Former President Jimmy Carter has passed away at age 100. The man was most notable for his humanity. He was elected President in the aftermath of President Nixon’s resignation in disgrace. And he became most admired for his post-Presidency. Rather than retiring from the spotlight, or focusing on lucrative business efforts, he focused on diplomacy and humanitarian causes.
At the same time, Carter was a better President than many give him credit for. While he won only one term, he left a significant legislative legacy including airline deregulation, and deregulation of railroads, trucking and energy. He nominated Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and it was Volcker who was most responsible for taming inflation in the United States.
President Carter signs the Airline Deregulation Act, by Jack E. Kightlinger (Public domain)
These moves set the stage for U.S. prosperity in the 1980s, though they were aided by the bipartisan Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 at the start of the Reagan administration which lowered rates and broadened the tax base (it passed 89-11 in the Senate).
What I will always remember President Carter for is this video of the former President walking through economy on Delta Air Lines in 2017, taking the time to greet everyone on board.
Jimmy Carter is on my plane to DC from ATL and just shook every hand of every passenger. #swoon #atl #delta pic.twitter.com/y6otolbhPj
— James Parker Sheffield (@JayShef) June 8, 2017
The effort was hardly a one-off, either, though if you were a United Airlines or American flyer you probably didn’t know it. The former Georgia governor was a regular on Delta Air Lines and its partners.
Jimmy Carter flew commercial. Here he is on a 2013 Delta flight from Atlanta to New York, shaking the hand of every passenger before we took off. pic.twitter.com/eianMDRtww
— Rachel Bachman (@Bachscore) December 29, 2024
My Delta pilot dad often took, developed, and snail-mailed pictures of passengers who wanted to sit in his captain’s seat.
When he asked this couple where he could send the pictures, President Carter replied, “Just write ‘Jimmy Carter, Plains, GA.’ They know where to find me.” + pic.twitter.com/xx5XZktE0l
— Chris Davis (Bluesky same handle) (@RevChrisDavis) July 9, 2021
Carter didn’t just help to give us airline deregulation, which brought lower fares and democratized travel, but also the deregulation of beer. One of his later acts was the 1979 change to permit the sale of malt, hops, and yeast to home brewers for the first time since prohibition. That change led not just to home brewing but led to the development of micro beweries, craft beer festivals, and a culture that supported better beer overall.
Carter deserves no real credit for airline deregulation, except to the limited extent that he didn’t do anything to prevent it. Alfred Kahn began pushing for airline deregulation in the Nixon Administration and continued in the Ford Administration. With the heavy lifting done already, Carter signed the deregulation Bill into law, and is said to have had second thoughts but convinced not to stand in the way by unlikely hero Senator Ted Kennedy.
@Mak Ted Kennedy and (later Justice) Stephen Breyer get most of the credit for the Airline Deregulation Act, but Carter signed it into law along with other sweeping deregulation bills.
” He nominated Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and it was Volcker who was most responsible for taming inflation in the United States.”
Not quite. He nominated William Miller who exacerbated existing inflation. The financial markets complelled him to nominate Volker, who cured it.
Deregualtion was in the academic air before Carter and proceeded in his term and later. Carter was essentially disinterested and ininvolved.
@L3 – as you agree, he nominated Volcker, and Volcker cured inflation.
I never suggest he came up with the academic ideas underlying deregulation (that was found more at University of Chicago) or that he crusaded for this. But his administration birthed several deregulatory efforts that are often mistakenly attributed to Reagan.
Recall that deregulation of airlines was championed by Ted Kennedy as a consumer issue, and uniformly opposed by airlines (other than United and Frontier). This was not a pro-business move and might not have happened without a Democrat in the White House.
@Gary: Ted Kennedy was a Jonny-come-lately on the issue who jumped on it when it already had public traction from pubicization of interstate fares in Texas and CA. Just about nobody approved it by then!
Your whole memory of the era seems to have been through a Carter hagiography while wearing rose-tinted glasses! Forget the political history and stick to points and miles.
approved = opposed.
You don’t get national political support for an issue until it’s ripe. It was proven out by PSA in California, and then Southwest copied their model. We got ‘experiments in price competition’ at the Civil Aeronautics Board under John Robson (so before Alfred Kahn).
I don’t know why you have such an issue with recognizing the legislative champion in Kennedy (aided by eventual Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer) and the President whose administration birthed deregulation of numerous industries including this one.
@Gary: The reality is that Carter was an unimaginative, wholely likable, disaster as a President who would not have been elected but for the political environment post-Watergate. Justifiably a one-termer, his final act was a distasterous “rescue” attempt of the American hostages in Iran that led to the US military helicopters bogged down in the desert.
He had a very favorable (biased) media. There was no Fox, Newsmax or X back then to counterbalance the MSM. Reagan’s victory showed them to be as out-of-touch with the populace as they were in 2024 supporting Kamala Harris and Field Commander Walz over Donald Trump.
There was a lot of bad but a lot of the good was forgotten, a mixed legacy as President and a noble (if often misguided) post-presidency
@Gary: “I don’t know why you have such an issue with recognizing the legislative champion in Kennedy … and the President whose administration birthed deregulation of numerous industries including this one.”
Because neither is true. I lived through it here studying a Ph.D. in Economics. So I studied it at the minutiae level.You appear to have been told, ex post, what happened by some filtered “official history” bot.
Jimmy Carter said he wanted to be remembered as the only president in whose term no US servicemens’ lives were lost.
Yeah, ok, that’s what happened…
@harry hv – what about the botched attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran (Operation Eagle Claw) in 1980 where eight U.S. servicemen, five Air Force and 3 Marines, were killed?
It is unseemly to speak ill of the dead, so I will forbear. I will say that if Jimmy Carter had displayed the spine *in office* that he displayed after leaving it, America would have been a lot better off. I’m sure he was, by today’s standards a rare beast, a decent man. But he still left a lot in his wake.
But that can be said of many Presidents.
@Gary: The Israel-Egypt peace treaty would be his outstanding achievement in office. That completely changed the state of play in the mid-east, even today.
Carter was horrible as a president. His foreign policy certainly changed the Middle East and not for the better. He ended up paralyzed with inaction due to the hostage crisis that was solved on the day Reagan took office after Reagan was sworn in. His domestic policy led to high inflation that hurt everyone. I was in high school when Carter took office and was in college when he left so I remember those years very well.
Good riddance. Post-death glorification of people is ridiculous. He was one of the worst presidents in US history and should be remembered as such. Thank God Reagan came in and saved our country.
Carter is sometimes seen as one of the least effective U.S. presidents, with his time in office clouded by economic troubles like stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis. He liked to handle things himself, which made it harder for him to delegate and focus on bigger issues. After his presidency, he did a lot of good work, but people noticed it more because he was a former president.
I was in broadcast news the first time the Carters came to town with Habitat: we’d seen these before, 15 minutes to get the video, back in the limo to the hotel. The stringer we left there called a couple times, ‘they’re still on the roof.’ And they were, till everybody else quit around 5p. The Carters brought their own hammers, nail aprons, sweat rags, it wasn’t just for show. And were back the next morning. None of us in news had ever seen anything like it! And definitely never will again!
Thank you Gary for your attempt at a good faith tribute (even within the context of the airline industry, which is the focus of your blog) to a decent man, a true servant leader.
It’s sad but not surprising that many of the other comments here (the typical foes) are dripping with hate for this nice man and anything he represented.
How different times are today. Some clearly prefer the opposite. Greed, selfishness, and narcissism; morals, ethics, and obligations be damned. We deserve the horrors that are coming.
I was in Iran before the revolution, traveling through virtually the whole country overland right down to the Gulf and on to Afghanistan. (It was on a long bus trip from France to Nepal). I could see the Shah, who was basically a creature of the CIA, was in real trouble–there were too many pictures of him up and at night in the poor part of Tehran where I stayed you could hear clandestine meetings. Yet when his regime collapsed Carter was caught flat footed. Years later I met a Foreign Service officer who claimed they kept the deteriorating situation from the White House since nobody wanted to be blamed for it. (He also told me he made up the figures LBJ wanted to hear about Vietnam.) And allegedly Reagan’s people made a deal with the Ayatollah’s to keep the hostages. They certainly worked closely together on Iran-Contra.
Carter made some real mistakes, but if the above is accurate he was ill-served by those who cared more for their own power than the good of America and the world. And compared to the parade of miserable to mediocre characters who came afterwards he was the last honest, decent human being whom one could largely trust in the Oval Office. He showed what America and Americans could be. May this country rise to that standard again.
Carter was bad. He brought the ayatollah to power by telling the Shah not to push back. Bad in so many ways.. Changed the world so it became a much more dangerous place. And he always was congratulating himself on what he did with great political spin
Sven, the Shah was as I said a creature of the CIA, his family having been put in power when a coup was engineered against a popular leader who wanted to nationalize the British and American owned oil. He did some real modernization of the country but moved too fast, had a fearsome secret police and was hated by a lot of Iranians. In the long run it is unlikely he could have held power–well, perhaps by becoming another Saddam or Assad. And honestly the U.S. has had no idea what it is doing in the region; “we” betrayed the Kurds 3 times since the 1970s and tried to play off both Iran and Iraq in their 1980s war. (I won’t even get into Bush’s lies for a pointless invasion which incidentally directly led to the rise of ISIS.) Maybe Carter mishandled a bad situation but frankly nobody can change this place. Thousands of years later people remember their feuds and wars, and taking sides is the fastest way to make enemies forever.
Could not care less about a president from four or five decades ago passing. Why is this news? Because he shook hands on a plane? How does this make any sense?
Carter wasn’t always a nice guy. He threatened to crush Lester Maddox if Maddox disagreed with him in any way.
@jns, the reason the hostages were released as Reagan was sworn in is because Reagan’s handlers had made a deal with the enemy for their own political benefit. The hostage’s release was needlessly delayed for the Hollywood actor’s benefit. Alzheimer’s Ronnie didn’t have a clue what was going on his entire eight years…
I agree Lance, he was a sock puppet who succeeded in tripling the national debt with the moronic “trickle down” economics he was told to push. Cutting taxes on the wealthy and imposing them on social security were part of the package too. Of course his admirers don’t want to hear that he didn’t end the Cold War, Soviet bankruptcy did that (if anything Carter did more with his emphasis on human rights, which certainly helped kill apartheid). Or that the Grenada invasion was to distract people when there were mass Marine deaths after pointlessly putting them in Lebanon. I will say though that he would be utterly horrified by what the Republican Party has become today, but then an empty showman is a logical extension of an actor.
For the haters, did you hear that American flags will be at half-mast for the inauguration in January 2025?
That must be upsetting to the returning god-king, you know, to see that things aren’t perfect for him, and that someone else might get a little attention. Gosh, what a shame.
God bless you, Jimmy Carter.
Carter was a loser of a president but a decent human being. His greatest gift to America was Ronald Reagan.
The Shah of Iran was a brutal dictator and a major, greedy as hell crook. And the regime after had a fundamentalist religious veneer applied to it, but the state of governance continued to largely remain the same awful state of governance since then too.
Jimmy Carter couldn’t save his own Administration. Saving the Shah made no sense.
Thank you, President Carter for surviving long enough to set a record and assure us that the nation’s flags would be set in a state of mourning for the presidential inauguration of a sleaze-ball on January 20th, 2025.
Did we see a late Christmas miracle? Apparently this is from Trump. It’s almost, we’ll, presidential:
“I just heard of the news about the passing of President Jimmy Carter. Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History. The challenges Jimmy faced as President came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude. Melania and I are thinking warmly of the Carter Family and their loved ones during this difficult time. We urge everyone to keep them in their hearts and prayers.”
Just some context for anyone interested in learning instead of arguing:
https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show-01gv2bv14079rhv1ch6dvacmbc/episode/are-we-on-the-cusp-of-a-new-political-order-01jbkj5kqyh8thd7z99vd35hfg
^ Basically, Carter was caught in the middle of a political order transition (New Deal to neoliberalism), and if you listen to his own words from that era, he really was:
“It can’t set our goals. It cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy. Or reduce inflation, or save our cities, or cure illiteracy, or provide energy. And government cannot mandate goodness.”
As is true for most transitional figures, he was a bit caught off guard on how to handle it. He waffled and fumbled a bit in both directions, and nice as he was, the country was hungry for a soothing voice.
https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show-01gv2bv14079rhv1ch6dvacmbc/episode/heres-how-an-open-democratic-convention-would-work-01hq5jxvwyaqp4jkchbm2x4p4j
^ The other thing happening at that time was that the parties were completely blowing up the election system. Carter was the first one to really make it through the new gauntlet and he was… not what the party apparatus had really been expecting. They had not foreseen that the voters would prefer *an outsider* over an expert, and that consequences. You think back on the decades since then, and who were the most legislatively accomplished Presidents? I tend to think of Reagan, Clinton, mayyyybe Obama, maybe Biden. Bush Sr self-owned (“No new taxes!”). Bush Jr would have been interesting to watch but most of the focus of his entire admin was literally terrorism. Who’s def not on that list? Trump. Mayyyybe Obama. Carter. What do they have in common? They’re outsiders. In this context meaning they never would have, at this time in their lives, been able to get the traditional (non-voter) party nomination.
Anyway, Carter came in, had no clue how to get his legislative agenda accomplished, largely failed at accomplishing it from what I’ve heard, and did exactly what the other definite outsider did in that time. He gave up and focused on what he could control, rather than what he couldn’t. Foreign relations and executive orders.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-aaron-miller.html
^ From Aaron David Miller (an author): “I mean, Carter was a rare — the rare American leader, the only one, frankly, who was not pushed into peacemaking by the urgency or the exigencies of a situation. He chased after it.
It was Carter’s single-mindedness, his focus, and the moral and ethical frame that he attached to resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict that enabled him to create the intensity of effort that was required both at the first Camp David in Sept. of 1978 and then, against the advice of his advisers, to embark on a spring trip early in 1979 to iron out the last remaining details of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.”
The man has accomplishments, he fought for what he believed in, he “made a dent in the universe”, he knew what he stood for, and his character was basically unimpugnible by nearly all accounts.
Cheers to you, sir! We should all aspire to such great heights.
Jimmy Carter was much like Herbert Hoover. He had tremendous economic challenges -.and had had the basis of the economic recovery in place when losing re-election, with the actual recovery and credit occurring under Reagan. Similarly, FDR used Hoover’s plan to emerge from the depths of the recession. Both were respected far more in light of their post-POTUS years. Both had unfortunate timing.
I was in college when he came into office. Not much can I recommend . He was completely out of his element. Being a governor is completely different than being president. He rode the backlash of the Watergate era, but failed to execute and follow thru while in office. Having Tip O’Neill as speaker of the house didn’t help at all.
Airline deregulation had its benefits, but more failure than success. Many, many airlines eventually declared bankruptcy or merger several times and disappeared into the background. More money lost and only bankruptcy attorneys benefited. Look at the current mash up (NK, B6, WN, etc); people applying for credit cards only for the perceived awards; outlandish behavior on flights; you name it.
Carter gets a gentlemen’s “C”, no more.
Deregulation has not been good for the industry and in many ways consumers. That being said I would imagine that the CBA would have become a TSA like nightmare government entity and you think deregulation was bad.
As far as Carter I’m old enough to remember him. He clearly was out of his depth, particularly given the events of the time. Younger people could not imagine 2 hour lines for gas (1978 and pre Smart phone), double digit unemployment numbers, and double digit mortgage rates. Although our society was far less uptight.
I lived through the Carter era as a college grad in 1980. It sucked. There were NO jobs unless you sold gold or were a petroleum engineer. 18% mortgages for some of my friends. Endless national humiliation in the Middle East. Hideous inflation. Depressing as hell. Godawful president.
It’s funny reading all these comments about what a dreadful president Jimmy Carter was from people who probably voted for the orange felon/rapist/insurrectionist who allowed over a million Americans to die from his inaction and will do worse in a second term.
Who knew Gary had so many presidential historians following his page?
You guys sure have a lot of strong feelings about a guy that is very recently passed.
Gary in shambles. Look how he grovels.
Though the foment for some form of airline deregulation began during the Ford administration, actual administrative action to enact formal policy to deregulate the industry (Air Cargo Deregulation Act – 1977) was begat by Carter & C.A.B. Administrator John Robson.
I usually stay out of inane political debates here and was no fan of Carter’s (although in full agreement with his deregulation steps….natural gas wasn’t mentioned here and should have been since the regulators kept prices too low to encourage exploration). In any case, while differing opinions are fine, outright lies aren’t. A previous poster said the US national debt tripled under Carter, but got a decimal point wrong. I rose by 29.9%, funnily enough just under Donald Trumps 31.3% in his first term.
If you were looking for a President that was the exact opposite of Donald Trump, Jimmy Carter would be it. Jimmy was kind, generous, empathetic, altruistic, giving and people conscious. All the things that Donny T. could never be.
Mark, 4 years of HH and nearly 8 of FDR and the depression raged on until WW2 started. HH did start a solution, FDR didn’t continue one. They both made things worse and delayed by many years a recovery. BTW, unemployment started and ended equally bad under Carter. In flation kept getting worse. It’s hard to see any redemption for him in the numbers.
Good God, such negativity on here….
I was on a Delta flight from MEM to ATL in 2015 or 2016 and Jimmy Carter came on board shaking everyone’s hand. The next day I found out he and Rosalynn had been building houses for Habitat For Humanity in either Tennessee or Mississippi. Whatever your politics, Jimmy Carter was a great man who dedicated his life to service for humanity. How many ex-presidents have done what he has done. RIP Jimmy and God Bless.
@biilk His Habitat for Humanity efforts were real, honest, and worthy of praise. His efforts to support the haters of Isreal, and his efforts to broker a deal with North Korea, sneaking past Bill Clinton, are self-center hypocrisy.
I met President Carter at a charity concert in Americus, GA, that I helped organize. I shook hands, made small talk and took pictures with President Carter. The highlight for me was spending 2 hours during the concert standing a couple of feet behind him (he was seated) with no Secret Service in sight. He was gracious, friendly and humble throughout the evening. Stood in line for the buffet and got his own food. Gave a standing ovation to the artists. Praised everyone and everything. Spoke eloquently. An all star.
HH did NOT start a solution
Soory