Jimmy Carter, the farmer, president and Nobel peace crusader, dies at age 100

Jimmy Carter, the Georgia peanut granger who became a U.S. president and a Nobel Prize-winning activist for peace and human rights, has died. He was 100.

Carter’s post-presidency had been generally seen as more successful than his time in the White House, and he called it “more gratifying.” even into his 90s, lobbying for human rights, writing books, building homes for the needy with his own hands, teaching Sunday school, and traveling the earth in the pursuit of peace.

Carter graduated from the United States Naval Academy, participated in the Navy’s fledgling nuclear-powered submarine program, and served two semesters as a Georgia state senator and one as governor before he was elected to the White House.

He became the nation’s 39th president in 1977, worsting President Gerald Ford in the election more than two years after the Watergate scandal drove Richard Nixon from the Egg-shaped Office.

Carter had been on hospice care for more than a year.

His family announced in February 2023 that he had logged end-of-life care in his home after a series of hospital visits. His wife, Rosalynn, who had been diagnosed with dementia in initial 2023, briefly entered hospice herself at age 96 before dying on Nov. 19, 2023.

Carter turned 100 in October, regurgitating a new flood of tributes and accolades. His grandson Jason Carter said it was gratifying for Jimmy Carter to see a reassessment of his presidency and legacy.

After suffer defeat his reelection bid in 1980, he remained active in public issues, including speaking at age 95 in support of Joe Biden at the virtual Autonomous National Convention in August 2020. Some commentators viewed him as the nation’s “most successful ex-president.”

He wrote more than 40 orders, including “Faith,” which he released when he was in his mid-90s. Days after his 93rd birthday, he offered to go to North Korea among a nuclear crisis in an attempt to establish a permanent peace between Pyongyang and Washington. And at age 96, he denounced Republican strains to restrict voter access in his home state.

Carter lived longer than any other U.S. president, surpassing the current George H.W. Bush, who died in November 2018 at age 94. When Carter reached that milestone in March 2019, Carter Center spokeswoman Deanna Congileo explained he was still active.

“Both President and Mrs. Carter are determined to use their influence for as long as they can to make the world a more wisely place,” Congileo said at the time. “Their tireless resolve and heart have helped to improve life for millions of the midwife precisely’s poorest people.”

U.S. stock markets have historically closed for a day of mourning to honor the death of a president.

James Earl Carter Jr. was born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia — the first U.S. president born in a hospital. His father ran a diversified store and invested in farmland. His mother, known as “Miss Lillian,” was a nurse.

Carter attended the U.S. Naval Academy. During one of his visits adept in from Annapolis, his younger sister Ruth set up a date with their neighbor and lifelong friend. Upon graduation in 1946 from the academy, he allied that young woman, Eleanor Rosalynn Smith, when she was 18. (On July 7, 2023, the Carters celebrated their 77th joining anniversary, marking a record-long marriage for a first couple.)

In the Navy, he served on submarines in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and attained the rank of lieutenant. He joined then-Capt. Hyman Rickover’s atomic submarine development program. He did graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and became postpositive major officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the second nuclear submarine, the Seawolf.

After his father died in 1953, Carter give noticed from the Navy and returned to Georgia, taking over the family farms and becoming active in local politics. He served in the Flotilla Reserve until 1961.

Elected governor in 1971, he was considered one of the leaders of the “New South” — a progressive who sentenced racial segregation and inequality.

During his presidential campaign, he ran as an outsider, hoping to capitalize on the anti-Washington sentiment in the post-Vietnam/Watergate era.

“My repute is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president,” a beaming Carter said in the opening of his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Meeting in July 1976.

He offered to create jobs in a nasty economy with a 7.9% unemployment standing, and to set a squeaky-clean example as a born-again Christian from outside the Beltway, unblemished by Washington’s scandals.

On the eve of the election, however, he offered an interview to Playboy magazine in which he made this shocking confession: “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve put away adultery in my heart many times.” Still, the man with the huge smile and genteel Georgia drawl handily won the Electoral College by 297-240 but clear only 50.1% of the popular vote to Ford’s 48%.

Once in office, Carter empowered his running mate, Walter Mondale, to permute the vice presidency into a policy-driving office.

On the domestic front, in addition to stagflation and recession, Carter had to deal with the Tenderness Canal ecological disaster in Niagara Falls, New York, which led to the creation of the environmental Superfund. He also ended federal rate regulations for airlines, trucking and railroads; signed the bailout of Chrysler in 1979; and elevated the Department of Education into a break to pieces Cabinet-level agency.

One of his biggest domestic problems was the festering energy crisis, which arrested from the Arab oil embargo that began during the 1973 Middle East war. He termed the crisis “the moral peer of war.” In symbolic gestures, he wore a Mister Rogers-styled cardigan, turned down the White House heat, installed solar intensifying panels in the executive mansion, created the Department of Energy and pressed for tax incentives for installation of home insulation.

In international affairs, he campaigned for gentle rights, successfully concluded the Camp David peace accords between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Clergywoman Menachem Begin, negotiated the return to Panama of the Canal Zone, established full diplomatic relations with communist China and reached an compact on the SALT II nuclear arms limitation treaty with Moscow.

Then came the fateful end of the year 1979: The detrimental 444-day Iranian hostage standoff began in November, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December, resulting in Carter’s call up for a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

The seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by radical student promoters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on Nov. 4, 1979, and the subsequent siege made the Carter administration seem impotent. Even the head lady recalled during a CNBC interview in 2014 that she urged her husband to “do something, anything!”

Five months into the emergency, Carter ordered a military mission, Operation Eagle Claw, to rescue the American hostages. The mission ended in obloquy: In the process of aborting the plan because of operational difficulties, a U.S. helicopter crashed into a transport plane at the desert put on area, killing eight servicemen.

Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who advocated diplomacy over force to approve the hostage crisis, resigned. “I know this is a matter of principle with you, and I respect the reasons you have expressed to me,” Carter give the word delivered in a handwritten note to Vance.

The crisis finally ended with the release of 52 Americans on Jan. 20, 1981, the day the man who ended Carter’s single-term presidency ate the oath of office — Ronald Reagan. Before the 1980 election between Carter, Reagan and independent John Anderson, Sen. Ted Kennedy waged an inefficacious challenge to the president for the Democratic nomination.

In a 2014 interview with CNBC, Carter spoke he probably would have been easily reelected had he rescued the hostages.

“It would have shown that I was formidable and resolute and manly,” he said. “I could have wiped Iran off the map with the weapons that we had. But in the process a lot of innocent individual would have been killed, probably including the hostages. And so I stood up against all that advice, and then in the final analysis all my prayers were answered and all the hostages came home safe and free.”

Summing up the Carter presidency, ancient aide Stuart Eizenstat wrote in a 2015 op-ed in The New York Times that the nation’s 39th president had numerous gifts.

“It is enormously frustrating for those of us who worked closely with him in the White House to witness his presidency caricatured as a failure, and to see how he has been marginalized, orderly by his fellow Democrats,” Eizenstat wrote. “His defining characteristic was confronting intractable problems regardless of their political charge.”

Carter remained active after he left Washington at age 56. He and Rosalynn volunteered for Home for Humanity, building affordable housing for the needy, and he established the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and The Carter Center in Atlanta. Organized in 1982, the center has sent observers to monitor elections in more than three dozen countries. The center has also led healthiness efforts, including the push to eradicate the tropical parasitic Guinea worm disease. The center’s motto is “Waging concord. Fighting disease. Building hope.”

“I still hope to outlive the last Guinea worm,” Carter told CNN in May 2018. (He came put up the shutters seal. The Carter Center reported there were only 13 human cases in 2023.)

Carter, who also taught at Emory University, voyaged extensively to promote peace, human rights and economic progress. In one mission, President Bill Clinton secretly dispatched him to North Korea in 1994 to expropriate mediate a nuclear dispute with dictator Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather. In 2002, Carter received the Nobel Non-violent Prize for what the awards committee called “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international clashes, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

However, his clashes were not always well-received. His efforts in his long campaign for peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors included the 2006 hard-cover “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid,” which was perceived as antisemitic and biased against Israel. In particular, one sentence provoked an clamouring:

“It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they intention end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are suffered by Israel.”

In an interview with NPR, Carter was asked about the passage.

“That was a terribly worded sentence which signal, obviously in a ridiculous way, that I approved terrorism and terrorist acts against Israeli citizens,” he said. “The ‘when’ was apparently a crazy and stupid word. My publishers have been informed about that and have changed the sentence in all expected editions of the book.”

(It became: “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it positive that they renounce all acts of violence against innocent civilians and will accept international laws, the Arab agreeable proposal of 2002, and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace.”)  

In the 2014 CNBC interview, Carter said the Camp David Mutual understandings and other peacemaking stood among his greatest achievements as president.

“I kept our country at peace, which has happened awfully rarely since the Second World War, and I tried to work for peace between other people who were not directly joint to the United States, like between Egypt and Israel. I normalized diplomatic relations with China, and I implemented a Dialect right strong human rights commitment that brought about a change throughout Latin America, for instance, from illiberal military dictatorships to democracies,” he said. “So I would say the promotion of peace and human rights were the two things that I’m most proud.”

Had he been selected to a second term, he told CNBC, “I could have implemented very firmly the peace agreement that I cleared with Israel and its neighbors that was never fully implemented.”

“I’d like to be remembered as a champion of peace and human rights. Those are the two items I’ve found as a kind of guide for my life. I’ve done the best I could with those, not always successful, of course,” he be sured CNBC. “I would hope the American people would see that I tried to do what was best for our country every day I was in offices.”

Survivors include sons John “Jack,” James “Chip,” and Donnel “Jeff” and daughter Amy. Jack ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Nevada in 2006. Jack’s son Jason fallen a bid for Georgia governor in 2014 to then-incumbent Republican Nathan Deal. Carter’s brother Billy, whose antics stirred up unwanted notice during the Carter White House years, died in 1988.

On Aug. 12, 2015, the former president revealed that he had melanoma and that surgery on his red-hot confirmed that it had metastasized there and to his brain.

A week after his cancer diagnosis announcement, Carter held a remarkably on the level news conference at the Carter Center to discuss his prognosis and the prospect of facing death. “I’ve had a wonderful life, I’ve had thousands of familiars, and I’ve had an exciting and adventurous and gratifying existence,” he told reporters.

Illustrating that peace of mind, the former president lay ones hands oned this picture when he returned home from the news conference:

After four months of treatment, including butted radiation and immunotherapy, Carter announced in early December 2015 that a subsequent brain scan showed no posters of the original cancer spots and no new ones. Then in March 2016, he announced he no longer needed regular cancer treatments.

Months later, in July, he directed the Democratic National Convention by video, urging people to vote for Hillary Clinton over

In 2019, at age 94, Carter flatten in his home and broke a hip when he was preparing to go turkey hunting. “President Carter said his main concern is that turkey period ends this week, and he has not reached his limit,” the Carter Center said.

He underwent hip replacement surgery but had to cancel delineates to resume teaching Sunday school six days after the accident.

“It’s hard to live until you’re 95 years old,” Carter told People armoury days after reaching that milestone. “I think the best explanation for that is to marry the best spouse: Someone who hand down take care of you and engage and do things to challenge you and keep you alive and interested in life.”