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Essay on James Earl Carter Jr. The Thirty-Ninth President
Carter, Jimmy, 39th president of the United States (1977-1981), had served one term as governor of Georgia and was considered an outsider to traditional party politics. From the beginning his presidency was marked by caution, conservatism, frustrations, and disappointments. Many reforms he promised were never carried out—some because they were abandoned by Carter, others because of congressional hostility.
During the 1976 campaign, for example, Carter had vowed to reform the tax system, which he called “a disgrace”; yet as president he gave only token support to tax reform (Burton, 1993). He had also promised to reduce drastically the number of agencies in the federal bureaucracy—which he called “the worst, most confused, bloated, overlapping, and wasteful” in history—and to slash the number of federal employees. Instead of eliminating departments, however, he added the departments of energy and education to the Cabinet, and the number of government employees continued to increase during his presidency (Burton, 1993).
James Earl Carter, Jr. was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, a tiny farming community of 600 people. He was the oldest of four children. His father was a peanut farmer and storekeeper. Jimmy Carter worked on the farm, but he had an uncle in the United States Navy who sent him postcards from exotic ports, so as a boy he dreamed of attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland (Burton, 1993). He was the first member of his family ever to go to college, starting at Georgia Southwestern College in 1941 for a year, followed by a year at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He then went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, graduating in 1946, ranked 60th in a class of 820.
Carter won his first elective office, a seat on the local school board, in 1960, and two years later he moved up to the state senate after proving that his opponent in the Democratic primary had broken voting laws....
