Jimmy Carter dies at 100 --- Jimmy Carter, 39th president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, dies at 100The 39th president served one term and went on to an extraordinary post-White House life
The tenacious Southerner was turned out of office by disillusioned voters after a single term. But he had a brilliant post-presidential career as a champion of health, peace and democracy.
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Jimmy Carter, a no-frills and steel-willed Southern governor who was elected president in 1976, was rejected by disillusioned voters after a single term and went on to an extraordinary postpresidential life that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, according to his son James E. Carter III, known as Chip. He was 100 and the oldest living U.S. president of all time.
A cause of death was not immediately provided. In a statement in February 2023, the Carter Center said the former president, after several hospital stays, would stop further medical treatment and spend his remaining time at home under hospice care. He had been treated in recent years for an aggressive form of melanoma skin cancer, with tumors that spread to his liver and brain.
His wife, Rosalynn, died Nov. 19, 2023, at 96. The Carters, who were close partners in public life, had been married for more than 77 years, the longest presidential marriage in U.S. history. One of his final public appearances was at her funeral in Plains, where he sat in the front row in a wheelchair. Carter was last photographed outside his home with family and friends as he watched a flyover on Oct. 1 held to mark his 100th birthday.
Mr. Carter is survived by his children Jack, Chip, Jeff and Amy; 11 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren, according to the Carter Center.
“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” Chip Carter said in a statement. “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.”
The Carter Center said Sunday that public observances will be held in Atlanta and Washington, to be followed by a private interment in Plains. President Joe Biden said he ordered a national day of mourning on Jan. 9, but other details for the final arrangements, including all public events and motorcade routes, are still pending. Biden issued a proclamation ordering U.S. flags to be flown at half-staff for 30 days at federal buildings and military installations.
“Jimmy Carter stands up as a model of what it means to live a life of meaning and purpose, a life of principle, faith and humility,” Biden said in remarks earlier Sunday night. “What I find extraordinary about Jimmy Carter though is that millions of people all around the world, all over the world, feel they lost a friend as well, even though they never met him.”
Mr. Carter, a small-town peanut farmer, U.S. Navy veteran, and Georgia governor from 1971 to 1975, was the first president from the Deep South since 1837, and the only Democrat elected president between Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Bill Clinton’s terms in the White House.
As the nation’s 39th president, he governed with strong Democratic majorities in Congress but in a country that was growing more conservative. Four years after taking office, Mr. Carter lost his bid for reelection, in a landslide, to one of the most conservative political figures of the era, Ronald Reagan.
When Mr. Carter left Washington in January 1981, he was widely regarded as a mediocre president, if not an outright failure. The list of what had gone wrong during his presidency, not all of it his fault, was long. It was a time of economic distress, with a stagnant economy and stubbornly high unemployment and inflation.
“Stagflation,” connoting both low growth and high inflation, was a description that critics used to attack Mr. Carter’s economic policies. In the summer of 1979, Americans waited in long lines at service stations as gasoline supplies dwindled and prices soared after revolution in Iran disrupted the global oil supply.
Mr. Carter made energy his signature domestic policy initiative, and he had some success, but events outside his control intervened. In March 1979, a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a core meltdown. The accident was the worst ever for the U.S. nuclear-energy industry and a severe setback to hopes that nuclear power would provide a safe alternative to oil and other fossil fuels.
Mr. Carter’s fortunes were no better overseas. In November 1979, an Iranian mob seized control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans as hostages. It was the beginning of a 444-day ordeal that played out daily on television and did not end until Jan. 20, 1981, the day Mr. Carter left office, when the hostages were released.
In the midst of the crisis, in April 1980, Mr. Carter authorized a rescue attempt that ended disastrously in the Iranian desert when two U.S. aircraft collided on the ground, killing eight American servicemen. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who had opposed the mission, resigned.
“I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” Mr. Carter said in a 2018 interview with The Washington Post in Plains. “But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.”
A month after the Iranian hostage crisis erupted, an emboldened Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Mr. Carter ordered an embargo of grain sales to the Soviet Union, angering American farmers, and a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, a step that was unpopular with many Americans and was widely seen as weak and ineffectual.
As the years wore on, the judgment on Mr. Carter’s presidency gradually gave way to a more positive view. He lived long enough to see his record largely vindicated by history, with a widespread acknowledgment that his presidency had been far more than long lines at the gas station and U.S. hostages in Iran.
Near the end of Mr. Carter’s life, two biographies argued forcefully that he had been a more consequential president than most people realized — “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history,” author Jonathan Alter wrote in his 2020 book, “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”
Both books — the other was Kai Bird’s 2021 volume, “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter” — said Mr. Carter was often ahead of his time, especially with his early focus on reducing fossil fuel use and his efforts to mitigate the nation’s racial divide, including by expanding the number of people of color in federal judgeships.
The biographies concluded that Mr. Carter’s reputation as a poor president was unfair and came largely from his stubborn insistence on doing what he thought was correct even when it cost him politically.
“He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better,” Bird wrote. “And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.”
Mr. Carter, noted for his mile-wide smile in public, was also tenacious and resolute, and those qualities were critical to achieving the Camp David Accords, a signature success of his presidency. He spent 13 days at the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains in September 1978, shuttling between cabins that housed Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In a process that almost collapsed several times, Mr. Carter was instrumental in brokering a historic agreement between bitter rivals.
The Camp David Accords led to the first significant Israeli withdrawal from territory captured in the Six-Day War of 1967 and a peace treaty that has endured between Israel and its largest Arab neighbor. In 1978, Begin and Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor conferred on Mr. Carter 24 years later for a lifetime of working for peace.
Against fierce conservative opposition, Mr. Carter pushed through the Panama Canal treaties, which ultimately placed the economically and strategically critical waterway under Panamanian control, a major step toward better U.S. relations with Latin American neighbors. He signed a nuclear-arms-reduction treaty, SALT II, with the Soviets, but he withdrew it from Senate consideration when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan.
Taking advantage of the opening made by President Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Carter granted full diplomatic recognition to China. He made human rights a central theme of U.S. foreign policy, a sharp departure from the approach of Nixon and his national security adviser and second secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger.
Two Cabinet-level departments — Energy and Education — were created under Mr. Carter, as was the Superfund to clean up toxic-waste sites. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act more than doubled the size of the national park and wildlife refuge system.
Mr. Carter was ahead of his time on environmental issues. In June 1979, he installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the West Wing of the White House, telling reporters that the point was to harness “the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”
“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people,” Mr. Carter said. Reagan removed the panels in 1986.
His relations with Congress were often strained, even though it was controlled by his party, but he had more success than most modern presidents at winning passage of his legislative proposals.
With the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, Mr. Carter set in motion a movement that picked up steam under Reagan and his conservative allies. The military buildup under Reagan was often credited with hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that buildup began under Mr. Carter.
Inflation was a constant scourge to his administration, but it was Mr. Carter who appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker was later hailed as the man who broke the back of inflation in the early 1980s, when Reagan was president.
In the 2018 Post interview, Mr. Carter said he had “a lot of regrets” from his time in office, mainly over the Iran hostage crisis and his not having done more to unify the Democratic Party. He said he was most proud of the Camp David Accords, his work to normalize relations with China and his focus on human rights.
“I kept our country at peace and championed human rights, and that’s a rare thing for post-World War II presidents to say,” he said, adding that he was also proud that he “always told the truth.”
Roving ambassador
Mr. Carter was a former president for more than four decades — longer than anyone else in history — and he was only the second to live to 94, after George H.W. Bush, who died in 2018.
He dedicated his postpresidential life to public service at home and supporting democracy and human rights abroad. It was a career that even some of his supporters said seemed better suited to him than being president.
“Nothing about the White House so became Mr. Carter as his having left it,” historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in “The Unfinished Presidency,” a 1998 account of Mr. Carter’s life after the presidency.
Mr. Carter lived more modestly than any ex-president since Harry S. Truman, whom Mr. Carter called his favorite president. He and Rosalynn lived in Plains until the end in the ranch house that they built for themselves in 1961, and where Mr. Carter will be buried with her next to a shady willow tree near a pond that he helped dig.
Mr. Carter declined the corporate board memberships and lucrative speaking engagements that have made other ex-presidents tens of millions of dollars. He said in the 2018 interview that he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the White House.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Mr. Carter said. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”
Instead, he wrote 33 books on topics ranging from war to woodworking, which gave him a comfortable retirement income. He also won three Grammy Awards for his recordings of audio versions of his books.
For decades, the Carters spent a week a year building homes with Habitat for Humanity, the Georgia-based nonprofit organization that constructs housing for low-income people. Wearing their own tool belts, they helped build or renovate about 4,300 homes in 14 countries.
In 1982, the Carters founded the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta. It became the base from which they traveled widely on peacemaking and other humanitarian missions. The Carter Center sponsors programs in education, agricultural development and health care and supports fair elections in countries around the world.
Mr. Carter became an unofficial roving ambassador, monitoring elections, mediating disputes and promoting human rights and democracy. In 1994, at the request of President Clinton, he helped forge an agreement that removed a brutal military regime in Haiti and averted a possible U.S. invasion of that country.
Mr. Carter’s missions required meeting with some of the world’s most notorious despots, including Kim Il Sung of North Korea and Moammar Gaddafi of Libya. Fledgling democracies trusted him, and he was asked to monitor elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Zambia, the West Bank and Gaza. The Carter Center has monitored 115 elections in 40 countries, according to its website.
He was not always successful, but Mr. Carter never seemed discouraged about his efforts to resolve conflicts. He spent the days leading up to the 1994 Christmas holiday in the Balkans, engaging in negotiations that included a shouted conversation by shortwave radio with Serbian strongman Radovan Karadzic, who in 2016 was convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Mr. Carter’s efforts resulted in a four-month ceasefire in the bloody conflict.
From Atlanta, the Carter Center coordinated dozens of initiatives, including a decades-long effort that helped to virtually eradicate Guinea worm disease, a painful and disabling condition that once afflicted millions of people in some of Africa's poorest countries.
Mr. Carter’s freelance diplomacy, which at times included outspoken criticism of U.S. policies, could provoke outrage. He angered Clinton in 1994 by thrusting himself into a dispute over U.N. inspections of North Korea’s nuclear facilities. In his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” (2006), Mr. Carter set off a storm of criticism by seeming to equate Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories with the former apartheid regime in South Africa.
Over the years, Mr. Carter was a constant source of irritation to conservative critics. In a book about Mr. Carter’s life after the White House — a book whose subtitle called him “Our Worst Ex-President” — conservative political commentator Steven F. Hayward accused him of engaging in “usually embarrassing and often disastrous peace missions around the world.”
The far more common judgment was that Mr. Carter’s tireless pursuit of peace and human rights was admirable and set a new standard for ex-presidents. In awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the Nobel committee lauded him “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.”
Introducing the 2002 Peace Prize laureate in Oslo, Gunnar Berge, a member of the Nobel committee, said: “Jimmy Carter will probably not go down in American history as the most effective president. But he is certainly the best ex-president the country ever had.”
The Carter image
That Mr. Carter became president was something of a historical accident, one that followed an unprecedented chain of events. The progression began in 1973 with the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who was caught in a web of corruption dating from his time as a Maryland politician. That led to the appointment of then-Minority Leader Gerald Ford, a respected but relatively little-known U.S. House member from Michigan, as Agnew’s successor. And, finally, in 1974, there was the resignation of Nixon to avoid impeachment stemming from the Watergate scandal.
Two years later, Mr. Carter narrowly defeated Ford, but the person he really campaigned against was Nixon. Mr. Carter was the peanut farmer from Georgia, the candidate who carried his own garment bag off the aircraft and promised to bring an open and honest style of leadership to the nation’s capital. It later became commonplace for presidential candidates, and most challengers to incumbents, to run “against Washington.” Mr. Carter was among the first of the modern era to do so.
Mr. Carter signaled his disdain for the “imperial” trappings of the presidency on Inauguration Day in 1977, when he, Rosalynn and their daughter, Amy, stepped out of the presidential limousine on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked the parade route to the White House.
“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said in 2018.
While that seemed refreshing to many people after the Nixon years, it ultimately grated on those who thought that Mr. Carter’s style — refusing, for example, to have “Hail to the Chief” played when he entered rooms — demeaned and diminished the presidency.
Eizenstat said Mr. Carter’s order eliminating drivers for top staff members was meant to signal a more frugal approach to governing. Instead, he said, it meant that busy officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day.
Two years later, in 1979, Americans were in a sour mood, and Mr. Carter’s response to events seemed to make matters worse. In July, he abruptly canceled a speech on energy and retreated to Camp David, where he held intense discussions with a cross section of guests. When he emerged July 15, he delivered a nationally televised address that was soon dubbed the “malaise” speech, although Mr. Carter never used that word in his address.
In the speech, Mr. Carter spoke of a “crisis of the American spirit” and, before setting out several energy policy proposals, warned that “we are at a turning point in our history.”
“There are two paths to choose,” he continued. “One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”
The speech, initially well received, was soon turned against Mr. Carter, who was accused of blaming the American people for the failures of his administration. Mr. Carter did not help his cause when, two days later, he demanded the resignation of his entire Cabinet and fired five of the secretaries. Then came the takeover of the U.S. Embassy by Iranian student protesters.
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