Jimmy Carter, peacemaking president amid crises, is dead at 100

Jimmy Carter, who rose from Georgia farmland to become the 39th president of the United States on a promise of national healing after the wounds of Watergate and Vietnam, then lost the White House in a cauldron of economic turmoil at home and crisis in Iran, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia. He was 100.

The Carter Center in Atlanta announced his death, which came nearly three months after Carter, already the longest-living president in American history, became the first former commander in chief to reach the century mark. Carter went into hospice care 22 months ago, but held on longer than even his family expected.

Tributes poured in from presidents, world leaders and many everyday people from around the world who admired not only Carter’s service during four years in the White House but his four decades of efforts since leaving office to fight disease, broker peace and provide for the poor. President Joe Biden ordered a state funeral to be held and was expected to deliver a eulogy.

“To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning — the good life — study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith and humility,” Biden, the first Democratic senator to endorse Carter’s long-shot 1976 bid for the presidency, said in a statement.

President-elect Donald Trump, who often denigrated Carter and in recent days spoke of unraveling one of his signature accomplishments, the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panama, issued a gracious statement. “The challenges Jimmy faced as president came at a pivotal time for our country, and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans,” Trump said. “For that, we owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Carter was no fan of Trump and family members said he was holding on in part to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

A lifelong farmer who still worked with his hands building houses for the poor well into his 90s, the former president cast his ballot for her in mid-October after making his final public appearance on his birthday when he was rolled out to his yard in a wheelchair to watch a flyover of military jets in his honor. Other than interludes in the White House and the Georgia governor’s mansion, he and his wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, lived in the same simple home in Plains for most of their adult lives and each of them passed away there, Rosalynn Carter in November 2023.

Carter’s death sets the stage for the first presidential funeral since that of George H.W. Bush in 2018, to culminate in a service at Washington National Cathedral. Such occasions traditionally prompt a cease-fire in America’s fractious political wars as the nation’s leaders pause to remember and bid farewell to one of their own. It was not immediately clear whether Trump would attend.

With his peanut farmer’s bluejeans, his broad, toothy grin and his promise never to tell a lie, Carter was a self-professed outsider intent on reforming a broken Washington in an era of lost faith in government. He became one of his generation’s great peacemakers with his Camp David accords, bringing together Israel and Egypt, but he could not turn around a slumping economy or free American hostages seized by militants in Iran in time to win a second term.

While his presidency was remembered more for its failures than for its successes, his post-presidency was seen by many as a model for future chief executives. Rather than vanish from view or focus on moneymaking, he established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease and combat social inequality. He transformed himself into a freelance diplomat traveling the globe, sometimes irritating his successors but earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Carter was outspoken into his final years. He condemned the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of Trump’s supporters trying to overturn his election defeat to Biden, and he denounced new voting limits subsequently passed by Republicans in Georgia. In an essay for The New York Times on the first anniversary of Jan. 6, he warned that “our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss” and called for changes to avoid “losing our precious democracy.”

Long a favorite target for Republicans, Carter’s name came up repeatedly as a foil for Trump to mock Biden even after the incumbent president withdrew from this year’s race. Biden’s critics compared high inflation on his watch to the price increases of Carter’s presidency, and the fall of Afghanistan to the Iran hostage crisis.

Carter went to Washington with an outsider’s promise to “drain the swamp” and make America great again four decades before Trump expressed those same aims. But the two could hardly have come from more different origins. Unlike the thrice-married New York playboy mogul with the flashy golf resorts and the private airliner, Carter grew up on a peanut farm with no electricity or running water. He was a frugal born-again Christian who taught Sunday school and was married to the same woman for more than three-quarters of a century.

He was a man of the people, or so he wanted to be perceived. Minutes after his inaugural address in January 1977, he surprised the crowds lining Pennsylvania Avenue when he, Rosalynn and their 9-year-old daughter, Amy, got out of the presidential limousine and walked the parade route to the White House, smiling and waving in the sunshine as spectators cheered.

Carter once said that he had gone to the capital to restore the country’s faith in itself after the twin traumas of Watergate and Vietnam — to build a “new foundation,” as he put it, of trust, decency and compassion.

Meeting that goal would have been hard enough without the intrusions of national and international crises. His four-year tenure was a story of distraction, disappointment and serial drama that came to an end only in the last tortured minutes of his presidency, with the release of Americans held hostage by Iranians for 444 days.

Troubles and triumphs

To his critics, Carter often undermined his own ambitions through stubbornness and insufficient attention to the egos and political needs of others in the government. His unorthodox style — informal in his cardigan sweaters but uncomfortable with the glad-handing ways of Washington — and an unfortunate confluence of circumstances cost him dearly in the domestic arena.

There was an intractable energy problem brought on by an Arab oil embargo. Inflation soared, and so did interest rates, leaving businesses and homebuyers deeply discouraged. He found himself at odds with an increasingly assertive Congress controlled by his own party. His approval rating in the polls sank from 70% early in his presidency to 28% little more than a year later.

He nevertheless achieved some notable successes in office, particularly in foreign affairs. His human rights policies set a new standard for how the United States should deal with abusive governments. He hammered out a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that still holds decades later. He signed a strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union. He formalized diplomatic relations with China. And over the opposition of conservatives like Ronald Reagan, he pushed through treaties turning over the Panama Canal to Panama.

Long pilloried by Republicans as a model of ineffectual liberal leadership and shunned by fellow Democrats who saw him as a political albatross, Carter benefited in recent years from some historical reappraisal, reinforced by a visit from Biden in 2021 and a gala celebration of the Carters’ 75th wedding anniversary three months later. Several recently published books argued that his presidency had been more consequential than it was given credit for.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic policy adviser, insisted in “President Carter: The White House Years” (2018) that the former president was a thoroughly decent, honorable man who had been underrated. While he may have been miscast as a politician, Eizenstat wrote, Carter’s accomplishments, measured against those of other presidents, made him “one of the most consequential in modern history.”

A son of a small-town businessman and farmer, Carter was the first president from the states of the former Confederacy to be elected since the Civil War, not counting Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian who had moved to New Jersey, where he taught and served as governor, and Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan who ascended to the Oval Office upon the assassination of his predecessor before being elected to a full term. To many Americans it was remarkable that a molasses-voiced Southerner from what had been a white-supremacist section of Georgia could win the presidency just over a decade after the death of Jim Crow.

Defeated in 1980 by Reagan, Carter went home to Plains not only disappointed but also worn in body and spirit. Then he set about rebuilding. He became a global humanitarian, an author, a professor and a wealthy landowner, engaging in public affairs to a degree not seen among former presidents in modern times.

Peanuts, Bibles and politics

James Earl Carter Jr. was born in Plains on Oct. 1, 1924, into a family not wealthy but “well off,” as Southerners put it. His father, who was known as Earl, owned enough fertile land to make a comfortable living growing peanuts, cotton and other crops. Jimmy’s mother, Lillian (Gordy) Carter, was a nurse and an avid reader with a keen interest in public affairs.

Jimmy Carter’s attitude toward race was shaped by a Southern complexity in which white people would keep their distance from Black people in town, expressing contempt for them there if not outright hostility, and then work side by side with them on the farm, where Black and white children might play together.

Carter spent a lot of time with his Black neighbors. “I played with their children, often ate and slept in their homes, and later hunted, fished, plowed and hoed with their husbands and children,” he wrote in a 2001 memoir, “An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood.”

He was 16 when he graduated from Plains High School at the top of his class of 26 — the first in his family to finish high school. He went on to spend a year at Georgia Southwestern College in nearby Americus and a year at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Then, in 1943, with the United States far into World War II, he was accepted into the Naval Academy at 19. He spent the rest of the war there in an accelerated program and graduated in 1946.

A month later he married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister Ruth.

The Navy gave the Carters a look at the world. Their first son, John, known as Jack, was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1947; James Earl Carter III, known as Chip, was born in Honolulu in 1950; and the third son, Donnel, was born in New London, Connecticut, in 1952. (Their daughter, Amy, came along much later in Plains, in 1967.)

In October 1952, Carter went to work for Capt. Hyman Rickover, who was well along in developing the Navy’s first nuclear-powered submarines and ships. After going back to school to study nuclear engineering, Carter became executive officer in a crew that would build and prepare the first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus.

Then, on July 23, 1953, his father, at that point a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, died of pancreatic cancer, the disease that would take the lives of three of his children, though not his son Jimmy’s.

Carter resigned his commission, angering Rickover, and returned to Plains to take over the family’s peanut warehouse and processing plant, angering Rosalynn; she had no interest in going back to Georgia.

No to segregationists

Deciding to go into politics, he ran for the state Senate in 1962 and won. Months later, civil rights activists moved into Americus, in his district. Police used violence to break up demonstrations, and obscure laws were used to jail protesters. But as the national media covered the turmoil, Carter kept silent rather than join the cry of resistance that most white Southerners expected of their political leaders at the time.

For his run for governor in 1970, Carter gathered a staff of up-and-coming Georgians, Black and white, including Eizenstat, Hamilton Jordan, Jody Powell, Bert Lance, Vernon Jordan and the Rev. Andrew Young, all of whom remained close to him as president.

With a deft though vague message that appealed to both liberals and conservatives, Carter handily defeated Carl Sanders, a former governor with a progressive image. While he had appealed during the campaign to supporters of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, Carter stunned his conservative backers when he stood in front of the Capitol and proclaimed in his inaugural address, “I say to you quite frankly the time for racial discrimination is over.”

Before summer, Carter was on the cover of Time magazine, hailed as one in a wave of “New South” governors elected in 1970.

‘President of what?’

Jimmy Carter’s quest for the White House began in the fall of 1972 as it became clear that Sen. George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, would lose to President Richard Nixon in November. Carter and his advisers calculated that the Democratic field in 1976 would be wide open and that a newcomer would have a chance.

Carter extended his reach in the national party in 1974 as chair of the midterm elections campaign. In the November election, Democrats made large gains in the House and the Senate as well as in statehouses across the nation. Within weeks Carter announced his intention to run for president.

Many observers were incredulous and shared the reaction of his plain-spoken mother, Lillian: “President of what?”

His brother, Billy, who had acquired the image of a beer-guzzling Southern good old boy, had misgivings of his own. When a reporter suggested to him that he was a little strange, he replied: “Look, my mama was a 70-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in India, one of my sisters goes all over the world as a holy-roller preacher, my oldest sister spends half her time on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and my brother thinks he’s going to be president of the United States. Which one of my family do you think is strange?”

In the general election, Carter took on President Gerald Ford, who had succeeded to the office with Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and then controversially pardoned him. Carter argued that after Watergate it was time for a change in Washington. “I will never lie to you,” he promised.

His campaign was aided by the poor economy. He cited the “misery index,” the combination of inflation and unemployment rates, which reached 13% by Election Day. On Nov. 2, 1976, Carter defeated Ford with 297 electoral votes to 240, and 50.1% of the popular vote.

President everyman

On Jan. 20, 1977, Carter opened his inaugural address by thanking Ford “for all he has done to heal our land.” It sounded a therapeutic tone that he would seek to sustain.

Carter’s first act as president was to grant amnesty to Vietnam War draft resisters. The predicted firestorm raged, then quickly faded. He had fulfilled his first campaign promise, part of his plan to bind up the nation’s wounds. Warned that the order would be fiercely opposed in the Senate, as indeed it was, he replied: “I don’t care if all 100 of them are against me. It’s the right thing to do.”

In response to criticism that his presidency was all style and no substance, Carter proposed tax reform, an overhaul of the welfare system and a comprehensive approach to the energy problem. He offered policies to halt the decline of cities, tackled inflation and unemployment, and sought increased spending for guns and butter while preaching the necessity of a balanced budget.

His foreign affairs list was just as long: disarmament; a new international respect for human rights; meaningful dialogue with developing nations; closer ties with Latin America; resolution of the Middle East conflict; better relations with the Soviet Union; and, presaging his first big fight with Congress, a pair of treaties turning over the Panama Canal to Panama.

‘Sacrifice and pain’

The president’s political problems worsened by the middle of his term. In the summer of 1979 he spent 10 days at Camp David, the Maryland presidential retreat, conducting a “domestic summit,” listening to advice from 150 prominent Americans. He returned to Washington and delivered an Oval Office address on what he termed “a crisis of confidence” in the nation. What became known as his “malaise” speech — although he did not use that word — lifted his popularity briefly but came to be derided as preachy and downbeat, seeming to define what many considered the uninspiring tone of his presidency.

But broadly speaking, “Carter’s message was sacrifice and pain,” Eizenstat wrote. During an address to the nation on the energy crisis, the president opened by saying, “Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem that is unprecedented in our history.” When celebrating the creation of the Education Department, he said dolefully, “This thing won’t work as well as you think it will.”

But along with the Iran hostage crisis, perhaps the most important factor in Carter’s undoing was the dismal state of the economy. Reagan turned the “misery index,” which had reached 22%, against Carter and summed up his case at the debate with the cutting question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

The answer for many Americans was no. On Nov. 4, 1980, Reagan won in a landslide, capturing 489 electoral votes to 49 for Carter, who won just six states and the District of Columbia. In the popular vote, Reagan received 51% to 41% for Carter; Rep. John B. Anderson, a Republican from Illinois running as an independent, finished with 7%.

After the White House

In leaving the White House at age 56, Carter resolved to do more than write books and build a presidential library. “What Carter really wanted was to find some way to continue the unfinished business of his presidency,” historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in “The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House” (1998).

In 1984, the Carters got involved in a well-publicized venture, Habitat for Humanity. They spent one week a year wielding hammers and saws to build houses for the poor, and as of 2019 the former president had helped renovate nearly 4,400 homes in 14 countries with his own tool belt. He also launched an effort to eliminate Guinea worm in Africa, and he taught Sunday school at his local church every other week.

Carter’s survivors include four children, 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

Carter escaped the pancreatic cancer that killed his father and his three younger siblings at relatively young ages. Ruth Carter Stapleton died in 1983 at 54, Billy Carter in 1988 at 51 and Gloria Carter Spann in 1990 at 63.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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