♪ she's gonna live for herself ♪ ♪ so she can change the world ♪ ♪ [ cheers and applause ] tonight remembering jimmy carter. >> my name is jimmy carter, and i'm running for president. >> the nation's 39th president. his journey from the fields. >> my family, the carters, have lived in georgia since about 1760 to the oval office. i told you i didn't intend to lose.

>> through the triumphs and what he called the worst year of his life. >> when i asked jimmy carter what he was most proud of. the first thing he said was. i always told the truth. >> how he used his station to serve. >> he didn't just want to be president, to be president. he wanted to be president, to kind of save god's earth. >> plus a love story for the ages. married to his high school sweetheart, rosalyn for 77 years. >> we've always grown deeper in our love for one another. >> insisting on leaving his hospice bed to attend her funeral and their final resting place together. >> i saw this beautiful bluebird. rosalyn said, and i knew that that was a perfect place for us to be buried side by side. >> and jimmy carter's hopes for the future, in his own words. >> that's what i think would make america a better country.

>> the special edition of nightline, remembering jimmy carter. we'll be right back. carter. we'll be right back. >> and this. let you should use , otherwise the flakes will come back. —he's right, you know. is that tiny troy? the ingredients in head and shoulders keep the microbes that cause flakes at bay. microbes, really? they're always on your scalp... but good news, there's no itchiness, dryness or flakes down here! i love tiny troy. and his tiny gorgeous hair. make every wash count! and for stubborn dandruff, try head & shoulders clinical strength.

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farming family in rural georgia, elected to the world's most powerful office but never losing his drive to help those less fortunate. >> i'm perfectly at ease with my life span being in the hands of god. i don't think anybody could have had a more gratifying life. my family, the carters, have lived in georgia since about 1760. we've all been farmers, my generation on my daddy's side. i'm the first one that ever finished high school. my name is jimmy carter, and i'm running for president. >> without question, jimmy carter defied the odds in so

many different ways. >> my grandfather is a small town guy. i think it sort of fundamentally true of him that he comes from a 600 person town. he didn't have shoes until he went to school. he grew up, you know, with the land on the farm. >> james earl carter senior is a farmer. he grows peanuts and cotton. and jimmy carter, as a boy, sells boiled peanuts on the main street of plains, georgia. >> when i was eight years old, if you'd asked me, what do you want to do when you grow up like a parrot, i would say, i want to go to annapolis and be a naval officer. >> when he graduates from the naval academy, he marries the girl next door, rosalynn smith, and she becomes rosalynn carter. >> he actually, you know, was primed to be an admiral in the navy. >> he was on track to being something really big. but when

my granddaddy passed away, he came home. >> he decided to come back to plains and run his father's peanut business. >> carter gives up this glamorous naval career, much to his wife's chagrin, in order to become the kind of humble peanut farmer that his father had been. >> but he gets really interested in politics, and his next step is running for the georgia senate. >> when he ran for governor of georgia, many people thought he stood no chance. even his wife questioned, do we really want to run for governor? and he did. >> i think when you heard jimmy carter, the governor, say in his inaugural address, i say to you, quite frankly, that the time for racial discrimination is over. he put martin luther king's

picture up in the state capitol. >> but he thought he could do more. so he ran for president. my name is jimmy carter. >> i'm from georgia. i hope to be your next president. >> how you doing? when it comes to presidential timing, jimmy carter, his timing was perfect. america was still exhausted from the nixon years. here comes honest abe. jimmy carter, the man who promised never to lie. >> by 272 electoral votes, two more than he needed. jimmy carter, projected as the next president of the united states. >> people who remembered the night that he won remember that image of him in this little town, in this remote place in the south? >> i told you i didn't intend to lose with that huge thousand watt smile. >> jimmy carter, less than 24 hours away from the presidency, still carrying his bags, making a point of cleaning up his den and turning off electricity and water before leaving home. >> jimmy carter this virtual

unknown former governor from the state of georgia, becomes our 39th president. >> jimmy carter was an engineer. he wanted to solve problems, and he set about trying to do that. >> he established fema and the department of energy. he passed 70% of the legislation that he put before congress. >> i have appointed more women to federal courts than all the presidents combined in the history of this country. >> most notably, ruth bader ginsburg. >> i think some of his greatest things are probably the environmental work that he did. >> jimmy carter points to a clean energy future by installing solar panels on the white house. >> he didn't just want to be president, to be president. he wanted to be president, to kind

of save god's earth. >> and there's one historic achievement that seemed impossible at the time. >> the participants are now beginning to arrive for the opening tomorrow of the big camp david summit. >> jimmy carter, amazingly, got the head of egypt, the largest arab country in the region, and the head of israel, to come to this rustic little place called camp david. >> and in 13 very historic days at camp david, he fashioned a peace between those two nations that continues today. >> peace has come to israel and to egypt. >> there is the three way handshake. >> blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be the children of god. >> he put together the peace treaty. big arab nations paid him back.

>> prices soared over 50% as worldwide oil supplies tightened. >> the price of oil doubled in less than 12 months. >> gas prices skyrocketed. you can only get gas on certain days, and this sent a wave of inflation throughout the whole world. >> the price of everything from a hamburger to an airplane ride has inflated at the rate of 125%. ho! >> that last year in the white house, the most stressful. >> it was the worst year of my life. we have two hostages held by iran. >> this is world news tonight. >> i was doing the sunday night news on abc on the 4th of november, 1979. >> the u.s. embassy in tehran has been invaded and occupied by iranian students. >> america agrees to take the deposed shah of iran into our borders in order to get medical

treatment. the ayatollah khomeini, the head of iran, orders the takeover of the american embassy. >> this is the fifth agonizing day for the u.s. government. >> this was the origination of nightline to give a daily report on those hostages. >> and every single day it starts with this is day 21, day 30, day 58. >> day 174. >> meanwhile, ronald reagan is getting a head start as the republican candidate. >> november 4th, 1980 the election of a president. >> the anniversary of their taking of the hostages happened to be on election day. >> even though carter loses the presidency in 1980 with a humiliating landslide defeat at the hands of ronald reagan, he is determined to get the 52 american hostages still held in iran free. >> he lost, but he's still president until january. >> there's never been a day that

went by. in fact, there's never been an hour that went by since the hostages were taken that i didn't try to do something to get them home safely. i need to be here until we get the hostages off the ground. i spent my last three days and nights as president. i never went to bed. i just stayed up and negotiated. and we had all the hostages in an airplane at the end of the runway. >> raise your right hand and repeat after me. >> i told i was waiting for ronald reagan to take the oath of office. >> i, ronald reagan, do solemnly swear. >> and the moment reagan took the oath of office. >> so help me god. >> permission was granted for those airplanes to take off. >> we got the word that the hostages were free. and i'd say that was probably the most happy moment of my life. >> of your life? >> yes, i think it was. >> carter essentially creates the playbook for the modern activist post-presidency.

>> he decided decided to take on projects that no one else wanted to do. so you can call on us. >> the carter center began as my grandparents life work. >> and we actually go in to foreign countries and sometimes a quite dangerous circumstance, work with revolutionaries and work with the incumbent governments, hold elections to establish democracy. quite often in the middle of turmoil and violence. we began to address diseases around the world. they're the kind of diseases, a few of which i knew when i was a child in georgia. the aftermath is very similar to polio. >> we turn now to former president jimmy carter. >> carter gets brain cancer in 2015. >> it was metastasized melanoma. it had already gone into the blood and the liver. >> and i'm perfectly at ease with whatever comes. i do have deep religious faith, which i'm very grateful for. i was just completely at ease. >> carter wins the nobel peace

prize in 2002. >> he got a nobel peace prize not for negotiating big peace agreements in olden days, but for the work we're doing in africa. there's been a very diverse life, exciting, challenging, unpredictable, adventurous. it has been a full life. >> i think it's fair to say that jimmy carter, he loved his wife. he loved his family. he loved his country. he loved planet earth. >> president carter wanted me to say something at his services whenever he passes on. so i've been thinking about it. there's a hymn i keep so busy serving my jesus, i ain't got time to die. >> when i asked jimmy carter what he was most proud of, the first thing he said was i always

told the truth. and then he started smiling. >> the carter center is one of the ways, and the people and the lives that it touches are one of the ways that he's going to be here forever. >> i think uncle jimmy would want us to remember that he he was true to himself. >> he was true to himself from the bottom of my heart. i want to express to you the gratitude i feel. thank you, fellow citizens. and farewell. >> for more about the legacy of jimmy carter, make sure to watch jimmy carter a full life. a special edition of 2020, now streaming on hulu. when we come back, the enduring love story of jimmy and rosalynn carter. jimmy and rosalynn carter. >> it's later chest congestion.

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> back. jimmy and rosalynn carter shared a love like no other. the lifelong couple sat down with our steve osunsami a couple of years ago. steve. >> hi, stephanie. we were the last television interview with the carters and he was inspiring to us even then. as he walked in the door, he came in early and demanded that we start right away. we talked with him and the former first lady. we didn't touch on any current events or global affairs. instead, we focused on their love story and the love that they told us, got them through this world and would power them through the next. president carter, you say

often that marrying mrs. carter was the pinnacle of your life, more than any presidency? oh, yes. >> that was the most important thing in my life. it was. it was happy and joyful and obviously long lasting. the the successful campaign was a great greatest event in our life together. except for getting married, having rosalynn say, okay, finally, and staying with me all this long, this 75 years of marriage, what advice do you have for people who want to make it last? well, let me take the first step. first of all, choose the right person to marry and then give each other plenty of space. let let the other person you know have a full life in the

way they choose and help when you can share things a lot and do things together. >> we are always looking for to do things for fun things we can do together, like fly fishing and bird watching and just going out to the pond. yeah, catch a fish. >> and every night we try to make sure we are completely reconciled from all the arguments during the day. okay. when we go to bed, we also read the bible every night, and we've done that for. 60 years. so we try to share what we can. >> it's hard to go to sleep if you've read angry, if you've read the bible. >> so never go to bed angry. try not to solve that argument before you go to bed. we do that. i have trouble with that. >> you have had trouble with it too? >> i think we've succeeded most of the time.

>> i think so, yeah. >> so get those arguments out of the way, right? >> you know, we still have our ups and downs, which makes life more exciting, i guess, particularly getting over them. >> so we're still love each other very much, maybe even more than we did at first. >> there's no doubt in my mind that my love for her is stronger than. because we've been through so many things together for 75 years of marriage, we've always grown deeper in our love for one another. i think that's a kind of extraordinary thing that happens to very many couples, but it certainly happened to us. >> the former president's remains will be moved on saturday and will stop at the georgia state house and then here at the carter center, where people can pay their respects. then he heads to washington, where there will be a public viewing at the u.s. capitol on

thursday is the state funeral at the national cathedral, where president joe biden will deliver the eulogy. >> stephanie. our thanks to steve. when we come back, jimmy carter's wish for america, in his own words, when this special edition of nightline remembering jimmy carter continues. jimmy carter continues. >> popping is hard work, but i gs without the extra work. it has a built-in solution that breaks down dirt on contact. and the pads hundreds of strips scrub away sticky messes even from grout lines. ok powermop! plus, it's 360-degree swivel head cleans up along baseboards and even behind the toilet. so, ditch the bucket and all the hard work that comes along with it. with the swiffer powermop. you've got a pepto predicament, ace. you overdid it on the loaded fries. undo it with pepto fast melts. ♪ when you have nausea, heartburn, indigestion, ♪

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tributes to the former president pour in from around the world, we leave you tonight with a piece of jimmy carter's legacy, his hope for the future. in his own words. on behalf of all of us here at nightline, good night america. >> wouldn't it be nice if the united states of america could be a superpower in maintaining peace and to be a champion of human rights if we helped one person have a new friend? that's what i think would make america a better country.