Former President Jimmy Carter, honored more widely for his humanitarian work around the globe after his presidency than for his White House tenure during a tumultuous time, has died.
“Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia,” the Carter Center confirmed on Sunday.
In November 2023, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, also passed away in the modest house they built together in 1961, when he had taken over his father’s peanut warehouse business and was only beginning to consider a political career.
In February 2023, he had announced he was ending medical intervention and moving to hospice care.
Jason Carter had visited his grandparents at the time of the announcement and said “They are at peace and – as always – their home is full of love,” he posted on Twitter.
At peace, perhaps, but still political: The former president vowed he wanted to cast a ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
After serving a single term in the White House, Jimmy Carter became one of the most durable figures in modern American politics. Evicted from the White House at age 56, he would hold the status of former president longer than anyone in U.S. history, and in 2019 he surpassed George H. W. Bush as the nation’s oldest living ex-president.
Carter remained remarkably active in charitable causes through a series of health challenges during his final years, including a bout with brain cancer in 2015.
He was admitted to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta in November 2019 for a procedure to relieve pressure on his brain, a consequence of bleeding that followed a series of falls. A few months earlier, in May, he had undergone surgery after breaking his hip.
In the White House from 1977 to 1981, Carter negotiated the landmark Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt, transferred the Panama Canal to Panamanian ownership, dramatically expanded public lands in Alaska and established formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.
But the 39th president governed at a time of soaring inflation and gasoline shortages, and his failure to secure the release of Americans held hostage by Iran helped cost him the second term he sought.
After losing his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan, and until well into his 90s, Carter continued working as an observer of elections in developing countries, building houses through the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity and teaching Sunday school at the tiny Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, his hometown.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, 22 years after he left the White House.
Culled from USA Today
