Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States, dies at the age of 100

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

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

The former president himself had entered a hospital in February 2023. Carter survived for years after having a “small mass” removed from her liver in early August 2015 and later that month announced that she had liver cancer that had spread throughout her body.

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

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

The soft-spoken leader with a distinctive Georgia drawl saw his one term in the Oval Office overshadowed by an economic downturn at home and a hostage crisis abroad.

His post-presidential life was marked by a highly visible dedication to service, but also by a series of sometimes controversial moves as he continued to wade into foreign affairs, particularly regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Carter met with the leadership of the terrorist group and Palestinian representative Hamas in 2009 and 2015. He rebuked Israel for its operations against Hamas in 2014, saying there was “no justification in the world for what Israel is doing.”

James Earl Carter Jr. was born in 1924 a 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-class and lower-class people who farmed it – that would follow him throughout his life. personal and professional.

But Carter initially looked for a way out of the dirt of Plains and, after attending the US Naval Academyserved as a submariner in the post-World War II Navy, eventually attaining the rank of lieutenant.

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

After Carter’s father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and returned to his and Rosalynn’s roots in the Plains. Carter took the lead in the family farm while Rosalynn operated a farm supply business in her small town in Georgia.

It wasn’t long, however, before Carter left the farm fields behind again, this time embarking on a political career that would land him the nation’s highest office in just 14 years.

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

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Carter became 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 the pardon that Ford had extended to Nixon.

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

He has cited the Panama Canal treaties and the Camp David accords that brought peace between Egypt and Israel as one of his greatest personal achievements.

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

But peace was not always easily maintained, and a perceived lack of strength to deal with bad actors likely contributed to his lopsided 1980 defeat by Ronald Reagan.

The last 14 months of his presidency were dominated by the Iran Hostage Crisis. After the country’s revolution, the new government took 52 American hostages. Carter was never able to retrieve the detained Americans or negotiate their release. In a no-brainer, Iran finally released the 52 after being held for 444 days, on the same day Carter left office.

And although Carter started the Department of Education and the Department of Energytwo government bureaucracies that have since become popular targets for Republicans, a national energy crisis also served to hurt his tenure. Images of gas lines and high gas prices are a staple of almost any documentary or discussion of the late 1970s.

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

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When leaving the White HouseCarter, the author of 28 books, was named a distinguished professor at Emory University in Atlanta and founded The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization focused on domestic and international public policy. Carter told The Associated Press that he had the “best time” of his life after establishing the organization in 1982.

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

Remembering 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 no longer involved in politics, whose ranks included South African President Nelson Mandela, Irish President Mary Robinson and the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan.

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

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