Friedman Industries, Incorporated ( NYSEAMERICAN:FRD – Get Free Report ) was the recipient of a significant growth in short interest in December. As of December 15th, there was short interest totalling 9,400 shares, a growth of 129.3% from the November 30th total of 4,100 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 10,700 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is presently 0.9 days. Approximately 0.1% of the company’s stock are sold short. Analyst Ratings Changes Separately, StockNews.com upgraded shares of Friedman Industries from a “hold” rating to a “buy” rating in a research report on Tuesday, November 19th. View Our Latest Report on FRD Friedman Industries Price Performance Friedman Industries Announces Dividend The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, February 14th. Stockholders of record on Friday, January 17th will be paid a dividend of $0.04 per share. This represents a $0.16 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.03%. The ex-dividend date is Friday, January 17th. Friedman Industries’s dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 14.04%. Insider Activity at Friedman Industries In other news, CEO Mike J. Taylor bought 2,000 shares of Friedman Industries stock in a transaction dated Thursday, November 21st. The stock was acquired at an average cost of $13.50 per share, with a total value of $27,000.00. Following the acquisition, the chief executive officer now owns 164,154 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $2,216,079. This trade represents a 1.23 % increase in their ownership of the stock. The acquisition was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link . 4.60% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders. Institutional Inflows and Outflows A number of hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the stock. Acadian Asset Management LLC boosted its stake in shares of Friedman Industries by 1.0% during the 2nd quarter. Acadian Asset Management LLC now owns 135,794 shares of the company’s stock worth $2,048,000 after acquiring an additional 1,337 shares in the last quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP boosted its position in Friedman Industries by 0.3% during the second quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 561,702 shares of the company’s stock worth $8,482,000 after purchasing an additional 1,591 shares in the last quarter. Empowered Funds LLC grew its holdings in Friedman Industries by 5.3% in the third quarter. Empowered Funds LLC now owns 34,878 shares of the company’s stock valued at $559,000 after purchasing an additional 1,742 shares during the last quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC increased its position in shares of Friedman Industries by 0.6% in the second quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC now owns 361,882 shares of the company’s stock valued at $5,464,000 after buying an additional 2,245 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Geode Capital Management LLC raised its stake in shares of Friedman Industries by 11.2% during the 3rd quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 70,727 shares of the company’s stock worth $1,133,000 after buying an additional 7,141 shares during the last quarter. 33.26% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors. About Friedman Industries ( Get Free Report ) Friedman Industries, Incorporated engages in steel processing, pipe manufacturing and processing, and the steel and pipe distribution businesses the United States. It operates in two segments, Coil and Tubular. The Coil segment is involved in the conversion of steel coils into flat sheet and plate steel cut to customer specifications and reselling steel coils. Featured Stories Receive News & Ratings for Friedman Industries Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Friedman Industries and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter .Hezbollah fires about 250 rockets and other projectiles into Israel in heaviest barrage in weeksThe secret hacks you need to know to save up to 54% on first-class train tickets By RICHARD MARSDEN FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY Published: 06:49 EST, 29 December 2024 | Updated: 06:54 EST, 29 December 2024 e-mail View comments Some diligent planning ahead – combined with a few savvy crosschecks – can make all the difference when it comes to bagging a cheap first-class ticket. Follow our guide to the ins-and-outs of travelling posh and a whole new world of British trains opens up, including bigger seats, soft drinks and snacks on shorter journeys, and hot meals and alcoholic drinks on long-distance services such as Avanti. We tried all the tricks to get first-class tickets at reduced prices – here’s what we found... Is there really a simple way of getting a cheap first-class ticket? Yes. Sign up to the Seatfrog auction app ( seatfrog.com ). After buying a standard-class fare for a journey, it’s possible to bid for an upgrade to first. On most trains, a limited number of such upgrades are available. It’s a straightforward system: the highest bid wins, with the auction closing 30 minutes before departure. On a random check, we found a standard ticket from London Euston to Penrith at 1.40pm was £94, while a first-class ticket was £230. Using Seatfrog you could bid for an upgrade for £36. So, effectively, the first-class ticket came to £130 – a saving of £100 (or 43 per cent off). Are first-class tickets for all train services offered on Seatfrog? Almost all. Transport for Wales has just joined but Scotrail and Hull Trains don’t take part. If not entering a Seatfrog auction, is it better to book in advance or wait till the last moment? Booking well in advance is usually best, says Mark Smith, of website Seat61.com . When we looked, a first-class fare from York to Edinburgh was £59.80 ten weeks in advance. This compared to £91.70 on the day (54 per cent more). Is there an exact best time to book ahead? Eight to 12 weeks is best for long-distance routes as this is when most rail operators release timetables and when prices are normally lowest. Fares may be up to 75 per cent cheaper during this ‘sweet spot’. Some operators allow you to book bargain advance fares even further ahead: LNER is 20 weeks and Hull Trains 26 weeks. What about very last-minute deals? These are possible and worth checking if the Seatfrog app is not for you. On trainline.com – on the day of travel – we found the difference between first-class and standard-class for Bristol to Penzance was a mere £22.10 – £83.50 instead of £61.40. For London King’s Cross to Edinburgh, a last-minute first-class ticket was £138.90 (booked 30 minutes before travel) while journeys later on that week were £173 to £299. Are some routes better for first-class deals than others? Yes. The best prices are usually available when travelling between regional stations and when avoiding London, says Railsmartr.co.uk. It highlights that a York to London first-class fare on the same day at around the same time can cost £95 (for a journey of 1h 52m), while York-Edinburgh in first class can be as low as £52 (for a journey of 2h 37m). Read More How to save a fortune by stocking up on booze in Calais: JEFF MILLS reveals the astonishing bargains What about upgrading once you’re onboard? This is sometimes possible if there’s availability – you’ll need to ask the guard. Especially low rates may be available at weekends and bank holidays. The cost on Great Western Railway and Greater Anglia is from £10, or it’s from £10 to £45 on LNER. You can pay there and then with your card and walk on through. What about on Avanti West Coast trains? It's different from the others with two upgrade possibilities: standard premium and first class. You sit in the same-style carriages for both – with wider seats and a guaranteed table – but with standard premium you do not get free food or drink. On-the-day first-class upgrade prices are similar to LNER. If booking in advance, Saturday fares between London and Glasgow might be £85 (standard), £120 (standard premium), and £199.50 (first class). On all journeys, standard premium is from £17.50 extra. Do railcard discounts apply to first-class tickets? Yes, when tickets are bought in advance. They do not work for upgrades available via Seatfrog or onboard. Any other travel tips? Try boarding a train with a restaurant car. Although first-class passengers get priority bookings, standard-class ticket holders can dine too on GWR. When do GWR dining cars run? GWR’s Pullman Dining is in a vintage-style Pullman carriage, available Mondays to Fridays on the 1.03pm and 7.04pm Paddington to Plymouth services; 5.48pm from Paddington to Swansea; 1.15pm and 6.16pm from Plymouth to Paddington; and the 12.23pm Swansea to Paddington (gwr.com). It’s £37 for two courses or £44 for three courses; wine is from £17 per bottle. What about the Transport for Wales dining service? Two courses £21.95 (with a bottle of wine £37) or three courses £24.95 (with a bottle of wine £40); for details, see First Class Menu at tfw.wales . Share or comment on this article: The secret hacks you need to know to save up to 54% on first-class train tickets e-mail Add comment
Rogers Communications Inc. Cl B stock rises Monday, outperforms market
A judge on Monday rejected a request to block a San Jose State women's volleyball team member from playing in a conference tournament on grounds that she is transgender. The ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Kato Crews in Denver will allow the player, who has played all season, to compete in the Mountain West Conference women's championship opening this week in Las Vegas. The ruling comes in a lawsuit filed by nine current players against the Mountain West Conference challenging the league's policies for allowing transgender players to participate. The players argued that letting her compete was a safety risk and unfair. While some media have reported those and other details, neither San Jose State nor the forfeiting teams have confirmed the school has a trans woman volleyball player. The Associated Press is withholding the player's name because she has not commented publicly on her gender identity. School officials also have declined an interview request with the player. Crews' ruling referred to the athlete as an "alleged transgender" player and noted that no defendant disputed that the San Jose State roster includes a transgender woman player. San Jose State will "continue to support its student-athletes and reject discrimination in all forms," the university said in a statement, confirming that all its student-athletes are eligible to participate under NCAA and conference rules. "We are gratified that the Court rejected an eleventh-hour attempt to change those rules. Our team looks forward to competing in the Mountain West volleyball tournament this week." The conference did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. The players filed a notice for emergency appeal with the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Crews said the players who filed the complaint could have sought relief much earlier, noting the individual universities had acknowledged that not playing their games against San Jose State this season would result in a loss in league standings. He also refused a request to re-seed the tournament without the forfeited losses. The judge said injunctions are meant to preserve the status quo. The conference policy regarding forfeiting for refusing to play against a team with a transgender player had been in effect since 2022 and the San Jose State player has been on the roster since 2022 -– making that the status quo. The player competed at the college level three previous seasons, including two for San Jose State, drawing little attention. This season's awareness of her reported identity led to an uproar among some players, pundits, parents and politicians in a major election year. Crews' ruling also said injunctions are meant to prevent harm, but in this case, he argued, the harm has already occurred. The games have been forfeited, the tournament has been seeded, the teams have made travel plans and the participants have confirmed they're playing. The tournament starts Wednesday and continues Friday and Saturday. Colorado State is seeded first and San Jose State, second. The teams split their regular-season matches and both get byes into Friday's semifinals. San Jose State will play the winner of Wednesday's match between Utah State and Boise State — teams that both forfeited matches to SJSU during the regular season. Boise State associate athletic director Chris Kutz declined to comment on whether the Broncos would play SJSU if they won their first-round tournament game. Utah State officials did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment. The conference tournament winner gets an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. San Jose State coach Todd Kress, whose team has not competed in the national tournament since 2001, has said his team has been getting "messages of hate" and that has taken a toll on his players. Several teams refused to play against San Jose State during the season, earning losses in the official conference standings. Boise State and Wyoming each had two forfeits while Utah State and Nevada both had one. Southern Utah, a member of the Western Athletic Conference, was first to cancel against San Jose State this year. Nevada's players stated they "refuse to participate in any match that advances injustice against female athletes," without elaborating. Nevada did not qualify for the conference tournament. The nine current players and others now suing the Mountain West Conference, the California State University Board of Trustees and others include San Jose State senior setter and co-captain Brooke Slusser. The teammate Slusser says is transgender hits the volleyball with more force than others on the team, raising fear during practices of suffering concussions from a head hit, the complaint says. The Independent Council on Women's Sports is funding a separate lawsuit against the NCAA for allowing transgender women to compete in women's sports. Both lawsuits claim the landmark 1972 federal antidiscrimination law known as Title IX prohibits transgender women in women's sports. Title IX prohibits sexual discrimination in federally funded education; Slusser is a plaintiff in both lawsuits. Several circuit courts have used a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to conclude that discriminating against someone based on their transgender status or sexual orientation is sex-based discrimination, Crews wrote. That means case law does not prove the "likelihood of success" needed to grant an injunction. An NCAA policy that subjects transgender participation to the rules of sports governing bodies took effect this academic year. USA Volleyball says a trans woman must suppress testosterone for 12 months before competing. The NCAA has not flagged any issues with San Jose State. The Republican governors of Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming have made public statements in support of the team cancellations, citing fairness in women's sports. President-elect Donald Trump likewise has spoken out against allowing transgender women to compete in women's sports. Crews was a magistrate judge in Colorado's U.S. District Court for more than five years before President Joe Biden appointed him as a federal judge in January. Get local news delivered to your inbox!Polls close in Uruguay’s election, with ruling coalition and opposition headed for photo finish
NoneMarjorie Taylor Greene Calls NPR 'Democrat Propaganda,' Threatens To Slash Its FundingMIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) — The Miami Dolphins were ready to deal veteran defensive tackle Calais Campbell to the Baltimore Ravens ahead of the Nov. 5 trade deadline until Mike McDaniel stepped in. “I may or may not have thrown an adult temper tantrum,” Miami's coach said, confirming the news first reported by NFL Network Sunday morning.
Decades spent recording the sounds of Wollongong'Crucial week': make-or-break plastic pollution treaty talks beginThe musical adaptation “Wicked” and action epic “Gladiator II” racked up a combined $270.2 million in global ticket sales over the weekend, a gift to cinemas heading into what may be a record-setting holiday season. The robust box office returns provided reassurance to Hollywood, which has weathered cost-cutting and layoffs amid forecasts of the death of cinema as consumers gravitated to streaming video services. “Moviegoers and box office pundits have been waiting for this weekend, and no one is disappointed,” said Chris Aronson, president of distribution for Paramount Pictures. “Wicked,” the first of two Universal Pictures films based on a Broadway prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” topped the domestic and global box office. It pulled in $114 million at U.S. and Canadian theaters, plus $50.2 million in international markets, for a global total of $164.2 million. It was the biggest opening weekend for a film based on a Broadway musical, ahead of the global debut of Universal’s 2012 release “Les Miserables,” according to the studio. “Gladiator II” hauled in $106 million around the world, including $55.5 million from domestic sales. The Paramount Pictures film is the sequel to a movie that won the best picture Oscar two decades ago. The film, which was released last weekend outside the U.S., had an overall box office tally of $221 million. The two films, dubbed “Glicked” by fans, brought in $169.5 million at domestic theaters, helping lift the weekend box office to $201.9 million. It’s the highest-grossing weekend in North America since the July opening of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” according to Comscore. “Glicked” fell short of the $245 million “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” opening frenzy in July 2023, which showed that the industry was rebounding from the pandemic and strikes that year by writers and actors. Still, the two films delivered a much-needed jolt to movie theaters, after anticipated fall films such as “Joker: Folie a Deux” and “Venom: The Last Dance” underperformed at the box office. The fervor was a positive sign for theater chains such as AMC Entertainment, Cineplex and Cinemark that are looking ahead to another major release, Walt Disney’s animated “Moana 2” this week. “This is a tremendous catalyst for a strong box office going into December and the New Year,” said National Association of Theatre Owners President and CEO Michael O’Leary. Movie ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada have hovered below pre-pandemic levels as cinemas grapple with competition from streaming and the disruptions from the last year’s Hollywood strikes. Sunday’s tallies brought year-to-date domestic ticket sales to $7.3 billion, down 10.6% from the same time in 2023, according to Comscore. Studios and theater owners are hopeful that “Moana 2” will lead next weekend to the strongest Thanksgiving-period sales in history. Box office analysts say ticket sales from Thanksgiving through the end of the year could rank as the biggest in cinema history. The holiday season record of $2.5 billion was set in 2017, led by the “Star Wars” film “The Last Jedi.” “This is the best possible news for movie theaters, this lineup of films, starting with ‘Glicked’ and ‘Moana 2,” said Paul Dergarabedian, media analyst for Comscore. “Wicked” stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in the story of a misunderstood, green-skinned student of magic who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West. “It’s wrapped in a fairy tale, but the point of it is to dig at real truth,” director Jon M. Chu told Reuters at the film’s premiere in London, when asked about the story’s broad appeal. Universal, a unit of Comcast, spent roughly $160 million to make the first “Wicked” movie, a sum that does not include tens of millions more for marketing ranging from a Super Bowl ad to hundreds of “Wicked” products. In a campaign reminiscent of the hoopla surrounding “Barbie,” “Wicked” tie-ins include pink and green drinks at Starbucks, a fashion line at Target and a Betty Crocker cupcake mix. “This campaign was just everywhere. It was just inescapable,” said Jim Orr, Universal Pictures’ president of domestic theatrical distribution. “And on top of all of that, we had the hardest-working cast that you could have. From a publicity and from a marketing standpoint, Cynthia and Ariana were literally just everywhere.” The second “Wicked” film is scheduled for release in November 2025. “Gladiator II” stars Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal and Denzel Washington in a story of political intrigue that unfolds 16 years after the original film. Other films coming before year-end include Walt Disney’s “Mufasa: The Lion King,” Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” and Searchlight Pictures’ “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothee Chalamet as musician Bob Dylan.
Jimmy Carter, a no-frills and steel-willed Southern governor who was elected president in 1976, was rejected by disillusioned voters after a single term and went on to an extraordinary post-presidential life that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, according to his son James E. Carter III, known as Chip. He was 100 and the oldest living U.S. president of all time. His son confirmed the death but did not provide an immediate cause. In a statement in February 2023, the Carter Center said the former president, after a series of hospital stays, would stop further medical treatment and spend his remaining time at home under hospice care. He had been treated in recent years for an aggressive form of melanoma skin cancer, with tumors that spread to his liver and brain. His wife, Rosalynn, died Nov. 19, 2023, at 96. The Carters, who were close partners in public life, had been married for more than 77 years, the longest presidential marriage in U.S. history. His final public appearance was at her funeral in Plains, where he sat in the front row in a wheelchair. Mr. Carter, a small-town peanut farmer, U.S. Navy veteran, and Georgia governor from 1971 to 1975, was the first president from the Deep South since 1837, and the only Democrat elected president between Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Bill Clinton’s terms in the White House. As the nation’s 39th president, he governed with strong Democratic majorities in Congress but in a country that was growing more conservative. Four years after taking office, Mr. Carter lost his bid for reelection, in a landslide, to one of the most conservative political figures of the era, Ronald Reagan. When Mr. Carter left Washington in January 1981, he was widely regarded as a mediocre president, if not an outright failure. The list of what had gone wrong during his presidency, not all of it his fault, was long. It was a time of economic distress, with a stagnant economy and stubbornly high unemployment and inflation. “Stagflation,” connoting both low growth and high inflation, was a description that critics used to attack Mr. Carter’s economic policies. In the summer of 1979, Americans waited in long lines at service stations as gasoline supplies dwindled and prices soared after the revolution in Iran disrupted the global oil supply. Mr. Carter made energy his signature domestic policy initiative, and he had some success, but events outside his control intervened. In March 1979, a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pa., suffered a core meltdown. The accident was the worst ever for the U.S. nuclear energy industry and a severe setback to hopes that nuclear power would provide a safe alternative to oil and other fossil fuels. Mr. Carter’s fortunes were no better overseas. In November 1979, an Iranian mob seized control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans as hostages. It was the beginning of a 444-day ordeal that played out daily on television and did not end until Jan. 20, 1981, the day Mr. Carter left office when the hostages were released. In the midst of the crisis, in April 1980, Mr. Carter authorized a rescue attempt that ended disastrously in the Iranian desert when two U.S. aircraft collided on the ground, killing eight American servicemen. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who had opposed the mission, resigned. “I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” Mr. Carter said in a 2018 interview with The Washington Post in Plains. “But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.” A month after the Iranian hostage crisis erupted, an emboldened Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Mr. Carter ordered an embargo of grain sales to the Soviet Union, angering American farmers, and a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, a step that was unpopular with many Americans and was widely seen as weak and ineffectual. As the years wore on, the judgment on Mr. Carter’s presidency gradually gave way to a more positive view. He lived long enough to see his record largely vindicated by history, with a widespread acknowledgment that his presidency had been far more than long lines at the gas station and U.S. hostages in Iran. Near the end of Mr. Carter’s life, two biographies argued forcefully that he had been a more consequential president than most people realized – “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history,” author Jonathan Alter wrote in his 2020 book, “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.” Both books — the other was Kai Bird’s 2021 volume, “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter” — said Mr. Carter was often ahead of his time, especially with his early focus on reducing fossil fuel use and his efforts to mitigate the nation’s racial divide, including by expanding the number of people of color in federal judgeships. The biographies concluded that Mr. Carter’s reputation as a poor president was unfair and came largely from his stubborn insistence on doing what he thought was correct even when it cost him politically. “He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better,” Bird wrote. “And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.” Mr. Carter, noted for his mile-wide smile in public, was also tenacious and resolute, and those qualities were critical to achieving the Camp David Accords, a signature success of his presidency. He spent 13 days at the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains in September 1978, shuttling between cabins that housed Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In a process that almost collapsed several times, Mr. Carter was instrumental in brokering a historic agreement between bitter rivals. The Camp David Accords led to the first significant Israeli withdrawal from territory captured in the Six-Day War of 1967 and a peace treaty that has endured between Israel and its largest Arab neighbor. In 1978, Begin and Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor conferred on Mr. Carter 24 years later for a lifetime of working for peace. Against fierce conservative opposition, Mr. Carter pushed through the Panama Canal treaties, which ultimately placed the economically and strategically critical waterway under Panamanian control, a major step toward better U.S. relations with Latin American neighbors. He signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty, SALT II, with the Soviets, but he withdrew it from Senate consideration when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. Taking advantage of the opening made by President Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Carter granted full diplomatic recognition to China. He made human rights a central theme of U.S. foreign policy, a sharp departure from the approach of Nixon and his national security adviser and second secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger. Two Cabinet-level departments — Energy and Education — were created under Mr. Carter, as was the Superfund to clean up toxic waste sites. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act more than doubled the size of the national park and wildlife refuge system. Mr. Carter was ahead of his time on environmental issues. In June 1979, he installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the West Wing of the White House, telling reporters that the point was to harness “the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.” “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people,” Mr. Carter said. Reagan removed the panels in 1986. His relations with Congress were often strained, even though it was controlled by his party, but he had more success than most modern presidents at winning passage of his legislative proposals. With the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, Mr. Carter set in motion a movement that picked up steam under Reagan and his conservative allies. The military buildup under Reagan was often credited with hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that buildup began under Mr. Carter. Inflation was a constant scourge to his administration, but it was Mr. Carter who appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker was later hailed as the man who broke the back of inflation in the early 1980s when Reagan was president. In the 2018 Post interview, Mr. Carter said he had “a lot of regrets” from his time in office, mainly over the Iran hostage crisis and his not having done more to unify the Democratic Party. He said he was most proud of the Camp David Accords, his work to normalize relations with China and his focus on human rights. “I kept our country at peace and championed human rights, and that’s a rare thing for post-World War II presidents to say,” he said, adding that he was also proud that he “always told the truth.” ROVING AMBASSADOR Mr. Carter was a former president for more than four decades — longer than anyone else in history — and he was only the second to live to 94, after George H.W. Bush, who died in 2018. He dedicated his post-presidential life to public service at home and supporting democracy and human rights abroad. It was a career that even some of his supporters said seemed better suited to him than being president. “Nothing about the White House so became Mr. Carter as his having left it,” historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in “The Unfinished Presidency,” a 1998 account of Mr. Carter’s life after the presidency. Mr. Carter lived more modestly than any ex-president since Harry S. Truman, whom Mr. Carter called his favorite president. He and Rosalynn lived in Plains until the end in the ranch house that they built for themselves in 1961, and where Mr. Carter will be buried with her next to a shady willow tree near a pond that he helped dig. Mr. Carter declined the corporate board memberships and lucrative speaking engagements that have made other ex-presidents tens of millions of dollars. He said in the 2018 interview that he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the White House.” “I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Mr. Carter said. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.” Instead, he wrote 33 books on topics ranging from war to woodworking, which gave him a comfortable retirement income. He also won three Grammy Awards for his recordings of audio versions of his books. For decades, the Carters spent a week a year building homes with Habitat for Humanity, the Georgia-based nonprofit organization that constructs housing for low-income people. Wearing their own tool belts, they helped build or renovate about 4,300 homes in 14 countries. In 1982, the Carters founded the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta. It became the base from which they traveled widely on peacemaking and other humanitarian missions. The Carter Center sponsors programs in education, agricultural development and health care and supports fair elections in countries around the world. Mr. Carter became an unofficial roving ambassador, monitoring elections, mediating disputes and promoting human rights and democracy. In 1994, at the request of President Clinton, he helped forge an agreement that removed a brutal military regime in Haiti and averted a possible U.S. invasion of that country. Mr. Carter’s missions required meeting with some of the world’s most notorious despots, including Kim Il Sung of North Korea and Moammar Gaddafi of Libya. Fledgling democracies trusted him, and he was asked to monitor elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Zambia, the West Bank and Gaza. The Carter Center has monitored 115 elections in 40 countries, according to its website. He was not always successful, but Mr. Carter never seemed discouraged about his efforts to resolve conflicts. He spent the days leading up to the 1994 Christmas holiday in the Balkans, engaging in negotiations that included a shouted conversation by shortwave radio with Serbian strongman Radovan Karadzic, who in 2016 was convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Mr. Carter’s efforts resulted in a four-month cease-fire in the bloody conflict. From Atlanta, the Carter Center coordinated dozens of initiatives, including a decades-long effort that helped to virtually eradicate Guinea worm disease, a painful and disabling condition that once afflicted millions of people in some of Africa’s poorest countries. Mr. Carter’s freelance diplomacy, which at times included outspoken criticism of U.S. policies, could provoke outrage. He angered Clinton in 1994 by thrusting himself into a dispute over U.N. inspections of North Korea’s nuclear facilities. In his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” (2006), Mr. Carter set off a storm of criticism by seeming to equate Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories with the former apartheid regime in South Africa. Over the years, Mr. Carter was a constant source of irritation to conservative critics. In a book about Mr. Carter’s life after the White House — a book whose subtitle called him “Our Worst Ex-President” — conservative political commentator Steven F. Hayward accused him of engaging in “usually embarrassing and often disastrous peace missions around the world.” The far more common judgment was that Mr. Carter’s tireless pursuit of peace and human rights was admirable and set a new standard for ex-presidents. In awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the Nobel committee lauded him “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” Introducing the 2002 Peace Prize laureate in Oslo, Gunnar Berge, a member of the Nobel committee, said: “Jimmy Carter will probably not go down in American history as the most effective president. But he is certainly the best ex-president the country ever had.” THE CARTER IMAGE That Mr. Carter became president was something of a historical accident, one that followed an unprecedented chain of events. The progression began in 1973 with the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who was caught in a web of corruption dating from his time as a Maryland politician. That led to the appointment of then-Minority Leader Gerald Ford, a respected but relatively little-known U.S. House member from Michigan, as Agnew’s successor. And, finally, in 1974, there was the resignation of Nixon to avoid impeachment stemming from the Watergate scandal. Two years later, Mr. Carter narrowly defeated Ford, but the person he really campaigned against was Nixon. Mr. Carter was the peanut farmer from Georgia, the candidate who carried his own garment bag off the aircraft and promised to bring an open and honest style of leadership to the nation’s capital. It later became commonplace for presidential candidates, and most challengers to incumbents, to run “against Washington.” Mr. Carter was among the first of the modern era to do so. Mr. Carter signaled his disdain for the “imperial” trappings of the presidency on Inauguration Day in 1977, when he, Rosalynn and their daughter, Amy, stepped out of the presidential limousine on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked the parade route to the White House. “He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said in 2018. While that seemed refreshing to many people after the Nixon years, it ultimately grated on those who thought that Mr. Carter’s style – refusing, for example, to have “Hail to the Chief” played when he entered rooms – demeaned and diminished the presidency. Eizenstat said Mr. Carter’s order eliminating drivers for top staff members was meant to signal a more frugal approach to governing. Instead, he said, it meant that busy officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day. Two years later, in 1979, Americans were in a sour mood, and Mr. Carter’s response to events seemed to make matters worse. In July, he abruptly canceled a speech on energy and retreated to Camp David, where he held a series of intense discussions with a cross-section of guests. When he emerged July 15, he delivered a nationally televised address that was soon dubbed the “malaise” speech, although Mr. Carter never used that word in his address. In the speech, Mr. Carter spoke of a “crisis of the American spirit” and, before setting out a series of energy policy proposals, warned that “we are at a turning point in our history.” “There are two paths to choose,” he continued. “One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.” The speech, initially well received, was soon turned against Mr. Carter, who was accused of blaming the American people for the failures of his administration. Mr. Carter did not help his cause when, two days later, he demanded the resignation of his entire Cabinet and fired five of the secretaries. Then came the takeover of the U.S. Embassy by Iranian student protesters. By the early 21st century, Mr. Carter’s warning about the fragmentation of American society leading to political paralysis appeared prescient to many. So, too, did his emphasis on concerns then only dimly perceived as threats — foremost among them, the spread of nuclear weapons to unfriendly and unstable regimes. But hindsight was of no benefit to him then. Mr. Carter’s dignity was ruthlessly assailed by reports in August 1979 of his encounter with a “killer rabbit” a few months before while fishing in Georgia. “President Attacked by Rabbit,” a front-page headline in The Post proclaimed. His use of a paddle to fend off a rabbit swimming toward his small boat was widely lampooned as a desperate struggle. The story, inconsequential in itself, reinforced an impression, cultivated by his political opponents, that Mr. Carter was a hapless bumbler unequal to his office. He also had been mocked for wearing a cardigan in February 1977 while sitting next to a fire to deliver his first speech on energy, in which he called the nation’s response to a growing energy crisis “the moral equivalent of war.” But his energy policies led to a reduction in U.S. consumption of foreign oil. Long after he left public office, there was a public outcry over congressional “earmarks” and other forms of pork-barrel spending because of the soaring federal budget deficit. One of Mr. Carter’s first acts as president was to veto a bill authorizing a number of federal water projects he considered wasteful, incurring the lasting enmity of some of the Democratic barons of Capitol Hill. “If you are president and you’re going to diagnose a problem, you better have a solution to it,” journalist Hendrik Hertzberg, who as a White House speechwriter worked on the “malaise” speech, later observed. “While he turned out to be a true prophet, he turned out not to be a savior.” To many who were sympathetic to Mr. Carter and considered his presidency underrated, his shortcomings stemmed largely from the way he defined the role more in moral than political terms, which reflected his deep religious faith. He craved political power to do good as he saw it, and he was adept at gaining power. But he was not a natural politician, and he was never at home in the messy world of politics and governing in an unruly democracy. He was always far more at home in Plains, the speck of a town in South Georgia that he never really left. Until late in their lives, he and Mrs. Carter frequently were seen walking hand in hand along Church Street on their way home from Saturday dinners at the home of their friend Jill Stuckey. Mr. Carter was a champion for the town, which is essentially a living museum of his life, with old-fashioned storefronts and shops selling everything from Carter Christmas ornaments to campaign memorabilia. He helped woo a Dollar General store to Plains, then shopped for his clothes there. In the 2018 interview, Mr. Carter said he and Mrs. Carter wanted to be buried in Plains partly because they knew their gravesite would draw tourists and provide a much-needed economic boost to their hometown. They celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in 2021 with a party for more than 300 people at Plains High School, which they both had attended about eight decades earlier. The guests included country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, a married couple who had worked with the Carters for years building homes for Habitat for Humanity. (Brooks and Yearwood quietly presented the Carters with a 1946 Ford Super Deluxe convertible, in honor of the year they were married.) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came to the party, as did billionaire and CNN founder Ted Turner, who was Mr. Carter’s longtime friend and fly-fishing buddy, and civil rights leader Andrew Young, whom President Carter appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and who later served as mayor of Atlanta. Also, there was Mary Prince, an African American woman who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1970. She met the Carters when she was a prisoner assigned to work at the Georgia governor’s mansion. Rosalynn Carter was convinced of her innocence and hired her to be Amy Carter’s nanny. After he became president, Mr. Carter persuaded the parole board to let him be Prince’s parole officer. She moved into the White House and lived there for all of Mr. Carter’s presidency, looking after Amy. She later received a full pardon. She still lives in Plains and sometimes cares for the Carters’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Most notably, Bill and Hillary Clinton made the long trip to Plains. The Carters and the Clintons had tense relations for decades but seemed ready to set their differences aside in the twilight of Carter’s life. Onstage, Mr. Carter, who was then 96, spoke haltingly, showing the combined effects of his age and many health problems, including brain cancer that appeared to have been treated successfully in 2015. Seated next to his wife, Mr. Carter expressed “particular gratitude” to her for “being the right woman.” Then he flashed his trademark toothy grin, looked out at an auditorium jammed with family and friends, many of them choking up, and declared, “I love you all very much.” Friends said it felt like a goodbye. The next morning, an exhausted Mr. Carter was wheeled into the Baptist church where he had until recently taught Sunday school. He kissed Pelosi’s hand when she walked in. “I thought he was a great president because he was a president of values, and he acted upon the values,” Pelosi said later. She admired him for his vision, for his striving to help free the world of nuclear weapons, and for the way he inspired people by his good works in his post-presidency. “He went from the White House to building houses for poor people,” she said. “He glorified that work. Others wanted to do it because he did it. That’s powerful.” Despite the feeling of farewell in Plains that summer weekend, Mr. Carter did not fade completely from public view. Nearly five months later, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times decrying “unscrupulous politicians” who guided the mob and the “lie” that the 2020 election had been stolen. He called on Americans to reject political violence, polarization, and disinformation and embrace “fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law.” “Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss,” Mr. Carter warned. “Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy. Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.” Survivors include their four children, John W. “Jack” Carter, James E. “Chip” Carter III, Donnel J. “Jeff” Carter and Amy Carter; 11 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. THE MAN FROM PLAINS James Earl L. “Buddy” Carter Jr., the eldest of four children, was born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, a farming town about 150 miles south of Atlanta. The Carters lived on the family farm in Archery, Ga., about two miles west of Plains, in a house with no electricity or running water. But that was not uncommon in the rural South of the time, and the Carters, though not wealthy, were not poor. As they prospered, the Carters eventually moved to a larger and more modern, although still modest, home in Plains. Mr. Carter’s father, who was known as Earl, was ambitious, hard-working and shrewd. Over the years, he enlarged his farm holdings in the region and branched into other business ventures, including a peanut warehouse. Running for president, Jimmy Carter was often described, and described himself, as a peanut farmer, but that label did not capture the full extent of the family’s business interests. By the time he entered state politics in the early 1960s, Mr. Carter was an affluent agribusinessman, the head of a sizable and thriving commercial enterprise. It was his mother who probably had the most influence on the future president. A nurse by training, Lillian Gordy Carter was talkative, outgoing, at times irrepressible. In 1966, at the age of 68, “Miss Lillian,” as she came to be known, decided to join the Peace Corps, and she spent nearly two years serving in India. She slipped quietly out of town to begin her training because, she said later, the family thought her joining the Peace Corps might arouse conservative suspicions about her son’s campaign for governor. Mr. Carter grew up in the rigidly segregated South of the 1920s and ’30s. But unlike in much of the North, which was segregated in fact if not in law, contact between Black and White people was part of everyday life in much of the South. There was only one other White family in Archery, and many of Mr. Carter’s boyhood friends were Black. His mother turned the family home into a social center where Black and White people were welcome and where she dispensed medical treatment and advice to the sharecropper families who worked the Carter land. In his youth, Mr. Carter made no attempt to conceal his ambition. Perhaps influenced by an uncle, Tom Watson Gordy, a Navy enlisted man who sent messages to the family from exotic places, he declared at an early age that he intended to enter the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and eventually become chief of naval operations. He also told a friend that one day he would be governor of Georgia. Mr. Carter graduated from Plains High School in 1941. To qualify for the Naval Academy, he enrolled at Georgia Southwestern College in nearby Americus, and he later spent a year studying at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In 1943, as World War II raged, he was admitted to the Naval Academy. He was a good student, a quick study who seemed to move through the academy’s rigorous academic schedule with ease. He was also popular with his classmates, and viewed as a “nice guy,” but not necessarily destined to be a leader. He was officially a member of the Class of 1947, but under the Navy’s accelerated wartime schedule, he graduated in 1946, ranking 59th in a class of more than 800. Shortly after his graduation, Mr. Carter married Eleanor Rosalynn Smith of Plains, a close friend of his sister Ruth’s. The new Mrs. Carter, three years younger than her husband, was from a respectable Plains family and shared Mr. Carter’s values and outlook. After graduating from the Naval Academy, Mr. Carter spent two compulsory years on Navy surface ships and then applied for the submarine service. He was accepted and soon won entry to the Navy’s newest and most glamorous program, which was developing the nation’s first nuclear-powered submarines under the iron-fisted direction of a captain (later admiral) named Hyman G. Rickover. Rickover was a cold man who drove his subordinates relentlessly. He never praised his men; he signaled his approval by allowing them to remain in their jobs. Years later, Mr. Carter would say, “I think, second to my own father, Rickover had more effect on my life than any other man.” The title of his 1975 presidential campaign autobiography, “Why Not the Best?” was based on his first encounter with Rickover, who asked him whether he had always done his best at the Naval Academy. The young lieutenant junior grade answered honestly that, no, he had not always done his best. After a long pause, Rickover asked icily, “Why not?” Rickover was not a man who cultivated friendships, and his influence on Mr. Carter might have reinforced the same tendency in the future president. Supremely self-confident, Mr. Carter, too, was a taskmaster, and he was not a favorite president among those who served on the permanent White House staff and saw chief executives come and go. When Mr. Carter came to Washington as the newly elected “outsider” president, he had few real friends in the capital, even among members of his own party. In four years, he did little to forge the bonds of friendship and loyalty that can help carry a president through times of turmoil. He alienated potential allies, and the engineer in him was given to micromanagement. Early in his term, Mr. Carter personally controlled access to the White House tennis court. “Although most considered Mr. Carter a kind, amiable man, he could turn nasty in an instant,” Brinkley wrote in “The Unfinished Presidency.” He added, “At times he was downright vicious; in fact, his trademark steely, laser-sharp stare usually preceded a hurtful put-down. Even in the most informal settings, Mr. Carter had to let everybody know he was in charge.” Mr. Carter, however, did develop deep friendships. One of them, surprisingly, was with Ford, the man he defeated in 1976. Out of office, the two men saw each other frequently and collaborated on various projects. Mr. Carter delivered a eulogy at Ford’s funeral in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 2007. Mr. Carter never stopped taking positions on personally and politically difficult issues. He cut ties with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000, citing its “increasingly rigid” views, especially on the role of women in society. “I’ve made this decision with a great deal of pain and reluctance,” Mr. Carter told the Associated Press at the time. “For me, being a Southern Baptist has always been like being an American. ... My father and his father were deacons and Sunday school teachers. It’s something that’s just like breathing for us.” But he added: “I personally feel the Bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God. I personally feel that women should play an absolutely equal role in service of Jesus in the church.” THE POLITICAL LIFE By 1952, promoted to lieutenant and assigned as the engineering officer on the USS Sea Wolf, the fleet’s second nuclear submarine, Mr. Carter’s Navy career was off to a good start. But his father died in July 1953, leaving the farm and other family business interests in shaky financial condition. As the oldest of the Carter siblings, the young naval officer felt a duty to return to Georgia and take his place as head of the family. And his mother wanted him at home to hold things together through a challenging time. He resigned from the Navy on Oct. 9, 1953, and headed home. His return to Plains reunited him with his sisters, Gloria and Ruth, and his brother, Billy, who became a well-known figure during the Carter presidency. Always the family rebel, Billy Carter reveled in the role of Georgia’s good ol’ boy at the gas station he owned in Plains. He also marketed a beer – Billy Beer — under his own name. But he became an embarrassment to his brother when it was disclosed that he had accepted a $220,000 loan from Libya and registered as a foreign agent of the Libyan government. Mr. Carter’s siblings all died before him —all from pancreatic cancer. Mr. Carter’s Navy resignation was a difficult decision, especially for Rosalynn. She enjoyed the adventure and security of military life, and as a young girl, she had yearned to leave the confines of Plains for the wider world. Now, at 26, with three small children, she headed back to the small town amid the dusty farm fields of southwest Georgia and a life she thought she had escaped. But the Carters soon found their footing in their native region. They formed an effective business partnership, with Rosalynn handling the bookkeeping and other managerial duties at the warehouse and her husband immersing himself in the technical and scientific details of modern farming. They began to prosper. The Carters remained partners in all facets of life. At the White House, Rosalynn Carter was an unusually activist first lady, regularly attending Cabinet meetings and policy sessions and serving as a trusted adviser to the president. She placed special emphasis on mental health issues and served as the active honorary chairman of the President’s Commission on Mental Health. After the White House years, she accompanied her husband on his global missions. Like his father before him, Mr. Carter became an active member in community institutions — Plains Baptist Church, the Lions Club, the local school and library boards, and the county planning commission. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter had been elected to the Georgia legislature the year before his death, and in 1962, his elder son embarked on a political career. He ran for a state Senate seat representing Sumter and six other counties. Mr. Carter ran an energetic campaign for the Democratic primary, the only election that counted at that time in the Deep South, but he came up just short against the incumbent. On the day of the primary, however, his operatives in the small city of Quitman witnessed widespread voting irregularities, including ballot stuffing. It was the way things had been done in Quitman for years. Mr. Carter convinced John Pennington, a young investigative reporter for the Atlanta Journal, that there was a good story to be had in Quitman. Pennington’s subsequent stories exposed the extent of voter fraud in the county and brought Mr. Carter statewide attention. Through intermediaries, including Griffin Bell, who became attorney general in the Carter administration, Mr. Carter made contact with Charles Kirbo, a partner in a prestigious Atlanta law firm. Kirbo, who had never met the Georgia peanut farmer, agreed to represent him in a challenge to the primary election’s outcome. Kirbo remained a friend and trusted adviser. Mr. Carter prevailed, and in January 1963 he took his seat in the Georgia Senate. He served four years, his only legislative experience, generally keeping a low profile while achieving a reputation for diligence and hard work. He promised to read every bill introduced in the legislature, and when he had trouble keeping up, he took a speed-reading course. In 1966, Mr. Carter announced that he was running for the congressional seat held by Howard “Bo” Calloway, a wealthy Republican and graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When Calloway unexpectedly dropped his reelection bid and entered the race for the Republican nomination for governor, Mr. Carter jumped into the race for the Democratic nomination. His primary opponents included Ellis Arnall, a former governor who was regarded as a progressive, and Lester Maddox, an Atlanta restaurant owner who dispensed ax handles to patrons as a symbol of his resistance to the civil rights advances of the 1960s. Mr. Carter finished third in the primary, which was won by Maddox. The 1966 defeat affected Mr. Carter profoundly. It was then, he later wrote, that he underwent a deep religious transformation, a “born-again” experience that guided him for the rest of his life. From then on, he pursued a moral as much as a political agenda and tended to define issues in terms of right and wrong. When he ran for president, he described himself as a “born-again Christian,” at the time a new and somewhat jarring term in the lexicon of presidential politics. He almost immediately began planning to run a second campaign for governor in 1970. His main rival in the Democratic primary was Carl Sanders, a well-regarded former governor with a moderate record on race. Mr. Carter had taken courageous stands on the issue of race, although he was never in the forefront of the civil rights movement, which was gathering momentum and tearing the South apart. In the 1950s, he withstood intense pressure from his neighbors and threats to the family business as one of the few White men in Plains who would not join the local chapter of the White Citizens Council, an organization whose thinly veiled purpose was the continued subjugation of Black people. In 1965, he and other members of his family stood virtually alone in opposing a resolution barring Black people from Plains Baptist Church. But in the 1970 campaign, Mr. Carter aggressively courted the state’s conservative, rural voters, kept his distance from the African American community and relentlessly attacked Sanders as the wealthy crony of the “bigwigs” of Atlanta’s business establishment. Sanders had refused to allow Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, the most prominent segregationist politician in the country, to address the Georgia legislature. Mr. Carter promised repeatedly to invite Wallace to the state. Mr. Carter was endorsed by some of Georgia’s leading segregationists, but the 1970 campaign cost him the support of some old allies. Mr. Carter defeated Sanders in a primary runoff and easily won the general election. He then executed a stunning political pivot. On Jan. 12, 1971, Mr. Carter delivered his inaugural address in front of the Georgia Capitol, declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over. ... No poor, rural, weak or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.” The speech was probably the most important of his life, including those he delivered as president. It brought him national attention and soon landed him on the cover of Time magazine. Mr. Carter became a leading figure in a generation of young New South politicians who were seen as determined to move their region beyond the rancorous politics of race. As governor, Mr. Carter largely lived up to his lofty words. He appointed more women and minorities to state government positions than all of his predecessors combined. He also continued efforts, begun in the state Senate, to upgrade Georgia’s public schools, and he overhauled the prison system and judiciary. EYE ON THE PRESIDENCY Mr. Carter was constitutionally limited to one term as governor (Georgia governors can now serve two consecutive terms), but his ambitions were not similarly constrained. He began to think of running for president, a goal that might seem wildly out of reach even for a bright young governor with a progressive reputation. As late as October 1975, a public opinion poll on possible 1976 Democratic presidential contenders did not include his name. By the 1970 gubernatorial campaign, Mr. Carter had acquired the services, and the fierce loyalty, of two young Georgians who would be at his side through his presidency. One was Hamilton Jordan, a political science student who volunteered to work for Mr. Carter in 1966 and became his closest political strategist and White House chief of staff. The other was Jody Powell, who began as Mr. Carter’s driver in the 1970 campaign and went on to be his chief spokesman and White House press secretary. Jordan died in 2008; Powell died in 2009. While still governor of Georgia, Mr. Carter quietly pursued the presidency with the same determination that marked all of his endeavors. He managed to get appointed to an important Democratic National Committee campaign post, providing a vehicle to meet Democratic politicians and activists around the county. Jordan, his executive assistant, left Atlanta for a job with the DNC in Washington, where he served as the unannounced candidate’s eyes and ears at national party headquarters. Jordan also wrote a long memo setting out the changing contours of the nomination process and a strategy that would lead to victory. Mr. Carter, with Powell at his side, crisscrossed the country tirelessly, impressing the people he met and gradually building a foundation of support. It all came together on a cold January night in Iowa. Mr. Carter did not win the Iowa caucuses in 1976 – the most votes were cast for uncommitted delegates – but he finished first among those who competed. That gave him a burst of publicity and momentum that carried him to victory in the New Hampshire primary and eventually to the nomination as his rivals dropped out of the race one by one. It was the 1976 Carter campaign that firmly established Iowa as the starting point of the road to the White House. After Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration, it was a good year to be a Democrat. Mr. Carter chose Sen. Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, a Northern liberal with strong ties to organized labor, as his running mate, and they headed into the fall campaign with a 30-point lead in the polls over their Republican opponents. They almost lost. Ford ran a disciplined campaign that made maximum use of his status as the incumbent, and Mr. Carter’s lead in the polls steadily dwindled. Shortly before Election Day, Playboy magazine published a long interview with the Democratic nominee. As a final question, Mr. Carter was asked whether he thought that he had reassured people who were uneasy about his religious beliefs and fearful that he would be a rigid, unbending president. In the midst of a long, rambling response, Mr. Carter said: “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Public doubts about the born-again peanut farmer and one-term governor deepened. Mr. Carter won the election by two percentage points. His steep slide during the 1976 campaign was an early warning signal of his political vulnerability. Four years later, Mr. Carter was the incumbent, but that was hardly an advantage. One July 1980 poll put his approval rating at 21 percent, one of the lowest ever recorded for a president. Mr. Carter was the first president to openly embrace rock-and-roll music, and he credits the Allman Brothers and other musicians with helping him win the election in 1976. “I was practically a nonentity, but everyone knew the Allman Brothers,” Mr. Carter said in a 2020 documentary, “Jimmy Carter: Rock-and-roll President.” “When they endorsed me, all the young people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers-like him, we can vote for him.’” Mr. Carter was challenged for his party’s nomination by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a hero to Democratic liberals who had come to detest Mr. Carter for what they considered his conservative policies. The Kennedy campaign badly damaged Mr. Carter’s reelection chances, but it also exposed weaknesses in Kennedy’s presidential aspirations. Mr. Carter won the nomination, and the youngest of the Kennedy brothers never again sought the presidency. In the fall, Mr. Carter faced Reagan, the hero of a rising conservative movement. As he had in the 1970 campaign for governor of Georgia, Mr. Carter played to win. He mounted a negative assault that depicted Reagan as a right-wing ideologue who was too dangerous to entrust with the nation’s future. In the only nationally televised debate of the fall campaign, Reagan disarmed that portrayal. “There you go again,” he said in his avuncular, optimistic style, responding to Mr. Carter’s accusations. Reagan won by almost 10 percentage points, sweeping 44 of the 50 states. For years, people in Mr. Carter’s orbit believed that Reagan supporters had been in contact with Iranian officials and urged them to delay the release of the U.S. hostages in Tehran until after the 1980 election. The purpose, allegedly, was to make sure that Mr. Carter didn’t pull off an “October surprise” that could swing the election in his favor. Investigations by the U.S. House and Senate concluded that there was no credible evidence of any such plot. In March 2023, while Mr. Carter was in hospice care, the New York Times reported allegations made by Ben Barnes, a longtime politician and operative from Texas, that supported those suspicions. Barnes said that he had accompanied his mentor, former Texas governor and former U.S. treasury secretary John B. Connally Jr., to several Middle East countries in the summer of 1980 and that Connally urged leaders there to pass a message to Iranian officials that they should wait until Reagan was president to release the hostages. Connally and most other key players had died, and Barnes’s allegations could not be independently confirmed. But the Times story felt like a vindication to Mr. Carter’s allies. Gerald Rafshoon, Mr. Carter’s White House communications director, told the Times that the allegations were “pretty damn outrageous.” After the Times story was published, grandson Jason Carter told The Post that he believed that Mr. Carter remained alert enough to know about the article and that the family was gratified by what it added to the historical record, but “my grandfather had moved on.” Jason Carter said he never once – despite all that had been written about dirty politics played at the expense of the hostages and Mr. Carter – heard his grandfather talk about it. “I think that tells you a lot,” Jason Carter said. “He believed there were other things more important than politics.” In his first act as a former president, performed at the request of the new president, Mr. Carter flew to a U.S. air base in Germany to greet the American hostages who were returning from Iran. He was 56 and could not know how much time he had left or how he would use it. But in a farewell address a week earlier, Mr. Carter suggested that although he had lost an election, he was not finished with what he saw as his life’s work. “In a few days,” he said, “I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of ‘citizen.’” Mary Jordan contributed to this report. Edward Walsh, who died in 2014, served as The Washington Post’s White House correspondent during the Carter administration. Jimmy Carter at 100: A century of changes for a president, the U.S., the world since 1924 We invite you to add your comments. We encourage a thoughtful exchange of ideas and information on this website. By joining the conversation, you are agreeing to our commenting policy and terms of use . More information is found on our FAQs . You can modify your screen name here . 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