Jimmy Carter, a one-term president who became a globe-trotting elder statesman, dies at 100

(CNN) — Former 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 at the age of 100.

The Carter Center said the 39th president died in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family.

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

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.”

President Joe Biden said in a statement that “America and the world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian” as well as a man of “great character and courage, hope and optimism.”

“With his compassion and moral clarity, he worked to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil rights and human rights, promote free and fair elections, house the homeless, and always advocate for the least among us. He saved, lifted, and changed the lives of people all across the globe,” Biden said. He declared January 9 a National Day of Mourning and called on “people of the world who share our grief to join us in this solemn observance.”

President-elect Donald Trump urged everyone to keep the Carter family in their prayers. “Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “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. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Carter became the oldest living former president when he surpassed the record held by the late George H.W. Bush in March 2019.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Trump. “I think it will be a disaster to have four more years of Trump,” he said.

In the subsequent presidential election, with Trump again on the ballot, Carter’s grandson Jason Carter told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this year that the former president wanted to live long enough to cast a ballot for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. He did just that, voting by mail for the vice president, who lost to Trump in November.

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.”

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.

An unlikely president

Carter had always seemed an unlikely president.

No one gave the Georgia governor and former Navy submariner a hope when he launched his campaign for the White House. But Carter spent months crisscrossing the cornfields and small towns of Iowa, building support voter by voter. In many ways, his success created the political lore of the modern Iowa caucuses as a place where little-known outsiders — Obama, for instance — could build a grassroots campaign that could lead to the White House. Democrats have recently downgraded the Hawkeye State’s role in their nominating process, reasoning that its mostly White demographic doesn’t represent the diversity of their supporters or the nation.

Timing is crucial for presidential hopefuls, and as it turned out, Carter proved to be the right man at the right time in 1976.

The deep political wounds of the Watergate scandal, which had forced the resignation of Nixon, remained raw. The nation was still deeply cynical about politicians following the social dislocation of the Vietnam War.

“I’ll never lie to you,” Carter promised voters, forging a public image as an honest, humble, God-fearing, racially inclusive son of the “New South.”

“He was never embarrassed to have a Georgian accent or be in blue jeans and play horseshoes and softball,” said his biographer Douglas Brinkley.

That down-to-earth persona of Carter proved alluring. He followed up victory in the Iowa caucuses with wins in New Hampshire and Florida, beating out Democratic candidates including George Wallace of Alabama, Morris Udall of Arizona and Jerry Brown of California.

“My name is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president,” Carter said, poking fun at his leap from obscurity as he accepted his party’s nomination at the 1976 Democratic convention in New York City, where he tapped Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate.

Carter’s openness was crucial to his appeal with voters — but occasionally, his truth-telling appeared off-key. On one such occasion, Carter admitted to Playboy that he had looked on women with lust and “committed adultery in my heart many times.”

A focus on human rights

Carter beat Ford by 297 to 240 electoral votes and vowed in his inaugural address to put universal rights at the center of US foreign policy.

“Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights. We do not seek to intimidate, but it is clear that a world which others can dominate with impunity would be inhospitable to decency and a threat to the well-being of all people,” he said.

Carter’s most significant achievement as president was the Camp David Accords, reached after exhaustive negotiations between Egypt and Israel that peaked at the presidential retreat in Maryland. It was the first peace deal between the Jewish state and one of its Arab enemies.

The agreement, signed by Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978, called for a formal peace between the foes and the establishment of diplomatic relations. It resulted in the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and called for an Israeli exit from the West Bank and Gaza, with promised future negotiations to resolve the Palestinian question.

While it did not settle the question of East Jerusalem, and subsequent violence and political unrest between Israel and the Palestinians meant the deal’s full potential was never realized, the enduring peace between Israel and Egypt remains a linchpin of US diplomacy in the region.

In subsequent decades, Carter soured on the Israeli leadership, becoming deeply critical of what he saw as a failure to live up to obligations toward the Palestinians. He sparked controversy in 2006 by saying that Israel’s settlement policies on the West Bank were tantamount to the apartheid policies of South Africa.

The Carter administration also forged progress outside the Middle East, in Latin America and Asia.

He countered growing hostility to the United States throughout the Western Hemisphere by concluding the Panama Canal treaties in 1977, which would return the strategic waterway between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to the control of its host nation in 1999. There had been fears that the Panamanians, increasingly resentful of US sovereignty, could trigger a showdown by closing the canal — a step that would have had significant economic and strategic consequences.

Carter also built on Nixon’s achievement of opening China by formalizing an agreement to establish full diplomatic relations in January 1979. An iconic visit to the United States by a cowboy-hat-wearing Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping followed.

The decision was a tough one for Carter and required him to sever formal diplomatic relations with the renegade government and US ally in Taiwan — which had claimed to be the legitimate government of China — in favor of the communists in Beijing.

That June, Carter and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the treaty concluding the second round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), which placed broad limits on strategic nuclear arms. Some analysts also give Carter credit for beginning the buildup of sophisticated weaponry that later helped Reagan outpace the Soviet Union and win the Cold War — a heavy political lift as the Pentagon remained unpopular in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Crises at home and abroad

At home, meanwhile, Carter established the Department of Energy and exhorted Americans to cut down on consumption amid an oil price spike. He installed solar panels on the White House roof. He also began the process of deregulating the airline and trucking industries.

But in 1979, Carter did himself significant political damage in an extraordinary address to the nation on the energy crisis in which he listed criticisms of his presidency, painting a picture of a listless nation trapped in a moral and spiritual funk.

“It is a crisis of confidence. 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,” Carter said.

Ultimately, the speech came back to haunt Carter and made it easy for opponents, not least Reagan, to portray him as a pessimistic and uninspiring leader.

Still, in the late 1970s, it seemed conceivable that Carter’s command of foreign policy at the height of the Cold War would give him a fair shot at a second term.

But a swelling of revolutionary Islam — heralding a trend that would confound future presidents — conspired to sweep him out of the White House.

In October 1979, the United States let the shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi — who had been overthrown by the Iranian Revolution a few months earlier — enter the country for medical treatment. That infuriated Islamic revolutionaries who saw him as an oppressive US puppet and wanted him returned to Iran for trial.

On November 4, a year before the US election, students who supported the Islamic revolution seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage.

The 444-day standoff transfixed the nation, souring the national mood day by day as television news bulletins tallied how long the hostages had been in custody. Gradually it dashed Carter’s hopes of a second term.

His fortunes were also battered by a daring and ultimately disastrous rescue bid in which a US helicopter carrying special forces crashed in the desert, killing eight US servicemen.

At the same time, the Cold War was approaching a pivotal point.

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter decided to boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow and asked the Senate to delay ratification of SALT II.

As November 1980 approached, a sense of Soviet belligerence and the lengthening humiliation of the hostage crisis fostered an impression of US power under siege.

“It was a perfect storm of unpleasant events, and that inability of Carter to get those Iranian hostages released before the 1980 elections spelled doomsday,” Brinkley said.

Carter wrote in his memoirs that his destiny was out of his hands as the election approached, but he prayed the hostages would be released.

“Now, my political future might well be determined by irrational people on the other side of the world over whom I had no control,” he said. “If the hostages were released, I was convinced my election would be assured; if the expectations of the American people were dashed again, there was little chance I could win.”

Throughout the campaign, Reagan berated Carter as an ineffectual leader consigning America to perpetual decline.

“A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his,” Reagan charged.

The actor-turned-California governor pulled off a stunning landslide on Election Day 1980, winning 489 electoral votes.

In the final humiliation for Carter, on January 20, 1981, 20 minutes after Reagan was sworn in, Iran released the hostages.

Humble beginnings

Carter was born on October 1, 1924, to James Earl Carter Sr. and Lillian Gordy Carter, who lived in a house without electricity in the south Georgia village of Plains. The oldest of four children, he was the first future US president to be born in a hospital.

Growing up during the Great Depression in the segregated Deep South, Carter showed a flair for music, art and literature, and often played with African American children — a factor influencing his thoughts on integration that played out in his political career.

After studying reactor technology and nuclear physics at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Carter was assigned to the submarine force. The future peacemaker served in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets before he was tapped by Adm. Hyman Rickover, the crotchety “Father of the Nuclear Navy,” to serve as a senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second US nuclear submarine.

After leaving active Navy duty in 1953, Carter spent time raising his children, running the family peanut farm and taking his first political steps, winning election to the Georgia Senate in 1962.

He lost the Democratic nomination to run for governor to segregationist Lester Maddox in 1966 but ran successfully for the same office four years later.

Political energy undimmed

Carter was 56 when he left the White House, and he soon looked for new outlets for his undimmed political energy.

“In the presidency, he got a sense of the fact that the world can be changed, and it doesn’t take a government to change it; it can be changed one person at a time, one disease at a time, building one house at a time,” said Andrew Young, who was a US ambassador to the United Nations under Carter.

The former president and first lady visited more than 130 countries to meet with foreign leaders and other prominent individuals. Carter was still traveling after his 90th birthday. As recently as May 2015, Carter went to Guyana to monitor the country’s most important election in two decades. The Carter Center has observed more than 125 elections in 40 nations since its founding in 1982.

“We try to fill vacuums in the world,” Carter told an audience at the center in 2010, “by doing things that others don’t want to do or cannot do because of diplomatic niceties. That’s part of bringing peace.”

Sometimes that meant mixing with unsavory company.

In 1994, the United States and North Korea were edging toward conflict over US concerns that Pyongyang was building a nuclear weapon. Absent diplomatic relations between the two countries, President Clinton gave Carter and Rosalynn permission to travel to the isolated Stalinist state to meet its supreme leader, Kim Il-Sung. In exchange for dialogue with the United States, North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear program, which defused the crisis — for a few years at least.

The same year, Carter was credited with helping avert a US invasion of Haiti and restoring President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power.

In 2002, he became the first former or sitting US president since 1928 to visit Cuba, where he called on the United States to end its “ineffective” economic embargo and challenged President Fidel Castro to hold free elections, grant more civil liberties and improve human rights. In 2008, he met with leaders from the Palestinian militant organization Hamas, designated a terrorist group by the US State Department, and from Syria.

At times, Carter also criticized the United States in public.

In a June 2012 op-ed in The New York Times, Carter accused the United States of “abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.” He cited revelations that officials were targeting people — including US citizens — for assassination abroad as “disturbing proof” that the nation’s stance on human rights had changed for the worse.

An enduring partnership

In the summer of 1945, Carter, then a fresh-faced US Naval Academy student, met Eleanor Rosalynn Smith and, after their first date, told his mother, “She’s the girl I want to marry.”

Rosalynn rejected his first proposal but accepted the second a few weeks later. They wed in 1946 and would eventually become the longest-married presidential couple in history.

Carter was asked the secret of his enduring marriage on CNN’s “The Lead” in July 2015.

“Rosalynn has been the foundation for my entire enjoyment of life. … First of all, it’s best to choose the right woman, which I did. And secondly, we give each other space to do our own things,” Carter told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“We try to be reconciled before we go to sleep at night and try to find everything we can think of that we like to do together. So we have a lot of good times.”

When he published his book “A Full Life” shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015, Carter contemplated his own mortality. He wrote that he was at peace with his accomplishments as president as well as his unrealized goals.

He said he and Rosalynn were “blessed with good health and look to the future with eagerness and confidence, but are prepared for inevitable adversity when it comes.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

Tom Watkins and CNN’s Jeff Zeleny and Haley Talbot contributed to this report.

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