JIMMY CARTER, the former Georgia peanut farmer who as US president brokered a historic and lasting peace accord between Israel and Egypt in a single term marred by soaring inflation, an oil shortage and Iran’s holding of American hostages, has died. He was 100.
Mr. Carter died on Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family, the Carter Center said on Sunday in a statement. Public observances are planned in Atlanta and Washington, followed by a private interment in Plains.
The longest-living former US president ever, Mr. Carter had opted in early 2023 to spend his remaining time at his home in Plains receiving hospice care. He was there alongside Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years, when she died in November 2023 at age 96. And he lived long enough to fulfill a final wish — to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
A Democrat who rose from running his family’s peanut-farming and seed-supply businesses to serving as Georgia governor, Mr. Carter won the White House in 1976 over incumbent Gerald Ford by promising to bring honesty to an office tainted two years earlier by the resignation of Richard Nixon in the culmination of the Watergate scandal.
Ascetic, humble and deeply religious, Mr. Carter was skeptical of the pomp surrounding the presidency and came to Washington with fewer allies and fixed positions than most who hold the job.
His allegiance to an inner moral compass, his vow to support societies that “share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights” and his tendency to speak his mind collided at times with political realities during his four years in office, from 1977 to 1981, and served as a preview of what was to come in a service-filled post-presidency that lasted decades.
Mr. Carter “assembled a new front line on nearly every issue, with no inherited party game plan or ideological playbook to fall back on,” Jonathan Alter wrote in a 2020 biography that painted him as often right in his instincts but flawed in executing government responses. The book was among several in recent years that offered a revised and sunnier view of Mr. Carter’s crisis-plagued tenure.
Though Mr. Carter “left the White House a widely unpopular president,” his achievements “shine brighter over time, few more than his unique determination to put human rights at the forefront of his foreign policy from the start of his presidency,” his chief domestic policy adviser, Stuart Eizenstat, wrote in a 2018 biography of his former boss.
STATE FUNERAL
In a statement on Sunday, President Joseph R. Biden eulogized Mr. Carter as “an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian” who touched the lives of people around the world with “his compassion and moral clarity.” Biden said he’ll be ordering a state funeral for Mr. Carter in Washington.
President-elect Donald J. Trump, who often brought up Mr. Carter’s presidency during this year’s election campaign to needle Mr. Biden, said Mr. Carter faced challenges at a pivotal time in US history. He “did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans,” Mr. Trump said on his Truth Social platform. “For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.”
The signature achievement of the Carter presidency, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, led to peaceful co-existence between the Middle East neighbors even as it fell short of resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
That and other foreign policy breakthroughs, including a treaty granting Panama ownership of the US-built Panama Canal, were overshadowed by the plight of American hostages held in Iran during the last 444 days of his presidency. They were finally released the day Mr. Carter turned over the Oval Office to Republican Ronald Reagan.
On the domestic front, the Mr. Carter presidency was dogged by economic woes. Inflation reached 13.3% at the end of 1979 compared with 5.2% when he took office in January 1977. The Federal Reserve’s actions to stem price increases pushed home-mortgage rates to almost 15%, and Mr. Carter had to take emergency action to stem a slide in the dollar. There were energy shortages, and oil prices more than doubled.
MALAISE SPEECH
A speech to the nation on July 15, 1979, became emblematic of Mr. Carter’s presidency.
With fuel prices skyrocketing and lines at gas stations lengthening, Mr. Carter told Americans that solving the energy mess “can also help us to conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country.” He said many Americans “now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”
Though Mr. Carter never uttered the word, the address became known as the “malaise” speech and contributed to a sense that Mr. Carter was powerless to change the nation’s course.
“Our memory of the speech comes from those who reworked it, who twisted its words into a blunt instrument that helped them depose a president,” historian Kevin Mattson wrote.
Mr. Carter’s words, he noted, “received immediate applause and yet wound up ensuring his defeat” to Mr. Reagan in the 1980 election.
Just weeks after delivering the speech, Mr. Carter tapped Paul Volcker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to take over as chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing G. William Miller, who became Treasury secretary. Mr. Volcker made it clear to Mr. Carter that he would deal head-on with inflation by pursuing tighter monetary policies than Mr. Miller. Mr. Volcker’s policies — which sent interest rates as high as 20% — came at a high price, the fallout contributing to Mr. Reagan’s landslide victory over Mr. Carter in the 1980 election.
Though some of Mr. Volcker’s policies “were politically costly, they were the right thing to do,” Mr. Carter commented upon Mr. Volcker’s death in 2019.
NOBEL PRIZE
Mr. Carter made some of his biggest imprints on the world in the years after he left the White House. He “reinvented the post-presidency,” observed Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University and a Carter biographer.
In four-plus decades as an ex-president — the longest such tenure in American history — Mr. Carter waged a worldwide campaign against war, disease and the suppression of human rights through the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which he founded with his wife. The center made particular strides against Guinea worm disease, a parasite spread through contaminated water that can render victims non-functional for months. Worldwide cases dropped to just 14 in 2023 from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986, according to the center.
Mr. Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
His post-presidential causes were not without backlash. Fourteen advisers to the Carter Center resigned in protest of his best-selling 2007 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which compared Israel to the White governments of South Africa that systematically oppressed Black citizens.
Mr. Carter’s longevity defied the odds. He revealed in 2015 that he had melanoma, a type of cancer, and that it had spread to his brain. He received treatment, recovered and on March 22, 2019, became the longest-living chief executive in US history. In 2021, Jimmy and Rosalynn Mr. Carter celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary.
His Christian faith, he said, made him “absolutely and completely at ease with death.”
PEANUT FARM
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, the first of four children born to Earl Carter, a farmer, and the former Lillian Gordy, a nurse. He grew up in the nearby hamlet of Archery, where the family owned a peanut farm and a general store. He traveled two miles each day to Plains to attend an all-White school.
Electricity and indoor plumbing didn’t reach the Carter farm until 1935.
Mr. Carter attended the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, from 1943 to his graduation in 1946. He began dating a girl from Plains, Rosalynn Smith, when home on breaks. They married in July 1946 and would have four children — sons Jack, Chip and Jeff, and daughter Amy.
While serving in the Navy for seven years, Mr. Carter worked on the development of the nuclear submarine program and rose to the rank of lieutenant. When his father died in 1953, Mr. Carter resigned his commission to return to his family’s peanut-farming business.
In 1962, he was elected to the Georgia Senate and in 1970 was elected governor, having lost his first bid in 1966. His work to end racial discrimination in the state made him a symbol of the “New South.”
At the start of his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Carter was not widely known outside of Georgia and was viewed by analysts as a long shot for the Democratic nomination. He began traveling the country before many other candidates had started their campaigns, pitching his outsider status to voters who had endured the revelations of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation.
Mr. Carter emphasized his religious upbringing — he was a Southern Baptist who often described himself as a “born again” Christian — and promised the American people that he would never lie to them. He won the New Hampshire primary, proving his viability in the North, and defeated Alabama Governor George Wallace in Florida to establish himself as the strongest candidate in the South, on the way to clinching the Democratic nomination.
With Minnesota Democrat Walter Mondale as his running mate, Mr. Carter narrowly beat Mr. Ford, with 50.1% of the vote, and was sworn into office in January 1977 as the 39th US president. Starting what has become a tradition for new presidents, he stepped out of his limousine during the inauguration parade and walked down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.
BILLY BREW
Mr. Carter’s family included colorful characters such as his sister Ruth, a faith healer, and brother Billy, a gas station operator whose enjoyment of drinking led to the creation of the short-lived Billy Beer brand during his brother’s presidency.
The president’s mother also grabbed media attention. A nurse who tended to Black and White families in the segregated South, she joined the Peace Corps at age 68 and always had a ready quip for the press.
“When I look at my children,” she once cracked, “I say, ‘Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.’”
As president, Mr. Carter signed legislation creating the cabinet-level Department of Education. He appointed women, Black people and Hispanic people to federal posts in large numbers. He stunned the defense contracting industry by killing the Air Force’s expensive B-1 bomber project, a step later reversed by Mr. Reagan. He signed the law that created the federal Superfund program to clean up hazardous waste sites.
Mr. Carter won praise after his presidency for the steps he had taken toward deregulation, particularly of the airline industry, where the removal of government control of fares and routes promoted competition.
One of his longest battles with Congress involved his proposal to scrap 18 dam and irrigation projects, most of them in the West and South. His “hit list” pleased many environmentalists while angering Westerners, including some fellow Democrats. Congress restored funding for most of the projects.
From his presidency’s earliest days, Mr. Carter sought to highlight and utilize energy shortages to raise support for his domestic agenda. The cabinet-level Department of Energy was created in his administration’s first year, and he had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. In a televised address to the nation two weeks into his term, Mr. Carter called for a new emphasis on conservation, mirroring the White House’s own push for frugality.
At Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, Mr. Carter guided Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the 1978 accord that led the next year to the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country. The treaty committed Israel to remove its troops and civilian settlements from the Sinai Peninsula and led to billions of dollars in US aid to Israel and Egypt.
The Camp David breakthrough didn’t lead to a broader Mideast peace, however, and Mr. Carter through the years didn’t hide his disappointment. In Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, he focused on Israel’s occupation of Arab land as the root cause of continued hostilities.
In a 2010 book based on his White House diaries, Mr. Carter said the US had “defaulted in carrying out one unchallenged and unique responsibility: mediating a peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors.”
OLYMPICS BOYCOTT
In response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Mr. Carter imposed a trade embargo and organized the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Rosalynn Carter said she tried and failed to persuade her husband to wait until after the Iowa presidential caucuses of 1980 to impose the embargo, which hurt US farmers.
“I am much more political than Jimmy and was more concerned about popularity and winning reelection,” Rosalynn wrote in her 1984 memoir, “but I have to say that he had the courage to tackle the important issues, no matter how controversial — or politically damaging — they might be.”
The biggest external crisis of his presidency was precipitated by the Islamic Revolution in Iran that overthrew the shah and installed a theocratic government headed by formerly exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
On Nov. 4, 1979, radical students overran the US Embassy in Tehran and took more than 60 Americans hostage. Fifty-two of them were held for the last 444 days of Mr. Carter’s term.
In April 1980, Mr. Carter gave the go-ahead for a military assault on the embassy to rescue the hostages. Of the eight helicopters from the USS Nimitz that headed to a desert staging area, from which the raid on Tehran was to commence, three had problems. The mission was aborted, and during preparations for retreat, a helicopter flew into a C-130 transport plane and exploded. Eight American servicemen died.
Stymied by crisis on the domestic and foreign fronts, Mr. Carter lost his bid for reelection in a landslide, with Mr. Reagan winning 44 states. The hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, the day Mr. Reagan was sworn into office.
ONE MORE HELICOPTER
“Over the years, in various classrooms and public forums, I have often been asked if there was one substantive action or decision I made as president that I would have changed,” Mr. Carter wrote in White House Diary. “Somewhat facetiously, I have answered, ‘I would have sent one more helicopter to ensure the success of the hostage rescue effort in April 1980.’ But I truly believe that if I had done so, I would have been reelected.”
The Carters returned to Plains after leaving the White House, and Mr. Carter taught scripture at the Maranatha Baptist Church as recently as 2020.
In his brimming post-presidency, Mr. Carter helped arrange peace talks between North and South Korea and a cease-fire in Bosnia. Through the Carter Center, he helped monitor elections around the world to help ensure that they were fair. He traveled to Haiti in 1994 to negotiate the restoration of constitutional government, averting a threatened US-led invasion.
Accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, as the US under President George W. Bush was preparing to invade Iraq, Mr. Carter made his disapproval clear. “For powerful countries to adopt a principle of preventive war may well set an example that can have catastrophic consequences,” he said.
Mr. Carter attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the sixth and final presidential swearing-in he witnessed after leaving office. Days earlier, he had told congregants at his hometown church that of 22 voters in his family, none had voted for Mr. Trump. But he had been the first former president to accept an invitation to the inauguration, determined to show support for the new US leader.
Mr. Trump “has never been involved in politics before,” Carter explained, according to an account by Voice of America. “He has a lot to learn. He’ll learn — sometimes the hard way, like I did.” — Bloomberg
