Former US President Jimmy Carter, a Georgia peanut farmer who promised to restore morality and truth to politics after an era of White House scandals and who redefined post-presidential service, died Sunday at the age of 100. .
The Carter Center said the 39th president died in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family.
The White House has been notified that Carter has died, according to a Biden administration official. According to a law enforcement official, preparations for the state funeral have already begun.
Carter had been under home palliative care since February 2023 after a series of brief hospital stays.
Carter, a Democrat, served a single term from 1977 to 1981, losing a re-election bid to Ronald Reagan. Despite his notable achievements as a peacemaker, Carter’s presidency is largely remembered as four unfulfilled years, rocked by blows to the American economy and its standing abroad. His most enduring legacy, however, may be that of a globe-trotting elder statesman and human rights pioneer during a tireless 43-year “retirement.”
Carter became the oldest living former president when he surpassed the late George HW Bush’s record in March 2019.
Carter’s beloved wife, Rosalynn, died in November 2023. They had been inseparable during their 77-year marriage, and following her passing, the former president said in a statement that “as long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew someone.” “He loved me and supported me.”
The former president attended his wife’s memorial events, including a private burial and a televised memorial service in Atlanta, where he sat front row in a reclining wheelchair. He didn’t make any comments.
Carter took office in 1977 with a serious promise to lead a government as “good, honest, decent, compassionate and loving as the American people are,” after what had begun as an improbable long-shot bid for the presidential nomination. Democratic Party.
In this Nov. 3, 2019, file photo, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. Carter, the oldest former American CEO in history, will quietly celebrate his 97th birthday at his home in southwest Georgia on Friday, Oct. 1, 2021, an aide said. (AP Photo/John Amis, File)
The southerner with the radiant smile achieved important successes, especially abroad. It forged a rare and lasting Middle East peace agreement between Israel and Egypt that remains to this day, formalized President Richard Nixon’s opening to communist China, and put human rights at the center of American foreign policy.
But Carter was finally brought down by a 444-day hostage crisis in Iran, in which student revolutionaries outwitted the American superpower by holding dozens of Americans in Tehran. The American sense of unease brought on by the crisis was exacerbated by Carter’s internal struggles, including a sluggish economy, inflation, and an energy crisis.
At times, Carter’s principled moral tone and his determination to strip the presidency of glitz, for example by selling the official yacht, Sequoia, seemed to verge on prudishness. But out of office, Carter earned admiration by living his values. Just a day after one of several falls he suffered in 2019, he was back building houses for Habitat for Humanity, even with a nasty black eye and 14 stitches, and teaching Sunday school as he had done hundreds of times.
The devout Southern Baptist’s life’s work was just beginning when he limped out of the White House, humiliated by Reagan’s 1980 Republican landslide, in which the incumbent won only six states and the District of Columbia.
“As one of the youngest former presidents, I hoped to have many useful years ahead of me,” Carter wrote in his 1982 memoir, “Keeping Faith.” He kept his word and became a humanitarian icon, perhaps more popular outside the United States than at home.
For four decades, Carter, Rosalynn and their Atlanta-based organization monitored elections in hotspots, negotiated with despots, fought poverty and homelessness, fought disease and epidemics, and promoted public health in the developing world.
In the process, Carter did nothing less than reinvent the concept of the post-presidency, blazing a philanthropic path since adopted by successors such as Bill Clinton and, in Africa, George W. Bush.
His efforts on behalf of his Carter Center, founded to “achieve peace, fight disease, and generate hope,” earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Even in old age, Carter remained a polarizing political figure. He was an awkward member of the former presidents’ club, sometimes frustrating successors like Clinton and criticizing the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and U.S. allies like Israel.
In recent years, he has come full circle by warning of the corrosive impact a scandal-plagued White House would have on American politics, just as he did when his criticism of the Nixon era helped him defeat the fallen former Republican president’s unelected successor. disgraced Gerald Ford, in 1976. (After Carter left office, he and Ford became close friends.)
In September 2019, Carter warned Americans not to re-elect President Donald Trump. “I think it will be a disaster to have four more years of Trump,” he said.
After losing re-election, his work at the Carter Center became a great comfort. The former president said in a moving news conference detailing a cancer diagnosis in August 2015 that being president had been the highlight of his political career, even if it ended prematurely, though he wouldn’t trade another four years in the White House for the joy had taken after leaving office to work with the Carter Center. And he said he was at peace with his legacy after a rich and full life: “I think I have been as blessed as any human being in the world.”
Carter also said at that August press conference that marrying Rosalynn was the “pinnacle” of his life. He is survived by four children: Jack, Chip, Jeff and Amy, 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren, according to the Carter Center.
In April 2021, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden visited the Carters at their home in Plains, after the former presidential couple was unable to travel to Washington for the inauguration of the 46th president.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN’s Jeff Zeleny and Haley Talbot contributed to this report.
