Admiral James Earl Carter

What if, instead of resigning his commission when his father died in 1953, Jimmy Carter stayed in the USNavy?
 
interesting, since carter was one of Rickover protégés

but he ll just end up some pentagon staff officer, i dont think he is the frontline type of guy
 
The trick is to keep Carter's father alive longer 20 years longer. The main reason for leaving the navy was to take over the family farm and look after his family. When Carter resigned from the navy he was 29 and his brother Billy was only 16, only 10 years older than Carter's oldest child.
 
Carter was enough of a politician inherently that he probably would have made flag rank, but chances are he'd have retired sometime in his mid 60s (say, about 1989) with a lavish banquet...and then would have been largely forgotten within a couple of years. He'd be spinning out his retirement probably in northern VA (I doubt he'd have gotten outside the corridors of the Pentagon much), probably working on Habitat for Humanity projects, teaching Sunday School, and the like, in near-complete obscurity.
 
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