By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Jimmy Carter, the earnest Georgia peanut farmer who, as U.S. president, battled a bad economy and the Iran hostage crisis but brokered peace between Israel and Egypt and later received the Prize Nobel Peace Prize winner for his humanitarian work, died at home. in Plains, Georgia, on Sunday, the Carter Center said. He was 100 years old.
“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights and selfless love,” said Chip Carter, the former president’s son. “My brothers, my sister and I share it with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family for the way it brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live out these shared beliefs.”
The Carter Center said there will be public events in Atlanta and Washington. These events will be followed by a private burial in Plains, he said.
According to the center, final arrangements for the former president’s state funeral are still pending.
Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, served as president from January 1977 to January 1981 after defeating incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford (NYSE:) in the 1976 U.S. election. Carter was ousted from office four years later in an election victory overwhelming when voters embraced Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, former actor and governor of California.
Carter lived longer after his term than any other American president. Along the way, he earned a reputation as a better former president than president, a status he readily acknowledged.
His one-term presidency was marked by the successes of the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, which brought some stability to the Middle East. But he was dogged by a receding economy, lingering unpopularity and the embarrassment of the Iran hostage crisis that consumed his final 444 days in office.
In recent years, Carter had experienced several health problems, including melanoma that spread to his liver and brain. Carter decided to receive palliative care in February 2023 rather than undergo additional medical intervention. His wife, Rosalynn Carter, died on November 19, 2023, at age 96. She appeared frail as she attended his funeral and memorial service in a wheelchair.
Carter left office deeply unpopular, but he worked vigorously for decades on humanitarian causes. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 in recognition of his “tireless efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, promote democracy and human rights, and promote economic and social development.”
Carter had been a centrist as governor of Georgia with populist tendencies when he came to the White House as the 39th president of the United States. He was a Washington outsider at a time when the United States was still recovering from the Watergate scandal that led Republican Richard Nixon to resign as president in 1974 and elevated Ford to the vice presidency.
“I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president. I will never lie to you,” Carter promised with a grin from ear to ear.
Asked to evaluate his presidency, Carter said in a 1991 documentary: “The biggest failure we had was a political failure. I could never convince the American people that I was a strong, energetic leader.”
Despite his difficulties in office, Carter had few rivals for achievements as a former president. He gained global recognition as a tireless advocate for human rights, a voice for the dispossessed, and a leader in the fight against hunger and poverty, earning respect that eluded him in the White House.
Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his efforts to promote human rights and resolve conflicts around the world, from Ethiopia and Eritrea to Bosnia and Haiti. Its Carter Center in Atlanta sent international election monitoring delegations to polling places around the world.
A Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher since his teens, Carter brought a strong sense of morality to the presidency, speaking openly about his religious faith. He also sought to take some of the pageantry out of an increasingly imperial presidency: by walking, rather than riding in a limousine, in his 1977 inauguration parade.
The Middle East was the focus of Carter’s (NYSE:) foreign policy. The 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, based on the 1978 Camp David accords, ended the state of war between the two neighbors.
Carter brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland for talks. Later, when the agreements appeared to be falling apart, Carter saved the day by flying to Cairo and Jerusalem for personal diplomacy.
The treaty provided for Israeli withdrawal from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the establishment of diplomatic relations. Begin and Sadat each won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978.
For the 1980 election, the overriding issues were double-digit inflation, interest rates exceeding 20%, and skyrocketing gasoline prices, as well as the Iran hostage crisis that brought humiliation to the United States. . These problems tarnished Carter’s presidency and undermined his chances of winning a second term.
HOSTAGE CRISIS
On November 4, 1979, revolutionaries devoted to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, captured the Americans present, and demanded the return of the ousted U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He was being treated in an American hospital.
Initially, the American public supported Carter. But his support faded in April 1980, when a commando raid failed to rescue the hostages, and eight American soldiers were killed in a plane crash in the Iranian desert.
Carter’s final ignominy was that Iran held the 52 hostages until minutes after Reagan was sworn in to replace Carter on January 20, 1981, and then released the planes carrying them to freedom.
In another crisis, Carter protested the former Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 by boycotting the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. He also asked the US Senate to delay consideration of a major nuclear weapons deal with Moscow.
Undaunted, the Soviets remained in Afghanistan for a decade.
Carter in 1978 won narrow Senate approval of a treaty to transfer the Panama Canal to Panamanian control despite critics who argued that the waterway was vital to American security. He also completed negotiations on full U.S. ties with China.
Carter created two new US cabinet departments: education and energy. Amid high gas prices, he said the United States’ “energy crisis” was “the moral equivalent of war” and urged the country to embrace conservation. “Ours is the most wasteful nation in the world,” he told Americans in 1977.
In 1979, Carter delivered what became known as his “malaise” speech to the nation, although he never used that word.
“After listening to the American people, I was reminded again that all the legislation in the world cannot fix what is wrong in the United States,” he said in his televised speech.
“The threat is almost invisible in ordinary form. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the heart, soul and spirit of our national will. The erosion of our confidence in the future threatens to destroy the social system. and the political fabric of the United States.
As president, the puritanical Carter was embarrassed by the behavior of his younger brother, Billy Carter, a heavy drinker, who had boasted, “I have a red collar, white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer.”
‘There you go again’
Jimmy Carter withstood Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy’s challenge for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, but was politically diminished in the face of his general election battle against a vigorous Republican opponent.
Reagan, the conservative who projected an image of strength, kept Carter off balance during their debates leading up to the November 1980 election.
Reagan scornfully told Carter, “There you go again,” when the Republican rival felt the president had misrepresented Reagan’s views during a debate.
Carter lost the 1980 election to Reagan, who won 44 of the 50 states and won a landslide victory in the Electoral College.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924 in Plains, Georgia, one of four children of a farmer and merchant. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1946, served in the nuclear submarine program and left to manage the family peanut-growing business.
He married his wife, Rosalynn, in 1946, a union he called “the most important thing in my life.” They had three sons and a daughter.
Carter became a millionaire, a Georgia state legislator, and governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975. He mounted an underdog bid for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination and bested his rivals for the right to face Ford in the general election.
With Walter Mondale as his vice presidential running mate, Carter received a boost thanks to a major gaffe by Ford during one of their debates. Ford said that “there is no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration”, despite decades of such domination.
Carter outperformed Ford in the election, even though Ford actually won more states: 27 to Carter’s 23.
Not all of Carter’s post-presidential work was appreciated. Former President George W. Bush and his father, former President George HW Bush, both Republicans, were said to have been displeased by Carter’s independent diplomacy in Iraq and elsewhere.
In 2004, Carter called the Iraq war launched in 2003 by the younger Bush one of the “most serious and damaging mistakes our nation has ever made.” He called George W. Bush’s administration “the worst in history” and said Vice President Dick Cheney was “a disaster for our country.”
In 2019, Carter questioned Republican Donald Trump’s legitimacy as president, saying “he was appointed because the Russians interfered on his behalf.” Trump responded by calling Carter “a terrible president.”
Carter also made trips to communist North Korea. A visit in 1994 defused a nuclear crisis, when President Kim Il Sung agreed to freeze his nuclear program in exchange for resuming dialogue with the United States. That led to a deal in which North Korea, in exchange for aid, promised not to restart its nuclear reactor or reprocess the plant’s spent fuel.
But Carter irritated Democratic President Bill Clinton’s administration by announcing the deal with North Korea’s leader without first consulting with Washington.
In 2010, Carter secured the release of an American sentenced to eight years of hard labor for illegally entering North Korea.
Carter wrote more than two dozen books, from a presidential memoir to a children’s book to poetry, as well as works on religious faith and diplomacy. His book “Faith: A Journey for Everyone” was published in 2018.
(Reporting and writing by Will Dunham; Additional reporting by Jasper Ward; Editing by Bill Trott, Diane Craft and Lisa Shumaker)