But he rose to even greater heights with his post-presidential career, devoting another four decades to working as an international envoy of peacemaking and democracy. James Earl Carter Jr., a peanut farmer who became the 39th president of the United States, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.Sign up to receive daily headline news from Ottawa Citizen, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
When he ran for president as a one-term former Georgia governor, Carter was so improbable a candidate that he said his mother asked him, “President of what?”Article content Ford had pardoned Nixon for any Watergate crimes. In the aftermath of Watergate, Carter was the anti-Richard Nixon figure. “I will never lie to you,” he told voters. But Carter was elected by only 2 percentage points.
He won the beginnings of an energy conservation policy. He gained ratification of the treaties that yielded U.S. control of the Panama Canal. He opened full diplomatic relations with China. The departments of energy and education were created. But his administration struggled and Carter shook up his Cabinet amid “a crisis of confidence.”On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian demonstrators invaded the U.S.
Carter spent nearly seven years in the Navy’s nuclear submarine force, resigning to take over the family business after his father died in 1953. His first political stop was in the Georgia State Senate. A Democratic moderate with a New South image, Carter was elected governor of Georgia in 1970, succeeding segregationist Lester Maddox and gaining his first national note when he declared in his inauguration address “the time for racial discrimination is over.