Jimmy Carter, who followed an initial but tumultuous one-term term in the White House with a post-presidency dedicated to human rights and peace advocacy, died this afternoon in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, the Carter Center said.
The nonprofit said there will be public celebrations in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., as well as a private burial in Plains, Georgia. Final arrangements for a state funeral are still pending.
His son, Chip Carter, said in a statement: “My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights and selfless love. My brothers, sister, and I shared it with the rest of the world through these shared 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.
Carter, who was born on October 1, 1924, when he was one hundred years old, lived longer than any other American president, and had the longest presidential term after the presidency. His grandson, Jason Carter, spoke at the Democratic National Convention and said the former president was looking forward to voting for Kamala Harris.
In 1974, just five months after Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, Carter entered the race for the Democratic nomination as a virtual unknown. At the time, Gallup polled a list of 31 potential Democratic candidates, and Carter's name was not even on the list, according to the British Daily Mail. New York Times. Then, in his first and only term as governor of Georgia, Carter appeared on the game show What is my line? To a maskless committee that had difficulty identifying him.
Carter used his political anonymity to his advantage, running as an outsider who could bring to Washington the kind of integrity and personal ethics required in the wake of the Watergate era. His decision to campaign extensively in the nation's first caucuses in Iowa proved to be a fluke, as he used the media attention from his unexpected showing as a springboard for the rest of the nominating contests.
In Hollywood, the relatively young Carter became a celebrity in his own right, establishing relationships with Lou Wasserman that gave him an entrée into fundraising and the celebrity circuit. This proved to be a lifeline at key moments of the campaign: at one point, according to… The Washington PostCarter's campaign was such a failure that Wasserman quickly organized a fundraiser that got the campaign the $200,000 it desperately needed.
After securing the nomination, Carter was initially far ahead of his rival, President Gerald R. Kennedy. Ford, who was hurt by his decision to pardon Nixon as well as a battle within the party with its conservative wing. The gap narrowed in the final weeks of the campaign, after Carter, a born-again Baptist, gave an interview Playboy He said, “I have looked at many women with lust. I have committed adultery in my heart many times.” Carter still won the election, but by a rather narrow margin of 297-240 electoral votes.
His victory was hailed as a new era of good government in Washington, where Carter's smile was a contrast to Nixon's frown. The fact that he is from Georgia has been described as a sign of a new South, built on the somewhat superficial idea that the racial divisions of the 1960s were a thing of the past. Pop culture captured the moment with lighthearted films like Smokey and the Bandit And TV series such as Dukes of Hazzard Which generally presented the area as an area of rednecks and good ole boys. ABC even scheduled a country comedy series, carter country, Which ran for two seasons.
In the first line of his inaugural address, Carter thanked Ford “for all he has done to heal our land,” but the new president signaled a shift toward a center-left approach to government.
In the White House, Carter eschewed pomp in favor of a more populist image: he did away with playing politics. Salute to the leader at the festivities and revived Franklin Roosevelt's fireside talks, as he mentored Americans on environmental conservation during the ongoing energy crisis.
Even with large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Carter's first days in D.C. sparked controversy. A scandal forced one of his close aides, Bert Lance, from office, while clashes between the administration and Democrats in Congress, over matters such as pork spending, damaged his agenda.
His leadership style has drawn criticism for a lack of delegation. One widely circulated story is that he oversaw the playing schedule on the White House tennis court, although Stuart Eisenstat said Carter only wanted to make sure that he or First Lady Rosalynn Carter were not using it at the same time. “The idea that he micromanaged the schedule is incorrect, but it fits with the idea of excessive attention to detail. He was actually very generous to his staff,” Eisenstat said at the 2018 National Book Festival.
Carter's energy policy was later viewed as visionary, decades before climate change became a national priority with the solution of conserving fossil fuels and keeping the public off them. The 1979 energy crisis saw Americans once again facing long lines at gas stations. Carter gave a nationally televised speech that summer, when he said the problem was a “crisis of confidence.” “The erosion of our confidence in the future threatens to destroy the social and political fabric of America.” Although he never used the word, it became known as “feel-good” speech, which contributed to the impression that the Carter administration was faltering.
The high point of his presidency came on September 17, 1978, when, after 12 days at Camp David, he announced a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, with the treaty signed the following year. Broadcasters cut their regular prime-time programming — which that night included the Emmy Awards — to cover the deal.
Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter and Menachem begin the signing ceremony of the Camp David Accords / Photo: Hum Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
But his foreign policy successes were overshadowed by the Iranian hostage crisis. In November 1979, following the revolution that overthrew the US-backed Shah, a group of students seized the US embassy in Tehran, taking 52 diplomats and citizens hostage.
The resulting attempts to free the hostages consumed Carter's presidency. A rescue attempt on April 24, 1980 failed after a helicopter crash led to the mission being cancelled. Every night, Americans were reminded of the crisis on television, and ABC called for nightly reports America is a hostage With Ted Koppel, Major Night line.
Despite the ongoing crisis, Carter was still seen as having an incumbent advantage in the 1980 presidential race, but his political fortunes turned when he faced a serious primary challenge from Edward Kennedy. Although he won the party's presidential nomination, the battle within the party left Democrats divided.
But what is most damaging to Carter's political fortunes is stagflation, or high inflation combined with slow economic growth and high unemployment rates. The recession of early 1980 coincided with the beginning of Carter's re-election campaign.
On the right, Ronald Reagan secured the Republican nomination with a combination of personal charisma and the ability to connect with working-class voters, who became known as Reagan Democrats, disaffected with the state of the economy. Although Carter and his team tried to paint Reagan as too extreme and untrustworthy, the former actor delivered a superior debate performance, in part with just one line in response to the current president's criticism: “There you go again.”
Reagan's landslide was a painful defeat for Carter, who was relatively young (56 years old) when he left office. He sold his peanut business, then heavily in debt, to Archer Daniels Midland, and received a large sum for his memoirs. Keep the faiththe first of dozens of other books.
But beyond retirement, Carter continued some focus on human rights policy during his tenure in the White House. He built homes for Habitat for Humanity. He tried to solve the problem of Guinea worm disease in African countries and other regions, and on his initiative it was almost eliminated. He supervised the elections. Sometimes he acted as a peace mediator, as he did during the Camp David Accords.
More than twenty years after leaving office, in 2002, Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize.
“War can sometimes be a necessary evil,” Carter said in his acceptance speech. “But no matter how necessary it may be, it is always evil, never good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
After his presidency, he and Rosalyn returned to Plains, Georgia, where they continued to be active members of the community. The former president's regular Sunday school classes at Maranatha Baptist Church became a stopping point for politicians and tourists until he was well into his 90s. In a profile in 2018, mail She stated that Carter was “the only president in the modern era to return full-time to the house in which he lived before entering politics.” The newspaper noted that Carter's two-bedroom farmhouse was estimated at $167,000, less than the cost of the Secret Service vehicles parked outside.
James Earl Carter Jr. grew up in Plains and graduated from the United States Naval Academy. He left his naval career in the 1950s to focus on the family business of peanut farming. At the time, Georgia was defiant in its resistance to segregation, but Carter spoke in favor of integration in schools.
He entered state politics in 1962 and was elected to the state Senate, in an unexpected campaign that foreshadowed his work as an international election observer. He lost the Democratic primary, but proved widespread voter fraud orchestrated by a local political leader. Among other things, it was claimed that 117 electors lined up in alphabetical order to cast their ballots, a fact cited by Carter in his 2015 book: A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety. He eventually got on the ballot in the general election and won.
Carter ran for governor of Georgia in 1966, but lost the primary to segregationist Lester Maddox. Carter ran for reelection in 1970 and won.
Carter leaves three sons, John William (Jack), James Earl III (Chip) and Donnell Jeffrey (Jeff) and a daughter, Amy Lynn. His wife, Rosalynn, died in November 2023. Their marriage lasted 77 years, longer than any presidential couple.
