Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the United States, dead at 100

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and former peanut farmer whose vision of “competent and compassionate” government brought him to the White House, died on Sunday, according to local media. He was 100 years old.

The news was reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday. Carter’s death follows death his wife Rosalynn November 19, 2023 at the age of 96 with her family by her side at the Carter home in Plains, Georgia, just days after being admitted to hospice care.

The late former president himself was hospitalized in February 2023. Carter survived for years after having a “small mass” removed from his liver in early August 2015, and announced later that month that he had liver cancer that had spread throughout his body.

The Carter family had a history of cancer, with the former president losing his father, brother and two sisters to pancreatic cancer. His mother had breast cancer, which later spread to the pancreas.

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Jason Carter, Carter’s grandson, announced in May that he believed the former president was “nearing the end” of his life’s journey. But the former president lasted much longer.

The indulgent leader with a distinctively Georgian drawl saw his one term in the Oval Office clouded by an economic crisis at home and a hostage crisis abroad.

His life after the presidential mandate was marked by a very visible commitment to service, but also by a series of sometimes controversial moves as he continued to enter foreign affairs, especially in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2009 and 2015, Carter met with the leadership of the terrorist group and the Palestinian representative of Hamas. He rebuked Israel for its operations against Hamas in 2014, saying “there is no justification in the world for what Israel is doing.”

James Earl Carter Jr. was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia. Plains was a farming town and Carter’s father was a farmer, a background that helped instill in him a love of the land—and the working and lower class people who farmed it—that would follow him throughout his personal and professional life.

But Carter at first looked for a way out of the Plains country and, after attending US Naval Academyhe served as a submariner in the Navy after World War II, eventually attaining the rank of lieutenant.

Carter married Rosalynn Smith, a fellow Plains resident, in 1946, the same year he graduated from the Academy.

After Carter’s father died in 1953, Carter resigned from the Navy and returned to his and Rosalynn’s roots in the Plains. Carter took the lead in the family farm while Rosalynn ran a farm supply company in their small town in Georgia.

However, it wasn’t long before Carter left the farm fields again, this time embarking on a career in politics that would bring him the nation’s highest office in just 14 years.

Carter won election to the Georgia Senate in 1962, and after an unsuccessful run for governor in 1966, became governor of the state in 1971.

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Carter grew into a national Democratic Party leader and won the 1976 presidential election against President Gerald Ford, riding a wave of popular discontent with former President Richard Nixon—and Ford’s pardon of Nixon.

While in the White House, Carter established full diplomatic relations with China and led negotiations for a nuclear limitation treaty with the Soviet Union. He led several conservation efforts in the country, showing the same love for nature as president as he did as a young farmer on the Plains.

Among his greatest personal achievements he listed the Panama Canal treaties and the Camp David accords that brought peace between Egypt and Israel.

“We are focused on peace,” he told The Washington Post in 2014. “We have never fired a bullet or dropped a bomb on anybody.”

But the peace was not always easy to maintain, and a perceived lack of strength in dealing with bad actors likely contributed to his unilateral defeat in 1980. Ronald Reagan.

He dominated the last 14 months of his presidency Iran hostage crisis. After the revolution in the country, the new government took 52 American hostages. Carter was never able to return the imprisoned Americans or negotiate for their release. In an apparent rebuke, Iran finally released 52 of them after being held for 444 days – the same day Carter left office.

And although Carter launched the Department of Education and Department of Energytwo government bureaucracies that have since become popular Republican targets, the nationwide energy crisis has also hurt his tenure. Footage of pipelines and high gas prices is a key feature of nearly every documentary or discussion of the late 1970s.

Domestic and foreign issues led Senator Ted Kennedy to take the rare step of challenging Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination. Although Carter survived that battle, albeit barely, he was not so lucky in November 1980, when Reagan won 44 states and became president.

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After leaving from The white houseCarter, who is the author of 28 books, was named a distinguished professor at Emory University in Atlanta and founded The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that focuses on national and international public policy. Carter told The Associated Press that he had the “best times” of his life after founding the organization in 1982.

“This beautiful place on Earth that has set the moral and ethical standards that show what a superpower like America should be,” Carter said of the center in October.

Recalling the manual labor of his youth on the Plains, Carter was often seen volunteering and raising funds for Habitat for Humanityhelping to build homes for the needy.

Carter also served as a member of The Elders, a group of independent global leaders who are no longer in politics, whose ranks have included one-time South African President Nelson Mandela, Irish President Mary Robinson and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

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In his spare time, Carter, a deeply religious man who served as a deacon at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, enjoyed fishing, running and woodworking.

Carter is survived by four children, 12 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.