Jimmy Carter, U.S. President and Prolific Humanitarian, Dead at 100
Jimmy Carter, humanitarian, diplomat, and 39th president of the United States, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, after receiving hospice care, his son James E. “Chip” Carter III confirmed. He was 100.
“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” Chip Carter said in a 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.”
Carter’s death comes more than a year after the death of his wife Rosalynn, to whom he was married for 77 years.
A former state legislator and Georgia governor, Carter unexpectedly rose to clinch the 1976 Democratic primary and presidency. His folksy charm and Washington outsider status won over a nation searching for a moral compass in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War.
But Carter would serve only one term. Despite several landmark foreign-policy accomplishments, his time in office was characterized by struggles to manage an energy crisis, an unstable economy, and the Iran hostage crisis, which spanned 444 days of his presidency. To many Americans, Carter never seemed a natural fit for the White House, turning his back on many of the trappings of the office — he famously banned the playing of “Hail to the Chief” — and failing to project a resolute image in the face of a series of national maladies.
Though his time in office was fraught, Carter’s post-presidential legacy of humanitarian and diplomatic work was unparalleled. In 2002, he became the third president after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to win the Nobel Peace Prize (Obama would also win the prize, in 2009.) With his wife Rosalynn, he founded the Carter Center, a nonprofit through which he worked to promote human rights until his death. He credited his religious faith as his moral lodestar and lived a famously modest life after holding the highest office in the land, returning to the same small ranch home he lived in prior to moving to Washington, buying his clothes at the Dollar General store, and teaching Sunday school almost every week at the Maranatha Baptist Church in the rural town of Plains, Georgia.
Born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Carter was raised in a family of peanut farmers. He attended Georgia Southwestern State University, Georgia Tech, and the United States Naval Academy. His seven years of active-duty service in the Navy was spent mostly as a submariner, including working in the nuclear-submarine program. After Carter’s father died in 1953, he returned to Plains to take over his family’s peanut business (which he relinquished control of before being sworn in as president, a concession that has often been cited for its stark contrast to President Trump’s refusal to divest himself from the Trump Organization despite clear conflicts of interest).
Carter soon established himself as a progressive local leader. In Jim Crow Georgia — where racism among the ruling class was unvarnished — he resisted pressure to join the local White Citizens Council, a white-supremacist organization that, unlike the KKK, met openly and was considered part of the community.
Carter jumped into politics in 1962, winning a seat in the Georgia state Senate. He became governor on his second bid, in 1970, claiming that he and Rosalynn shook 600,000 hands and visited every factory in the state en route to victory.
Though he was a long shot, Carter’s relentless campaigning and honest man-of-the-people message landed him the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. Rolling Stone endorsed Carter with a cover story written by Hunter S. Thompson, who met the future president in 1974 when he gave what Thompson described as a “king hell bastard of a speech” about how the judicial system had failed minorities. “Hunter was my good buddy,” Carter said in 2007 when asked by Tom Brokaw about his relationship with the gonzo journalist. So too were Willie Nelson, Gregg Allman, and Bob Dylan, the latter Carter referred to in that speech as a “poet” who aided his “understanding of what’s right and wrong in this society.”
Carter’s outsider status may have helped him win the presidency, but his aversion to playing politics made for a coarse relationship with Congress throughout his time in office. Though most historians have not considered Carter a particularly effective president, he was able to normalize relations with China; broker peace between Israel and Egypt through the Camp David Accords; and ratify the Panama Canal treaties, which turned control of the waterway over to its namesake nation and ensured its neutrality. These were all foreign-policy accomplishments, however. Where Carter struggled was in inspiring hope domestically.
“There was something more than a desire to lead,” Carter’s speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg told Rolling Stone in 2011. “That was very strong. But as strong was the self-sacrificial ideal of doing the right thing even if it cost him the presidency. He risked it over and over. He loved thankless tasks like the Panama Canal. It’s a perfect Carter achievement. He got absolutely no mileage out of it. It sparked Reagan. Reagan rode it to the election. And yet, by doing it, he avoided a catastrophic, very serious war in Latin America.”
By 1979, the U.S. was gripped by an energy crisis, sparked by instability in the Middle East, which resulted in skyrocketing oil prices and long queues of cars at gas stations. The nation’s fears about energy security were further heightened by the nuclear mishap at Three Mile Island that March. On July 15, Carter delivered an address that has since become known as the “malaise speech,” in which he criticized the nation’s crisis of confidence. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways,” said Carter. “It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”
But Carter’s attempt to right the course of his presidency was foiled when a group of Iranian students took control of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage that November. The standoff consumed Carter, who often secluded himself in the White House as he grappled with how to resolve it. In April 1980, he ordered Operation Eagle Claw, a military mission to rescue the hostages. It failed, and eight American service members were killed.
The crisis persisted through the end of Carter’s presidency, and triggered his landslide Electoral College defeat in 1980. After warding off a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy, Carter lost all but six states and the District of Columbia to Ronald Reagan, who ran on the campaign slogan, “Let’s make America great again.” (All 52 hostages were freed minutes after Reagan took the oath of office.)
In 1982, Carter and Rosalynn founded the Carter Center to “advance peace and health worldwide.” The nonpartisan nonprofit sent election-monitoring delegations everywhere from Panama to Indonesia; worked to eradicate Guinea-worm disease, an effort Carter called “one of the most gratifying experiences of my life”; and led initiatives aimed at cultivating equality around the world. Two years after founding the Carter Center, he and Rosalynn began volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, a Georgia-headquartered nonprofit devoted to building housing in poverty-stricken areas. As part of the Carter Work Project, the couple spent time on the ground helping to build houses around the world, from Southeast Asia’s Mekong River region to Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Carter’s post-presidential work as a diplomat was equally far-reaching. He traveled to North Korea in 1994 to negotiate a treaty freezing the nation’s nuclear program, and would visit the nation again in 2010, when he arranged for the release of Aijalon Gomes, an American teacher who had been detained after illegally entering the country. Carter’s diplomatic efforts also took him throughout the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, but such excursions were often a source of frustration for the White House. As Nicholas Dawidoff wrote for Rolling Stone in 2011, Carter “operates as a foreign service of one, going where he pleases, making his own assessments, issuing statements that can alter the course of world events. The ambiguity of this official-yet-unofficial status has irritated every American president from Reagan on.”
Carter’s “own assessments” — often relayed through opinion pieces — were a constant in the American political discourse. In 2003, he urged President Bush not to invade Iraq, arguing that “our government has not made a case for a preemptive military strike.” He long advocated for Palestine’s right to statehood, green energy solutions, and universal health care. After the Supreme Court ruled in step with Citizens United, effectively eliminating caps on campaign donations, Carter described the United States as an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” Prior to the 2018 midterm elections, he called on Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Brian Kemp, who was accused of deploying myriad voter-suppression tactics, to resign as the state’s secretary of state.
While Carter was critical of President Trump, he made his expertise available to the administration. In 2017, at the age of 93, he offered to serve as an envoy to North Korea as tensions escalated between Trump and Kim Jong Un. “This is the most serious existing threat to world peace, and it is imperative that Pyongyang and Washington find some way to ease the escalating tension and reach a lasting, peaceful agreement,” Carter wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post.
Though he noted that President Trump “reacted quite well” to an invitation to talk with North Korea — Carter himself was criticized over the years for his willingness to meet with dictators — he was typically more critical of the 45th president. “If I were foolish enough to feel I could be president again, I think the first thing I would do would be to change all of the policies that President Trump has initiated,” he said in 2018 at Emory University, where he was a professor. “I pray for him fairly regularly. If he answered my prayers, he’d have to change a lot of things.”
Unlike other presidents, Carter did not parlay his post-presidential fame into monetary gain. He spent his later years living modestly in Plains, painting, reading, and writing. Carter authored dozens of books. An Hour Before Daylight, his 2001 memoir of his upbringing in rural Georgia, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He won two Grammy awards, among nine nominations, including for the audio version of his final book, 2018’s Faith: A Journey For All.
To the end, Carter was a realist who never lost sight of his ideals, which he strove toward tirelessly and for far longer than anyone else who has occupied the Oval Office. For Carter, there was no other option. “The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices,” he said in 2002 while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. “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.”
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