Former US President Jimmy Carter pictured in 2019 at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. He has died aged 100. Photo / Getty
Jimmy Carter, a no-frills and steel-willed Southern governor who was elected United States President in 1976, has died at his home in Plains, Georgia.
He was 100 and the oldest living US President of all time.
Carter was rejected by disillusioned voters after a single term and went on to an extraordinary post-presidential life that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
His son James E. Carter III, known as Chip, confirmed the death but did not provide an immediate cause.
In a statement in February 2023, the Carter Center said the former President, after a series of hospital stays, would stop further medical treatment and spend his remaining time at home under hospice care.
He had been treated in recent years for an aggressive form of melanoma skin cancer, with tumours that spread to his liver and brain.
Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia. pic.twitter.com/aqYmcE9tXi
— The Carter Center (@CarterCenter) December 29, 2024
His wife, Rosalynn, died November 19, 2023, at 96.
The Carters, who were close partners in public life, had been married for more than 77 years, the longest presidential marriage in US history.
His final public appearance was at her funeral in Plains, where he sat in the front row in a wheelchair.
Carter, a small-town peanut farmer, US Navy veteran, and Georgia Governor from 1971 to 1975, was the first President from the Deep South since 1837, and the only Democrat elected President between Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Bill Clinton’s terms in the White House.
As the nation’s 39th President, he governed with strong Democratic majorities in Congress but in a country that was growing more conservative.
Four years after taking office, Carter lost his bid for re-election, in a landslide, to one of the most conservative political figures of the era, Ronald Reagan.
When Carter left Washington in January 1981, he was widely regarded as a mediocre President, if not an outright failure.
The list of what had gone wrong during his presidency, not all of it his fault, was long. It was a time of economic distress, with a stagnant economy, and stubbornly high unemployment and inflation.
“Stagflation”, connoting both low growth and high inflation, was a description that critics used to attack Carter’s economic policies.
In the summer of 1979, Americans waited in long lines at service stations as fuel supplies dwindled and prices soared after revolution in Iran disrupted the global oil supply.
Carter made energy his signature domestic policy initiative, and he had some success, but events outside his control intervened.
In March 1979, a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a core meltdown. The accident was the worst ever for the US nuclear-energy industry and a severe setback to hopes that nuclear power would provide a safe alternative to oil and other fossil fuels.
Jimmy Carter, former US president who was committed to human rights, has died. He was 100 years old.
— Human Rights Watch (@hrw) December 29, 2024
Carter set a powerful example for world leaders to make human rights a priority, and he continued to fight for human rights after he left office. pic.twitter.com/4bzHooX2ZG
Carter’s fortunes were no better overseas. In November 1979, an Iranian mob seized control of the US Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans as hostages. It was the beginning of a 444-day ordeal that played out daily on television and did not end until January 20, 1981, the day Carter left office, when the hostages were released.
In the midst of the crisis, in April 1980, Carter authorised a rescue attempt that ended disastrously in the Iranian desert when two US aircraft collided on the ground, killing eight American servicemen. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who had opposed the mission, resigned.
“I may have over-emphasised the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” Carter said in a 2018 interview with the Washington Post in Plains. “But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.”
A month after the Iranian hostage crisis erupted, an emboldened Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
Carter ordered an embargo of grain sales to the Soviet Union, angering American farmers, and a US boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, a step that was unpopular with many Americans and was widely seen as weak and ineffectual.
Today, we mourn the loss of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who passed away at the age of 100. For more than 35 years, he and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter dedicated themselves to Habitat for Humanity, helping to build homes and hope for families in need. pic.twitter.com/8P5z39Za7c
— Habitat Seattle-King County (@habitatskc) December 29, 2024
As the years wore on, the judgment on Carter’s presidency gradually gave way to a more positive view.
He lived long enough to see his record largely vindicated by history, with a widespread acknowledgment that his presidency had been far more than long lines at the service station and US hostages in Iran.
Near the end of Carter’s life, two biographies argued forcefully that he had been a more consequential president than most people realised – “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history”, author Jonathan Alter wrote in his 2020 book, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.
Both books – the other was Kai Bird’s 2021 volume, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter – said Carter was often ahead of his time, especially with his early focus on reducing fossil fuel use and his efforts to mitigate the nation’s racial divide, including by expanding the number of people of colour in federal judgeships.
The biographies concluded that Carter’s reputation as a poor president was unfair and came largely from his stubborn insistence on doing what he thought was correct even when it cost him politically.
“He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better,” Bird wrote. “And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.”
President Jimmy Carter was a hero to family farmers and working people--from the fields in Georgia to the White House and the stage at Farm Aid. I met him when I was a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. He swung a hammer with the rest of us, ensuring families earned a home and… pic.twitter.com/e3vdZqr57s
— Jane Fleming Kleeb👢🪧🗳️ (@janekleeb) December 29, 2024
Carter, noted for his mile-wide smile in public, was also tenacious and resolute, and those qualities were critical to achieving the Camp David Accords, a signature success of his presidency.
He spent 13 days at the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains in September 1978, shuttling between cabins that housed Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
In a process that almost collapsed several times, Carter was instrumental in brokering a historic agreement between bitter rivals.
The Camp David Accords led to the first significant Israeli withdrawal from territory captured in the Six-Day War of 1967 and a peace treaty that has endured between Israel and its largest Arab neighbour. In 1978, Begin and Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour conferred on Carter 24 years later for a lifetime of working for peace.
Against fierce conservative opposition, Carter pushed through the Panama Canal treaties, which ultimately placed the economically and strategically critical waterway under Panamanian control, a major step toward better US relations with Latin American neighbours.
He signed a nuclear-arms-reduction treaty, Salt II, with the Soviets, but he withdrew it from Senate consideration when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan.
Taking advantage of the opening made by President Richard Nixon, Carter granted full diplomatic recognition to China. He made human rights a central theme of US foreign policy, a sharp departure from the approach of Nixon and his national security adviser and second Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.
After leaving the Navy in 1953, Jimmy Carter made so little money that he and his family had to live in public housing in Plains, GA.
— Mike Beauvais (@MikeBeauvais) December 29, 2024
We’re so used to impossibly wealthy politicians that it’s important to remember it wasn’t always that way.
RIP pic.twitter.com/MspV1J6Nbx
Two Cabinet-level departments – Energy and Education – were created under Carter, as was the Superfund to clean up toxic-waste sites. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act more than doubled the size of the national park and wildlife refuge system.
Carter was ahead of his time on environmental issues. In June 1979, he installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the West Wing of the White House, telling reporters that the point was to harness “the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil”.
“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people,” Carter said. Reagan removed the panels in 1986.
His relations with Congress were often strained, even though it was controlled by his party, but he had more success than most modern presidents at winning passage of his legislative proposals.
With the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, Carter set in motion a movement that picked up steam under Reagan and his conservative allies. The military build-up under Reagan was often credited with hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that build-up began under Carter.
Inflation was a constant scourge to his administration, but it was Carter who appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker was later hailed as the man who broke the back of inflation in the early 1980s, when Reagan was President.
In the 2018 Post interview, Carter said he had “a lot of regrets” from his time in office, mainly over the Iran hostage crisis and his not having done more to unify the Democratic Party. He said he was most proud of the Camp David Accords, his work to normalise relations with China and his focus on human rights.
“I kept our country at peace and championed human rights, and that’s a rare thing for post-World War II presidents to say,” he said, adding that he was also proud that he “always told the truth”.
Adriana Smith was kept alive until her son was born via C-section.