Jimmy Carter, 39th US president, dead at 100

 

Former President Jimmy Carter, died Sunday. He was 100. His son, Chip Carter confirmed that the former president died at his home in Plains about 3:45 p.m.

Carter, who lived longer than any other U.S. president, entered home hospice care in Plains, Georgia in February 2023 after a series of short hospital stays.

“People will be celebrating Jimmy Carter for hundreds of years. His reputation is only going to grow,” Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley wrote in his book “The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.”

Born on Oct. 1, 1924, Carter grew up on a peanut farm and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. In the Navy, he eventually served on submarines and rose to the rank of lieutenant. The Navy commissioned a nuclear-powered submarine in 2005, naming it the USS Jimmy Carter.

He was elected to the Georgia State Senate in 1962 and was a little-known Georgia governor when he began his bid for the presidency ahead of the 1976 election. He went on to defeat Gerald Ford, capitalizing as a Washington outsider in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office in 1974.

His father Earl, a farmer, businessman and cornerstone personality in the Plains community, died from cancer. Carter left the Navy and its far-from-Plains postings such as Hawaii, and he, Rosalynn and their growing family returned to Georgia in 1953 to take over the family farming business. It was there he first ran for school board, then state senator.

Carter began volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, a fairly new Americus-based organization, building houses for the poor. Then, together with Rosalynn, he founded the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which focused on making peace and spreading health and democracy around the world. It will carry the couple’s humanitarian and democratic work forward.

From his work as president and as the leader of the Carter Center, he won the Nobel Prize, the United National Human Rights Prize and many other notable awards from countries, organizations and world leaders. The Carters both were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.

”Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter,” Clinton said, “have done more good things for more people in more places than any other couple on the face of the Earth.”

Rosalynn Carter, Jimmy Carter’s wife of 77 years, died in November 2023. They are survived by their children Amy, Chip, Jack and Jeff; 11 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren.