Former President Jimmy Carter, a distinguished Naval officer, author and humanitarian, has died. He was 100.
"Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia," read a statement from The Carter Center.
The longest-lived American president in U.S. history entered hospice care in February 2023.
His death comes nearly two years after his wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, died in their Plains, Georgia, home at the age of 96 after joining her husband in hospice care.
He is survived by their children — Jack, Chip, Jeff, and Amy; 11 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren.
“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” said Chip Carter, the former president’s son, said in a written 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.”
There will be public observances in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., followed by a private interment in Plains, Georgia. The final arrangements for President Carter’s state funeral, including all public events and motorcade routes, are still pending, according to The Carter Center.
Carter, who held office from 1977 until 1981, had largely receded from public view as his health declined and the coronavirus pandemic limited his public appearances, including at his beloved Maranatha Baptist Church where he taught Sunday School lessons for decades before standing-room-only crowds of visitors.
The 39th president and his wife Rosalynn spent their post-White House years in tiny Plains, Georgia, a town of about 650 residents where they both are from, and where they returned in 1981.
A tumultuous White House term
Carter was a little-known Georgia governor and peanut farmer when he began his bid for the presidency ahead of the 1976 election. He went on to defeat then-President Gerald R. Ford, capitalizing as a Washington outsider in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office in 1974.
Carter served a single, tumultuous term and faced a string of setbacks, but after leaving the White House, he enjoyed perhaps one of the most celebrated post-presidencies in the nation's history thanks to his decades of global advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights via The Carter Center.
During Carter's time in office, there was the discovery of the Love Canal toxic waste dump, the meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, an energy crisis, the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics and an economy struggling with "stagflation."
In July of 1979, morale was so low that Carter took to the airwaves to address the "crisis of confidence" that he felt had gripped the nation. Though history has come to deride him for his “malaise speech," with his critics accusing him of blaming the American people for the nation's state, in truth he never used the word "malaise" and the immediate response to the speech was largely positive. But the following month, an odd photograph of his fending off a swimming rabbit with a paddle as he fished on a pond led to more jeers.
The most indelible stain on the Carter administration began on Nov. 4, 1979, when Iranians stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and took hostage 52 Americans, in protest of U.S. support for the recently deposed shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Six months into the hostage crisis, a failed rescue attempt left eight U.S. servicemen dead, a tragedy Carter himself would later point to as a major factor in his loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
Carter's administration leveled sanctions against Iran and worked for months to secure the hostages' freedom, negotiating for their release right through Carter’s final hours in office, but to no avail. The final indignity of a beleaguered president came when the Iranians waited until just minutes after Reagan's inaugural address to announce they were setting the hostages free.
But amid all the misfortune and mistakes, Carter's time in the White House was marked by several important achievements, including the Camp David Accords, which brought peace between Egypt and Israel, and the establishment of full diplomatic relations with China.
On the homefront, Carter is credited with deregulating much of the transportation industry, making air travel far more accessible to Americans. He expanded the National Parks system by more than 100 million acres, created the Departments of Energy and Education and deregulated the beer industry, thereby paving the way for the homebrew movement. He diversified the federal judiciary and executive branch. He appointed the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, who, along with Reagan, would get credit for the economic growth of the 1980s. Carter was the first president to raise concerns about rising global temperatures.
A renewal in retirement
It was in the years after his time in office that Carter truly shined, as founder of The Carter Center, which "seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health."
Carter and his organization, which works in about 70 nations, improved crop yields across Africa, helped all but eradicate Guinea worm disease, went on diplomatic missions on five continents, partnered with Habitat for Humanity to build housing in dozens of communities across the United States and beyond, and monitored elections in more than 39 countries.
Carter gained renewed attention upon death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Carter is the only president since 1850 not to make a single Supreme Court nomination, but he reshaped the lower courts with a record number of nominations of women and non-white jurists, Ginsburg being the most notable.
In 1980, Carter tapped Ginsburg, then the nation’s most accomplished civil rights attorney, for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, considered the nation’s second highest court. She was the second woman Carter nominated for the D.C. Circuit, setting her up for a promotion to the U.S. Supreme Court 13 years later.
“He looked around at the federal judiciary and he said, ‘You all look like me, but that’s not how the great United States looks,’” Ginsburg said to a Fordham University Law School forum in 2016.
A man of deep religious conviction, Carter made headlines in 2009, when he announced he was severing his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention. In an editorial published in The Observer, Carter decried the convention's leaders for saying that women must be "subservient" to their husbands and are prohibited from serving as deacons.
"This was in conflict with my belief - confirmed in the Holy Scriptures - that we are all equal in the eyes of God," wrote Carter of a decision he termed "painful and difficult."
For his humanitarian efforts, Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, and the Nobel committee used the occasion to criticize the Bush administration for its stance on Iraq ahead of the 2003 invasion.
“In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power,'' the Nobel citation read, “Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights and economic development.''
Carter wrote more than two dozen books after he left Washington, most recently a new memoir, “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety," and “A Call To Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power,” which examines gender-based violence on five continents and religious persecution of women.
A man made in Plains, Goergia
Carter was born James Earl Carter Jr. on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia. The oldest of four, Carter grew up in nearby Archery, Georgia, where he attended public school, before going off to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in 1946.
Shortly after graduation, Carter married Rosalynn Smith, with whom he had four children.
Carter spent seven years in the Navy, working primarily on the nuclear submarine program, before returning to Georgia in 1953 to take over the family farm following the death of his father. His career in politics started modestly enough, as he served on county boards supervising education, the hospital authority and the library.
In 1962, Carter was elected to the Georgia State Senate, where he served one term before making an unsuccessful run for governor in 1966. He would spend the next four years preparing for the 1970 race, making hundreds of speeches all across the state, efforts that would help land him in the Governor's Mansion. Four years later he announced his intention to run for president.
In an interview published in the 1976 issue of Playboy magazine, during which he talked about his religion, he startled many Americans when he said, "I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times."
“This is something that God recognizes I will do — and I have done it — and God forgives me for it,” he went on to say.
He told the Washington Post in a 2013 interview that he wants to be remembered as a champion of human rights.
“Human rights are more than just freedom of speech, the right to elect one’s own leaders and freedom of assembly. They also include the right to a home, access to adequate health care, and to live in peace. That is how I want to be remembered, for human rights and peace.”
Later years
During an election-monitoring trip to Guyana in May 2015, an aging Carter fell ill and returned to Atlanta before polling opened in the South American country. The election would have marked the 39th foreign election in which Carter had acted as an observer.
When he came home, his doctors at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, found a mass on his liver. It was removed on Aug. 3 as well as about a tenth of his liver. Tests showed metastatic melanoma had spread to his liver and also his brain.
“I’m ready for anything and looking forward to a new adventure,” he said at an unusual news conference that Aug. 20 to discuss his cancer.
"I just thought I had a few weeks left, but I was surprisingly at ease. I've had a wonderful life," Carter said describing his reaction to learning of the four spots of melanoma on his brain. "It's in God's hands. I'll be prepared for anything that comes."
After undergoing radiation, immunotherapy and treatment for brain lesions, he announced in December 2015 that he was cancer-free.
Carter’s doctors had long monitored him for pancreatic cancer, which killed his father and three siblings, but no cancer had been found there. But he said he expected more cancers to appear elsewhere in his body.
In 2019, Carter was admitted to a hospital for surgery to relieve pressure on his brain caused by bleeding due to several falls, and he was readmitted a couple weeks later for treatment of a urinary tract infection.
Members of the public are encouraged to visit the official tribute website to the life of President Carter at www.jimmycartertribute.org, where they can sign an online condolence book.
The Carter family has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to The Carter Center, 453 John Lewis Freedom Parkway N.E., Atlanta, GA 30307.
