DECEMBER 29, 2024
Former President Jimmy Carter, honored more widely for his humanitarian work around the globe after his presidency than for his White House tenure during a tumultuous time, has died. He was 100.
“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. “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.”
Carter died in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. In November 2023, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, also passed away in the modest house they built together in 1961, when he had taken over his father’s peanut warehouse business and was only beginning to consider a political career.
In February 2023, he had announced he was ending medical intervention and moving to hospice care.
Jason Carter had visited his grandparents at the time of the announcement and said “They are at peace and – as always – their home is full of love,” he posted on Twitter.
At peace, perhaps, but still political: The former president vowed he wanted to cast a ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
After serving a single term in the White House, Jimmy Carter became one of the most durable figures in modern American politics. Evicted from the White House at age 56, he would hold the status of former president longer than anyone in U.S. history, and in 2019 he surpassed George H. W. Bush as the nation’s oldest living ex-president.
Carter remained remarkably active in charitable causes through a series of health challenges during his final years, including a bout with brain cancer in 2015. He was admitted to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta in November 2019 for a procedure to relieve pressure on his brain, a consequence of bleeding that followed a series of falls. A few months earlier, in May, he had undergone surgery after breaking his hip.
In the White House from 1977 to 1981, Carter negotiated the landmark Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt, transferred the Panama Canal to Panamanian ownership, dramatically expanded public lands in Alaska and established formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.
But the 39th president governed at a time of soaring inflation and gasoline shortages, and his failure to secure the release of Americans held hostage by Iran helped cost him the second term he sought.
“He’s never going to be ranked as a great president; he’s middling as a president,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, author of a 1998 book on Carter, “The Unfinished Presidency.” “But as an American figure, he’s a giant.”
After losing his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan, and until well into his 90s, Carter continued working as an observer of elections in developing countries, building houses through the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity and teaching Sunday school at the tiny Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, his hometown.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, 22 years after he left the White House.
“I can’t deny that I was a better ex-president than I was a president,” he said with a wry laugh at a breakfast with reporters in Washington in 2005.
“My former boss was humiliated when he lost in 1980; he felt he let himself and the American people down,” David Rubenstein, a young White House staffer for Carter who became founder of the Carlyle Group and a billionaire philanthropist, told USA TODAY in an interview in 2019.
“For a long time, he was basically the symbol of a weak president and a terrible person. And today, 40-some years later, he’s seen as a very incredible person who has had many good things he did, though he didn’t get reelected,” Rubenstein said.
Peanut farms and nuclear subs
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains to Earl Carter, a peanut warehouser who had served in the Georgia Legislature, and “Miss Lillian” Carter, a registered nurse and formidable figure who joined the Peace Corps when she was in her 60s.
He grew up on a peanut farm in Plains, then graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. In the years after World War II, he served in the Navy’s submarine service in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. After doing graduate work in nuclear physics, he became a pioneer in the introduction of nuclear power in submarines.
When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and took over operation of the family peanut farms with Rosalynn, his hometown sweetheart. After a rough early patch, the business flourished, and Carter became increasingly active in community affairs and politics.
During two terms in the Georgia state Senate, he gained a reputation as an independent voice who attacked wasteful government practices and helped repeal laws designed to discourage Black Americans from voting.
But in 1966, he lost a race for governor to segregationist Lester Maddox in an election that analysts said reflected a Southern backlash against national civil rights legislation enacted in 1964 and 1965. In a second bid for governor in 1970, Carter minimized his appearances before Black audiences and won endorsements from some segregationists.
After he was elected, though, Carter declared that the era of segregation in Georgia was over, and he was hailed as a symbol of a new, more inclusive South.
Still, he was an unlikely presidential contender. When he launched his bid for the 1976 Democratic nomination, the former one-term governor was so obscure outside the Peach State that “Jimmy who?” became a campaign trope. He perfected the meticulous cultivation of voters in Iowa, and his unexpected victory in the opening presidential caucuses there provided a launching pad that long-shot contenders tried to emulate for decades.
The Watergate scandal boosted Carter’s prospects. In the aftermath of President Richard Nixon’s decision to resign in 1974 rather than be impeached, Carter pitched himself to voters as an outsider who would reject Washington’s unsavory ways. “I’ll never lie to you,” he told them.
In 1976, he narrowly defeated President Gerald Ford, whose campaign was damaged by verbal missteps and by controversy over his decision to pardon Nixon.
Four years later, Carter would be ousted himself. He faced a damaging challenge for the Democratic nomination from the left by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and then a landslide defeat in the general election from the right by Reagan.
The former California governor tapped into discontent with Carter’s leadership. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan asked voters in the iconic closing of their only campaign debate.
Presidential achievements eclipsed?
Carter’s defenders argue that he was a better president than generally recognized.
“I think that he is the most underappreciated modern president that we’ve had,” said Stuart Eizenstat, a veteran Washington official and ambassador who was Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser in the White House.
“The reason for that is the lingering memories of his presidency are negative ones – gasoline lines, high interest rates and inflation, the Iran hostage crisis, the Desert One failed rescue effort – and those totally obscure a really remarkable set of accomplishments both at home and abroad, which in many ways didn’t materialize until after he left office.”
Eizenstat, author of “President Carter: The White House Years,” published in 2018, said Carter’s policies and appointments laid the groundwork for a stronger economy, energy independence, environmental protection, business innovation in transportation and more.
On foreign policy, Carter painstakingly negotiated the 1978 Camp David Accords, a historic agreement between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat that led to a formal peace treaty between the two countries the next year.
But he stumbled when he came to the politics of the job.
Despite having the advantage of a solidly Democratic Congress, many of his legislative proposals, including a consumer protection bill, stalled. The no-backroom-deals approach that helped him win the White House contributed to his difficulties in actually governing once he got there. He was mocked for charging members of Congress for their breakfast when invited to meet with him at the White House and for eliminating alcohol from most evening events.
He was seen by some, then and later, as prickly and sanctimonious.
Meanwhile, unemployment rose, interest rates for home mortgages climbed into double digits and Americans found themselves waiting in lines to buy gas in an oil crisis created by OPEC, the powerful international energy cartel. In a speech to the nation in July 1979, Carter described a “crisis of confidence” among the American people. Although he never said the word, it became short-handed as his “malaise” speech.
“He lacked the political and managerial skills needed to make best use of the office he held,” said Robert McClure, a political scientist at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
Damaged by the hostage crisis
Most damaging of all was the Iranian hostage crisis.
Carter had agreed to allow Iran’s deposed shah, a former U.S. ally who was living in exile, to receive cancer treatment in the United States. In protest, Iranian Islamist radicals overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans captive. The confrontation, which began on Nov. 4, 1979, would end only as Reagan was being inaugurated 444 days later.
Carter chose diplomacy and economic sanctions over military action. He halted oil imports from Iran and froze Iranian assets in the U.S. He severed diplomatic relations with Iran and imposed a full economic embargo on the country.
Finally, he approved a top-secret military mission to free the hostages, but it ended in catastrophe. Three helicopters developed engine trouble in a remote staging area in the Iranian desert, forcing the mission to be aborted. Eight U.S. troops were killed when a helicopter and a plane collided while forces were being withdrawn.
It all added to the impression that Carter was out of his depth.
“The hostage crisis left a bitter taste in voters’ mouths, which Carter was never able to overcome,” said Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar who worked on Carter’s transition team when he was president-elect.
On the day of Reagan’s inauguration, Jan. 20, 1981, Iran agreed to accept $8 billion in frozen assets and a promise by the U.S. to lift trade sanctions in exchange for the release of the hostages. Minutes after Carter’s successor took the oath of office, the hostages were freed.
Former President Jimmy Carter was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. – Getty Images
Finally, a Nobel Peace Prize
Carter left the White House, but he didn’t retire.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter established the Carter Center in Atlanta, their home base for decades as they worked on global health and democracy. He helped negotiate an end to the long civil war in Nicaragua between the Contra rebels and the Sandinistas. He met with North Korean leaders to try to end its nuclear weapons program. He mediated conflicts in Ethiopia, Liberia, Haiti, Bosnia, Sudan, Uganda and Venezuela. He led dozens of delegations of international observers to various countries to help assure elections were free and fair.
For decades, the Carter Center also led an international campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease, a devastating tropical ailment that in 1986 afflicted an estimated 3.5 million people in Africa and Asia. In 2020, it was on the verge of eradication; just 27 cases were reported in six African countries.
For a week each year, the Carters volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, a charitable group that renovates and builds homes for poor people around the world.
He also wrote more than 30 books – controversial ones on the Palestinian territories and the Middle East and less controversial ones on Christmas memories and fly-fishing. He published a collection of his poems and a collection of his paintings. Again and again, he returned to writing about the lessons and demands of his Christian faith.
Carter, who attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, at times criticized the 45th president. In June 2019, at a Carter Center conference in suburban Virginia, he questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s election, citing allegations of Russian interference that were later called into question.
Trump responded at a news conference by calling Carter a “nice man, terrible president.”
But there were also times when Carter reached out to Trump. On the 40th anniversary of the normalization of U.S.-China relations, in 2019, he sent Trump a letter offering advice on managing that relationship. Carter said the phone conversation that followed was the first time the two men had spoken.
In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that supporters thought he had deserved years earlier, when it had been presented to Begin and Sadat. The Nobel committee honored Carter “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.”
“The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices,” Carter said in accepting the prestigious award. “God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes – and we must.”
When he left the White House, Carter moved back home to Plains. Unlike most other modern presidents, he didn’t choose to make money by delivering high-priced speeches or serving on corporate boards. But he did regularly speak to hundreds of visitors who would gather for his Sunday school class at Maranatha Baptist Church.
In November 2019, he told those gathered that he didn’t fear death.
“It’s incompatible for any Christian not to believe in life after death,” Carter, then 95, told them, although he acknowledged he had wrestled with doubts throughout his life. In his prayers, he said, “I didn’t ask God to let me live, but I just asked God to give me a proper attitude toward death. And I found that I was absolutely and completely at ease with death.”
In July 2021, he and his wife hosted a 75th anniversary party in Plains attended by about 300 friends, family members and fellow pols, among them Bill and Hillary Clinton. Carter, his fragility apparent, made a point of greeting the guests at each table for what many of them assumed would be the last time they saw him.
“He was not a self-promoter in the White House or afterwards, and I think that hurt, because it leaves all the sour tastes from the failures and didn’t allow the positives to shine through,” Eizenstat said. When Eizenstat visited Carter in Plains in 2018, Carter told his former aide he was comfortable with letting history judge.
As he approached his 90th birthday, Carter mused about his legacy in an interview with USA TODAY.
“One is peace,” he said. “I kept peace when I was president and I try to promote peace between other people and us, and between countries that were potentially at war, between Israel and Egypt for instance. And human rights. … I think human rights and peace are the two things I’d like to be remembered for – as well as being a good grandfather.”
