Jimmy Carter helped cause Arizona to have 3 governors in 5 months. What to know about his legacy
The 39th U.S. president had several connections to Arizona and its people worth remembering.
Former President Jimmy Carter died Sunday at age 100 after nearly two years in hospice care.
His wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, died in 2023. Their marriage lasted 77 years.
Carter, a former Georgia governor, was the nation’s 39th president, serving from 1977 to 1981, and was the longest-living former president. He lost his 1980 reelection bid to Republican Ronald Reagan.
He battled cancer and struggled with other health issues since 2015.
He had several notable connections to Arizona before, during and after his single term in the White House.
Here is a rundown of what you need to know about Carter and Arizona.
Arizona’s Mo Udall stood in his path
One of the 12 men challenging Carter for the 1976 Democratic nomination was U.S. Rep. Morris K. “Mo” Udall, D-Ariz.
Udall received the fourth-most votes in the Democratic primaries and finished a distant second to Carter in the party’s delegate count.
Carter made three campaign appearances in Arizona in 1976, one of them to help Udall retire his own presidential campaign debt.
That November, President Gerald Ford carried Arizona by about 16 percentage points over Carter. It extended a string of Republican wins in the state that began in 1952 and continued until 1996.
Senator from Arizona helped shape Panama Canal Treaty
The same year Carter won the White House, Arizona elected U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz. While they belonged to the same party, they battled on at least two major issues.
Perhaps the most memorable involved ratifying the handover of the Panama Canal. DeConcini was a key holdout on the decision and only approved the deal Carter and Ford had negotiated when an amendment was included to make clear the U.S. could still use military force in Panama if the canal’s security was threatened.
The issue was one of the more controversial of its era and 11 Democratic senators who voted for handing over the canal lost in 1980. DeConcini, who wasn’t on the ballot until 1982, survived a recall attempt over the issue.
President-elect Donald Trump floated the idea of the U.S. reestablishing control of the canal during an appearance in Phoenix in December.
Carter sought to kill Central Arizona Project
Carter wanted to cut spending across the government and looked for prominent examples to make his case, such as selling the presidential yacht. One of his targets was the Central Arizona Project, the 336-mile water network that provides plentiful water for the Phoenix and Tucson areas.
DeConcini again butted heads with the Carter administration.
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed onto a plan that allowed Arizona to move ahead with the system in exchange for earlier support for his Voting Rights Act.
The CAP was an area of intense lobbying by Arizona’s congressional delegation for decades beginning in the 1940s with eventual Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland, D-Ariz., and carried on principally by Sen. Carl Hayden, D-Ariz., who rose to head the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.
It also helped that Arizona had another well-positioned senior member of Congress.
Rep. John Rhodes, R-Ariz., was on the House Appropriations Committee and was the ranking member of its Public Works subcommittee. He ensured the project had funding support — including its first $1 million — in his chamber as well.
By the time Carter took office, Rhodes had risen to the post of House minority leader and had the influence to resist Carter's efforts to defund CAP.
“The Central Arizona Project, there was nothing more dear for Arizona than that, so we had a second run-in,” DeConcini told The Arizona Republic in 2023. “He said, 'Well, Dennis, we just can’t afford it.' … But he was nice about the disagreement.”
Carter eventually backed off the issue and the water system continued to receive annual federal funding.
An early interest in Latino affairs
Carter showed an interest in Latino issues and their political empowerment at a time when much of the country didn’t.
Arizonans played a role in his administration’s efforts on that front.
In 1977, Carter named Graciela Olivarez, a Phoenix resident who advocated for the poor, to head the federal Community Services Administration. Near the end of his presidency, Carter created the Office of Hispanic Affairs to increase representation of the demographic in the federal government.
Carter named Tommy Espinoza, CEO of the San Juan Diego Institute, a Phoenix nonprofit, to the president’s Mexican American Advisory Council ahead of his 1979 state visit to Mexico.
“Most of the time, they come in and do the meet-and-greet and, maybe, if you’re lucky, five or 10 minutes. President Carter sat through it and asked a lot of good questions,” Espinoza recalled. “He definitely wanted to get a pulse of what was happening out there across the country.”
One Carter appointment led to Arizona having 3 governors in 5 months
Carter named Arizona’s then-Gov. Raúl Castro as ambassador to Argentina in 1977.
Castro’s departure from the state Capitol meant longtime Secretary of State Wesley Bolin ascended to governor.
But Bolin died after less than five months in office, and, because his recent replacement as secretary of state was not elected, the state’s attorney general, Bruce Babbitt, became the governor.
Babbitt held office until 1986, when he left to pursue his own presidential ambitions. Babbitt later served as secretary of the Interior under President Bill Clinton.
Arizona played part in Carter’s post-presidency
In 2017, Carter received an honor from Arizona State University named for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in one of her final public appearances.
Carter offered rare praise for his successor, President Ronald Reagan, over nominating the nation’s first woman justice to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I didn’t always agree with everything that Ronald Reagan did, but selecting her as a justice was one of the best decisions he ever made,” Carter said at the time.
In 2022, the Carter Center, the namesake nonprofit he founded that provides humanitarian aid and monitors elections, gave Arizona’s embattled election systems a clean bill of health.