{"id":120874,"date":"2024-12-31T11:33:50","date_gmt":"2024-12-31T11:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/jimmy-carter-39th-us-president-and-noted-humanitarian-has-died-usa-today\/"},"modified":"2024-12-31T11:33:50","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T11:33:50","slug":"jimmy-carter-39th-us-president-and-noted-humanitarian-has-died-usa-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/jimmy-carter-39th-us-president-and-noted-humanitarian-has-died-usa-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Carter, 39th US president and noted humanitarian, has died – USA TODAY"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former President Jimmy Carter<\/a>, honored more widely for his humanitarian work around the globe after his presidency than for his White House tenure during a tumultuous time, has died. He was 100.
\u201cMy father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,\u201d said Chip Carter, the former president\u2019s son. \u201cMy brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs.\u00a0The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs.\u201d
Carter died Sunday in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. In November 2023, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, also passed away<\/a> in the modest house they built together in 1961, when he had taken over his father’s peanut warehouse business and was only beginning to consider a political career.
In February 2023, he had announced he was ending medical intervention and moving to hospice care.<\/a>
Jason Carter\u00a0had visited his grandparents<\/a> at the time of the announcement and said “They are at peace and\u00a0\u2013 as always\u00a0\u2013 their home is full of love,” he posted on Twitter.\u00a0
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At peace, perhaps, but still political: The former president vowed he wanted to cast a ballot<\/a> for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
After serving a single term in the White House, Jimmy Carter became one of the most durable figures in modern American politics. Evicted from the White House at age 56, he would hold the status of\u00a0former president longer than anyone in U.S. history, and in 2019\u00a0he surpassed George H. W. Bush as the nation’s oldest living ex-president.\u00a0<\/a>
Carter remained remarkably active in charitable causes through\u00a0a series of health challenges during his final years, including a bout with brain cancer<\/a>\u00a0in 2015. He was admitted to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta in November 2019 for a procedure to relieve pressure on his brain<\/a>, a consequence of bleeding that followed a series of falls.\u00a0A few months earlier, in May, he had undergone surgery after breaking his hip.
In the White House from 1977 to 1981, Carter negotiated the landmark Camp David peace accords<\/a> between Israel and Egypt, transferred the Panama Canal to Panamanian ownership, dramatically expanded public lands in Alaska and established formal diplomatic relations with the People\u2019s Republic of China.
But the 39th president governed at a time of soaring inflation<\/a> and gasoline shortages, and his failure to secure the release of Americans held hostage by Iran helped cost him the second term he sought.
\u201cHe\u2019s never going to be ranked as a great president; he\u2019s middling as a president,\u201d said historian Douglas Brinkley, author of a 1998 book on Carter, “The Unfinished Presidency.” \u201cBut as an American figure, he\u2019s a giant.\u201d
After losing his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan,\u00a0and until well\u00a0into his 90s, Carter continued working as an observer of elections in developing countries, building houses through the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity<\/a> and teaching Sunday school<\/a> at the tiny Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, his hometown.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, 22 years after he\u00a0left the\u00a0White House.
“I can’t deny that I was a better ex-president than I was a president,” he said with a wry laugh at a breakfast with reporters in Washington in 2005.\u00a0
“My former boss was humiliated when he lost in 1980; he felt he let himself and the American people down,” David Rubenstein, a young White House staffer for Carter who became founder of the Carlyle Group and a billionaire philanthropist, told USA TODAY in an interview in\u00a02019.
“For a long time, he was basically the symbol of a weak president and a terrible person. And today, 40-some years later, he’s seen as a very incredible person who has had many good things he did, though he didn’t get reelected,” Rubenstein said.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains\u00a0to Earl Carter, a peanut warehouser who had served in the Georgia Legislature, and \u201cMiss Lillian\u201d Carter, a registered nurse and formidable figure\u00a0who joined the Peace Corps when she was in her 60s.
He grew up on a peanut farm in Plains, then graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. In the years after World War II, he served in the Navy’s submarine service in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. After doing graduate work in nuclear physics, he became a pioneer in the introduction of nuclear power in submarines.
When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and took over operation of the family peanut farms with Rosalynn, his hometown sweetheart.<\/a> After a rough early patch, the business flourished, and Carter became increasingly active in community affairs and politics.
During two terms in the Georgia state Senate, he gained a reputation as an independent voice who attacked wasteful government practices and helped repeal laws designed to discourage Black\u00a0Americans from voting.
But in 1966, he lost a race for governor to segregationist Lester Maddox in an election\u00a0that analysts said reflected a Southern backlash against national civil rights legislation enacted in 1964 and 1965. In a second bid for governor in 1970, Carter minimized his appearances before Black audiences and won endorsements from some segregationists.
After he was elected, though, Carter declared that the era of segregation in Georgia was over, and he was hailed as a symbol of a new, more inclusive South.
Still, he was an unlikely presidential contender. When he launched his bid for the 1976 Democratic nomination, the former one-term governor was so obscure outside the Peach State that \u201cJimmy who?\u201d became a campaign trope. He perfected the meticulous cultivation of voters in Iowa, and his unexpected victory in the opening presidential caucuses there provided a launching pad that long-shot contenders tried to emulate for decades.
The Watergate scandal<\/a> boosted\u00a0Carter’s prospects. In the aftermath of President Richard Nixon\u2019s decision to resign in 1974 rather than\u00a0be impeached, Carter pitched himself to voters as an outsider who would reject Washington\u2019s unsavory ways. \u201cI\u2019ll never lie to you,\u201d he told them.
In 1976, he narrowly defeated President Gerald Ford, whose campaign was damaged by verbal missteps and by controversy over his decision to pardon Nixon.
Four years later, Carter would be ousted himself. He faced a damaging challenge\u00a0for the Democratic nomination from the left by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and then a landslide defeat in the general election from the right by Reagan.
The former California governor tapped into\u00a0discontent with Carter\u2019s leadership. \u201cAre you better off than you were four years ago?\u201d Reagan asked voters in the iconic closing of their only campaign debate.
Carter\u2019s defenders argue that he was a better president than generally recognized.
“I think that he is the most underappreciated modern president that we’ve had,” said Stuart Eizenstat,\u00a0a veteran Washington official and ambassador who was Carter\u2019s chief domestic policy adviser in the White House.
“The reason for that is the lingering memories of his presidency are negative ones\u00a0\u2013 gasoline lines, high interest rates and inflation, the Iran hostage crisis, the Desert One failed rescue effort\u00a0\u2013 and those totally obscure a really remarkable set of accomplishments both at home and abroad, which in many ways didn’t materialize until after he left office.”
Eizenstat, author of “President Carter: The White House Years,” published in 2018, said Carter’s policies and appointments laid the groundwork for a stronger economy, energy independence, environmental protection, business innovation in transportation and more.
On foreign policy, Carter painstakingly negotiated the 1978 Camp David Accords, a historic agreement between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat that led\u00a0to a formal peace treaty between the two countries the next year.\u00a0
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But he stumbled when he came to the politics of the job.
Despite having the advantage of a solidly Democratic Congress, many of his legislative proposals, including a consumer protection bill, stalled. The no-backroom-deals approach that helped him win the White House contributed to his difficulties in actually governing once he got there. He was mocked for charging members of Congress for their breakfast when invited to meet with him at the White House\u00a0and for eliminating alcohol from most evening events.
He was seen by some, then and later, as prickly and sanctimonious.
Meanwhile, unemployment rose,\u00a0interest rates for home mortgages climbed into double digits and\u00a0Americans found themselves waiting in lines to buy gas in an oil crisis created by OPEC, the powerful international energy cartel.\u00a0In a speech to the nation in July 1979, Carter described a \u201ccrisis of confidence” among the American people. Although he never said the word, it became short-handed as\u00a0his \u201cmalaise\u201d speech.
“He lacked the political and managerial skills needed to make best use of the office he held,” said Robert McClure, a political scientist at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
Most damaging of all was the Iranian hostage crisis.
Carter had agreed to allow Iran’s deposed shah, a former U.S. ally who was living in exile, to receive cancer treatment in the United States. In protest, Iranian Islamist radicals overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans captive. The confrontation, which\u00a0began on Nov. 4, 1979,\u00a0would end only as Reagan was being inaugurated 444 days later.
Carter chose diplomacy and economic sanctions over military action. He halted oil imports from Iran and froze Iranian assets in the U.S. He severed diplomatic relations with Iran and imposed a full economic embargo on the country.
Finally, he approved a top-secret military mission to free the hostages, but it ended in catastrophe.\u00a0Three helicopters developed engine trouble in a remote staging area in\u00a0the Iranian desert, forcing the mission to be aborted. Eight U.S. troops were killed when a helicopter and a plane collided while forces were being withdrawn.
It all added to the impression that Carter was out of his depth.
“The hostage crisis left a bitter taste in voters’ mouths, which Carter was never able to overcome,” said Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar who worked on Carter’s transition team when he was president-elect.
On the day of Reagan’s inauguration, Jan. 20, 1981, Iran agreed to accept $8 billion in frozen assets and a promise by the U.S. to lift trade sanctions in exchange for the release of the hostages. Minutes after Carter’s successor took the oath of office, the hostages were freed.
Carter left the White House, but he didn\u2019t retire.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter established the Carter Center in Atlanta, their home base for decades as they worked on global health and democracy. He helped negotiate an end to the long civil war in Nicaragua between the Contra rebels and the Sandinistas. He met with North Korean leaders to try to end its nuclear weapons program. He mediated conflicts\u00a0in Ethiopia, Liberia, Haiti, Bosnia, Sudan, Uganda and Venezuela. He led dozens of delegations of international observers to various countries to help assure elections were free and fair.
For decades, the Carter Center also led an international campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease, a devastating tropical ailment that in 1986 afflicted an estimated 3.5 million people in Africa and Asia. In 2020, it was on the verge of eradication; just 27 cases were reported in six African countries.\u00a0
For a week each year, the Carters\u00a0volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, a charitable group that renovates and builds homes for poor people around the world.
He also wrote more than 30 books \u2013 controversial ones on the Palestinian territories and the Middle East and less controversial ones on Christmas memories and fly-fishing. He published a collection of his poems and a collection of his paintings. Again and again, he returned to writing about the lessons and demands of his Christian faith.
Poking at the president:<\/strong>Carter pokes fun at Trump in\u00a0speech at Liberty University<\/a>
Carter, who\u00a0attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, at times criticized the 45th president. In June 2019, at a Carter Center conference in suburban Virginia, he questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s election, citing allegations of Russian interference that were later called into question.
Trump responded at a news conference by calling Carter a “nice man, terrible president.”
But there were also times when Carter reached out to Trump.\u00a0On the 40th anniversary of the normalization of U.S.-China relations, in 2019, he sent Trump a letter offering advice on managing that relationship. Carter said the\u00a0phone conversation that followed was the first time the two men had spoken.\u00a0\u00a0
On hiring:<\/strong>Carter calls Trump’s decision to hire Bolton ‘a disaster for our country’<\/a>
Together for charity:<\/strong>5 living ex-presidents to headline hurricane relief concert<\/a>
In 2002, Carter\u00a0was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that supporters thought he had deserved years earlier, when it had been presented to Begin and Sadat. The Nobel committee honored Carter “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development.”
“The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices,” Carter said in accepting the prestigious award. “God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes \u2013 and we must.”
Friendly skies:<\/strong>Jimmy Carter shakes hands of every passenger on his flight<\/a>
When he left the White House, Carter moved back home to Plains.\u00a0Unlike most other modern presidents, he didn’t choose to make money by delivering high-priced speeches or serving\u00a0on corporate boards. But he\u00a0did regularly speak to hundreds of visitors who would gather for his Sunday school class at Maranatha Baptist Church.
In\u00a0November 2019, he told those gathered that he didn’t fear death.
“It’s incompatible for any Christian not to believe in life after death,” Carter, then 95, told them, although he acknowledged he had wrestled with doubts throughout\u00a0his life. In his prayers, he said, “I didn’t ask God to let me live, but I just asked God to give me a proper attitude toward death. And I found that I was absolutely and completely at ease with death.”\u00a0
In July 2021, he and his wife hosted a 75th anniversary party in Plains<\/a> attended by about 300 friends, family members and fellow pols, among them Bill and Hillary Clinton. Carter, his fragility\u00a0apparent, made a point of greeting the guests at each table for what many of them assumed would be the last time they saw him.\u00a0
“He was not a self-promoter in the White House or afterwards, and I think that\u00a0hurt, because it leaves all the sour tastes from the failures and didn’t allow the positives to shine through,” Eizenstat said. When Eizenstat visited Carter in Plains in 2018, Carter told his former aide he was comfortable with letting history judge.
Historic photo:<\/strong>George H.W. Bush, George W. and Laura Bush, the Clintons, the Obamas and Melania Trump huddle for a picture<\/a>
As he approached his 90th birthday, Carter mused about his legacy in an interview with USA TODAY.
“One is peace,” he said. “I kept peace when I was president and I try to promote peace between other people and us, and between countries that were potentially at war, between Israel and Egypt for instance. And human rights. … I think human rights and peace are the two things I’d like to be remembered for \u2013 as well as being a good grandfather.”
Contributing: Richard Benedetto<\/em><\/p>\n

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Former President Jimmy Carter, honored more widely for his humanitarian work around the globe after his presidency than for his White House tenure during a tumultuous time, has died. He was 100.\u201cMy father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,\u201d said Chip Carter, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":120875,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-120874","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}