Jimmy Carter dies at 100 years old
FOX News Chief Political Anchor Bret Baier looks back on former President Jimmy Carter’s life and accomplishments on “FOX News Live.”
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and a former peanut farmer who entered the White House with a vision of a “competent and benevolent” government, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia. The Carter Center confirmed. He was 100 years old.
The news was first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shortly before the late president’s nonprofit organization, the Carter Center, made an announcement about X. “Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia,” the organization’s post read.
His specific cause of death was unknown. Mr. Carter’s death followed the death of his wife, Rosalyn, on November 19, 2023. She passed away at the age of 96, surrounded by her family, at the Carter home in Plains, days after being admitted to hospice care.
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Jimmy Carter served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. (Diana Walker/Getty Images, File)
The late Mr. Carter himself entered hospice care in February 2023. Carter survived for several years after having a “small mass” removed from his liver in early August 2015, and announced later that month that he had liver cancer that had spread throughout his body.
The Carter family has a history of cancer, with the former president losing his father, brother and two sisters to pancreatic cancer. His mother had breast cancer, which later spread to her pancreas.
Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, announced in May that he believed the former president was “nearing the end” of his life’s journey. But the former president endured much longer.
Funeral details were still being planned, but the Carter Center announced that he would be buried in Plains after public ceremonies in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta. In lieu of flowers, the family encourages donations to the Carter Center.
Georgia’s typically loquacious, soft-spoken leader’s single term in the Oval Office has been clouded by the country’s economic downturn and hostage crisis abroad.
His post-presidential life was marked by a highly visible dedication to service, but also a series of sometimes controversial moves as he continued to dip his toe into foreign affairs, particularly related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also showed movement. Mr. Carter met with Hamas, the terrorist organization’s leader and representative for Palestine, in 2009 and 2015, and rebuked Israel’s operations against Hamas in 2014, saying, “What Israel is doing cannot be justified to the world.”
President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group, File)
James Earl Carter Jr. was born in 1924 in the farming town of Plains. Carter’s father was a farmer, and that background helped instill in him a love of the land and the workers and lower class people who cultivated it, which would continue throughout his personal and professional life.
But Carter initially sought a path outside the Plains, attending the U.S. Naval Academy before serving as a submariner in the post-World War II Navy, eventually reaching the rank of lieutenant. .
Carter married fellow Plains native Rosalyn Smith in 1946, the same year he graduated from the academy.
After Carter’s father died in 1953, he resigned as Navy Commissioner and returned to his and Rosalyn’s Plains roots. The young man headed the family farm while Rosalyn ran a produce supply company in a small Georgia town.
But it didn’t take long for Mr. Carter to leave the field again, this time to begin a career in politics that would take him to the nation’s highest office after just 14 years.
Carter was elected to the Georgia State Senate in 1962 and became governor in 1971 after an unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in 1966.
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Carter rose to become a national Democratic leader, riding a wave of public dissatisfaction with former President Richard Nixon to defeat President Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election and securing the pardon that Ford had granted to Nixon.
During his time in the White House, Carter established full diplomatic relations with China and led negotiations for a nuclear limitation treaty with the Soviet Union. Domestically, he demonstrated his love for nature as president, leading several conservation initiatives, just as he had as a young Plains farmer.
Then-Vice President Walter Mondale and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill (Ernie Sachs) listen to President Jimmy Carter deliver the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol on January 23, 1980. /CNP/Getty Images, File)
He cites the Panama Canal Treaty and the Camp David Accords, which brought peace between Egypt and Israel, as his greatest personal accomplishments.
“We focused on peace. We never fired a bullet or dropped a bomb at anyone,” he told the Washington Post in 2014.
But peace was not always easily maintained, and a perceived lack of strength in dealing with bad actors may have contributed to the lopsided defeat to Ronald Reagan in 1980. is high.
The final 14 months of his presidency were marked by the Iran hostage crisis. After the country’s revolution, the new government took 52 Americans hostage. Carter was unable to retrieve the captured Americans or negotiate their release. In apparent disdain, Iran finally released 52 people held for 444 days on the same day Carter left office.
On November 9, 1977, Jimmy Carter signs the Federal Mine Safety and Health Amendments Act of 1977. (Hum Images/Universal Images Group, File)
And while Mr. Carter launched two government bureaucracies, the Department of Education and the Department of Energy, and has since become a popular target of Republicans, the national energy shortage also hurt his tenure. Footage of gas pipes and high gas prices is a seminal feature of nearly every documentary and discussion of the late 1970s.
Citing internal and external issues, Sen. Ted Kennedy took the unusual step of challenging Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination. Carter narrowly survived the battle, but he was not as lucky as he was in November 1980, when Reagan won 44 states and won the presidency.
From left to right: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and former President Jimmy Carter. (HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images, File)
Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn celebrate 75th wedding anniversary
After leaving the White House, Carter, the author of 28 books, was appointed a distinguished professor at Emory University in Atlanta and founded the Carter Center, which focuses on domestic and international public policy. Carter told The Associated Press that he has had the “best time” of his life since founding the organization in 1982.
“This beautiful place has set the moral and ethical standards of what a superpower like America should be,” Carter said of the center in October.
Recalling the manual labor of his youth on the Plains, Carter was often seen volunteering and fundraising for Habitat for Humanity, helping build homes for the poor.
Former President Jimmy Carter is pictured before the game between the Atlanta Falcons and the Cincinnati Bengals at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on September 30, 2018. (Scott Cunningham/Getty Images, File)
Carter also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Additionally, he is a member of Elders, a group of independent, apolitical world leaders whose members include South African President Nelson Mandela, Irish President Mary Robinson, and the United Nations Secretary-General. – General Kofi Annan.
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Carter, who served as a deacon at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, enjoyed fishing, running, and woodworking in his spare time.
Carter is survived by four children, 11 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
This article was written by a FOX News staff member.
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