Jimmy Carter, The Longest-living US President, Has Died At 100

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.

The longest-living former US president ever, Carter had opted in early 2023 to spend his remaining time at his home in Plains receiving hospice care. He was there alongside Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years, when she died in November 2023 at age 96. And he lived long enough to fulfill a final wish “- to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

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.

President-elect Donald Trump, who often brought up Carter’s presidency during this year’s election campaign to needle Biden, said Carter faced challenges at a pivotal time in US history. He “did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform. “For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.”

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.

His allegiance to an inner moral compass, his vow to support societies that “share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights” and his tendency to speak his mind collided at times with political realities during his four years in office, from 1977 to 1981, and served as a preview of what was to come in a service-filled post-presidency that lasted decades.

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.

The signature achievement of the Carter presidency, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, led to peaceful co-existence between the Middle East neighbors even as it fell short of resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

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.