Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter holds up his Nobel Peace Prize Dec. 10, 2002, in Oslo, Norway. During his acceptance speech, Carter urged others to work for peace.
Arne Knudsen | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Jimmy Carter, the Georgia peanut farmer who became a U.S. president and a Nobel Prize-winning activist for peace and human rights, has died. He was 100.
Carter’s post-presidency had been widely seen as more successful than his time in the White House, and he called it “more gratifying.” even into his 90s, crusading for human rights, writing books, building homes for the needy with his own hands, teaching Sunday school, and traveling the world in the pursuit of peace.
Carter graduated from the United States Naval Academy, participated in the Navy’s fledgling nuclear-powered submarine program, and served two terms as a Georgia state senator and one as governor before he was elected to the White House.
He became the nation’s 39th president in 1977, defeating President Gerald Ford in the election more than two years after the Watergate scandal drove Richard Nixon from the Oval Office.
Carter had been on hospice care for more than a year.
His family announced in February 2023 that he had entered end-of-life care in his home after a series of hospital visits. His wife, Rosalynn, who had been diagnosed with dementia in early 2023, briefly entered hospice herself at age 96 before dying on Nov. 19, 2023.
Carter turned 100 in October, bringing a new flood of tributes and accolades. His grandson Jason Carter said it was gratifying for Jimmy Carter to see a reassessment of his presidency and legacy.
After losing his reelection bid in 1980, he remained active in public issues, including speaking at age 95 in support of Joe Biden at the virtual Democratic National Convention in August 2020. Some commentators viewed him as the nation’s “most successful ex-president.”
Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary with friends at Plains High School, within the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Plains, Georgia, U.S. July 10, 2021.
Michael A. Schwarz | The Carter Ce | Reuters
He wrote more than 40 books, including “Faith,” which he released when he was in his mid-90s. Days after his 93rd birthday, he offered to go to North Korea amid a nuclear crisis in an attempt to establish a permanent peace between Pyongyang and Washington. And at age 96, he denounced Republican efforts to restrict voter access in his home state.
Carter lived longer than any other U.S. president, surpassing the late George H.W. Bush, who died in November 2018 at age 94. When Carter reached that milestone in March 2019, Carter Center spokeswoman Deanna Congileo said he was still active.
“Both President and Mrs. Carter are determined to use their influence for as long as they can to make the world a better place,” Congileo said at the time. “Their tireless resolve and heart have helped to improve life for millions of the world’s poorest people.”
U.S. stock markets have historically closed for a day of mourning to honor the death of a president.
Early life
James Earl Carter Jr. was born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia — the first U.S. president born in a hospital. His father ran a general store and invested in farmland. His mother, known as “Miss Lillian,” was a nurse.
Carter attended the U.S. Naval Academy. During one of his visits home from Annapolis, his younger sister Ruth set up a date with their neighbor and lifelong friend. Upon graduation in 1946 from the academy, he married that young woman, Eleanor Rosalynn Smith, when she was 18. (On July 7, 2023, the Carters celebrated their 77th wedding anniversary, marking a record-long marriage for a first couple.)
Jimmy Carter on his peanut farm, Plains, Georgia, 1976.
PhotoQuest | Getty Images
In the Navy, he served on submarines in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and attained the rank of lieutenant. He joined then-Capt. Hyman Rickover’s nuclear submarine development program. He did graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and became senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the second nuclear submarine, the Seawolf.
After his father died in 1953, Carter resigned from the Navy and returned to Georgia, taking over the family farms and becoming active in local politics. He served in the Navy Reserve until 1961.
A leader of the ‘New South’
Elected governor in 1971, he was considered one of the leaders of the “New South” — a progressive who condemned racial segregation and inequality.
During his presidential campaign, he ran as an outsider, hoping to capitalize on the anti-Washington sentiment in the post-Vietnam/Watergate era.
“My name is Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president,” a beaming Carter said in the opening of his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in July 1976.
Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Hulton Archive | Getty Images
He offered to create jobs in a nasty economy with a 7.9% unemployment rate, and to set a squeaky-clean example as a born-again Christian from outside the Beltway, unblemished by Washington’s scandals.
On the eve of the election, however, he gave an interview to Playboy magazine in which he made this shocking confession: “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Still, the man with the huge smile and genteel Georgia drawl handily won the Electoral College by 297-240 but received only 50.1% of the popular vote to Ford’s 48%.
Once in office, Carter empowered his running mate, Walter Mondale, to transform the vice presidency into a policy-driving office.
On the domestic front, in addition to stagflation and recession, Carter had to deal with the Love Canal ecological disaster in Niagara Falls, New York, which led to the creation of the environmental Superfund. He also ended federal price regulations for airlines, trucking and railroads; signed the bailout of Chrysler in 1979; and elevated the Department of Education into a separate Cabinet-level agency.
Foreign policy successes
One of his biggest domestic problems was the festering energy crisis, which stemmed from the Arab oil embargo that began during the 1973 Middle East war. He termed the crisis “the moral equivalent of war.” In symbolic gestures, he wore a Mister Rogers-styled cardigan, turned down the White House heat, installed solar heating panels in the executive mansion, created the Department of Energy and pressed for tax incentives for installation of home insulation.
In international affairs, he campaigned for human rights, successfully concluded the Camp David peace accords between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, negotiated the return to Panama of the Canal Zone, established full diplomatic relations with communist China and reached an agreement on the SALT II nuclear arms limitation treaty with Moscow.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, right, addresses a gathering for the signing of a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, left, and U.S. President Jimmy Carter watch, on the White House lawn, March 26, 1979.
Ya’akov Sa’ar | GPO | Getty Images
Then came the fateful end of the year 1979: The disastrous 444-day Iranian hostage standoff began in November, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December, resulting in Carter’s call for a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Iran Hostage Crisis
The seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by radical student followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on Nov. 4, 1979, and the subsequent siege made the Carter administration seem impotent. Even the first lady recalled during a CNBC interview in 2014 that she urged her husband to “do something, anything!”
Five months into the crisis, Carter ordered a military mission, Operation Eagle Claw, to rescue the American hostages. The mission ended in humiliation: In the process of aborting the plan because of operational difficulties, a U.S. helicopter crashed into a transport plane at the desert staging area, killing eight servicemen.
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who advocated diplomacy over force to resolve the hostage crisis, resigned. “I know this is a matter of principle with you, and I respect the reasons you have expressed to me,” Carter said in a handwritten note to Vance.
The crisis finally ended with the release of 52 Americans on Jan. 20, 1981, the day the man who ended Carter’s single-term presidency took the oath of office — Ronald Reagan. Before the 1980 election between Carter, Reagan and independent John Anderson, Sen. Ted Kennedy waged an unsuccessful challenge to the president for the Democratic nomination.
I could have wiped Iran off the map.
In a 2014 interview with CNBC, Carter said he probably would have been easily reelected had he rescued the hostages.
“It would have shown that I was strong and resolute and manly,” he said. “I could have wiped Iran off the map with the weapons that we had. But in the process a lot of innocent people would have been killed, probably including the hostages. And so I stood up against all that advice, and then eventually all my prayers were answered and all the hostages came home safe and free.”
In this 1979 photo, from right, President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, on their way to meet about the Iran Hostage Crisis.
Universal Images Group | Getty Images
Summing up the Carter presidency, former aide Stuart Eizenstat wrote in a 2015 op-ed in The New York Times that the nation’s 39th president had numerous accomplishments.
“It is enormously frustrating for those of us who worked closely with him in the White House to witness his presidency caricatured as a failure, and to see how he has been marginalized, even by his fellow Democrats,” Eizenstat wrote. “His defining characteristic was confronting intractable problems regardless of their political cost.”
After the White House
Carter remained active after he left Washington at age 56. He and Rosalynn volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, building affordable housing for the needy, and he established the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and The Carter Center in Atlanta. Founded in 1982, the center has sent observers to monitor elections in more than three dozen countries. The center has also led health efforts, including the push to eradicate the tropical parasitic Guinea worm disease. The center’s motto is “Waging peace. Fighting disease. Building hope.”
“I still hope to outlive the last Guinea worm,” Carter told CNN in May 2018. (He came close. The Carter Center reported there were only 13 human cases in 2023.)
Carter, who also taught at Emory University, traveled extensively to promote peace, human rights and economic progress. In one mission, President Bill Clinton secretly dispatched him to North Korea in 1994 to help mediate a nuclear dispute with dictator Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather. In 2002, Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize for what the awards committee called “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.”
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and North Korean President Kim Il Sung meet in June 1994, just weeks before Kim’s death.
Korean Central News Agency | AP
However, his actions were not always well-received. His efforts in his long campaign for peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors included the 2006 book “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid,” which was perceived as antisemitic and biased against Israel. In particular, one sentence provoked an outcry:
“It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel.”
In an interview with NPR, Carter was asked about the passage.
“That was a terribly worded sentence which implied, obviously in a ridiculous way, that I approved terrorism and terrorist acts against Israeli citizens,” he said. “The ‘when’ was obviously a crazy and stupid word. My publishers have been informed about that and have changed the sentence in all future editions of the book.”
(It became: “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they renounce all acts of violence against innocent civilians and will accept international laws, the Arab peace proposal of 2002, and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace.”)
In the 2014 CNBC interview, Carter said the Camp David Accords and other peacemaking stood among his greatest achievements as president.
“I kept our country at peace, which has happened very rarely since the Second World War, and I tried to work for peace between other people who were not directly related to the United States, like between Egypt and Israel. I normalized diplomatic relations with China, and I implemented a very strong human rights commitment that brought about a change throughout Latin America, for instance, from totalitarian military dictatorships to democracies,” he said. “So I would say the promotion of peace and human rights were the two things that I’m most proud.”
Had he been elected to a second term, he told CNBC, “I could have implemented very firmly the peace agreement that I negotiated with Israel and its neighbors that was never fully implemented.”
“I’d like to be remembered as a champion of peace and human rights. Those are the two things I’ve found as a kind of guide for my life. I’ve done the best I could with those, not always successful, of course,” he told CNBC. “I would hope the American people would see that I tried to do what was best for our country every day I was in office.”
A portrait of President Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn Carter and their extended family. Left to right: daughter-in-law Judy, the wife of Jack Carter; grandson Jason James Carter; son Jack (John William Carter); daughter-in-law Annette, the wife of Jeff Carter; son Jeff (Donnel Jeffrey Carter); first lady Rosalynn Carter; daughter Amy Lynn Carter; President Jimmy Carter; daughter-in-law Caron Griffin Carter holding grandson James Earl Carter IV; and son Chip (James Earl Carter III).
Historical | Corbis Historical | Getty Images
Survivors include sons John “Jack,” James “Chip,” and Donnel “Jeff” and daughter Amy. Jack ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Nevada in 2006. Jack’s son Jason lost a bid for Georgia governor in 2014 to then-incumbent Republican Nathan Deal. Carter’s brother Billy, whose antics stirred up unwanted attention during the Carter White House years, died in 1988.
On Aug. 12, 2015, the former president revealed that he had melanoma and that surgery on his liver confirmed that it had metastasized there and to his brain.
A week after his cancer diagnosis announcement, Carter held a remarkably frank news conference at the Carter Center to discuss his prognosis and the prospect of facing death. “I’ve had a wonderful life, I’ve had thousands of friends, and I’ve had an exciting and adventurous and gratifying existence,” he told reporters.
Illustrating that peace of mind, the former president took this picture when he returned home from the news conference:
After four months of treatment, including targeted radiation and immunotherapy, Carter announced in early December 2015 that a subsequent brain scan showed no signs of the original cancer spots and no new ones. Then in March 2016, he announced he no longer needed regular cancer treatments.
Months later, in July, he addressed the Democratic National Convention by video, urging people to vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.
And at an Atlanta Braves game in September 2015, the former first couple was caught on the “kiss cam.”
In 2019, at age 94, Carter fell in his home and broke a hip when he was preparing to go turkey hunting. “President Carter said his main concern is that turkey season ends this week, and he has not reached his limit,” the Carter Center said.
He underwent hip replacement surgery but had to cancel plans to resume teaching Sunday school six days after the accident.
Later that year, just before a planned week at an October 2019 Habitat for Humanity project in Tennessee, the 95-year-old Carter fell in his home while heading to church. Although he suffered a black eye and needed 14 stitches in his head, Carter appeared 400 miles away at a concert that night in Nashville to support the project. Wielding a power drill and other building tools, he soon joined the volunteer construction crews.
Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter attach siding to the front of a Habitat for Humanity home being built June 10, 2003, in LaGrange, Georgia.
Erik S. Lesser | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Then, two weeks later, he fell in his house and suffered a pelvic fracture. But in another two weeks, he was back at church, giving a lesson on the Book of Job and talking about facing death during his 2015 cancer treatment.
“I obviously prayed about it. I didn’t ask God to let me live, but I just asked God to give me a proper attitude toward death. And I found that I was absolutely and completely at ease with death. It didn’t really matter to me whether I died or lived,” Carter told the congregation of 400 people at Maranatha Baptist Church on Nov. 3, 2019, according to the church’s feed on Facebook. “I have since that time been absolutely confident that my Christian faith includes complete confidence in life after death.”
During the Covid pandemic, the Carters decided not to travel to Biden’s inauguration, but weeks later, they were fully vaccinated and were back in their usual seats in the front pew of Maranatha Baptist for Sunday services.
“It’s hard to live until you’re 95 years old,” Carter told People magazine days after reaching that milestone. “I think the best explanation for that is to marry the best spouse: Someone who will take care of you and engage and do things to challenge you and keep you alive and interested in life.”
Former President Jimmy Carter in 2006.
Carol Cole | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
— Michele Luhn and Lynne Pate contributed to this report.
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