James Earl Carter took the presidential oath as “Jimmy,” not “James.” In December 1977, Hugh Sidey of Time called him “the first President in history to get away with official use of a nickname.” National Park Service historians checked with the White House about which name to use. “Back came the order: Jimmy.”
Carter had campaigned the same way. In Iowa in 1975, before the 1976 caucuses, he would walk up to strangers. The journalist Judy Woodruff recalled that he would “put out his hand and say, hi, I’m Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer from Georgia, former Governor and I’m running for president.”
Sidey also saw a cost. He wrote that Carter’s “seemingly casual, unorthodox approach to the presidency may now be working against him.”