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.
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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.
Mr. Carter, the longest-living president in American history, died nearly three months after he turned 100, becoming the first former commander in chief to reach the century mark. In August, his grandson, Jason Carter, told the Democratic National Convention that the former president was “holding on” and “though his body may be weak tonight, his spirit is as strong as ever” and he “can’t wait to vote for Kamala Harris.”
The former president cast his absentee ballot for her in mid-October after making his final public appearance on his birthday when he was rolled out to his yard in a wheelchair to watch a flyover of military jets in his honor. Other than interludes in the White House and the Georgia governor’s mansion, he and his wife, the former first lady Rosalynn Carter, lived in the same simple home in Plains for most of their adult lives and each of them passed away there, Mrs. Carter in November 2023.
A lifelong farmer who still worked with his hands building houses for the poor well into his 90s, Mr. Carter had long defied death and outlived not only his wife but his vice president, most of his cabinet, key aides and allies as well as the Republican president he defeated and the Republican challenger who later defeated him. Over the years, he beat back a series of health crises, including a bout with the skin cancer melanoma, which spread to his liver and brain, and repeated falls, one giving him a broken hip.
The Carter Center announced in February 2023 that Mr. Carter, “after a series of short hospital stays,” had decided to forgo further life-prolonging medical treatment and would receive hospice care at home.
News that he seemed to be in his final days prompted a wave of tributes and remembrances of his extended and eventful life but even then he upended expectations by hanging on for 22 months. He lived long enough to bid farewell to Mrs. Carter, who died at 96r, culminating a marriage of 77 years.
Jimmy Carter left office in 1981 as one of the most unpopular presidents in modern times, defeated for re-election and seemingly doomed to be remembered by posterity as a failed commander in chief with little to show for his four years in office.
“History will treat him more kindly than the American people did on Nov. 4,” Clark M. Clifford, the longtime consigliere of presidents and one of the capital’s so-called wise men, pronounced at the time. Then, having softened the blow, he added the shiv: “But there was nothing epochal about his presidency, nothing really remarkable.”
By the time Mr. Carter died on Sunday more than 40 years later, though, the first part of Mr. Clifford’s judgment appeared more salient. While not epochal, Mr. Carter’s presidency is now treated more kindly by many historians, a reassessment fueled not just by what he did in office but what he did after leaving office. Mr. Carter is still held out as a totem of failure by Republicans, still an attack line against Democrats like President Biden. But the passions of the 1970s have cooled, and the 39th president’s reputation has been helped to some extent by the travails of those who followed him in the Oval Office.
Mr. Carter has not climbed the ranks into the pantheon of great presidents by any means, but he is no longer consigned near the bottom of the heap either. In surveys of historians by Siena College, Mr. Carter rose from 33rd place in 1982 shortly after he left the White House to 24th place in 2022. With a half-dozen more presidents now included in the assessments, that means Mr. Carter, who was judged better than just six other presidents four decades ago, is deemed above 21 other presidents today.
“Most citizens will concede that he had an admirable post-presidential life filled with good works, but they quickly add that his presidency was a failure,” said Kai Bird, author of “The Outlier,” a fresh look at Mr. Carter’s presidency published in 2021. “Historians in recent years would disagree. His presidency was in fact quite consequential.”
Mr. Carter brokered peace at Camp David between Israel and Egypt, established formal diplomatic relations with China and won ratification of the treaties turning over control of the Panama Canal to Panama. He tried to move the country beyond the traumas of the previous decade, pardoning Vietnam War draft dodgers and ushering in post-Watergate reforms.
He created the Departments of Education and Energy and tackled energy policy in a way that foreshadowed some of the issues with fossil fuel and climate change now dominating national discussion. He appointed Paul A. Volcker, the Federal Reserve chairman who ultimately tamed inflation, and began the deregulation of industries and military buildup that later defined Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
None of that, of course, overshadows the setbacks of his tenure — the economic tumult, the gas lines, the so-called malaise that he diagnosed in American society or of course the Iran hostage crisis that dominated the final 444 days of his presidency. He was for years a punchline on late-night television and a pariah at Democratic conventions, the model Democratic successors hoped to avoid.
But a slew of recent books and movies have offered a more complex picture to a new generation with no firsthand memory of that era, including Mr. Kai’s account, Jonathan Alter’s “His Very Best” in 2020, and “President Carter,” the 2018 book by Stuart E. Eizenstat, Mr. Carter’s former domestic policy adviser. Coinciding with those volumes were a pair of films, “Carterland,” released in 2021 by Will and Jim Pattiz, two young directors born a decade after Mr. Carter’s presidency, and “Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President,” Mary Wharton’s entertaining documentary that aired in 2020 looking at his relationship with musicians like Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers.
Amid that reassessment, the public has taken a more generous attitude as well. In a YouGov poll in 2021, 45 percent of Americans held a favorable view of Mr. Carter, compared with 32 percent who thought of him unfavorably. That put him essentially in the middle of the pack among recent presidents, just behind Mr. Biden (47 percent favorable), tied with Bill Clinton and slightly above George H.W. Bush (44 percent) and George W. Bush (43 percent).
Historical revisionism of past presidents is common, of course. Dwight D. Eisenhower was often dismissed as an amiable but lazy golf player until Fred Greenstein’s 1982 book “The Hidden-Hand Presidency” depicted a craftier player pulling strings behind the scenes. Likewise, Harry S. Truman left office deeply unpopular only to be rehabilitated by David McCullough’s magisterial 1992 biography, much as Ron Chernow reshaped thinking about Ulysses S. Grant with his 2017 biography.
By contrast, once-iconic American presidents have lost their luster in recent years. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the revered early titans of the Democratic Party, have fallen in grace as more attention has focused on their status as slave owners. Woodrow Wilson, the longtime hero of progressive idealists, is increasingly remembered for his support of segregation and suppression of dissent, as illustrated in Adam Hochschild’s 2022 book, “American Midnight.”
Funerals are often a time for sanding off the harsher edges of presidential legacies. By the time Gerald R. Ford died in 2006, many critics had changed their minds about him, agreeing that he was right after all to pardon Richard M. Nixon to move the country past Watergate. When George H.W. Bush died, many called him perhaps the most successful one-term president for his leadership at the end of the Cold War.
Most striking perhaps was Mr. Nixon, who spent the 20 years after being driven from office laboring to restore his legacy with a series of foreign policy books reminding the world of his diplomatic achievements. When he died in 1994, he was granted a form of absolution at his funeral by none other than Mr. Clinton, a Democrat whose wife had worked on the House committee investigating Watergate. “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close,” Mr. Clinton declared.
Former President Donald J. Trump has also helped some presidents. Mr. Reagan and George W. Bush, both loathed by liberals for years, have often been cited more approvingly by Democrats than Republicans in recent years as contrasts to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Carter, who died at 100, had more time to reshape public perception than any of his predecessors, living longer than every former president in American history. His post-presidential work on human rights, conflict resolution, election monitoring and disease control, plus the houses he built for Habitat for Humanity, reminded Americans of what they admired about him rather than what they did not.
“Jimmy Carter ran for president as an outsider, and when he left the office, he returned to that same status,” said Lawrence Wright, author of “Thirteen Days in September,” about the Camp David accords. “He lived simply, in his home in Plains, Ga., and teaching Sunday school at the Maranatha Baptist Church. His long record of public engagement has encouraged a much more favorable view of his presidency.”
Still, however admirable Mr. Carter’s post-presidency may have been, some historians argue that nothing new has emerged to change the assessment of his time in office. “It’s not that we’ve discovered some secret memos or programs that actually exceeded expectations,” said Alvin S. Felzenberg, author of “The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn’t),” which ranked presidents. “That’s why I don’t change my view very much. We knew all that when he came out of office.”
Mr. Felzenberg, who placed Mr. Carter 29th out of 43 he rated, said Mr. Carter deserves his due without his legacy being artificially inflated. “I put him in a class like John Quincy Adams and William Howard Taft and a few other presidents who had the character and made their contributions and were great Americans and noble characters but maybe not great presidents,” he said. “I think that’s a fair way to look at it.”
Mr. Bird agreed that Mr. Carter’s personal qualities helped him stand out even as his accomplishments were debated. “Historians now view him as the most decent politician to occupy the White House in decades and certainly the most intelligent and hard-working president in the 20th century,” he said. “But perhaps that is a low bar.”
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