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How Jimmy Carter Launched His Career and Cemented His Legacy in Atlanta
The mythology of Jimmy Carter begins and ends in Plains, the small Georgia town that raised him and kept drawing him back.
Yet roughly 150 miles away is Atlanta, a city just as essential to understanding the life of the 39th president. If Plains was his home, Georgia’s capital was his stage. If Plains reflected Mr. Carter’s small-town character, Atlanta fit his global ambitions.
While it was never a permanent home, Atlanta allowed him to develop policy priorities and kick off a national political career. Then, after leaving Washington, it gave him the space to burnish a humanitarian legacy, housing his efforts to promote equality, peace and democratic ideals.
Now, because Mr. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, chose to place the Carter Center, their presidential library and the crown jewel of their post-presidential work, in the city, it is where hundreds of visitors will shuffle through the cold to pay their respects while he lies in repose through Tuesday.
“It would have been inconceivable to put everything in Atlanta and to move to Atlanta, because that’s not where they’re from, that’s not who they are,” Jason Carter, Mr. Carter’s grandson, said in an interview. But, he added, “the platform that was available to them in Atlanta was going to be exactly what they needed to have this global jumping-off point.”
Mr. Carter was undeniably shaped by the years he spent in youth on his father’s peanut farm. But beginning with his campaign to serve in the State Senate, he sought to bridge what was often a yawning divide between the rural region where he grew up and the urban engine of the state.
The effort helped shape a career that played out equally on large public stages like Atlanta and more intimate and personal ones like Plains.
“He could relate to people who did not have voices in those big rooms,” said Shannon Heath-Longino, who recounted how Mr. Carter listened to Eva Davis, her grandmother and a champion for revitalizing the East Lake neighborhood of Atlanta, about her vision. He even went to Washington with her to help secure crucial housing funds, she said.
“We had not had the best relationship with political leaders and people being people of their word once they’re elected,” she added. “He was just a man of his word.”
There are the obvious personal influences of the big city. The younger Mr. Carter joked that his grandfather may never have had a Pepsi, given the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, and always tried to take his commercial flights through Delta Air Lines, in a nod to its prominence in the city.
And there was his rain-or-shine devotion to the Atlanta Braves. Mr. Carter and his wife often attended games and were on occasion caught on the kiss cam that panned over the home crowd.
“He would sit there in the rain and cheer the team on — and he was a die-hard fan, a real fan,” said Terry McGuirk, the chairman of the Braves. He added that Mr. Carter had perhaps “the purest love of the game that I have ever seen out of a president.”
But as a political figure who grew his influence in Atlanta, he helped shape its growth and many of the people who would go on to lead or represent the city and the ideals it valued.
As a state senator, Mr. Carter voted to establish the city’s main public transportation authority and later, as governor, oversaw a sales tax increase to help fund its growth and operations. He overhauled the state government, oversaw new mental health and education policies and established a judicial nominating commission.
He “diversified government,” said Dr. Meredith Evans, the director of the president’s library and museum, by elevating women and people of color into positions of power.
“His door was always open — and people sought his counsel in Atlanta,” she added, calling it “a quiet force.”
Mr. Carter was also instrumental in preserving the legacies of some of Atlanta’s most important figures, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He hung a portrait of the civil rights icon in the Capitol gallery during his term as governor. As president, he designated Dr. King’s home and neighborhood a national historic site and helped raise millions of dollars to help fulfill the King family’s ambitions of building the King Center.
“He laid that foundation to make that recognition,” recalled Dr. Bernice King, the daughter of Dr. King and chief executive of the King Center. She added, “these partners, relationships, working together have really made Atlanta a world class city — I don’t think it could have happened without the alignment of the King family and President Carter.”
After his single term in the White House, it quickly became clear that Mr. Carter, who was 56 at the time, would return to his home state.
“He wasn’t the kind of person who’s going to move into a mansion in Atlanta and tap into corporate boards,” said Sheffield Hale, the president and chief executive of the Atlanta History Center. But, Mr. Hale added, “he was deeply rooted in Georgia.”
His devotion to Plains and frugal inclinations meant he spent years sleeping on a pullout couch or Murphy bed during his regular visits to Atlanta. But he still honed connections with Emory University, where he would serve on faculty, team up with the school to open the Carter Center and frequently lecture. (Mr. Carter earned tenure after 37 years, at 94.)
He also helmed the Atlanta Project, a plan to address housing, unemployment and other problems in the city, ahead of the 1996 Olympics.
“Being a relatively young man when he left the presidency and determined, as he was, to make the most of the gifts he’d been given and the opportunities he’d been given, Plains was not going to be a big enough of a landscape for President Carter and his ambitions,” said Joe Crespino, an Emory University history professor. He added that his students frequently peppered the former president with questions based on his papers.
The placement of the Carter Center — which houses a traditional presidential library in tandem with a private organization focused on health care and peace — cemented the former president’s connection to Atlanta. (Dr. Evans, of the Carter library, noted that the easy logistics of the city helped overtake Mr. Carter’s initial vision to put the library in Plains.)
Its permanent location was not without conflict, as the initial plans for the center included building a new highway — decades after Mr. Carter, as governor, had opposed similar construction. A coalition of neighborhoods fought against the new parkway until a compromise was struck, one that led to both the creation of the center and about 200 acres of greenery for what is now Freedom Park.
In a symbol of its importance, the center is now the centerpiece of the tributes to Mr. Carter in Georgia, with flowers and jars of peanuts left at its entrance. The family made a point of holding its first full service there in Atlanta on Saturday, before mourners arrived to pay respects.
“He was a great neighbor, a tremendous friend,” said Brian Maloof, who still owns Manuel’s Tavern, the Atlanta bar where Mr. Carter announced his campaign for governor and continued to visit over the years. “We’re going to miss him.”
The US is planning to board and seize Iran-linked oil tankers and commercial ships in the coming days, according to a Saturday report by The Wall Street Journal.
The report noted that these actions would take place in international waters, potentially outside of the Middle East.
The US “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran,” US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said. “This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil.”
“As most of you know, dark fleet vessels are those illicit or illegal ships evading international regulations, sanctions, or insurance requirements,” Caine continued.
Caine was further quoted as saying that the new campaign, which would be operated in part by the US Indo-Pacific Command, would be part of a broader US President Donald Trump-led campaign against Iran, known as “Economic Fury.”
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the WSJ that Trump was “optimistic” that the new measures would lead to a peace deal.
The potential US military action comes as Iran tightens its grip on the Strait of Hormuz, including attacking several ships earlier on Saturday, the WSJ reported.
The report cited CENTCOM as saying that the US has already turned back 23 ships trying to leave Iranian ports since the start of its blockade on the Strait.
The expansion of naval action beyond the Middle East will provide the US with further leverage against Iran by allowing it to take control of a greater number of ships loaded with oil or weapons bound for Iran, the report noted.
“It’s a maximalist approach,” said associate professor of law at Emory University Law School Mark Nevitt. “If you want to put the screws down on Iran, you want to use every single legal authority you have to do that.”
Iran claimed earlier on Saturday that it had regained military control over the Strait, intending to hold it until the US guarantees full freedom of movement for ships traveling to and from Iran.
“As long as the United States does not ensure full freedom of navigation for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz will remain tightly controlled,” the Iranian military stated.
In addition, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei declared on Saturday in an apparent message on his Telegram channel that the Iranian navy is prepared to inflict “new bitter defeats” on its enemies.
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By Jodi Kantor, Alexandra Ostasiewicz, June Kim and Luke Piotrowski
April 18, 2026
A Pakistani Ranger walks past a billboard for the U.S.-Iran peace talks in Islamabad on April 12, 2026. The talks, led by Vice President JD Vance, produced no concrete movement toward a peace deal.
Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images
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Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images
Despite stalled talks with Iran and a fragile ceasefire nearing its end, President Trump expressed optimism this week that a permanent deal is within reach — one that may include Iran relinquishing its enriched uranium. However, experts who spent months negotiating a nuclear agreement during the Obama administration say mutual mistrust, starkly different negotiating styles make a quick truce unlikely.
Referring to Vice President Vance’s whirlwind negotiations in Islamabad last week that appear to have produced little beyond dashed expectations, Wendy Sherman, the lead U.S. negotiator on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal finalized in 2015, says the administration’s approach was all wrong.
“You cannot do a negotiation with Iran in one day,” she told NPR’s Here & Now earlier this week. “You can’t even do it in a week.” To get agreement on the JCPOA, she said, it took “a good 18 months.”
The talks leading to that deal highlighted Iran’s meticulous style of negotiation, says Rob Malley, who was also part of the JCPOA negotiating team and later served as a special envoy to Iran under President Joe Biden.
Summing up the two sides’ differing styles, Malley said: “Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership [is] stubborn and tenacious.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a news conference on the Iran nuclear talks deal at the Austria International Centre in Vienna, Austria on July 14, 2015.
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In 2015, patience led to a deal
The talks in 2015, led by Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, culminated with a marathon 19-day session in Vienna to finish the deal, says Jon Finer, a former U.S. deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration. Finer was involved in the negotiations as Kerry’s chief of staff. He said his boss’s patience “was a huge asset” in getting the deal to the finish line, he said.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister during the negotiations for the Obama-era nuclear deal, speaks on April 22, 2016 in New York.
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“He would endure lectures … ‘let me tell you about 5,000 years of Iranian civilization’… and just keep plowing ahead,” Finer said, adding that a tactic of Iranian negotiators seemed to be “to say no to everything and see what actually matters” to the U.S.
“They’re just maddeningly difficult,” he said. “You need to go back at the same issue 10 or 12 times over weeks or months to make any progress.”
Even so, Finer called the Iranian negotiators “extremely capable” — noting that, unlike the U.S., they often lacked expert advisers “just outside the room,” yet still mastered the details of nuclear weapons, nuclear materials and U.S. sanctions.
“They were also negotiating not in their first language,” Finer added. “The documents were all negotiated in English, and they were hundreds of pages long with detailed annexes.”
Vance’s trip to Islamabad suggests that the U.S. doesn’t have the patience for a negotiation to end the conflict that could be at least as complex and time-consuming. “The Trump administration came in with maximalist demands and actually just wanted Iran to capitulate,” Sherman, who served as deputy secretary of state during the Biden administration, told Here & Now. “No nation – even one as odious as the Iran regime – is going to capitulate.”
Distrust but verify
Iran was attacked twice in the past year. First in June of last year, as nuclear negotiations were ongoing, Israel and the U.S. struck the country’s nuclear facilities. Months later, at the end of February, Iran was attacked again at the start of the latest conflict. This time around, “the level of trust is probably almost at an all-time low,” Malley said.
“It’s hard for them to take at their word what they’re hearing from U.S. officials,” Malley said. The Iranians, he said, have to be wondering how long any commitment will last and “will be very hesitant to give up something that’s tangible” – such as their enriched uranium – in exchange for anything that isn’t ironclad or subject to suddenly be discarded by Trump or some future president.
“Once they give up their stockpile … they can’t recapture it the next day,” Malley said.
Even during the 2013-2015 nuclear deal talks, the decades of mistrust between Tehran and Washington were impossible to ignore, Finer said. “Our theory was not trust but verify — it was distrust but verify,” he said, adding: “I think that was their theory too.”
Malley cautions about relying on the JCPOA as a guide to how peace talks to end the current war might go. The leadership in Tehran that agreed to the deal is now gone — killed in Israeli airstrikes, he says. The regime’s military capabilities are also greatly diminished and “whatever lessons were learned in the past … have to be viewed with a lot of caution, because so much has changed,” he said.
Negotiations have a leveling effect
Mark Freeman, executive director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions, a peace and security think tank based in Spain that advises on conflict negotiations, says several factors shape the U.S.-Iran relationship. Going into talks, one side always has the upper hand, he says, but negotiations have a leveling effect. “The weaker party gains just by virtue of entering into a negotiation process,” he said.
Each side is looking for leverage, he adds.
In Iran’s case, it has used its closure of the Strait of Hormuz to exert such leverage, while the White House has shown an eagerness to resolve the conflict quickly. “If one side perceives the other needs an agreement more … that shapes the entire negotiation,” he said.
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