Jimmy Carter: One-term president, humanitarian icon, and global statesman, dies at 100

The late former President Jimmy Carter, 2007. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

By CNN

President Jimmy Carter, a Georgia peanut farmer who vowed to restore morality and truth to politics after an era of White House scandal and who redefined post-presidential service, died Sunday, December 29, 2024 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, per a Biden administration official. Preparations for the state funeral have begun, according to a law enforcement official.

Carter had been in home hospice care since February 2023 after a series of short hospital stays.

At Florida Memorial College in 1976 during his presidential campaign. (Phil Sandlin/AP) 

Carter, a Democrat, served a single term from 1977 to 1981, losing a reelection bid to Ronald Reagan. Despite his notable achievements as a peacemaker, Carter’s presidency is largely remembered as an unfulfilled four years shaken by blows to America’s economy and standing overseas. His most enduring legacy, though, might be as a globetrotting elder statesman and human rights pioneer during an indefatigable 43-year “retirement.”

Former President Jimmy Carter holds hands with his wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, as they work with other volunteers on site during the first day of the weeklong Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project, their 35th work project with Habitat for Humanity, Aug. 27, 2018, in Mishawaka, Ind. (Robert Franklin/South Bend Tribune via AP)

Carter’s beloved wife, Rosalynn, died in November 2023. They had been inseparable during their 77-year marriage, and after she passed away, the former president said in a statement that “as long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

Jimmy Carter is shown at age 6, with his sister, Gloria, 4, in 1931 in Plains, Ga. (AP)

The former president attended his wife’s memorial events, including a private burial and a televised tribute service in Atlanta, where he was seated in the front row in a reclined wheelchair. He did not deliver any remarks.

Holding his first Cabinet meeting in the White House in 1977. (Getty Images)

Carter took office in 1977 with the earnest promise to lead a government as “good and honest and decent and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people” following what had started as an unlikely long-shot bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination.

The Southerner with a flashing smile did enjoy significant successes, particularly abroad. He forged a rare, enduring Middle East peace deal between Israel and Egypt that stands to this day, formalized President Richard Nixon’s opening to communist China and put human rights at the center of US foreign policy.

Georgia state Sen. Jimmy Carter with his wife, Rosalynn, at his Atlanta campaign headquarters in 1966. (AP)

But Carter was ultimately felled by a 444-day hostage crisis in Iran, in which revolutionary students flouted the US superpower by holding dozens of Americans in Tehran. The feeling of US malaise triggered by the crisis was exacerbated by Carter’s domestic struggles, including a sluggish economy, inflation and an energy crisis.

As governor of Georgia in 1972, Carter signs a state resolution urging Congress to halt forced busing to achieve integration in U.S. classrooms. (AP)

At times, Carter’s principled moral tone and determination to strip the presidency of ostentation, such as by selling the official yacht, Sequoia, seemed to verge on sanctimony. But out of office, Carter won admiration by living his values. Just a day after one of several falls he suffered in 2019, he was back out building homes for Habitat for Humanity, even with an ugly black eye and 14 stitches — and teaching Sunday school as he had done several hundreds of times.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter speaks to the congregation at Maranatha Baptist Church before teaching Sunday school in his hometown of Plains, Georgia on April 28, 2019. (Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The devout Southern Baptist’s life’s work was only 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 of former presidents, I expected to have many useful years ahead of me,” Carter wrote in his 1982 memoir, “Keeping Faith.” He proved as good as his word, going on to become a humanitarian icon, perhaps more popular outside the United States than he was at home.

Running for governor in 1970, Carter is applauded at his campaign headquarters in Atlanta with his mother, Lillian, at his side. (John Storey/AP)

Over four decades, Carter, Rosalynn and his Atlanta-based organization monitored hot-spot elections, negotiated with despots, battled 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.

Former President Jimmy Carter, one of the delegates of the Elders group of retired prominent world figures, holds a Palestinian child during a visit to East Jerusalem in Oct. 2010. (Menahem Kahana/AP)

His efforts on behalf of his Carter Center, founded to “wage peace, fight disease and build hope,” yielded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Even into old age, Carter remained a polarizing political figure. He was an uneasy member of the ex-presidents’ club, sometimes frustrating successors like Clinton and criticizing the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and of US allies such as Israel.

President Jimmy Carter and his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan, shake hands as they greet one another before their debate on the stage of the Music Hall in Cleveland, Ohio on Oct. 28, 1980. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

In recent years, he came full circle as he warned of the corrosive impact on American politics of a scandal-plagued White House — just as he did when his critique of the Nixon era helped him beat the disgraced Republican ex-president’s unelected successor, Gerald Ford, in 1976. (After Carter left office, he and Ford became close friends.)

In September 2019, Carter warned Americans against reelecting President Donald Trump. “I think it will be a disaster to have four more years of Trump,” he said.

Former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter enjoys an ice cream cone while campaigning on March 5, 1976 in New Port Richey, Fla. (AP)

After losing reelection, his work at the Carter Center became a great consolation. The ex-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 would not swap another four years in the White House for the joy he had taken after leaving office in working with the Carter Center. And he said he was at peace with his legacy after a rich, fulfilling life: “I think I have been as blessed as any human being in the world.”

A portrait of President Jimmy Carter as a young boy in Georgia, ca. 1920s. (Corbis via Getty Images)

Carter also said at that August news 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 46th president’s inauguration.

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