in his first state Senate race — local political boss Joe Hurst favored Carter's opponent and orchestrated voter fraud in the election.
Yes, but: Carter challenged the election results and personally gathered affidavits from voters across the county. After a judge reviewed the evidence, Carter won a new write-in election.
More recently, the Carter Center turned its focus to U.S. elections, including Carter's home state Georgia, following the torrent of false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
- The center's bipartisan efforts continued in 2022 and 2024.
- Its overall goal is to promote nonpartisan citizen observation, spread accurate information and advocate for policy change.
By the numbers: The Carter Center's 2023 operating budget ran around $167 million, plus some $200 million from in-kind donations, mainly medicine for fighting a number of tropical diseases.
- For fundraising events, Carter liked to contribute his handcrafts, including wine and oil paintings. A cedar chest made by the former president sold for $1.25 million at a 2019 donor auction.
- He called woodworking therapeutic. "A stabilizing force in my life – a total rest for my mind.”
What's next? When Carter announced in 2015 that liver cancer had spread to his brain, he said that the center was "well prepared to continue on."
- His eldest grandson, Jason Carter, has been board chair since then.
Remembering Carter: The nation's longest-living former president, dies at 100.
