Editor’s Note: Jimmy Carter, who died December 29, 2024, at age 100, had a long history with Notre Dame. The former U.S. president’s 1976 campaign included a campus rally. During his first year in office, he delivered an important foreign policy address at the 1977 Commencement. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, received the inaugural Notre Dame Award for International Humanitarian Service in 1992. A longtime friend of Father Hesburgh, Carter also spoke at the 2015 tribute to the legendary University president. Presidential historian Robert Schmuhl reflects on Carter’s ascension to the White House, his one-term presidency and the values that guided his public life.
Jimmy Carter emerged as a national political figure at a time when America was hungry to turn the page on the recent past and willing to try someone completely different from the Washington politicians who’d occupied the White House during the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s.
After the Vietnam War and Watergate, with whopper after whopper of truth-stretching, to hear a presidential candidate promise, “I’ll never lie to you,” struck many potential voters as audaciously appealing. In addition, there was the ever-present and toothy smile that provided a visual clue to the question then on lips of millions: “Jimmy who?”
The one-term governor of Georgia went door-to-door and television studio-to-television studio introducing himself to America before the caucuses and primaries in 1976. He and his campaign advisors had figured out the significance of the new, more participatory presidential nominating system that had come into being during the ’70s.
Carter focused on the first contest, the Iowa caucuses, to make his initial impact. As it turned out, he didn’t win — but, more importantly, he didn’t lose. He received about 28 percent of the vote, while “uncommitted” garnered 37 percent.
You can’t interview the amorphous entity called “uncommitted,” so journalists eager to explain the mysterious selection process rushed to the next best opportunity: the candidate with the greatest support. Carter was more than happy to talk about his policy proposals, his background in public service, even his life as a peanut farmer.
Media exposure was his oxygen, his telegenic smile his calling card.
Success in the New Hampshire primary a month after Iowa helped build a strong foundation for winning the nomination. At the Democratic National Convention in mid-July, he ended up securing the backing of nearly three-quarters of the delegates. No other candidate was close.
In the November election that year, Carter took on Gerald Ford, the incumbent president. Ford, who had replaced Richard Nixon after his resignation in 1974, had weathered a stiff nomination battle with former California governor Ronald Reagan to become the Republican standard bearer.
Though Ford won more states than Carter — 27 to 23 — the incumbent lost both the popular and Electoral College votes. The man from Georgia was the first former governor to become president since Franklin D. Roosevelt 44 years earlier. Roosevelt, too, had beaten an incumbent, Herbert Hoover.
Carter’s victory started the presidential trend of candidates not associated with Washington — those known as “outsiders” — winning the White House. Reagan followed in 1980 and then Bill Clinton in 1992. The trend continues, and Donald Trump, who never spent a day in government and didn’t serve in the military, became the most notable “outsider” with his victory in 2016.
Carter, who made six trips to Notre Dame before, during and after his White House days, deserves credit as a political and presidential pioneer. A virtual unknown, he mastered the complex nominating process and then opened the door to outsiders as occupants of the nation’s highest office.
The Carter presidency, alas, will never rank among the best in overall achievement. (A 2021 survey of historians placed him 26th out of 44 for leadership and performance.) A lackluster economy with crippling inflation hobbled the nation in the late 1970s, and a 444-day hostage crisis involving 52 Americans in Iran made the U.S. look weak. A failed attempt to rescue the hostages became a potent symbol of the administration’s inability to solve problems.
Carter also paid a price for trying to do too much on his own. When word leaked that he personally handled scheduling of the White House tennis court, more than a few observers wondered about his time-management skills.
Despite the dilemmas and difficulties, there was a consistency of purpose that helped define the administration and the man in charge.
One specific focus of his attention became a hallmark pursuit, and Notre Dame played a central part in it. Carter came to the University on May 22, 1977 to deliver that year’s commencement address and to receive an honorary degree. Early in his remarks, he roused the assembled thousands in the Athletic and Convocation Center by recognizing someone he’d come to know well and would call on frequently.
“In his 25 years as president of Notre Dame,” the president of the United States said, “Father [Theodore] Hesburgh has spoken more consistently and more effectively in the support of the rights of human beings than any other person I know.”
That compliment became the springboard to one of Carter’s most detailed and important presidential statements. In a key portion of his address, he championed “America’s commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.”
This president planned to be different from previous ones who practiced “realpolitik:” an emphasis on national interests whatever that might involve. His approach would stress moral considerations as well as the more pragmatic ones.
Outlining his orientation, he developed his argument by saying: “In ancestry, religion, color, place of origin and cultural background, we Americans are as diverse a nation as the world has ever seen. No common mystique of blood or soil unites us. What draws us together, perhaps more than anything else, is a belief in human freedom. We want the world to know that our nation stands for more than financial prosperity.”
The word “freedom” became central to nearly everything Jimmy Carter did. He worked to enlarge democracy and the freedom it brings in this country and abroad. He battled numerous diseases around the world to provide the freedom that comes from being healthier. He built homes for those in need to give people the freedom of their own habitat.
Carter was 56 when he left the White House in 1981. Until his final illness and almost two years in hospice care, he devoted nearly every day during his post-presidency to a cause or a concern with the goal of expanding and deepening “human freedom.”
In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for, in the words of the citation, “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
His untiring effort has come to an end at age 100, but his life and work provide an enduring legacy — and a definitive answer to that question so many asked almost a half-century ago: “Jimmy who?”
Bob Schmuhl is the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Notre Dame. He’s the author of several books, including Fifty Years with Father Hesburgh: On and Off the Record and The Glory and the Burden: The American Presidency from the New Deal to the Present (both published by Notre Dame Press).