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Former President Jimmy Carter has died at age 100
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Former President Jimmy Carter has died at age 100.
Carter served as the 39th president of the United States and 76th governor of Georgia and won a Nobel Prize for his work as a global humanitarian dedicated to waging peace and fighting disease.
He was the longest-lived U.S. president, as well as the one with the longest post-presidency.
Carter died at home this afternoon in Plains, Ga., surrounded by family, The Carter Center, The Atlanta Journal Constitution and The Washington Post reported. He was preceded in death by his wife and former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023.
On Feb. 18, 2023, the Carter Center released a statement that said Carter had begun receiving hospice care and was no longer seeking medical interventions.
Known for his wide smile and soft-spoken Southern cadence, Carter was a lover of music and poetry, a caring husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather, an author, a painter, a woodworker and an unprecedented conservationist.
Early life
James Earl Carter Jr. was born Oct. 1, 1924, on a farm just outside of Plains, Ga. — a far cry from the marble glamour of Washington, D.C., the place he called home as president in the late 1970s.
After graduating top of his class at Plains High School, Carter studied at Georgia Tech and the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1946 with distinction after which he was assigned to USS Wyoming (E-AG 17) as an ensign. After seven years' service as a naval officer, Carter returned to Plains and entered state politics in 1962. He was elected governor of Georgia in 1970 and as president of the United States in 1976.
An inseparable couple
Carter was married for 76 years to his wife, Rosalynn. Though he's better known for his politics than his poetry, several collections of his work have been published over the years, including an eponymous ode to his wife.
“She’d smile, and birds would feel that they no longer had to sing,” he wrote, “or it may be I failed to hear their song.”
The pair married in 1946 and were inseparable. Rosalynn was his closest adviser, and a fierce advocate for mental health as first lady of Georgia and the country.
She was also his biggest campaigner.
“My grandmother is certainly the best political mind in the family,” grandson Jason Carter said of Rosalynn in an interview. “My grandfather has incredible attributes, but my grandmother really is his strength.”
As governor and president
In 1966, Carter finished third in the Democratic Party primary for Georgia governor before winning in 1970.
A 1971 New York Times article about Carter’s inauguration as Georgia’s governor highlighted his call for an end to racial discrimination.
"He increased the number of African American staff members in Georgia's government by 25%," the University of Virginia's Miller Center reported. He also combined state agencies to reduce wasteful spending, promoted environmental protection and school funding.
He announced his candidacy for president in 1974.
According to his White House biography, "Carter began a two-year campaign that gradually gained momentum. At the Democratic Convention, he was nominated on the first ballot. He chose Sen. Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate. Carter campaigned hard against President Gerald R. Ford, debating with him three times. Carter won by 297 electoral votes to 241 for Ford."
He was elected on Nov. 2, 1976, and sworn in as the 39th president of the United States on Jan. 20, 1977.
During his time in office, Carter brokered the Camp David agreement of 1978, which improved relations between Egypt and Israel. He also succeeded in obtaining ratification of the Panama Canal treaties.
His domestic accomplishments still resonate. In a 2022 interview, Carter's grandson Josh Carter said younger generations will likely view President Carter's accomplishments in the White House as positive: "If you look at his legacy, he put solar panels on the roof of the White House. He strove towards clean energy. He expanded the National Park Service ... He started the Department of Energy, Department of Education."
Waging peace throughout the world
After his presidential loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, Carter embarked on more than four decades of humanitarian work to make the world better. Buoyed by his faith, his hometown of Plains and his wife Rosalynn, he prepared for his next and, perhaps, most important, chapter: waging peace through the Carter Center.
Founded in 1982 as a natural extension of Carter's presidential focus on diplomacy, the center became an outlet for continuing the work that both Carters began in the White House, including Mrs. Carter's efforts to promote the dignity and self-worth for people living with mental illnesses. Over the years, the center has monitored elections around the world, virtually eradicated Guinea worm disease and championed the furtherance of human rights.
“If I had to choose between four more years [in the White House] and the Carter Center, I think I would choose the Carter Center,” he once said.
Carter also joined Emory University's faculty in 1982, serving as University Distinguished Professor until his death. The Carter Center's partnership with the university "has resolved conflict, advanced democracy and human rights, prevented disease, and improved mental health care," Emory's website said.
Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
“I am not here as a public official, but as a citizen of a troubled world who finds hope in a growing consensus that the generally accepted goals of society are peace, freedom, human rights, environmental quality, the alleviation of suffering, and the rule of law,” he said during the acceptance speech.
The Carter Center also raised the former president's profile as an author, and he published nearly three dozen original titles ranging from novels and how-tos to presidential journals, memoirs and nonfiction bestsellers about foreign affairs. Some of his most high-profile writing dovetailed the center's work with its human rights and peace programs throughout the 2000s, with the influential books Palestine: Peace not Apartheid in 2006 and A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power in 2014.
Carter's role as an international statesman continued throughout his final two decades.
In 2007, Jimmy Carter became a co-founding member of The Elders, an independent group of "moral voices for peace and ethical leadership" led by founder Nelson Mandela, who was approached by entrepreneur Richard Branson and singer Peter Gabriel about forming a council of elders to help solve the world's problems. Other co-founding members included Graça Machel, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson.
The Carter Center hosted members of The Elders in 2014 at a roundtable about women's rights, a topic Carter had spoken about as part of the United Nations Foundation's 2014 Social Good Summit in New York. In 2016, he and U2 singer Bono were honored by the We Are Family Foundation in New York for their humanitarian work.
Jimmy Carter preferred public service over politics, and often did not interfere in the jobs of the presidents who took the White House after him or engage in campaigning for political candidates. He did not shy away from commentary during recent years of political division, although he did so only occasionally and without personal attacks. In 2017, he hosted Bernie Sanders, U.S. senator from Vermont, as part of a human rights forum at the Carter Center. During that panel discussion, Carter told the audience he'd voted for Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary.
Fighting Guinea worm
One of Jimmy Carter’s most impressive challenges was his pursuit of the eradication of Guinea worm disease.
Beginning in 1986, the Carter Center pioneered eradication, elimination, and better control of Guinea worm, river blindness, trachoma, and lymphatic filariasis.
Only one human disease has ever been eradicated: smallpox, in 1980. But Carter believed the Carter Center can finish the job on Guinea worm, one of 20 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) that are preventable and treatable but can cause disability, disfigurement or death.
When the Carter Center assumed leadership of the global Guinea Worm Eradication Program in 1986, about 3.5 million human cases occurred annually in 21 countries in Africa and Asia.
In 2022, only 13 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported worldwide — the lowest annual case total ever, pushing the disease closer to complete eradication.
The record low case count delighted Carter.
“Rosalynn and I are pleased with this continued advance toward eradicating Guinea worm disease,” Carter said in a January 2023 press release. “Our partners, especially those in the affected villages, work with us daily to rid the world of this scourge. We are heartened that eradication can be achieved soon.”
A life well lived
An avid believer in exercise and sensible eating, Carter famously rode bicycles and later "trikkes" in his hometown of Plains for years.
In 2015, Jimmy Carter was diagnosed with malignant melanoma which had spread to his brain in 2015. He beat the disease with an experimental lifesaving immune therapy that is now a frontline treatment for some forms of cancer.
Although Carter remained active in his final years, he and Rosalynn began positioning the Carter Center for future generations, with grandson Jason Carter joining the Center's Board of Directors after a run for governor of Georgia in 2014.
Well into his 90s, Carter could be seen building houses with Habitat for Humanity with the organization's ambassadors, country singers Trisha Yearwood and Garth Brooks, as well as delivering annual “Carter Town Hall” lectures to incoming Emory University students.
He won three Grammy awards, the most recent in 2019 for the spoken-word recording of his book Faith: A Journey For All and was the subject of the 2020 music documentary Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President, about his lifelong love of music.
In honor of his 99th birthday in 2023, the musician Peter Gabriel, whom he befriended as part of the Elders organization, enlisted a sold-out audience at New York City's Madison Square Garden to sing "Happy Birthday" to Carter, at home in Plains.
His 100th birthday was celebrated in Atlanta with a star-studded concert at the city's Fox Theatre featuring musicians including Chuck Leavell, the B-52's, Eric Church, Angelique Kidjo, India Arie, Carlene Carter, Lalah Hathaway, Duane Betts, the Drive By Truckers, the War and Treaty, Grouplove and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
Jimmy Carter was outspoken about his faith. Teaching Sunday School at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains was one of his most lasting commitments to the community, speaking to locals and tourists many Sundays each year for decades. He was nominated for a fourth Grammy for the 2024 collaboration with Kabir Sehgal, Last Sundays in Plains, which paired music with spoken word passages from his Sunday School classes.
“The haven for our lives has been in Plains, Ga.,” Carter said in 2015 after his cancer diagnosis. “I plan to teach Sunday School this Sunday, and every Sunday as long as I am physically and mentally able in my little church. We have hundreds of visitors who come to see the curiosity of a politician teaching the Bible.”
That tradition ended in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and Carter's increasingly limited mobility after two falls.
In the Bible, the Aramaic term Maranatha appeared once in 1st Corinthians, translated as “Come, Lord,” and served as a way to describe the pilgrimage people made from around the world to hear him preach in his tiny hometown in Southwest Georgia.
Now, many more will pay their respects to Carter.
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