By James Varney Special to The Washington Times Sunday, December 29, 2024

Jimmy Carter, the Georgia peanut farmer and naval officer who became the 39th president of the United States and eventually the nation’s longest-living president, died Sunday.

He was 100 years old and survived almost two years after entering hospice care in February 2023.

The Carter Center posted on social media Sunday afternoon that the former president died peacefully at his home and surrounded by family.

Mr. Carter died nearly nine years after his diagnosis of liver cancer. The disease has stalked his family. Pancreatic cancer killed all three of his younger siblings. The former president also underwent surgery in November 2019 to relieve pressure caused by bleeding in his brain after a series of falls.

The tributes poured in Sunday afternoon and evening from all over the world and across the political spectrum.

President Biden said the world lost an “extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian,” and he a dear friend.

“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,” Mr. Biden wrote.

“With his compassion and moral clarity, he worked to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil rights and human rights, promote free and fair elections, house the homeless, and always advocate for the least among us. He saved, lifted, and changed the lives of people all across the globe,” he added.

Mr. Biden said he would order a state funeral for Mr. Carter in Washington, though he didn’t immediately specify a date. Mr. Carter will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol and will have a funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington.

Mr. Biden made a rare public appearance Sunday evening, breaking from a family vacation to speak about Mr. Carter from a hotel in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Speaking for about 10 minutes and even taking questions, Mr. Biden said he had talked with several of the former president’s children to help formalize memorial arrangements.

Mr. Biden spoke personally about Mr. Carter’s “simple decency.” He said he couldn’t imagine Mr. Carter walking past a person in need without trying to help.

He represented “the most fundamental human values we can never let slip away,” Mr. Biden said.

President-elect Donald Trump spoke similarly.

“Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. “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.

“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,” he added.

Mr. Carter’s longevity and personality made him a popular figure for his post-presidency humanitarian work through the Carter Center, which he established in 1992. He was also a peace envoy sent to hot spots such as North Korea on president-assigned missions, an advocate for democratic elections worldwide, and a carpenter with Habitat for Humanity.

Even in his 90s, he taught Sunday school twice monthly in his hometown of Plains.

“President Carter was one of the most honest and committed — to his faith and to integrity — that America has ever had,” said Barry Bradford, an independent scholar and member of the Organization of American Historians. “Even if he didn’t have the most successful presidency, he did many things that had a global impact, and I think his post-presidency really stands out in that he not only set a model but actually accomplished something.”

Indeed, that historically long and productive post-presidential stretch, which included a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, helped overshadow his single term in the White House. His presidency had low marks because of the energy crisis, an economy ravaged by high inflation and unemployment, and the Iran hostage crisis.

On the domestic front, Mr. Carter established two Cabinet-level departments — Energy and Education — and signed legislation that deregulated the airline industry in 1978. He sent his daughter, Amy, to District of Columbia Public Schools instead of private schools, as most presidents with young children do.

His tenure is perhaps best remembered by his “malaise” speech in July 1979. Mr. Carter, while not ever using that exact word, addressed the nation about a “crisis in confidence.”

Mr. Carter did mark a significant triumph in foreign policy when he secured the Camp David Accords, a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that has held up ever since.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi praised Mr. Carter’s role in achieving the peace agreement, which he said “will remain etched in the annals of history.”

In his statement Sunday evening, he said Mr. Carter’s “humanitarian work exemplifies a lofty standard of love, peace, and brotherhood.” Mr. Carter will be remembered as “one of the world’s most prominent leaders in service to humanity,” Mr. el-Sissi said.

His agreement to cede control of the Panama Canal to Panama raised U.S. prestige in Latin America. Mr. Trump has suggested taking it back from Panama if the small nation doesn’t stop “ripping off” the U.S.

His diplomatic successes paled in most voters’ minds to the 444-day ordeal in Tehran, where Shiite revolutionaries inspired by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s toppling of the Shah seized the U.S. Embassy and held 52 Americans captive.

An April 1980 rescue attempt failed spectacularly, with an explosion in the Iranian desert and the deaths of eight American service members. At the time, the disaster seemed to magnify the general incompetence of the Carter administration.

Later that year, when Mr. Carter sought reelection, Ronald Reagan crushed him.

Mr. Carter won the presidency in 1976 and arrived in the White House on a wave of glowing national press coverage. Voters hoped the Washington outsider and devout Baptist would steady a nation shaken by its long involvement in the Vietnam War and then the Watergate scandal.

Before his narrow victory over incumbent Gerald Ford in the 1976 election, Mr. Carter had served one term as the 76th governor of Georgia.

He won the governor’s job through a calibrated effort to appeal to Georgia’s Republicans while not upsetting the state’s traditionally conservative Democrats. Mr. Carter chided his opponent for supporting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and walked a fine line on several civil rights issues, such as school busing.

Once in the governor’s mansion, he established himself as a champion of civil rights. “No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice,” he said in his inaugural address.

As a Sumter County school board member, he supported desegregating public schools after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1972, as governor, he filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against the school board, saying, “We cannot have people serving on public education boards who have the objective of driving white children from the public school-system.”

He also restored Georgia’s capital punishment, a move he later regretted.

“I think President Carter was evidence that the so-called ‘solid South’ was not really all that solid,” said Patrick Allitt, a U.S. history professor at Emory University specializing in the modern American period. “It had plenty of White people, of whom Carter was one, who believed in getting rid of segregation. The fact that he was able to win the state’s governorship shows that this point of view was acceptable to a lot of the state’s voters by the early ’60s and ’70s.”

Unlike other former presidents, Mr. Carter eschewed the lucrative avenues available through speeches. Instead, he returned to his rural Georgia life in Plains and was active in the community. He spoke out occasionally about his successors’ policies and cropped up as an envoy or an election observer on the international scene.

“He’s looked on affectionately by Georgians in general as their only president, but he’s also widely criticized, from the right, for favoring big-government paternalism,” said Mr. Allitt, noting the admiration for Mr. Carter’s humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors, including his work with Habitat for Humanity, whose headquarters is in nearby Americus.

Country life was hardly an act for the first American president born in a hospital. He was successful in the agriculture business before he entered politics, with his family’s peanut farm prosperous by 1959.

After graduating from the Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1946, he married his wife, Rosalynn, who died on Nov. 19, 2023, at 96 at their longtime home in Plains. She had entered hospice care several days earlier after living with dementia and suffering many months of declining health.

Rosalynn Carter was her husband’s closest adviser during and after his presidency, and she prided herself on being an activist first lady.

Mr. Carter pursued a career as a submariner and was close to Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the Navy’s nuclear submarine program. In February, the academy renamed a building after Mr. Carter as the military removed names connected to the Confederacy.

Mr. Carter’s expertise in the nuclear field also led him to lead a team sent to the Chalk River Laboratory, part of the Canadian atomic energy effort, in December 1952. The reactor core was damaged, and Mr. Carter and his team were lowered into the radioactive hot zone a few minutes at a time to repair it.

“That’s all a part of Jimmy Carter’s legacy that is often overlooked: that here was a man who had a significant career before he ever entered politics,” Mr. Bradford said.

While running the farm, he became involved in his community, serving on local boards for hospitals and libraries. He also became a church deacon and Sunday school teacher.

Mr. Carter acknowledged the personal sting he felt from his resounding defeat in 1980, and he formally separated himself from the Southern Baptist Convention because it refused to appoint female pastors. Yet, said Mr. Allitt, who had Mr. Carter speak to his Emory students on many occasions, he remained an intellectually curious and gracious man to the end.

“The students loved it, of course, especially President Carter’s willingness to admit mistakes he made in the White House and his thoughts on how, in retrospect, he would have done some things differently,” Mr. Allitt said. “He was friendly, cooperative, low key, but still intellectually impressive, with wonderful recall of names and details. He was sharp, pushed back against what he saw as wrongheaded ideas, and left them with a wonderful sense of moral engagement on difficult issues.”

Officials of the Empire State Building lit the iconic New York City landmark in red, white and blue on Sunday night “to honor the life and legacy” of Mr. Carter.

Mr. Carter is survived by his four children, three sons and a daughter, and numerous grandchildren and two great-grandsons.