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Surrounded by his family, Jimmy Carter died peacefully on December 29, 2024, in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. At 100, he was the longest-lived president in American history. “My father was a hero, not only to me, but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” said Chip Carter, the former president’s son, in an official Carter family press release. “My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs.”
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Carter had been in hospice care since February 18, 2023. From his hometown, he witnessed a global outpouring of accolades and well wishes, turned 100, fulfilled his goal of voting in the 2024 presidential election, celebrated his 77th wedding anniversary, and mourned the death of his wife, Rosalynn, who died on November 19, 2023.
Jimmy Carter parlayed four tumultuous years in the White House into a four-decade reign as a moral conscience and a globe-trotting do-gooder, monitoring elections, battling disease, building homes for the poor, and publishing dozens of books. History will likely record his one-term presidency as mediocre at best; his tenure in the Oval Office was notable for an energy shortage at home and a hostage crisis in Iran. But as an ex-president, he set the standard for leveraging his position to support domestic and international humanitarian and political causes. “Some consider him to be the nation’s greatest former president,” wrote Robert A. Strong of the Miller Center, a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that focuses on presidential scholarship.
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Carter’s decades of post-presidential work includes founding the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which spearheads health and human rights efforts worldwide, and tirelessly volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. In 2002, more than two decades after his departure from the White House, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his lifelong efforts.
“His was unlike any post-presidency, before or since,” said Charles Bullock, political scientist at the University of Georgia. “As an author and with his good works, he was always visible—more than his predecessors or successors.”
On frequent Sundays, Carter continued to teach Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, drawing hundreds of attendees from around the world. In November 2019, at age 95 and two weeks after breaking his pelvis in a fall, he returned to the pulpit to teach a lesson on life and death.
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A peanut farmer from Plains
James Earl Carter, Jr. was born October 1, 1924 in Plains, Georgia. His father, James Earl Sr., ran a farm and business and his mother, Lillian, was a nurse. Carter went to public school in Plains, and then attended Georgia Southwestern and the Georgia Institute of Technology before graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 and marrying Rosalynn Smith, whom he’d known since childhood, a few months later.
Carter served on Naval submarines, reaching the position of lieutenant and earning an appointment to the nuclear submarine program. But following the death of his father in 1953, Carter left the Navy and returned to Plains to run the family business—a role that he shared with his wife. Carter ran the peanut farm and Rosalynn managed Carter’s Warehouse, a seed and supply concern. The couple had three sons—John William (Jack), James Earl Carter III (Chip), Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff)—and one daughter, Amy Lynn.
It was as a businessman in Plains that Carter began to get involved in politics, serving on hospital and school boards. His decades of work in voting advocacy might have its roots in his first political campaign, in which he fought the system in Quitman County during his successful 1962 bid for the Georgia Senate, ultimately leading to the dismantling of Georgia’s county-unit voting system that reinforced segregationist practices. In 1966, he made an ambitious but unsuccessful gubernatorial bid, losing to Lester Maddox. In the 1970 race, Carter backed away from some progressive positions that had hindered his first campaign, even obtaining an endorsement from onetime rival Maddox.
The tactics worked, and in 1970, Carter won the governorship. He then surprised both supporters and detractors with a 1971 inaugural address in which he declared that segregation should be over in Georgia. He appointed women and minorities to state agencies and boards as well as his own staff. In 1974, he unveiled a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the state capitol. “This was a small gesture in a way, the hanging of these portraits, but it seemed especially significant to those who had assembled for the ceremony,” Carter wrote in a 2001 essay for Atlanta magazine. “It seemed to me that everyone was aware of how far we had come during the last few years, but were much more cognizant of how far we had to go. There was a dramatization of goodwill that has long existed between the Black and white people of our state, and the realization that no matter what the future holds, we must face it together.”
Carter’s tenure as governor was marked by a massive restructuring of offices and a stringent budgeting overhaul. “For Georgians, his legacy is the reorganization of state government and the creation of the Department of Natural Resources and combining agencies that are still in place today,” Bullock said. “He also created the judicial nominating process which had the effect of diversifying the bench, with more women and minorities having a role in the state courts.”
An unlikely candidate
After one term in Georgia’s top office, Carter made a bid for the U.S. presidency, positioning himself as a folksy and almost puritanical political palate cleanser following the scandal of Richard Nixon’s post-Watergate resignation and Gerald Ford’s subsequent hapless tenure. In a crowded field in which he started as a virtual unknown, Carter won multiple primaries and secured the Democratic nomination before the convention.
In his acceptance speech, Carter underscored his commitment to political inclusion, stating: “We can have an America that encourages and takes pride in our ethnic diversity, our religious diversity, our cultural diversity—knowing that out of this pluralistic heritage has come the strength and the vitality and the creativity that has made us great and will keep us great.”
In the months leading up to the general election, Carter, who had been leading over Ford, experienced a self-induced setback following a Playboy magazine interview in which the Baptist Sunday school teacher confessed to lustful thoughts prompting a flurry of punditry and a plummet in Carter’s poll numbers. (Imagine what would have happened in the era of social media.)
But Carter prevailed over Ford and in a tight race clinched liberal bastions like New York and Pennsylvania and virtually all of the South.
Carter set the tone for his presidency with a low-key inauguration, bucking with tradition and walking to the White House following his swearing in, accompanied by Rosalynn and Amy. The Carters continued the low-key lifestyle in the White House. Rosalynn skipped the ritual of ordering White House china and instead sat in on cabinet meetings and attended briefings. The Carters’ grown sons and extended family visited often, but the Carters did not spend their White House decorating allowance and decommissioned perks like the presidential yacht. Carter made TV appearances wearing a cardigan and Rosalynn, whose mother had worked as a dressmaker, famously made some of her own outfits.
Energy and the embassy
Carter’s reformer tendencies and his impatience with political deal-making did not endear him to Congress—even members of his own party—and some of his bold plans such as labor reform and spending cuts were squashed by lawmakers.
Carter did succeed with international outreach, including a new treaty for the Panama Canal, negotiation of the Salt II treaty on Cold War nuclear policy, and, most significantly, brokering peace talks between Egypt and Israel.
Domestically, his most successful efforts were around energy policy, including expansion of natural gas and regulation of the nuclear industry. These successes were only recognized retroactively, as his term in office overlapped with a surge in oil prices and lines at U.S. gas stations.
The defining crisis of his presidency was the November 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by militants, an impasse that dragged on for more than a year, with 52 hostages remaining captured for 444 days. An April 1980 military operation to storm the embassy was aborted, and the hostages remained in captivity during the 1980 election cycle. They were released only after Ronald Reagan was sworn in, following his defeat of Carter.
Post-presidency
Carter returned to Plains but did not remain in his old business for long. In 1982, he co-founded, with Emory University, the Carter Center and began his four-decade tenure as a roving ambassador, mediating conflict in countries ranging from Sudan and Uganda to North Korea and Bosnia. The Carter Center has overseen more than 190 elections and worked to eradicate health scourges such as Guinea worm disease.
Carter wrote more than 30 books, covering such varied topics as woodworking and outdoorsmanship and Middle East policy and health policy. He returned repeatedly to personal history and commentary on faith, with a significant memoir, A Full Life, published when he turned 90.
His ongoing work earned him recognition from the Nobel committee in 2002, when he was presented with the Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Despite these accolades, Carter remained a polarizing figure. He sparked controversy in some circles with the publication of his 2006 book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. Close to home, his ambitious Atlanta Project, launched in advance of the 1996 Olympics, was positioned as a bid to unite the city across racial and economic lines. Despite a few successes, such as creating a vaccination program in underserved areas, the project largely fizzled. Rather than creating unity across civic lines, the program was criticized for its top-down approach and lack of connection to communities.
In 2015, Carter revealed that he was being treated for melanoma that spread to his liver and brain. He underwent experimental treatment at Emory and in March 2016 announced that he was cancer-free. He continued his work on Habitat for Humanity builds, traveled, and taught, rallying after falls and hospitalizations for infections. In his final years, his health declined; he did not attend Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, prompting instead a visit from Biden to Plains. On October 1, 2024, the oldest living U.S. president turned 100, spending the day with family in Plains and watching a flyover of World War II-era planes. According to his family, Carter had said his goal was to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, a goal he accomplished by submitting an absentee ballot on October 16, 2024.
