The office of the former president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, on Sunday confirmed his death. The 39th president who dedicated his life after he left office to brokering international peace died at age 100. Carter, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his human rights work around the world, had been in hospice care since February 2023 at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he lived with his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter who died on Nov. 19, 2023. Carter was the first U.S. president to reach his 100th birthday. In October, for Carter’s 100th birthday, President Joe Biden recognized him in a direct-to-camera birthday message shared with CBS News, saying: “Mr. President, you’ve always been a moral force for our nation and the world. I recognized that as a young senator. That’s why I supported you so early. You’re a voice of courage, conviction, compassion, and most of all, a beloved friend of Jill and me and our family.” Biden said he would order an official state funeral to be held in Washington. In a proclamation he issued later Sunday formally announcing Carter’s death, Biden declared Jan. 9 to be a national day of mourning. A Georgia native and a Democrat, Carter was elected president in 1976, defeating the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. Carter served one term before he lost re-election in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, his bid hobbled by an inability to resolve the Iran hostage crisis, a standoff that lasted 444 days. Only 56 years old when he left the Oval Office, Carter would spend the next four decades focusing on good works that made him an almost universally revered figure, sometimes called America’s greatest ex-president — a sharp contrast to his relatively low For years, he and his wife could be found on construction sites hoisting beams and pounding nails to build homes for the disadvantaged with the nonprofit organization Habitat for Humanity. Around the world, Carter was recognized after his presidency for his tireless work promoting peaceful resolutions to conflict and advancing democracy, human rights and social justice, primarily through the Carter Center, which he and the former first lady established at Emory University in Atlanta in 1982. Working through the center, the Carters traveled to developing countries to monitor elections, help build democratic institutions, lobby for victims of human rights abuses and spearhead efforts to eradicate diseases. Many historians credited the Carter administration with having been at the forefront of events that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Carter and his hard-line national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, used human rights to put Moscow on the ideological defensive, and their forceful support for Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement in Poland helped fuel a revolutionary wave in Eastern Europe that eventually sparked the fall of communism. But Carter was often characterized as an ineffectual micromanager whose efforts to rally the American people during a time of economic recession and energy shortages landed with a thud. He was mocked for wearing sweaters in the White House to encourage Americans to turn down their thermostats in the winter to conserve energy, and his declaration in a nationally televised address in July 1979 that the United States was suffering a “crisis of confidence” was widely panned, given that it came after 2½ years into his leadership. It came to be known as Carter’s “malaise” speech, even though he never used the word. Reagan would present himself as the sunny alternative to Carter’s scolding demeanor to win the 1980 election in a landslide. In addition, Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow in protest of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan was popular domestically, but it remains controversial among historians, with some characterizing it as a missed opportunity to open warmer relations with Moscow and others declaring that it led to a decade of intensified Soviet repression before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The final year of Carter’s presidency was dogged by the Iran hostage crisis, which began Nov. 4, 1979, when Iranian students took more than 60 U.S. hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran after Carter had allowed the deposed shah of Iran to receive medical treatment in the United States on humanitarian grounds. In April 1980, Carter sent an elite rescue team into the embassy compound, but a desert sandstorm crippled several of the military helicopters. One of them crashed into a transport plane on takeoff, killing eight U.S. service members and leading Carter to abort the mission. The debacle prompted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to order the hostages scattered among numerous locations to prevent another rescue attempt, and it gave him more ammunition with which to denounce the United States as “the Great Satan.” An official investigation into the rescue attempt found major deficiencies in planning, command and control, and it identified critical shortcomings in communication and coordination among the U.S. military branches, bolstering perceptions of Carter as a weak leader and leading to the passage of the Goldwater–Nichols Act, which ordered a top-to-bottom reorganization of the Defense Department in 1986. Fifty-two of the hostages would remain captive for 444 days, each day ticked off by Walter Cronkite at When Carter reached his 100th birthday in October, his grandson Jason Carter told The Journal-Constitution that he had said he wanted to hang on until November to cast his vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. Carter was diagnosed with melanoma in 2015, a virulent form of skin cancer that had spread to his liver and his brain. He underwent experimental treatment with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, also known as Keytruda, and a few months later he announced that doctors had ended his treatments after having found no signs of tumors. Carter spent much of the second half of 2019, right before the pandemic hit, in the hospital for brain surgery, infections and two falls that resulted in a broken hip and pelvis. He was back teaching Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church two weeks after he fractured his pelvis. He told the congregation at the time that since doctors told him in 2015 that cancer had spread to his brain, he had been “absolutely and completely at ease with death.”
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