Pre-Presidency:

• Carter grew up on a farm with no running water or electricity and went barefoot most of the year.
  
• Carter’s father was a farmer, merchant and strict segregationist; his mother was an eccentric nurse who took care of black patients for free; he was raised by an illiterate Black cotton-picker who shared her love of nature and instilled his value system. His playmates were mostly Black.
  
• Carter was badly hazed at the Naval Academy. While at sea, he wrote Rosalynn sexually-explicit love letters that have never been published before.
  
• Carter was a protege of Admiral Hyman Rickover, whose development of nuclear-powered submarines was considered the greatest technological marvel of the immediate postwar era.
  
• Carter spent 90 seconds in a melted-down nuclear reactor, helping to repair it without being killed.
  
• Carter was an integrationist but remained silent for 18 years (between 1953 and 1971) about the vicious civil rights abuses going on in his own backyard—then spend the second half of his life making up for it.
  
• Carter went door-to-door in 1980 as a Baptist missionary in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania and Springfield, Massachusetts, once happening on a brothel, where he tried unsuccessfully to convert the madam.
  
• Carter ran a dog whistle, code word campaign for governor in 1970, seeking support from the founder of the White Citizens’ Council, but he also established an important relationship with Martin Luther King Sr. and after being sworn in did much for civil rights in Georgia.
  
• Carter’s friend David Rabhan—an eccentric entrepreneur and pilot later imprisoned for a decade in Iran—was indirectly responsible for him being elected governor and president.
  
• Carter came from zero in the polls to win the 1976 Democratic nomination and the presidency. His defeat of George Wallace in the Florida primary destroyed the openly racist wing of the Democratic Party. This is his racially progressive legacy. 
  

Presidency:

• Carter exaggerated but never lied as president and was transparent to a fault, even insisting that even his hemorrhoids be disclosed. Running for reelection, he gave himself middling grades on 60 Minutes.
  
• Carter got more of his legislation passed than any other president since World War II except Lyndon Johnson.
  
• Carter was the only president since Thomas Jefferson under whom the U.S. military never fired a shot or dropped a bomb.
  
• Carter was the greatest environmental president since Theodore Roosevelt—doubling the size of the National Park Service and signing 14 environmental bills—and would have begun addressing global warming in the 1980s had he been reelected.
  
• Carter made possible the development of clean energy technologies.
  
• Carter signed bills establishing Inspector Generals and whistleblower protections, without which President Trump would never have been impeached.
  
• Carter revolutionized both the office of vice president and the role of the first lady.
  
• Carter is an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause, but the Camp David Accords he engineered made him the best president for the security of the State of Israel since Harry Truman.
  
• Carter’s human rights policy set a new standard for how governments should treat their people and kicked off the transition to democracy all over the world.
  
• Carter’s diplomatic recognition of China established the most important bilateral relationship in the world and helped make today’s global economy possible.
  
• Carter disdained politics, which Rosalynn thought was pompous and harmful to his career.
  
• Carter’s Pentagon (not Ronald Reagan’s) built the weapons—especially the B-2 bomber—that helped win the Cold War.
  
• Carter’s ability to beat the odds and win ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties prevented a major war in Central America.
  
• Carter’s appointment of Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve is what ended inflation under Reagan, thereby assuring Reagan’s reelection.
  
• Carter was the only president serving at least four years who never appointed a Supreme Court justice. But he moved the government from tokenism to diversity, appointing more blacks and women to the federal bench than all of his predecessors combined times five.
  
• Carter did scores of little-known things that changed American life, from requiring vaccinations for children entering school to legalizing craft breweries.
  

Post-Presidency:

• Carter and the Carter Center have come close to eradicating Guinea Worm Disease, which once afflicted three million people. He became a hero in Africa.
  
• Carter and the Carter Center monitored more than 115 elections around the world, missions that often included facing dangerous circumstances. Most recently, the Carter Center monitored the GA senate run offs in 2020.
  
• Carter was the first president to publish as novel and a book of poetry, and he and Rosalynn spent a week each year building houses for Habitat for Humanity.
  
• Carter remained healthy and sharp enough to teach Sunday School until 2019, when he was sidelined by a fall.
  

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