“He began to run for the presidency with no national reputation,” says Robert Strong, an emeritus professor at Washington and Lee University. “When he told the people closest to him that he was going to run for president, there’s a story that Miss Lillian, his mother, said: ‘President of what?’
After serving in the U.S. Navy from 1946 to 1953, Carter returned to his hometown of Plains, Georgia to run his family’s peanut farming business. There, he began his political career on the Sumter County school board. He won a seat on the Georgia State Senate in 1962, and was elected governor in 1970. Still, when Carter entered the 1976 Democratic primaries, he didn’t have a strong national profile.
“There are people who enter politics late in life, like Dwight Eisenhower or Donald Trump or Ronald Reagan, but they were famous in their earlier endeavors,” Strong says. In contrast, Carter was the kind of unknown, “dark horse” candidate who Strong says “almost never gets to the White House”—except he did.
In 1924, two future U.S. presidents were born: George H.W. Bush (June 12) and Jimmy Carter (October 1). Like most American babies at the time, Bush was delivered at home. But Carter’s mother chose to have him at the Wise Sanatorium in Plains, Georgia where she worked as a nurse, making him the first future president to be born in a hospital.
On December 12, 1952, an Ontario research facility called Chalk River Laboratories experienced the world’s first nuclear reactor meltdown. The U.S. Navy sent service members, including Lieutenant Jimmy Carter, to Canada to help remove the reactor’s damaged core.
Each person could only work in the reactor for 90 seconds at a time—a precaution meant to limit radiation exposure—and Carter was one of the people who worked inside it while it was melting down. The workers successfully removed the core, but still suffered dangerous levels of radiation exposure. In a 2009 interview with The Ottawa Citizen, Carter said: “For about six months after that I had radioactivity in my urine.”
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in schools was illegal. Civil rights activists responded to the decision by working to integrate schools, while white supremacists reacted by forming local White Citizens Councils to keep schools and other facilities segregated.
“[Carter] was on the local school board and every school board member was expected to join the White Citizens Council to oppose the Brown decision, and he refused,” Strong says. This led members of the council to boycott his peanut business.
One evening in October 1969, while waiting outside for a Lion’s Club Meeting in Leary, Georgia, Carter observed something bright in the sky that he could not identify. Four years later, as governor, he filed a report about the incident with the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City.
Decades later, former Air Force scientist Jere Justus proposed what Carter may have seen: a cloud of barium released by a rocket. During the 1960s, Justus worked on Air Force and NASA studies that involved releasing barium into the atmosphere. The night that Carter saw the bright light, a rocket had released barium after taking off from Florida’s Panhandle, around 150 miles from where Carter was standing.
In May 1974, Governor Carter gave a speech at the University of Georgia School of Law in which he said that “a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan” had a great influence on “my understanding about what’s right and wrong in this society.” As examples, Carter pointed to the songs “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” about the real-life murder of a Black woman, and “Maggie’s Farm.”
“I grew up as a landowner’s son,” Carter said. “But I don’t think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan’s record, ‘I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More.’”
The speech caught the attention of Rolling Stone correspondent Hunter S. Thompson, who later wrote: “I have heard hundreds of speeches by all kinds of candidates and politicians—usually against my will and for generally the same reasons I got trapped into hearing this one—but I have never heard a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me any more than the speech Jimmy Carter made on that Saturday afternoon in May 1974.”
