Newsman: Former President Jimmy Carter has died. He was 100.The former American President was known and honored more widely to the world as a global hero for his humanitarian work around the globe
“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.
After serving a single term in the White House, Jimmy Carter became one of the most durable figures in modern American politics. Leaving 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.
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.
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.
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.
In the aftermath of President Richard Nixon’s decision to resign in 1974 rather than be impeached for the Watergate scandal, 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.
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.
The official state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter will be held Jan. 9 at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., the White House confirmed Monday.
The Carter Center releases a statement saying the family has accepted an invitation from Congress for Carter, who died Sunday at 100, to lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda. Details on the events in Washington and in Georgia, including burial for Carter, have not been released.
President Joe Biden declared Jan. 9 a National Day of Mourning, ordered U.S. flags to fly at half-staff for 30 days and issued an executive order closing all executive departments and agencies of the federal government that day.
Supreme Court will close to honor Jimmy Carter
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday ordered the Supreme Court building closed on Jan. 9 in recognition of the national day of mourning for Carter.
The court was not scheduled to be in session that day but will hear arguments the next day in TikTok’s challenge to a federal law requiring the popular, short-form video app to divest from its Chinese parent company by Jan. 19.
While Carter never had the chance to nominate a Supreme Court justice, he named Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to federal appeals courts, both of whom were later elevated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton.
Ginsburg was one of 40 women Carter appointed to the federal bench. Until then, only eight women had been previously confirmed as federal judges, according to the Alliance for Justice.
“He envisioned a judiciary that upheld equal justice under the law by modeling equality among its ranks,” the Alliance’s Keith Thirion said in a statement.
Trading on the New York Stock Exchange will be closed Jan. 9 in accordance with the National Day of Mourning following the death of Carter.
The Nasdaq said it would be closing trading of all U.S. equities and options that day as well. Bond markets will be open, but for reduced hours, closing early at 2 p.m. ET, according to a recommendation from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.
“Jimmy Carter, with humble roots as a farmer and family man, devoted his life to public service and defending our freedom,” Lynn Martin, president of NYSE Group, said in a news release.
The New York Stock Exchange held a moment of silence Monday to honor Carter’s “life and legacy,” according to a post on X. The last time the New York Stock Exchange closed trading to honor the passing of a former president was in December 2018, when former President George H. W. Bush died.
