Former President Jimmy Carter dies

ATLANTA — Former President Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, whose post-presidential work as a humanitarian set a modern standard for the kind of legacy presidents can craft after their time in the White House, has died at 100 years old.

“Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia,” the Carter Center announced Sunday in a social media post.

His son Chip Carter said in a statement that he was a “hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love.”

“My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs,” Chip Carter said.

The Carter Center said public observances will be held in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., followed by a private internment in Plains. A final schedule is still being formalized and will be released at this link, the Carter Center said.

The public is encouraged to visit the Carter Center’s official tribute website for President Carter, where an online condolence book as well as materials commemorating his life are available. In lieu of flowers, President Carter’s family is asking for donations to be made to The Carter Center, 453 John Lewis Freedom Parkway NE, Atlanta, GA, 30307.

Turning 100 on Oct. 1, 2024, President Carter reached a milestone as the longest-living U.S. president that no other person to hold the title has reached. He is the only president from Georgia.

Carter went on hospice care in February 2023, and lived another 22 months at home in his cherished Plains, Georgia, a testament to his advocacy of hospice as comfortable and dignified end-of-life care. His passing follows over a year after the death of his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, who died on Nov. 19, 2023, at 96 years old. The couple forged the longest presidential marriage in U.S. history, an iconic love story as well as an enduring political and philanthropic partnership. 

Carter was president from 1977-81, a one-term executive whose time in the White House was marked by an ambition for more peaceful relations with the world at a time of high Cold War tensions, but also economic stagnation and geopolitical challenges. 

His term’s highs included a masterstroke in diplomacy with the ushering of a landmark Middle East peace deal, the Camp David Accords. However, rampant inflation and world events – the Iran Hostage Crisis chief among them, as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – hindered his standing as the nation’s commander in chief.

He was soundly defeated by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 re-election bid – but rather than marking the end of Carter’s public life, it paved the way for the humanitarian contributions that would define him far more than anything he accomplished in office.

He and Rosalynn established the Carter Center in Atlanta in 1982, an organization through which the former president would do much to, as he hoped for in his inaugural address, see that “the nations of the world might say that we had built a lasting peace, based not on weapons of war, but on international policies that reflect our own most precious values.”

The Carter Center’s work over the years has touched on advancing human rights, forging peace talks in some of the world’s most devastated conflict zones, promoting democracy and observing elections throughout the world, and disease prevention and eradication – including a decades-long campaign that has resulted in the near-elimination of Guinea worm.

Carter’s personal volunteerism and service to community were also noteworthy. He worked for decades with Habitat for Humanity, participating on a build as recently as 2019 even as he was recovering from a fall at his home that required 14 stitches and gave him a black eye. And he was famous for his Sunday school lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains.

Crowning his post-presidential humanitarian legacy, in 2002 Carter was named the Nobel Peace Prize honoree. The Nobel committee highlighted his “untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

President Carter once said, “We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes – and we must.”

James Earl Carter, Jr. was born in rural Plains, Georgia on Oct. 1, 1924 to James Earl Carter, Sr. and Lillian Gordy Carter. Famously, the family business was peanut farming, and the Baptist Church was another mainstay of his upbringing.

After growing up as a farmhand and promising student, Carter attended Georgia Southwestern and Georgia Tech before heading to the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1946. In one of his life-defining moments, the previous summer he had been home from the academy and noticed his sister Ruth walking with a friend, Rosalynn Smith. He asked Rosalynn out – and quickly fell in love with her, with his first proposal famously refused by Rosalynn because she had promised her father, on his deathbed, she would finish college before getting married.

But it did not deter their love story – roughly a year after that first date, they were wed on July 7, 1946.

The couple mainly spent their first married years in Norfolk, Virginia. Jimmy was in the Navy and assigned to the USS Wyoming. The day before Independence Day in 1947, they had their first son, John Williams, whom they named after Rosalynn’s grandfather. In 1950 while stationed in Hawaii, James Earl III was born and named after Jimmy and his father, James Earl Sr. Two years later, Donnell Jeffrey became their third boy. It would be 15 years before they had their only baby girl, Amy Lynn in 1967.

In one 1952 episode that has taken on legendary status in recent years, then-Lt. Carter led a team in cleanup efforts at the world’s first nuclear reactor meltdown in Canada. He left the Navy in 1953 upon the death of his father, returning to Plains to take up the reins of running the peanut farm.

Back in Plains, Jimmy and Rosalynn operated the farm and a seed and supply store called Carter’s Warehouse. He slowly built a profile as a community leader and, in 1962, embarked on his remarkable political life with a successful run for the Georgia Senate. After serving two terms, he ran unsuccessfully for governor – but came back in four years’ time and became Georgia’s 76th governor.

Carter was inaugurated on Jan. 12, 1971, and famously declared in his address, “The time for racial discrimination is over.”

It was an outspoken declaration that caught many observers by surprise. As a white legislator in an Old Confederacy state, he had been more muted on civil rights issues earlier in his political rise and at times positioned himself as a conservative Democrat. While there were signs of Carter’s more sympathetic racial attitudes – such as his advocacy for educational reorganization as a state senator, considered a step toward desegregation – he also endorsed during the 1970 gubernatorial campaign “local control” over federal intervention, which biographer Jonathan Alter has described as a “code-word campaign.”

As governor, Carter pursued reforms of Georgia’s education system as well as the state bureaucracy, extending to his own appointments – another signal in his turn toward promoting equality.

“He appointed more women and minorities to his own staff, to major state policy boards and agencies, and to the judiciary than all of his predecessors combined,” the New Georgia Encyclopedia states.

He also advanced mental health as a priority – at the urging of Rosalynn, for whom the issue became a life-defining cause – in a way that was ahead of his time, in 1971 creating the Governor’s Commission to Improve Services for Mentally and Emotionally Handicapped Georgians on which the future first lady would serve.

Jimmy Carter announced his presidential candidacy in December 1974 – more than a year away from the 1976 Democratic primary. Almost a complete unknown to the rest of the country, Carter was initially “dismissed as an absurdity by the elders of his party” the New York Times reported at the time.

His campaign was aided first by the decision of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey to not seek the nomination, and then Carter rose past other, more well-known candidates such as California Gov. Jerry Brown and Alabama Gov. George Wallace thanks to dogged grassroots campaigning highlighted by the “Peanut Brigade” of nationwide volunteers, as well as a reputation as as the “rock & roll” candidate that helped him crack the national consciousness.

Carter was also one of the first Democrats to court a coalition with Black voters in the wake of the 60s civil rights era. He forged an alliance with Martin Luther King Jr.’s family and capped the 1976 Democratic Party convention with a closing speech from Martin Luther King Sr., MLK’s father, and sharing a moment with Coretta Scott King.

“As I’ve said many times before, we can have an American President who does not govern with negativism and fear for the future, but with vigor and vision and aggressive leadership, a President who’s not isolated from the people but who feels your pain and shares your dreams and takes his strength and his wisdom and his courage from you,” he said upon accepting the Democratic nomination. “I see an America on the move again, united, a diverse and vital and tolerant nation, entering our third century with pride and confidence, an America that lives up to the majesty of our Constitution and the simple decency of our people. This is the America we want. This is the America that we will have.”

On Nov. 2, 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected the 39th president of the United States, defeating incumbent Republican Gerald Ford – who had ascended to the presidency on Richard Nixon’s resignation – with 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240.

In office, the optimism of Carter’s Democratic acceptance speech met the hard realities of international affairs and economic headwinds.

The economy was in recession when he took office, and inflation was a deep thorn in his administration’s side throughout his term. He targeted inflation early in his presidency, but it spiked – arguably, outside of his control – every year of his term, to more than 13% by 1980. 

The 1979 oil crisis – largely stemming from shortages after the Iranian Revolution and punctuated by images of gas stations with no gas and Americans waiting in long lines – underscored the economic frustrations that undermined Carter’s re-election hopes. 

On Nov. 4, 1979, 66 American diplomats and citizens were also taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, and Carter’s inability to resolve the crisis – the failed rescue mission Operation Eagle Claw in April 1980 resulted in eight dead American servicemen – dealt a serious blow to his political standing.

Additional challenges included the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in March of 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan later that year in December.

Capturing the difficult mood of the time, a 1979 address of Carter’s would become somewhat infamously deemed the “malaise” speech, as he spoke of a national “crisis of confidence.” 

Carter’s tenure as president was, however, also marked by a number of accomplishments. He created two new cabinet-level departments – the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He sought warmer relations in Latin America, and – while not without political controversy – achieved a diplomatic priority with the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which gave Panama control of the Panama Canal.

And the Camp David Accords – a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in large part negotiated personally by Carter – remains to this day one of the most significant achievements in the long, tumultuous Arab-Israeli peace process.

Carter also made strides for Black enfranchisement, making good on many of his promises to the Kings who helped him rise to the presidency. Carter opened government contracts to Black-owned businesses and appointed record numbers of Black citizens to executive and judicial posts. He steered more public money to historically Black colleges and opposed tax breaks for discriminatory private schools. He also helped establish government observances of King’s birthday and enabled the federal historic site in Atlanta encompassing King’s birthplace, burial site and the family’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Perhaps counterintuitively, a large component of Carter’s economic policy would appear conservative by today’s politics. He deregulated several industries, such as trucking and airlines – for which he actually has been praised in recent years by some conservatives – and his plan to fight inflation announced in early 1980 called for a huge slate of federal spending cuts.

Inflation would subside greatly in the years when he would have served a second term, but in the end, Carter’s popularity had diminished too greatly with the American people by the time of the 1980 election. He lost his bid for a second term in the White House to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide.

“As I return home to the South where I was born and raised, I am looking forward to the opportunity to reflect and further to assess – I hope with accuracy – the circumstances of our times,” he said in his farewell address. “I intend to give our new president my support, and I intend to work as a citizen, as I have worked in this office as president, for the values this nation was founded to secure.”

He may not have realized it in that moment, but it would be that work as an ordinary citizen that secured his place in history more than any of the events in office that he faced – which he noted in the same address often are “controversial, broad in scope, and which do not arouse the natural support of a political majority.”

Carter, at 100, lived longer than any other former president. And his marriage to Rosalynn is the longest presidential marriage in U.S. history. He is survived by his three sons, daughter and 25 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. 

Once, in an interview with USA Today, Carter revealed what he hoped his legacy would be. The quote is telling – touching on the universalist humanitarian themes that drove his political ambitions, but not forgetting the personal humility and devotion to community and family that endeared him to so many.

“Human rights and peace are two things I would like to be remembered for,” he said. “And of course, being a good grandfather.”

 The Associated Press contributed to this story.