Jimmy Carter, the former Georgia peanut farmer who as US president brokered a historic and lasting peace accord between Israel and Egypt in a single term marred by soaring inflation, an oil shortage and Iran’s holding of American hostages, has died. He was 100.
Carter died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family, the Carter Center said Sunday in a statement. Public observances are planned in Atlanta and Washington, followed by a private interment in Plains.
President Joe Biden eulogized Carter as “an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian” who touched the lives of people around the world with “his compassion and moral clarity.” Biden said he’ll be ordering a state funeral for Carter in Washington.
A Democrat who rose from running his family’s peanut-farming and seed-supply businesses to serving as Georgia governor, Carter won the White House in 1976 over incumbent Gerald Ford by promising to bring honesty to an office tainted two years earlier by the resignation of Richard Nixon in the culmination of the Watergate scandal.
Ascetic, humble and deeply religious, Carter was skeptical of the pomp surrounding the presidency and came to Washington with fewer allies and fixed positions than most who hold the job.
Carter “assembled a new front line on nearly every issue, with no inherited party game plan or ideological playbook to fall back on,” Jonathan Alter wrote in a 2020 biography that painted him as often right in his instincts but flawed in executing government responses. The book was among several in recent years that offered a revised and sunnier view of Carter’s crisis-plagued tenure.
Though Carter “left the White House a widely unpopular president,” his achievements “shine brighter over time, few more than his unique determination to put human rights at the forefront of his foreign policy from the start of his presidency,” his chief domestic policy adviser, Stuart Eizenstat, wrote in a 2018 biography of his former boss.
That and other foreign policy breakthroughs, including a treaty granting Panama ownership of the US-built Panama Canal, were overshadowed by the plight of American hostages held in Iran during the last 444 days of his presidency. They were finally released the day Carter turned over the Oval Office to Republican Ronald Reagan.
On the domestic front, the Carter presidency was dogged by economic woes. Inflation reached 13.3% at the end of 1979 compared with 5.2% when he took office in January 1977. The Federal Reserve’s actions to stem price increases pushed home-mortgage rates to almost 15%, and Carter had to take emergency action to stem a slide in the dollar. There were energy shortages, and oil prices more than doubled.
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