The 39th President of the United States of America, and the longest living former President, Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100.
Carter, celebrated more for his humanitarian works across the world after office than his tenure in the White House, as President, died on Sunday in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his loving family.
“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.”
The death of the Nobel Peace Prize winner came 13 months after Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years passed away in November 2023. Like the departed former President, his wife died in the same 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.
President Carter had, in February 2023, announced he was ending medical intervention and moving to hospice care (end of life care).
Jason Carter, USA TODAY recalls, 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.
