Former President Jimmy Carter dies at 100

Former President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100.

WSB reported Carter died at home on Sunday. The Carter Center announced his death on social media.

His son James E. Carter III, also known as Chip, did not provide a cause, The Washington Post reported.

The Carter Center has not released the details about the ceremonies and memorials that will be held for the former president. But there will be public observances in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. with a private interment in Plains, Georgia.

Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States, serving from 1977 to 1981. He was honored in 2002 with a Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts,” according to the Nobel Foundation.

Over his lifetime, Carter penned more than two dozen books and won three Grammy awards for audio productions of his work.

Carter was born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains. He was the first of four children born to James Earl Carter Sr., a farmer and businessman, and Lillian Gordy Carter, a registered nurse. He spent most of his childhood on his family’s 360-acre farm, where his father grew peanuts.

He studied at Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology before moving to Annapolis, Maryland, to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. He married Rosalynn Smith after graduating in 1946 and launched a Navy career soon afterward.

He returned to Georgia in 1953 after his father’s death and resigned his Navy commission, choosing instead to run the Carter family’s peanut warehouse and farming operations.

He ran for a seat in the Georgia Senate in 1962 but failed to win enough votes to put him in office, according to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. The vote was later overturned after Carter was able to prove claims of widespread voter fraud. He served a pair of two-year terms in the Georgia Senate before launching what would turn out to be an unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in 1966, according to the Miller Center.

Four years later, Carter again ran for governor and won. He was sworn in on Jan. 12, 1971, as Georgia’s 76th governor.

During his time in office, Carter undertook a massive reorganization of state government. He cut the total number of state agencies from 300 to two dozen, according to the Miller Center. He reshaped the education, mental health and criminal justice systems.

He was portrayed as a down-to-earth Washington outsider in 1975, after he announced his intention to run for president in a country still reeling in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. His campaign was bolstered by the support of the Peanut Brigade, a group of friends from Georgia who knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors to vouch for Carter starting years earlier, during his campaign for the Georgia Senate, The Washington Post reported in 1977.

In his four years in the White House, Carter created the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He normalized diplomatic relations with China, signed the Panama Canal treaties and made human rights a cornerstone of U.S. foreign affairs.

His most groundbreaking presidential achievement came in September 1978 with the signing of the Camp David Accords. Carter served as an intermediary between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat as they negotiated the peace agreement. Begin and Sadat later won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.

But Carter’s approval rating plummeted to record lows as inflation, economic woes and a growing perception of weakness took hold, The New York Times reported in 1980. He was criticized heavily for his response to the 444-day Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 Americans were held by militants who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The group wasn’t released until after Carter lost his bid for a second term as president.

Still, despite public perceptions that his presidency was a failure, Carter said he was “at ease” with his time in the White House.

“I think the failed presidency (perception) comes from the fact that I wasn’t re-elected. That’s the kind of crucial measure of whether you have a success or not, whether you are chosen for a second term or not,” Carter told Charlie Rose in 2010 during an interview on Rose’s self-titled PBS show. “I never have felt

discouraged or disappointed when I look back at those four years of excitement and challenge and many successes. Some failures.”

Carter was only 56 when he left the White House in 1981 to face what he described in his book “Everything To Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life” as “an altogether new, unwanted and potentially empty life.”

There was never any serious discussion about living anywhere other than Plains, the Carters told The Washington Post. By 1982, the former president had such a low profile that Time magazine was calling him “virtually a non-person, a president who never was.”

Carter started teaching Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church after he returned to Plains. In 1982, he and his wife founded The Carter Center, which focuses on resolving issues related to human rights and democracy.

In 1986, the Carter Center joined the fight against Guinea worm disease, a parasitic infection spread by drinking contaminated water. That year, the disease affected an estimated 3.5 million people in Africa and Asia. By 2018, only 28 cases were reported, according to the center. The group has also helped to bring trained mental health clinicians to Liberia, wiped out river blindness in Colombia and standardized election practices across China.

“Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have done more good things for more people in more places than any other couple on the face of the Earth,” President Bill Clinton said in 1999 while awarding them the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Not everyone saw the good of Carter’s freelance diplomatic efforts, however, the former president wasn’t fazed by critics.

“I take action every now and then that’s not completely acceptable to everybody on Earth,” he said during a 2014 Carter Center town hall meeting.

In August 2015, Carter disclosed that doctors had discovered four melanoma lesions on his brain. By December 2015, he had announced that doctors had found no signs of the cancer spots that led to his diagnosis and by March 2016, his doctors had determined he no longer needed treatment.

Rosalynn Carter died on Nov. 19, 2023, two days after The Carter Center announced she had entered hospice care. President Carter is survived by the couple’s four children, Jack, James, Donnel and Amy; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

He turned 100 on Oct. 1, 2024.

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