Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia who became the 39th U.S. president and later won a Nobel Peace Prize for promoting human rights worldwide, has died at age 100.
“Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia,” The Carter Center said in a statement on the social media platform X. The statement added that he died peacefully with his family.
A devout Christian, Carter taught Sunday school at his Baptist church for many years. His faith-based approach to politics was seen as a fresh and hopeful change during the cynical post-Watergate era. He rose unexpectedly from being Georgia’s governor to becoming president.
Carter’s presidency from 1977 to 1981 faced significant challenges, including economic struggles for many Americans and the Iranian Revolution, during which U.S. diplomats were held hostage for 444 days. The hostages were released just after his successor, Ronald Reagan, took office.
Over time, several achievements of Carter’s administration gained recognition. These included the Camp David Accords, which paved the way for peace between Egypt and Israel, the Panama Canal Treaty, and the SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union to limit missile development. Carter also established formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.
“Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood,” President Jimmy Carter said at a White House event in 1978.
On Sunday, the White House announced that President Joe Biden has declared January 9 a national day of mourning across the United States. He encouraged Americans to visit places of worship to “pay homage” to Carter’s memory.
At home, Carter created the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He pushed Democrats to control government spending while also increasing the Pentagon’s budget—a position some in his party disliked but became more popular with later Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
After his presidency, Carter stayed active in international diplomacy, often working through the Carter Center. He helped negotiate ceasefires in conflict areas and monitored elections in new democracies.
In 2002, Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
When he accepted the prize, Carter called on leaders to address “the growing chasm between the richest and the poorest people on Earth.”
‘The Man From Plains’
Carter knew poverty firsthand, working on his father’s peanut farm during the Great Depression alongside Black sharecroppers. For the early years of his life, the family home didn’t have indoor plumbing or running water.
James Earl Carter, Jr. earned the nickname “The Man from Plains,” referring to his birthplace on October 1, 1924, and the location of the family farm about 200 kilometers south of Atlanta. He spent much of his childhood in Archery, a tiny nearby community with about 30 families.
While in college in Georgia, Carter was accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy. He graduated in 1946 with a bachelor of science degree, the same year he married Rosalynn Smith, who he met through his sister, Ruth.
Years later, Carter called marrying Rosalynn, whom he lovingly called Rosa, “the pinnacle of my life.” She passed away in November 2023 at the age of 96 from natural causes.
Carter served in the Navy as a submariner in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, reaching the rank of lieutenant. He later moved to Schenectady, New York, to join the nuclear submarine program at Union College.
In 1953, his life took a new direction. After his father passed away, Carter left the Navy and returned to Georgia to run the family’s peanut farm and supply business.
Over the next ten years, Carter became a business leader in his community, and his role in local politics grew. He was elected as a Democrat to the Georgia Senate in 1962 and became the state governor in 1971.
During this time, a key event happened. As Carter later shared with a biographer, in 1968, while on a mission to a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania with his church, he felt “in a personal and intense way the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life.” This experience would guide him in the years to come.
Influential Presidential Campaign
Carter announced his plan to run for president in 1974, just a few years into his term as Georgia’s governor. After the Nixon scandal, when many Americans were losing faith in Washington politics, Carter’s outsider status and his speeches about restoring integrity to government connected with voters.
Taking advantage of new campaign rules, Carter ran in a then-record 30 primaries. He and his team were the first to recognize the importance of gaining early momentum in the new system, showing how the results in Iowa and New Hampshire would shape future presidential primaries.
“Carter’s impact on the shape and structure of the modern nomination system cannot be overstated,” wrote longtime Democratic consultant Elaine Kamarck in the book Primary Politics.
Near the end of the campaign, the religious Carter surprised many when he told a Playboy interviewer, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”
In the end, he won the election, defeating incumbent Republican Gerald Ford in the closest race in 60 years based on the Electoral College margin.
Tumultuous Term
Carter had a strong start with high approval ratings, but things quickly went downhill during his presidency. Rising inflation, high unemployment, and some mistakes he made contributed to his troubles.
He brought many of his Georgia advisers to Washington, but they struggled to convince experienced members of Congress to support their legislative plans.
Carter gained a reputation as a micromanager in the White House. Former staff member James Fallows, who later became a journalist with The Atlantic, described the administration in 1979 as having “the spirit of a bureaucracy, drained of zeal, obsessed with form.”
Carter spent days working on his most famous, and misunderstood, speech, given on July 15, 1979. In a speech about the country’s “crisis of confidence” — which some later called the “malaise” speech, even though that word was never used — Carter urged Americans to work together to save energy, explaining that it would help their finances and reduce U.S. reliance on foreign energy.
His approval ratings actually rose after the speech, contrary to some later accounts, but within days, he fired several cabinet members, which hurt any chance of building momentum and gave the impression of a struggling administration.
Carter also faced criticism for deciding to pull U.S. athletes from the 1980 Moscow Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Additionally, his younger brother Billy’s questionable business dealings with the Libyan government led to more negative headlines.
As a result, Carter faced a rare primary challenge for a sitting president. While he defeated Ted Kennedy’s attempt to take the Democratic nomination, Carter became the first elected president in 48 years to lose a bid for a second term.
Carter had general support for how he handled the international crisis when Iranian students took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held dozens of American diplomats and citizens hostage. However, his failure to secure their release eventually hurt his presidency, especially after he approved a failed rescue mission that resulted in the deaths of three Marines and five Air Force members.
In the only 1980 presidential debate, Reagan took advantage of Carter’s tendency to be overly detailed, dismissing him with the sharp remark, “There you go again.” Reagan went on to defeat Carter with a 440-vote margin in the electoral college, and exit polls showed that the economy and leadership qualities were bigger factors in the election than the hostage crisis.
‘i’m A Better Ex-president’
After leaving office, Carter returned to Georgia, became a professor at Emory University, and founded the Carter Center, a non-partisan, non-profit group focused on promoting human rights and resolving conflicts worldwide.
He and his wife also helped expand the affordable housing charity Habitat for Humanity. In his free time, Carter, a skilled woodworker, became the face of the organization and was often photographed volunteering on building sites around the world.
“I can’t deny I’m a better ex-president than I was a president,” he said in 2005.
Carter wrote more than two dozen books. Along with books on international politics and U.S. history, he also wrote about faith, fishing, and his parents. He even wrote children’s books and a collection of poetry.
In a review of Carter’s 2017 book, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates wrote, “Carter is a brave, thoughtful, disciplined leader who understands the world at a remarkable level and who has improved the lives of billions of people through his advocacy for human rights and global health.”
Carter was never afraid to share his views on domestic politics, no matter which party was in power. Although his relationship with Bill Clinton was sometimes tense, he co-wrote a 1998 op-ed with former rival Gerald Ford, arguing that Clinton should not be impeached for lying about his relationship with an intern, but should instead be formally censured.
In 2004, Carter criticized the U.S. war in Iraq led by George W. Bush, calling it “based on lies and misinterpretation from London and from Washington.” He also urged Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.
Late in Donald Trump’s first year as president, Carter told an interviewer that the media had been “harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” a comment that was praised by the former president.
But less than two years later, Carter questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency during a panel discussion.
He said that Russian interference, “if fully investigated, would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016.” Carter argued, “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
In a statement after the 2020 election, Carter said he was looking forward to the “positive change.” According to Biden, the two had a private conversation on the eve of his inauguration in January 2021.
In November 2019, Carter had surgery to relieve pressure on his brain after suffering two falls in the weeks before. Earlier in the year, he had broken his hip in another fall, and he had also survived a melanoma diagnosis in 2015.
Carter is survived by his sons John, Chip, and Donnell, and his daughter Amy. Besides his wife, Carter was preceded in death by his three younger siblings — his brother Billy and sisters Ruth and Gloria, all of whom died of pancreatic cancer, as did their father — as well as one grandchild.
In His Own Words
“The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes and we must.”
— Jimmy Carter, 2002, Nobel speech
“Acknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world — water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution — if we tackle them with courage and foresight.”
— Jimmy Carter, 1981, farewell address
“If we are to serve as a beacon for human rights, we must continue to perfect here at home the rights and values which we espouse around the world: A decent education for our children, adequate medical care for all Americans, an end to discrimination against minorities and women, a job for all those able to work, and freedom from injustice and religious intolerance.”
— Jimmy Carter, 1981, farewell address
“There’s no way now for you to get the Democratic or Republican nomination without being able to raise two or three hundred million dollars, or more, and I would not be inclined to do that. And I would not be capable of doing it. We’ve become now an oligarchy instead of a democracy. And I think that’s been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards of the American political system that I’ve ever seen in my life.”
— Jimmy Carter, telling Oprah Winfrey in 2015 why he could not become president in the current-day political climate
“America did not invent human rights, but in a very real sense, human rights invented America. Ours was the first nation to be founded on the idea that all are created equal and all deserve equal treatment under the law. Despite our missteps and shortcomings, these ideals still inspire hope among the oppressed and give us pride in being Americans.”
— Jimmy Carter, op-ed, December 2016
