Jimmy Carter's Faith, Leadership, and Moral Presidency

Introduction: Faith and Moral Leadership

The 39th President of the United States, James Earl ("Jimmy") Carter, Jr., was elected to the White House in 1976, having defeated the incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford. Ford himself had not been elected President; he had completed Richard Nixon's second term when Nixon resigned in 1974 as a result of the Watergate scandals. Jimmy Carter was in turn defeated by Republican challenger Ronald Reagan when he sought re-election four years later. During the 1976 presidential race, Carter stressed his strong belief in and capacity for moral leadership — a quality especially appealing to American voters in the aftermath of Watergate.

Jimmy Carter's moral values, a key component of his presidential leadership style, did not emerge from nowhere in 1976. On the contrary, the values of Carter's childhood, adolescence, and early manhood were deeply influenced by his family's Southern Baptist piety. The values that shaped his early life carried over into his public and private work as an adult, inside and outside politics: throughout his college and graduate education; his Naval career; his business career as a Georgia peanut farmer; his tenure as Governor of Georgia; his time as a Presidential candidate; and his four years as President of the United States. Carter's successful 1976 presidential candidacy and his policies as President were guided by those same ideas of faith.

In particular, Carter's distinctly moral, humanistic approach to leadership — characterized especially by his emphasis on and lifelong commitment to human rights, honesty, and integrity, as opposed to the self-interest of various other contemporary U.S. Presidents — had been based all along on early influences that helped determine his leadership style long before he ever held public office. A faith- and morality-driven presidency, however well-intentioned and full of integrity it may be, does not always add up in the end to a great or even a very good one. This fact is vividly and sometimes starkly exemplified by the less-than-successful aspects of Carter's largely, though not completely, undistinguished presidency. As Kaufman states, Carter, while President from 1976 through 1980, was "long on good intentions but short on knowledge."

According to Hargrove, Carter was a personable but also a probing discussion leader, and that quality, combined with his inner circle's independent reading, research, and private reflection, was how decisions were arrived at within the Carter White House. On the other hand, perhaps in reaction to Watergate, Carter was neither well-practiced nor very interested in political maneuvering, and was perhaps — due, as Hargrove suggests, to his engineering background in the Naval Submarine Program under Hyman Rickover — too intently focused and therefore lacking in sufficient peripheral vision.

Still, the overall moral integrity of Jimmy Carter's presidency deserves fresh scrutiny — not so much for what it accomplished, which remains questionable, but for what it embodied: a steady and serious sense of human dignity, human equality, and ethical fair play. Primary and secondary evidence drawn from biographical, political, philosophical, and other works from 1976 onward offers insight into his morally based leadership: a kind America might arguably do well to more strongly encourage today, rather than ignore or denigrate when found, rarely, among its political, corporate, and educational leaders.

Early Life, Family, and Formative Influences

James Earl ("Jimmy") Carter, Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in the tiny rural Georgia farming town of Plains. Carter and his three younger siblings — Gloria, Ruth, and Billy — were raised on a 350-acre peanut farm, by far the largest and most prosperous in the area. Their father, James Earl Carter, Sr., was a very successful and enormously hard-working, exacting, but always compassionate and fair-minded farming businessman.

Consequently, there was very little turnover, for years at a time, among the mostly African-American tenant farmers and day laborers who worked at the farm. Carter recalls that when he first came home after eleven years away — first at Annapolis Naval Academy in Maryland, and then as a command officer in the Navy's nuclear submarine program for seven years until his father died in 1953 — he was surprised to see that most of the same people who had been working for his father before he left for Annapolis were still there.

Several early positive role models, mentors, and lifelong moral influences strongly shaped Former President Carter's life and work — publicly and privately — as they did when he was President. Carter recalls that it was on the family farm that he learned the value of sustained physical labor done carefully, meticulously, and with a sense of pride — and about the dignity of honest work, whatever it was. He learned this watching his father, but even more so from working alongside his father's main assistant, a Black man and near-lifetime employee of Earl Carter, Jack Clark.

It was Jack Clark, not Earl himself, who was Jimmy Carter's first real teacher about farm work, both in its large dimensions and its finer details. As Carter recollects in his memoir of his rural childhood: "Before I was big enough for real farm work, Daddy encouraged me to spend time with Jack Clark, knowing that it was the best way for me to be educated about farm life." He adds, "Jack kept up a constant stream of comments about the world as he knew it, or envisioned it."

Carter also recalls that Clark's wife Rachel — a small, gentle, regally elegant woman who had "skin lighter than her husband" and "a special aura about her" — influenced his worldview on matters of conscience and social justice. Carter writes, "I believe that, if Rachel's ancestors in Africa could be traced, they would be found to be a royal family." The former President notes that the early formative lessons about farm life and human dignity remained with him, proving especially helpful when he returned from the Navy after his father's death to run the farm.

Naval Career and the Rickover Standard

In his 1976 campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, candidate Carter explained the origin of that title. His future mentor in the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine program, future Admiral Hyman Rickover, upon learning that Carter had graduated 59th in his class of 802 at Annapolis, asked the future President whether he had in fact done his best. Carter had to admit to Rickover — whose new nuclear submarine program Carter very much wished to enter — that he had not always done his best in college. He then reviewed in his mind all of the various times he had not done his best to learn everything he possibly could in all of his Annapolis classes.

Rickover's challenge to Carter — to always do his best, and if he ever did not, to ask himself why not — became a standard Carter would uphold in all future areas of his life from that day forward. The future Admiral Rickover would later become an important mentor to newly commissioned Lieutenant Jimmy Carter, USN, during Carter's eight-year naval career.

That naval career ended abruptly, however, as a result of his father Earl's death back in Plains. After his father died, Carter understood the need — despite his strong personal desire to remain in the Navy for life — to leave the service and return to Plains in order to take over the complex management of his family's long-established, successful peanut farming business. As Carter reflects in Why Not the Best?, a strong belief in the importance of serving God through public service — whether within the United States Navy, through community work, or by holding political office — has continually been a major catalyst in his adult life.

The Presidency: Achievements, Failures, and Religious Paradox

As Governor of Georgia before becoming President, Jimmy Carter had promoted ecology, greater government efficiency, and less waste at taxpayer expense by consolidating 300 state departments into just 30. He also removed racial barriers and increased educational and other opportunities for disadvantaged children and adults.

As U.S. President, Carter made human rights a cornerstone priority of his administration. During the Camp David negotiations, he brokered an Israel-Egypt peace treaty. He also brought about the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty, thereby promoting peace with Panama over continued U.S. hegemony over the Canal Zone. In addition, Carter was responsible for the success of the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT).

During Carter's one term in office, the Arab Oil Embargo caused sky-high gas prices, two-hour lines at the pump, and temporary gas rationing. Out-of-control oil prices combined with double-digit inflation gave many Americans an increasingly dim view of Carter's presidential leadership in the run-up to 1980. As for foreign policy, the internationally embarrassing Iran Hostage Crisis was likely Carter's final political undoing. He lost that fall to Ronald Reagan. By most measures, Carter's presidency was largely undistinguished.

Ribuffo suggests how Carter's deeply held Protestant beliefs deeply inflected, if not drove altogether, his decision-making processes and leadership. That fundamental religious influence on the secular office of the American Presidency, Ribuffo argues, may have strengthened Carter's personal resolve and inner confidence as president, but may also have resulted in a lack of clear focus or forcefully underscored, widely recognizable purpose to his administration. That in turn, Ribuffo suggests, may have contributed to many Americans' perception of Carter — especially during the years of high inflation, soaring gas prices, and the Iran Hostage Crisis — as a weak and indecisive leader.

Conclusion: A Moral Beacon in Perspective

Throughout his life, Jimmy Carter has accepted his weaknesses and mistakes as President for what they were, and determinedly drew on the strengths he did have and let them work for him. Losing the presidency to Ronald Reagan in 1980 might have led him into bitterness and recrimination. Instead, he launched the Carter Center in Atlanta — a base for his efforts to reconcile warring factions abroad, eradicate diseases in developing countries, and address domestic problems of housing and poverty.

Carter's post-presidential volunteer work and other humanitarian activities, even if not in the purest sense apolitical, seem no longer to be dominantly politically driven. Through his myriad charitable works for organizations like Habitat for Humanity; through his varied and prolific writings across many public and personal subjects, including fiction and poetry; and through his volunteer ambassadorial efforts to promote genuine democratic principles worldwide, the former President arguably shines brighter today than ever as a beacon of non-politically centered human morality.

Former President Carter, recalling his public service in Why Not the Best?, demonstrates that he still possesses the same quiet seriousness and low-key, dispassionate, carefully analytical sense of purpose he showed as U.S. President. The overall moral integrity of Jimmy Carter's presidency deserves fresh scrutiny — not so much for what it accomplished, which remains questionable, but for what it embodied: a steady and serious sense of human dignity, human equality, and ethical fair play. As Ribuffo suggests, Carter's deeply held beliefs may at times have blurred the practical focus of his administration, yet they also produced a consistency of conscience rarely matched in American presidential history. That consistency, visible from the Plains peanut fields through the Oval Office to the Carter Center's global health missions, is perhaps his most enduring contribution.