As president, Carter pardoned all Vietnam draft evaders and negotiated several major foreign policy agreements, including the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, and the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and he established diplomatic relations with China.

[30] Carter was promoted to lieutenant junior grade in 1949, and his service aboard Pomfret included a simulated war patrol to the western Pacific and Chinese coast from January to March of that year.

[40] His plans changed when his father died of pancreatic cancer in July, two months before construction of Seawolf began, and Carter obtained a release from active duty so he could take over the family peanut business.

[82] He pushed several reforms through the legislature, providing equal state aid to schools in Georgia's wealthy and poor areas, setting up community centers for mentally disabled children, and increasing educational programs for convicts.

[108] Carter's stated positions during his campaign included public financing of congressional campaigns,[109] his support for the creation of a federal consumer protection agency,[110] creating a separate cabinet-level department for education,[111] signing a peace treaty with the Soviet Union to limit nuclear weapons,[112] reducing the defense budget,[113] a tax proposal implementing "a substantial increase toward those who have the higher incomes" alongside a levy reduction on taxpayers with lower and middle incomes,[114] making multiple amendments to the Social Security Act,[115] and having a balanced budget by the end of his first term of office.

"[120][121] This response and his admission in another interview that he did not mind if people uttered the word "fuck" led to a media feeding frenzy and critics lamenting the erosion of boundary between politicians and their private intimate lives.

[128] Carter's victory was attributed in part[129] to his overwhelming support among black voters in states decided by close margins, such as Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

[158] Due to economic stimulus legislation, such as the Public Works Employment Act of 1977, proposed by Carter and passed by Congress, real household median income had grown by 5.2%, with a projection of 6.4% for the next quarter.

"[176] On January 12, 1978, during a press conference, Carter said the continued discussions about his energy reform proposal had been "long and divisive and arduous" as well as hindering to national issues that needed to be addressed with the implementation of the law.

[190] Carter developed a bitter feeling following an unsuccessful attempt at having Congress enact the scrapping of several water projects,[191] which he had requested during his first 100 days in office and received opposition from members of his party.

[192] As a rift ensued between the White House and Congress afterward, Carter noted that the Democratic Party's liberal wing opposed his policies the most ardently, attributing this to Ted Kennedy's wanting the presidency.

I've been favorably impressed at the high degree of concentrated experience and knowledge that individual members of Congress can bring on a specific subject, where they've been the chairman of a subcommittee or committee for many years and have focused their attention on this particular aspect of government life which I will never be able to do.

He furthered that a majority of House members were placing higher importance on "local or parochial interests" and challenged the lower chamber of Congress with composing their own rationing plan in the next 90 days.

Carter assembled a team that included Vice President Mondale and Assistant Domestic Policy Adviser David Rubenstein to secure a $1.5 billion loan guarantee to rescue Chrysler.

[232] After a failed attempt to seek a comprehensive settlement between the two nations in 1977 (through reconvening the 1973 Geneva conference),[233] Carter invited the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to the presidential lodge Camp David in September 1978, in hopes of creating a definitive peace.

"[235] In an address to the African officials at the United Nations on October 4, 1977, Carter stated the U.S.'s interest to "see a strong, vigorous, free, and prosperous Africa with as much of the control of government as possible in the hands of the residents of your countries" and pointed to their unified efforts on "the problem of how to resolve the Rhodesian, Zimbabwe question.

[246] On May 16, 1979, the Senate voted in favor of lifting economic sanctions against Rhodesia, seen by some Rhodesians and South Africans as a potentially fatal blow to joint diplomacy efforts the United States and Britain had pursued in the region for three years and any compromise between the Salisbury leaders and guerrillas.

[247] On December 3, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance promised Senator Jesse Helms that when the British governor arrived in Salisbury to implement an agreed Lancaster House settlement and the electoral process began, the President would take prompt action to lift sanctions against Zimbabwe Rhodesia.

In December 1978, he announced the United States' intention to formally recognize and establish full diplomatic relations with the PRC starting on January 1, 1979, while severing ties with Taiwan, including revoking a mutual defense treaty with the latter.

[282] Released in 2017, a declassified memo produced by the CIA in 1980 concluded "Iranian hardliners—especially Ayatollah Khomeini" were "determined to exploit the hostage issue to bring about President Carter's defeat in the November elections."

[295] The modest scope of this early collaboration was likely influenced by the understanding, later recounted by CIA official Robert Gates, "that a substantial U.S. covert aid program" might have "raise[d] the stakes", thereby causing "the Soviets to intervene more directly and vigorously than otherwise intended.

"[294][296]According to a 2020 review of declassified U.S. documents by Conor Tobin in the journal Diplomatic History: "The primary significance of this small-scale aid was in creating constructive links with dissidents through Pakistan's ISI that could be utilized in the case of an overt Soviet intervention ...

In a televised speech on January 23, 1980, he announced sanctions on the Soviet Union, promised renewed aid and registration to Pakistan and the Selective Service System, and committed the U.S. to the Persian Gulf's defense.

[294][296][298][299] Carter imposed an embargo on grain shipments to the USSR, tabled SALT II, requested a 5% annual increase in defense spending,[300][301] and called for a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, which was ultimately joined by 65 other nations.

[305] In early 1980, Carter determined the thrust of U.S. policy for the duration of the war: he initiated a program to arm the mujahideen through Pakistan's ISI and secured a pledge from Saudi Arabia to match U.S. funding for this purpose.

[311][312] In October 1979, Curran announced that no evidence had been found to support allegations that funds loaned from the National Bank of Georgia had been diverted to Carter's 1976 presidential campaign, ending the investigation.

[350] In July 2007, Carter joined Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, South Africa, to announce his participation in The Elders, a group of independent global leaders working together on peace and human rights issues.

[357] In December 2008, Carter met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,[358][359] and in a June 2012 call with Jeffery Brown, he stressed that Egyptian military generals could take full executive and legislative power to form a new constitution favoring themselves if their announced intentions came true.

[368] He condemned the handling of the Sabra and Shatila massacre,[369] the lack of efforts to rescue and retrieve four American businessmen from West Beirut in 1984,[370] Reagan's support of the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1985,[371] and his claim of an international conspiracy on terrorism.

In an unusual action, Carter had filed an opinion in support of a lawsuit by environmental groups, saying the swap violated the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (Anilca) passed in 1980, near the end of his presidency.