Former President Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, who dedicated his life after he left office to brokering international peace, has died at age 100, his office confirmed Sunday.
Carter, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his human rights work around the world, had been in 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 reach his 100th birthday.
In October, 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.”
Biden said he would order an official state funeral to be held in Washington and issued a proclamation later Sunday declaring Jan. 9 to be a national day of mourning. On Monday, the U.S. Army Military District of Washington said Monday morning that the state funeral would be held on that same date, and Biden ordered federal offices closed "as a mark of respect" for Carter.
A Georgia native and a Democrat, Carter was elected president in 1976, defeating the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. Carter served one term before he lost re-election in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, his bid hobbled by an inability to resolve the Iran hostage crisis, a standoff that lasted 444 days.
Carter, the oldest living former president after George H.W. Bush died in 2018 at 94, was the first American president to have been born in a hospital.
Only 56 years old when he left the Oval Office, Carter would spend the next four decades focusing 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.
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.
Around the world, Carter was recognized after his presidency for his tireless work promoting peaceful resolutions to conflict and advancing 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.
Working through the center, the Carters traveled to developing countries to monitor elections, help build democratic institutions, lobby for victims of human rights abuses and spearhead efforts to eradicate diseases.
In February 1986, Carter secured the release of the journalist Luis Mora and the labor leader José Altamirano from prison in Nicaragua. In 1994, he traveled to North Korea at the request of President Bill Clinton and soon announced the negotiation of a “treaty of understanding” with the then-leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung.
Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, shared a statement on Carter’s death Sunday afternoon, commemorating 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 to 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.”
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, Carter brokered 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’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978.
Many historians also credit the Carter administration with having been at the forefront of events that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Carter and his hard-line national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, used human rights to put Moscow on the ideological defensive, and their forceful support for Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement in Poland helped fuel a revolutionary wave in Eastern Europe that eventually sparked the fall of communism.
But Carter was often characterized as an ineffectual micromanager whose efforts to rally the American people during a time of economic recession and energy shortages landed with a thud. He was mocked for wearing sweaters in the White House to encourage Americans to turn down their thermostats in the winter to conserve energy, and his declaration in a nationally televised address in July 1979 that the United States was suffering a “crisis of confidence” was widely panned, given that it came after 2½ years into his leadership.
It came to be known as Carter’s “malaise” speech, even though he never used the word. Reagan would present himself as the sunny alternative to Carter’s scolding demeanor to win the 1980 election in a landslide.
In addition, Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow in protest of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan was popular domestically, but it remains controversial among historians, with some characterizing it as a missed opportunity to open warmer relations with Moscow and others declaring that it led to a decade of intensified Soviet repression before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The final year of Carter’s presidency was dogged by the Iran hostage crisis, which began Nov. 4, 1979, when Iranian students took more than 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 it 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 Defense Department in 1986.
Fifty-two of the hostages would remain captive for 444 days, each day ticked 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, who is considered the father of the U.S. nuclear submarine program. Rickover selected Carter as an aide and assigned him to Schenectady, New York, where the family relocated while Carter studied reactor technology and nuclear physics at Union Graduate College. Eventually, Carter would become a senior officer of the USS Seawolf, the United States’ second nuclear submarine.
Speaking about Rickover in a 1984 interview with CBS’ “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 appeared set for a stellar military career under Rickover’s tutelage, but in 1953, he left the Navy after his father died, returning to Georgia to run the family peanut business.
As the company grew, 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 rose quickly, becoming a member of the Democratic Executive Committee and chairman of the Senate Education Committee in just his second two-year term.
After just four years in the Senate, Carter launched a campaign for governor, losing the Democratic primary but winning enough votes to force a runoff between the presumed front-runner and an outlandish segregationist chicken-restaurant owner, Lester Maddox. Maddox would win 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. In his 2014 biography, “Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter,” the Dartmouth College religion historian Randall Balmer wrote that Carter regretted the 1970 campaign for the rest of his life.
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?”
Relying 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 busy 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.
Carter still participated in church activities by video amid the pandemic.
“When I got through being governor, I went back to Plains,” he told the congregation in August 2015. “When I got 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 the only living president aside from Donald Trump not to attend Biden’s inauguration in 2021, because of the pandemic. It was the first inauguration Carter had missed as a former president.
Trump sent the Carter family his condolences Sunday afternoon, saying he owed “a debt of gratitude” to Carter for his work.
“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 visited the Carters in Georgia in April 2021. “We sat and talked about the old days,” Biden said afterward.
Biden paid tribute to Carter on Sunday night, addressing the nation from St. Croix, where he is on vacation.
Biden praised Carter, whom he called “a dear friend,” for his “decency” and character.
“Jimmy Carter lived a life measured not by words, but by his deeds,” Biden said.
He remembered Carter’s work in and out of the Oval Office, saying his “compassion and moral clarity lifted people up and changed lives all over the globe.”
“Just look at his life, his life’s work. He worked to eradicate disease, not just at home, but around the world. He forged peace, advanced civil rights, human rights, promoted free and fair elections around the world. He built housing and homes for the homeless,” Biden said.
Biden said in a statement earlier Sunday that he and the first lady mourned Carter’s passing.
“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.
Former President Barack Obama commemorated Carter on X, saying 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.
“We join our fellow citizens in giving thanks for Jimmy Carter and in prayer for his family,” he added.
Habitat for Humanity issued its own statement mourning the death of its longtime ally.
“President and Mrs. Carter began volunteering with Habitat for Humanity near their home in southwest Georgia more than 40 years ago, and soon brought worldwide attention to the need for decent and affordable housing. We are grateful for the incredible 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 Habitat for Humanity’s CEO, Jonathan Reckford.
When Carter reached his 100th birthday in October, his grandson Jason Carter told The Journal-Constitution that he 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 — as a Lieutenant in the United States Navy, the 76th Governor of Georgia, and the 39th President of the United States. He reminded our nation and the world that there is strength in decency and compassion," she said.
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, right before the pandemic hit, in the hospital for brain surgery, infections and two falls that resulted in a broken hip and pelvis.
He was back teaching Sunday school at 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.”
