Today is former US President Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday, so here are 10 facts about him:
Carter was the first American president born in a hospital. the Wise Sanitarium in Plains, Georgia, to be exact. Carter’s mother, Lillian, worked there as a nurse. Three years later, Lillian would help deliver her future daughter-in-law, Rosalynn.
After his father’s sudden death in 1953, Carter left the Navy to manage his family’s Peanut farm in Georgia.
He believed in the Civil Rights movement and was the only white man in Plains who refused to join a group to oppose it. Some people boycotted his farm in protest, but Carter still wouldn’t join the group.
In 1974, Carter announced that he would run for president in 1976. Since he was a bit of an unknown, he published a book about his life called Why Not the Best? He positioned himself as a political outsider who was scandal free, which after the Watergate scandal increased his popularity. In a close race, he defeated then president Gerald Ford and became the country’s 39th president.
He believed in and promoted wind and solar power, and put his money where his mouth was by installing solar panels at the White House. His ideas on this subject weren’t popular. When he left office the solar panels were taken down. However, Barack Obama put them back and even Donald Trump didn’t remove them – they are still there today.
He is the only president to have graduated from the United States Naval Academy in in Annapolis, Maryland.
He was the first president to use a nickname rather than his full name when sworn into office (Jimmy rather than James).
One of Carter’s greatest accomplishments in office was a step toward peace in the Middle East. He brought leaders from the rival countries to Camp David in Maryland, a holiday home for U.S. presidents in 1978. Carter helped create an agreement between the nations called the Camp David Accords that established peace between Israel and Egypt for the first time in history.
Things didn’t go so well in 1979 when students from Iran stormed the U.S. embassy in the capital city of Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage. Carter unsuccessfully tried to resolve the issue with peace talks. When that failed, he signed off on a secret military rescue, which didn’t go well at all. Some helicopters got stuck in a sandstorm, others had mechanical failures, and one crashed into another aircraft. The rescue attempt killed eight U.S. soldiers and one Iranian civilian. The hostages were still being held during the 1980 presidential campaign, which cost Carter votes. Ronald Reagan won by a landslide.
At 56, Carter began what is now the longest presidential retirement in U.S. history. Since leaving the White House in 1981, he’s written more than 20 books, has worked to negotiate peace agreements between nations, create fair elections in other countries, and improve health in developing nations. Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Only three other presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama—have received this honour. At 99, he became the longest lived former President ever.
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The Gingerbread Man
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