Former President Jimmy Carter dies at 100

Former President Carter, the unassuming Georgia peanut farmer whose improbable political rise took him to the governor’s mansion before the White House, died peacefully on Sunday in Plains, Ga., according to the Carter Center.

He had turned 100 in October, making him the longest-lived president in the nation’s history.

“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, in a Carter Center 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.”

Surviving the former president are his children Jack, Chip, Jeff and Amy; 11 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Smith Carter, died Nov. 19, 2023.

The Carter Center announced on Feb. 18, 2023, that the former president had begun receiving hospice care after a series of short hospital stays, choosing to “spend his remaining time at home with his family” instead of receiving additional medical intervention.

Former President Carter, a Democrat who was 52 when he entered the Oval Office, served a chaotic four years in the White House marred by the Iran hostage crisis, oil shortages and high inflation.

The Carter postpresidency lasted an astonishing four-plus decades.

It allowed for shifting views on a man whose presidency was widely seen as a failure after it ended after one term and a landslide victory for Republican nominee Ronald Reagan. Carter won just six states and the District of Columbia in his reelection bid.

In the ensuing decades, Carter rehabilitated his public image as he devoted his postpresidency to humanitarian causes. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, founded the Carter Center in Atlanta and spent the next 40 years advocating for peace, democracy and human rights.

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.”

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children,” Carter said in his Nobel acceptance speech that year.

He helped make Habitat for Humanity’s work known across the country and the globe; the group helps low-income people build and buy their homes and access clean water.

“After leaving the White House, he continued to inspire people, not just in America but around the world,” said Rep. John Lewis, the late civil rights icon and fellow Georgia Democrat who spoke to The Hill about Carter before his own death in 2020.

“He used his ability to inspire and motivate people. He has a good spirit, a good heart,” Lewis said at the time.

Carter’s longevity was remarkable. He held the record as the oldest living former U.S. president in history, and had survived a number of health scares in recent years.

He lived to see his own vice president, Walter Mondale, die in 2021, and former President George H.W. Bush, who was the vice presidential candidate on Reagan’s ticket, in 2018.

Rosalynn Carter died on Nov. 19, 2023, at age 96, just days after she entered hospice care. She had been diagnosed with dementia in March.

 Former President Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter celebrated their 75th anniversary in 2021. (AP Photo/John Amis, File)

James Earl Carter Jr. was born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Ga., the same town where he and his wife lived after leaving the White House. Carter’s father managed a farm and a store, while his mother was a registered nurse.

Carter graduated from the Naval Academy in 1946, the same year he would marry childhood friend Rosalynn Smith. His work in the Navy focused on submarines, and his assignments took him all over the country, from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to San Diego to Schenectady, N.Y.

But when his father died in 1953, Carter left the Navy, returned home and took over the family peanut farm. Carter also followed his father, who served in the Georgia Statehouse, into politics, winning election to the state Senate in 1962. Just eight years later, he was governor, a perch from which he fought against racial discrimination and poverty.

In the 1976 election, Carter ran as a Washington outsider at a time when the wounds from the Watergate scandal were still fresh. He narrowly edged out Ford, the former House minority leader and D.C. insider who had become vice president and then president after the resignations, respectively, of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon.

Carter captured 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240.

As president, Carter did his best to connect with everyday Americans, speaking plainly and often sporting a sweater. But he struggled to find his way in Washington.

Lacking relationships on Capitol Hill and K Street, the outsider president watched his welfare reform and consumer protection bills go down in flames, despite having Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

File pic: Former President Carter strides toward Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House as he leaves for Camp David. (AP Photo/Ira Schwarz)

During his presidency, the economy continued to flail due to high unemployment, rising inflation and an energy crisis stemming from America’s dependence on foreign oil and overconsumption.

Television images of long lines at gas stations plagued the Carter presidency after the Iranian revolution contributed to an oil shortage and hiked prices.

America, Carter warned in his famous televised “malaise” speech, suffered from a “crisis of confidence.”

Things only got worse as he geared up for his reelection bid. On Nov. 4, 1979, prorevolution Iranian students took 52 American diplomats and other citizens hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

While Carter successfully negotiated their release after 444 days, the drawn-out hostage crisis pushed down his already declining approval numbers and contributed to Reagan’s victory over Carter in the 1980 election. In fact, the hostages were not officially set free until immediately after Reagan was sworn into office on Jan. 20, 1981.

“He missed on the economy and he missed on the Iranian Revolution, which spiked oil prices around the world and produced a theocracy in Iran in the 20th century,” said presidential historian Robert A. Strong, who interviewed Carter many times and wrote the book, “Working in the World: Jimmy Carter and the Making of American Foreign Policy.”

“With the hostage crisis, Carter said he would get them out alive and would argue, ‘I did get them out alive.’ But many would say it was a significant failure.”

But Strong, a politics professor at Washington and Lee University, said Carter had more successes than he’s given credit for and his presidency will be viewed more favorably with time.

Carter brokered the Camp David Accords with then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, leading to a historic peace treaty between those two nations.

He was also responsible for a treaty to transfer control of the Panama Canal to Panama, avoiding what could have been a long-term U.S. military conflict in Central America.

Carter also continued to press fellow world leaders on human rights abuses.

“Carter was consistent. Every time he met with a foreign leader, he had a list of prisoners and would put in a word for them,” Strong said.

“His conclusion was words matter. If you talk about human rights long enough, to the right people and with seriousness, you can move that very difficult agenda.”

“I don’t argue he was a great president, I don’t think you can,” Strong added, “but I agree there were more accomplishments than were appreciated.”

It seemed that Carter became even more active after leaving the White House. He traveled the world, helping to raise money for disaster relief and to build homes for the less fortunate with Habitat for Humanity International. Other presidents called on Carter to help mediate diplomatic disputes in countries such as North Korea and Libya.

Former first lady Rosalynn Carter and former President Carter. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell)

But he and his wife also lived simply and frugally back in the tiny town of Plains, Ga., captured by a viral Washington Post story titled, “The un-celebrity president.”

Even into his 90s, Carter could still be found teaching Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains most Sundays, despite a 2015 diagnosis of melanoma on his liver and brain. The crowds would line up early and come from as far as Indiana, Florida and New Jersey.

During one service in 2018, a little girl told Carter she had traveled from Washington, D.C.

“Oh, I used to live there,” Carter replied with a smile.

Updated at 4:30 p.m. EST.

Julia Shapero contributed to this report.