Carter had been receiving hospice care since February 2023 at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he lived with his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter.
Former President Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States who dedicated his life after leaving office to brokering international peace, has died at age 100, his office confirmed Sunday.
Carter had been receiving hospice care since February 2023 at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he lived with his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter. The former first lady, 96, died on Nov. 19, 2023.
Carter was the first U.S. president to live up to his 100th birthday.
In October 2024, for Carter’s 100th birthday, President Joe Biden recognized him in a direct-to-camera birthday message shared with CBS News, saying, “Mr. President, you’ve always been a moral force for our nation and the world. I recognized that as a young senator. That’s why I supported you so early. You’re a voice of courage, conviction, compassion, and most of all, a beloved friend of Jill and me and our family.
Born in Georgia and a Democrat, Carter won the presidency in 1976, defeating incumbent Gerald Ford, a Republican, in the wake of the Watergate scandal. He served one term and lost re-election in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, whose campaign was hamstrung by Carter’s inability to resolve the 444-day Iran hostage crisis. Carter also received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his international work on human rights.
The oldest living former president after the death of George H.W. Bush in 2018 at 94, Carter was the first American president to have been born in a hospital.
Only 56 when he left the Oval Office, Carter would spend the next four decades concentrating on good works that made him an almost universally revered figure, sometimes called America’s greatest ex-president—a sharp contrast to his relatively low popularity when he exited the White House in January 1981.
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Jimmy Carter delivers a “Fireside Chat” from the White House library in 1978.Hum Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images file
For years, he and his wife could be found on construction sites hoisting beams and pounding nails to build homes for the disadvantaged with the nonprofit organization Habitat for Humanity.
Worldwide, Carter was acclaimed after leaving the presidency for his indefatigable advocacy of peaceful resolution of conflicts and of democracy, human rights, and social justice, primarily through the Carter Center, which he and the former first lady established at Emory University in Atlanta in 1982.
Traveling through the center, Carters went to developing countries to monitor elections, to help build democratic institutions, to lobby for victims of human rights abuses and lead efforts to eradicate diseases.
In February 1986, Carter freed the journalist Luis Mora and the labor leader José Altamirano from prison in Nicaragua. In 1994, he went to North Korea at the behest of then-President Bill Clinton and shortly thereafter declared that he had negotiated a “treaty of understanding” with the then-leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung.
His wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, shared with him a statement on the death of Carter Sunday afternoon, where they commemorated Carter’s commitment to civil rights, environmental conservation and his efforts to broker peace internationally.
“Hillary and I mourn the passing of President Jimmy Carter and give thanks for his long, good life. Guided by his faith, President Carter lived to serve others — until the very end,” they wrote. Hillary and I met President Carter in 1975 and were proud, early supporters of his Presidential campaign. I will always be proud to have presented the Medal of Freedom to him and Rosalynn in 1999, and to have worked with him in the years after he left the White House.
Carter was also credited with having helped persuade Egypt and Tunisia to ease violence in the Great Lakes region of Africa in 1996, and he helped negotiate the Nairobi Agreement to end the war between Sudan and Uganda in northern Uganda in 1999.
In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts” and his “outstanding commitment to human rights.”
For Carter, the award was something of a mark of rehabilitation after a presidency that ended with one of the lowest public approval ratings on record, averaging just 45.5% over his single term in office, according to Gallup.
As president, significant successes and notable failures
In 1978, President Carter negotiated the Camp David Accords, a historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. The deal, which capped 16 months of negotiations, led to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978.
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin after signing the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel at the White House in 1979. Bob Daugherty / AP
Many historians attribute the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which took place in 1991, to leading events during the Carter presidency. Using human rights on the ideological plane to make Moscow back on its heels, Carter and his forceful national security adviser with a hard line, Zbigniew Brzezinski, supported, with considerable aplomb and force, the Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland, supporting a revolutionary wave in Europe that led to the fall of communism.
But Carter was repeatedly portrayed as an ineffective micro-manager whose attempts to get the American people fired up during a period of recession and energy shortages bombed. He was ridiculed for wearing sweaters in the White House to make Americans turn down their thermostats in winter in an effort to save energy, and his announcement during a nationally televised address in July 1979 that the United States was facing a “crisis of confidence” was roundly criticized, since it came more than 2½ years into his presidency.
It came to be known as Carter’s “malaise” speech, although the term was never used, of course. Reagan could posture as the sunny opposite to Carter’s scolding personality and win the election by landslide in 1980.
A college student watches a televised speech from President Jimmy Carter at a service station in Los Angeles in 1979.Mao / AP
Moreover, Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow as a protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan proved popular at home but is controversial among historians, who brand it as a lost chance to open warmer relations with Moscow and others declare it to have led to a decade of intensified Soviet repression before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The last year of Carter’s presidency was marked by the Iran hostage crisis, which started on Nov. 4, 1979, when Iranian students took over 60 U.S. hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran after Carter had allowed the deposed shah of Iran to receive medical treatment in the United States on humanitarian grounds.
In April 1980, Carter sent an elite rescue team into the embassy compound, but a desert sandstorm crippled several of the military helicopters. One of them crashed into a transport plane on takeoff, killing eight U.S. service members and leading Carter to abort the mission.
The debacle prompted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to order the hostages scattered among numerous locations to prevent another rescue attempt, and it gave him more ammunition with which to denounce the United States as “the Great Satan.”
An official investigation into the rescue attempt found major deficiencies in planning, command and control, and identified critical shortcomings in communication and coordination among the U.S. military branches, bolstering perceptions of Carter as a weak leader and leading to the passage of the Goldwater–Nichols Act, which ordered a top-to-bottom reorganization of the Department of Defense in 1986.
Fifty-two of the hostages would spend 444 days in captivity, every day marked off by Walter Cronkite at the end of the “CBS Evening News,” until they were released on Jan. 20, 1981 — the day Reagan was inaugurated as president.
From Naval officer on a nuclear submarine, to Georgia governor
James Earl Carter Jr. was born Oct. 1, 1924, in the tiny Sumter County town of Plains in southwest Georgia, where he grew up on a peanut farm. His intellect was recognized early, and he was appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy. He graduated in 1946 and the same year married Rosalynn Smith, a 19-year-old childhood friend who was a star student at Plains High School.
Carter became a submariner in the Navy, where he was spotted by Adm. Hyman Rickover, considered the father of the U.S. nuclear submarine program. Rickover chose Carter as an aide and sent him to Schenectady, New York, where the family relocated while Carter studied reactor technology and nuclear physics at the Union Graduate College. He would eventually become a senior officer of the USS Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine in the United States.
Speaking about Rickover in a 1984 interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Carter said, “There were a few times when I hated him, because he demanded more from me than I thought I could deliver.”
Carter seemed well on his way to an illustrious military career under Rickover’s guidance but left the Navy in 1953 following the death of his father to take over the family peanut business in Georgia.
As the company expanded, Carter became prominent in south Georgia politics, speaking out as a rare advocate of civil rights in church addresses and as chairman of the Sumter County School Board. He was elected as a Democrat to the state Senate in 1962 in a special election after he challenged his defeat in what an investigation revealed to have been a fraudulent vote.
Carter was swiftly promoted to the Democratic Executive Committee and chairman of the Senate Education Committee in only his second two-year term.
Within four years in the Senate, Carter campaigned for governor, losing the Democratic primary but garnering enough votes to force a runoff between the presumed front-runner and an outlandish segregationist chicken-restaurant owner, Lester Maddox. Maddox won the runoff and the general election.
Carter tried again in 1970, this time compromising his civil rights record by declaring himself “basically a redneck” and complimenting the divisive Maddox — who was famous for having used an ax handle as a weapon to drive Black activists from his restaurant in 1964 — for being “steadfast” and “honorable” in his beliefs.
“Carter, believe it or not, ran a segregated race, one that he was connected with George Wallace of Alabama,” his main Democratic opponent, former Gov. Carl Sanders, said in a 2014 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, adding that Carter “hoodwinked enough people to make them believe” that he would work to undermine integration.
“I can win this election without a single Black vote,” Carter told The Atlanta Constitution in July 1970.
Carter was forced into a runoff in the Democratic primary, which he easily won. And then he changed strategy to one he would use for the rest of his career — reaching out to Black voters and campaigning in Black churches and easily defeating a Republican news broadcaster in the general election. According to historian Randall Balmer, as reported in his 2014 biography “Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter,” for what remains of his life Jimmy Carter regretted his activities on the campaign in the 1970 election period.
A modest presidential candidate for a scandal-weary nation
Barred from running for re-election as governor in 1974 and seizing on the opening left by disarray in both major parties after the Watergate scandal, Carter leaped into the 1976 presidential campaign, starting out near the bottom of the polls in a Democratic field of more than a dozen candidates. He was generally derided as “Jimmy who?”
Leaning on his reputation as a reformer with deep ties in the Baptist church and promising voters “I will never lie to you” — and capitalizing on political cartoonists’ depictions of him as a peanut with a big smile by adopting them in his campaign — Carter entered a record number of state primaries and caucuses. He campaigned tirelessly in Black and other minority communities and slowly chipped away at the opposition.
Turning back a liberal “Anybody But Carter” movement led by California Gov. Jerry Brown and Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, by June he had wrapped up the nomination. Helped by a colossal blunder by the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas — who dismissed the U.S.-led victories in both World War I and World War II as “Democrat wars” — Carter defeated President Ford with 50.1% of the vote.
Carter took pains to project a modest image to a scandal-weary nation. He walked down Pennsylvania Avenue during his inaugural parade. He carried his own bags on Air Force One. And there were his constant messages to Americans that he couldn’t address the nation’s problems alone, often in self-effacing, sweater-wearing public appearances.
‘Absolutely and completely at ease with death’
Throughout his packed post-presidency, Carter wrote — a lot. He wrote more than two dozen books, some with his wife. And as always, his faith and his humble roots remained his guides. He continued to teach Sunday school at his hometown church, Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, until the pandemic hit in early 2020, forcing him and his wife to forgo most public engagements.
Still he, by video, during the pandemic, participated in activities for his church.
“Having gone through being a governor, I went back to Plains,” he told the congregation in August 2015. “When having gone through being president, I went back to Plains and now no matter where we are in the world you look forward to getting back home to Plains.
Carter was one of only two living presidents to miss Biden’s 2021 inauguration, apart from Donald Trump, whose illness prevented him from attending during the pandemic. This marked the first inauguration that Carter missed as a former president.
Trump sent condolences Sunday afternoon to the family of Carter, saying he was in debt of gratitude for the work of the ex-president.
“The challenges Jimmy faced as President came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude,” Trump wrote. “Melania and I are thinking warmly of the Carter Family and their loved ones during this difficult time. We urge everyone to keep them in their hearts and prayers.”
Biden and first lady Jill Biden went to the Carters in Georgia in April 2021. “We sat and talked about the old days,” Biden said afterward.
Biden said in a statement Sunday afternoon that he and the first lady mourned the passing of Carter, whom they called a “dear friend.”
“Today, America and the world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian. Over six decades, we had the honor of calling Jimmy Carter a dear friend. But, what’s extraordinary about Jimmy Carter, though, is that millions of people throughout America and the world who never met him thought of him as a dear friend as well,” Joe and Jill Biden wrote.
An official state funeral will be held in Washington, D.C.,” Biden said.
Former President Barack Obama wrote about Carter on X: “He taught all of us what it means to live a life of grace, dignity, justice, and service.” In a longer statement, Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama said Carter had embodied those values.
“Whenever I had a chance to spend time with President Carter, it was clear that he didn’t just profess these values. He embodied them. And in doing so, he taught all of us what it means to live a life of grace, dignity, justice, and service. In his Nobel acceptance speech, President Carter said, ‘God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering.”. We can choose to work together for peace.’ He made that choice again and again over the course of his 100 years, and the world is better for it,” the Obamas said.
Former President George W. Bush similarly sent his and former first lady Laura Bush’s “heartfelt” condolences to the Carter family.
James Earl Carter, Jr., was a man of deeply held convictions. He was loyal to his family, his community, and his country. President Carter dignified the office. And his efforts to leave behind a better world didn’t end with the presidency. His work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center set an example of service that will inspire Americans for generations,” Bush wrote.
He concluded with these words: “We join our fellow citizens in giving thanks for Jimmy Carter and in prayer for his family.”
Habitat for Humanity released a statement to pay tribute to its long-time ally whose life had ended.
President and Mrs. Carter started volunteering with Habitat for Humanity near their home in southwest Georgia over 40 years ago and soon brought global attention to the need for decent and affordable housing. We are grateful for the fantastic impact the Carters have had on Habitat and on the families who have benefited from their shining example. The Carters put Habitat for Humanity on the map, and their legacy lives on in every family we serve around the world, said Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity.
When Carter reached his 100th birthday this October, his grandson Jason Carter told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the former president had said he wanted to hang on until November to cast his vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris added her voice to the choir of mourners, saying in a statement Sunday evening that “the world is a better place because of President Carter.”
“Jimmy Carter’s life is a testament to the power of service, from his time as a Lieutenant in the United States Navy to his 76th Governor of Georgia and the 39th President of the United States,” Harris said. “He reminded our nation and the world that there is strength in decency and compassion.”.
Carter was diagnosed with melanoma in 2015, a virulent form of skin cancer that had spread to his liver and his brain. He underwent experimental treatment with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, also known as Keytruda, and a few months later he announced that doctors had ended his treatments after having found no signs of tumors.
Carter spent much of the second half of 2019 before the pandemic, in hospital for brain surgery, infections and two falls that were followed by a broken hip and pelvis.
He was back teaching Sunday school at the Maranatha Baptist Church two weeks after he fractured his pelvis. He told the congregation at the time that since doctors told him in 2015 that cancer had spread to his brain, he had been “absolutely and completely at ease with death.”
