Congressman Carter was born in Tompkinsville, Kentucky. He attended Western Kentucky State College (now Western Kentucky University) in Bowling Green, having pursued a pre-med curricula. Carter went on to earn his medical degree from the University of Tennessee in 1937. He then volunteered to serve as a medic in World War II, traveling with the Thirty-Eighth Infantry for over three and a half years. Later Carter returned to practice medicine in Tompkinsville.

In 1964, Carter sought the Republican nomination for Congress, following the retirement of Representative Eugene Siler. Carter won the election over Democrat Frances Jones Mills and served in the U.S. House of Representatives until his retirement in 1981. He was one of the few bright spots in a disastrous year for the GOP. However, he represented one of the few ancestrally Republican districts south of the Ohio River. Voters in this region identified with the Republicans after the Civil War, and have supported the GOP through good times and bad ever since. Carter was considered a moderate-progressive Republican in Washington. Carter voted in favor of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

In 1966, Congressman Carter was sent by President Johnson to Vietnam along with ten other war-veteran congressmen on a “Speaker’s Committee.” Upon his return, he was asked by Johnson about his opinion of the state of the war. Carter went against the nine other delegates, stating: “No, Mr. President, you are not winning the war,”. Carter later came to be known as the first Republican Congressman to call for the end of the Vietnam War. Rising before the U.S. House of Representatives on August 28, 1967, Carter stated “Let us now, while we are yet strong, bring our men home, every man jack of them. The Vietcong fight fiercely and tenaciously because it is their land and we are foreigners intervening in their civil war. If we must fight, let us fight in defense of our homeland and our own hemisphere.”

A Carter nephew, M.C. “Doc” Keen of Burkesville, served as sheriff of Cumberland County and ran unsuccessfully for the Kentucky State Senate in the Republican primary held on May 29, 1973. The eventual winner was United Methodist minister Doug Moseley, a native of Bowling Green who then ran unopposed in the general election held on November 6, 1973.

As reported in a 1977 issue of Time magazine, Physician-Congressman Tim Lee Carter put forth the first Republican plan for national health insurance.

Carter often joked that his congressional district stretched from “Fountain Run to Kingdom Come.” On his retirement, he returned to live in Tompkinsville, Kentucky, and remained active in local, state, and national politics until his death in 1987.