U.S. president, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and submariner James Earl Carter, Jr., died in his home on Sunday in Plains, Ga. He was 100. Carter was a peanut farmer-turned-multi-role public servant. He served as the 39th president of the United States between 1977 to 1981. Less known, his public life began at the U.S. Naval Academy and service in nuclear-powered submarines, US Naval Institute News reports.
Carter attended Plains High School in Georgia from 1937-1941, graduating after 11th grade “because the school did not have a 12th grade,” according to Kaye Minchew’s 2021 oral history collection, Jimmy Carter: Citizen of the South.
Carter’s uncle, Tom Gordy, served in the Navy and inspired his young nephew to write to the Academy for a catalog to get a taste of what life was like “on the Yard” at Annapolis, according to an account from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
Carter joined the Brigade of Midshipmen after a year of study in the NROTC program at Georgia Tech and graduated from the Academy in the top 10th of the class of 1946. As an ensign, he served two years on board the battleship-turned-experimental gunnery ship USS Wyoming (E-AG-17). He then served as executive officer, engineering officer and electronics repair officer aboard submarine SSK-1, which was laid down in 1949 by Electric Boat in Groton, Conn., as an experimental attack sub called Barracuda III and launched in 1951 as K-1.
As then-Capt. Hyman G. Rickover—acclaimed later as “The Father of the Nuclear Navy”—launched a program that would lead to the creation of nuclear-powered submarines, Lt. jg. Carter was one of the first candidates to join Rickover’s disciples. President Carter later reportedly said that Rickover, “second to my own father, had more effect on my life than any other man.” The junior officer withstood at least one of Rickover’s notorious and exhaustive entrance interviews and was promoted to lieutenant.
From November 1952 to March 1953, Lt. Carter went “on temporary duty” with the Nuclear Reactors Branch of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Washington. Having “learned to fly seaplanes, trained on old battleships, and learned to man 40-millimeter anti-aircraft guns,” according to the Naval History and Heritage Command, the young officer would be instrumental “in the design and development of nuclear-propulsion plants for naval vessels.”
Carter served in the nuclear navy when the world’s understanding of fission was in its infancy. As Carter detailed in his 1976 book, Why Not the Best?: The First 50 Years, the NRX reactor at the Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, Canada, ruptured on Dec. 12, 1952 —a partial meltdown. No one was seriously injured from the blast, but 4.5 million liters of radioactive water contaminated the reactor’s basement, and no human could spend more than 90 seconds in the extensively damaged core. The Canadians “needed help” to disassemble it, and “the United States sent 28-year-old Jimmy Carter to the reactor’s damaged core.” He and his two dozen crewmen teamed with Canadian and other U.S. service members and built a replica of the reactor on a nearby tennis court so they could practice on it and ensure all the bolts were accounted for and in the right place, one by one, in the proper sequence.
Carter’s own exposure to radiation produced high levels of radioactivity in his urine for approximately six months, as reported by Canadian journalist Arthur Milnes.
“They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now. It was in the early stages, and they didn’t know,” Carter recalled.
Carter was on track to become the engineering officer for the USS Seawolf (SSN-575), one of the first submarines to operate on atomic power in July 1953 when his father died. After his father’s death, Carter left the service and was honorably discharged on Oct. 9 and asked to be transferred to the retired reserve force with the rank of lieutenant.
Following his departure from the active-duty Navy, Carter returned to his family’s peanut business and won election to the Georgia Senate in 1961, the governorship of Georgia in 1971 and the presidency of the U.S. in 1976.
In the White House, Carter oversaw the first major Middle East peace deal as part of the Camp David Accords, transferred control of the Panama Canal to Panama and negotiated the SALT II nuclear arms reduction agreement with the Soviet Union. In 1979, after the overthrow of the Shah, Iranian forces held U.S. citizens for more than a year, casting a shadow over the end of Carter’s presidency.
As a private citizen, Carter was an envoy in peace negotiations from Asia to the Middle East and worked with charities like Habitat for Humanity and his own non-profit the Carter Center.
Carter was married to his wife Rosalynn for 77 years before she died in November 2023.
Carter’s naval legacy includes the nuclear attack boat USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23), the third and final submarine of the Seawolf class, which was commissioned in 2005. Carter is the only U.S. president to qualify on subs, and Jimmy Carter is one of only three U.S. Navy subs to be named for a living person. Last year, the Naval Academy renamed a building at the Naval Academy after Carter.
