Jimmy Carter, 39th president, humanitarian and Nobel laureate, dies at 100

Former President Jimmy Carter, a former peanut farmer and Navy officer who went on to become the longest-living American president in history, died Sunday, according to The Carter Center. He was 100.

Carter's swift political ascent led to a single tumultuous term in the White House. But he went on to chart a prolific postscript as a statesman, human rights champion and Nobel laureate.

"My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love," Chip Carter, the former president's son, said in a statement. "My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The 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."

Carter spent close to the last year and a half of his life in home hospice care, announcing through his center in early 2023 that he had decided to discontinue medical intervention.

Until the last few years of their lives, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, were active with their advocacy organization The Carter Center, built houses with Habitat for Humanity and taught Sunday school lessons at his local church.

Shortly after he entered home hospice care, The Carter Center also announced that Rosalynn had dementia. The couple celebrated their 77th wedding anniversary that summer, far exceeding the record among U.S. presidents. Rosalynn died in November 2023 at the age of 96.

WATCH: Faith, service and duty at center of memorial for Rosalynn Carter

Carter's signature achievement as president — the Camp David Accords — soothed a bitter rivalry between Israel and Egypt. Domestically, he made strides in overhauling education and environmental policy, but his presidency was also dogged by economic woes, energy shortages and a hostage crisis in Iran.

Four turbulent years after he unseated President Gerald Ford, he was toppled by Ronald Reagan, who wooed voters away from Carter-era austerity with California glamor and a movie star's charm.

Still, despite the landslide defeat, Carter remained a force in American politics and was widely admired in his role of elder statesman. He founded The Carter Center with Rosalynn in their home state of Georgia to advance human rights, public health and peace; and received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work with the center.

The Carters' love story inspired generations of Americans, grandson Jason Carter recalled at her funeral last year. "I just think none of us really understand what it's like for him right now" to live life without her, he told Southern Living months later.

In an interview on the PBS News Hour to mark their 75th anniversary, the former president shared what he was most proud of during his time in office.

"We kept the peace, and we obeyed the law, and we told the truth, and we honored human rights. Those were things that were important to me," he told anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff.

The pride of Plains

Carter was not groomed for power and influence. He rose to the White House from a Depression-era childhood in and near Plains, Georgia, then a humble farming town of just over 600 residents. James Earl Carter Jr. was born on Oct. 1, 1924, to Earl and Lillian, a nurse.

The family's farm, located two-and-a-half miles from the town center, focused on peanuts and cotton as its cash crops. Carter, the oldest of four children, would help his father tend to the fields.

Challenges were mounting for cotton farmers back then. Carter's 2001 memoir, "An Hour Before Daylight," described how the region's cotton business had been drying up, especially as the Great Depression dragged on. "[T]he Depression years," he wrote, "were marked by a sense of frustration and even despair in our region."

But the story was different for his family's peanut business, which he said benefited from surging demand.

"There was a rapid shift toward dependence on peanuts while I was growing up," he wrote, "and this was the crop that made the greatest impact on my life, both when I was a child and much later, when I returned home with a wife and family."

WATCH: Why Jimmy Carter may be the most misunderstood president in American history

Carter's education began at the local Plains High School, which was segregated at the time. He left his hometown afterward to take college classes in Americus, a neighboring city, and in Atlanta, before entering the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

It was during a visit home in 1945 — while Carter was still a midshipman — when he went on a first date with Rosalynn Smith, a close friend of his sister, Ruth. In an interview with PBS's American Experience for a 2002 documentary, Rosalynn said she was "thrilled to death" with how the date had gone; Jimmy told his mother the next morning, "She's the girl I want to marry." They wed the following year.

Carter — who was a newly commissioned Navy ensign on his wedding day — would soon rise to the rank of lieutenant, and be assigned to the nuclear submarine service. But his father's death in 1953 from pancreatic cancer brought the promising Navy officer back to Plains, and to his family's peanut farm. By then, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter had already had three sons: Jack, Chip and Jeff. (The Carters' daughter Amy wasn't born until 1967.)

Carter got a late start in politics, but he quickly made a career out of upsetting favorites. He upended his community's political scene in 1962 when he defeated the local Democratic Party's favorite for state Senate. Eight years later, he beat a former governor in the Democratic primary and easily won the general election.

As a little-known governor of a Southern state, Carter was written off when he launched his 1976 presidential campaign. But he capitalized on his no-name status, even using "Jimmy Who" in a TV ad.

His "Peanut Brigade" of volunteers helped propel him to that year's Democratic nomination, and into a general election fight with Ford. "There's an intensity of commitment to my campaign," he told the MacNeil/Lehrer Report, a predecessor to the PBS News Hour, in April 1976. "A depth of sacrifice among people who volunteer to go all the way to New Hampshire at their own expense, to give up their vacation time, to go back later to Wisconsin … Other candidates don't have this."

Carter held his own during the fall's first two debates, sparring with Ford over the economy, the energy crisis, the aftermath of Watergate and a myriad of other topics. But by then, an interview that Carter had done with Playboy magazine was already threatening to derail his presidential bid.

During the interview, he had discussed some of his most deeply held religious convictions, including about sin and human temptation. He admitted, "I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times."

"This is something that God recognizes I will do," he continued, "and I have done it — and God forgives me for it."

Carter's remarks pale in comparison to the comments and conduct of more recent presidents, but at the time many voters found his candor shocking, even disqualifying. Years later, he called the reaction to his comments a "devastating blow" to his campaign. When a moderator forced him to confront the misstep during that fall's third debate, he admitted: "If I should ever decide in the future to discuss my deep Christian beliefs and condemnation and sinfulness, I'll use another forum besides Playboy."

Carter's commanding lead in public opinion polls that summer evaporated, but in the end, he still swept the South, and held on in most of the Eastern states. It was just enough to win. Carter's margin of victory over Ford in the Electoral College — 57 votes — was the smallest since 1916.

'A beautiful new day'

"I think the sun's rising on a beautiful new day, a beautiful new spirit in this country, a beautiful new commitment for the future," Carter promised as he celebrated the election results. "I feel good about it."

It wasn't long, though, before he had to confront the challenges of that new day. The sputtering economy and the energy crisis were chief among them, but as Carter recalled at a 2010 forum in Washington, the Middle East was foremost on his mind.

He said that within a week of becoming president, he "was already working on a comprehensive peace in the Middle East … There had been four wars in the previous 25 years against Israel, all led by Egypt, the only Arab country with enough heft to really challenge Israel. And I wanted to bring peace between Israel and Egypt. That was my preeminent goal."

It was the motivation for the 1978 Camp David talks that Carter mediated between the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, and the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin. The two principals met face-to-face only sparingly during the staggering 13-day negotiation, leaving Carter to do most of the work through "shuttle diplomacy."

But those talks paid off — the resulting Camp David Accords laid the foundation for an Israel-Egypt peace that has lasted to this day. In the process, Carter clinched the landmark achievement of his presidency.

It was, however, one of just a few highlights for the Carter administration. While Carter saw some success with the rest of his agenda — creating a federal Department of Education, for example, and renormalizing diplomatic relations with China — high unemployment and unending lines at gas stations continued to weigh on the nation's mood.

By the summer of 1979, the mood had soured so much that Carter chose to deliver an extraordinary address from the Oval Office. His "malaise speech" — as it would be remembered despite him never actually using the term — included a plea to ward off "a fundamental threat to American democracy."

"I do not mean our political and civil liberties," he said. "They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America … It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will."

That November, America's will sustained yet another blow half a world away, when 66 Americans were taken hostage by Iranians who seized control of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The news was cheered by the country's new supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a committed adversary to the United States.

About two weeks into the crisis, 13 of the hostages were released. But there was little progress in the following months — and with that, little confidence that the other 53 hostages would ever be freed.

The swirl of trouble followed Carter into 1980, an election year. A monthslong primary fight with Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, a liberal stalwart, dragged on all the way to that year's Democratic convention, laying bare Carter's weak standing even within his own party heading into the fall. The Republicans, meanwhile, quickly fell in line behind Reagan, a battle-tested and charismatic conservative, while an Illinois Republican, Rep. John Anderson, jumped into the general election fray as a centrist independent.

A squabble between the Carter and Reagan campaigns over inviting Anderson to the debates led to only two being scheduled that fall. The first debate, between just Reagan and Anderson, saw both challengers chastising the absent incumbent; the second, the Carter-Reagan debate, gave life to two of the most memorable one-liners in debate history.

And Carter was on the wrong end of both.

One — "There you go again" — was a well-timed putdown by Reagan that stopped one of Carter's lines of attack in its tracks. The other — "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" — was Reagan's simple-but-devastating rebuke of the Carter presidency, just as the debate came to a close.

Years later, during an interview with the News Hour's former anchor and executive editor Jim Lehrer, Reagan called the debate a crucial episode in the campaign.

Carter laid the blame for his 1980 election struggles on the hostage crisis instead. Earlier that year, the U.S. military launched a mission, Operation Eagle Claw, to free the 53 captives in Iranian custody. But mechanical problems with the helicopters forced Carter to abort the rescue. Even more devastating, a helicopter crashed during the retreat, killing five U.S. airmen and three U.S. Marines.

In recent years, reporting has revealed that prominent Republicans, including Reagan's campaign manager and eventual CIA director William Casey, may have worked to sabotage a potential deal between Carter and the Iranians to free the hostages. Carter biographer Jonathan Alter told News Hour's Geoff Bennett that Carter and Rosalynn had "very strong suspicions" a deal had been brokered.

Whatever the reason, Carter was trounced on election night, winning just six states to Reagan's 44. And at 9:50 p.m., more than an hour before polls closed on the West Coast, Carter conceded.

"I promised you four years ago that I would never lie to you," he told supporters. "So I can't stand here tonight and say it doesn't hurt."

During Carter's final hours in office, the hostages were put on a plane bound for Algeria, which mediated the talks between the U.S. and Iran.

"It lasted, as most people still remember, 444 days," Carter recalled at the Washington forum in 2010. "So the last three days I was president, I never went to sleep, I never went to bed. I spent all of that time negotiating the release of the hostages."

The returning Americans took off for home mere minutes after Reagan was sworn in as president. Carter later called it "one of the happiest moments of my life. Every hostage came home safe and free."

Citizen Carter

In 1982, he and Rosalynn founded The Carter Center, their platform for advancing democracy, peace and health policy beyond America's borders. The work brought them to all corners of the globe, from Sudan, where they boosted efforts to curb hunger, to Bosnia, where they shepherded talks to end years of fighting.

"The best times of my life have been after the White House," he told the News Hour in 2000. "You have served a great nation — the greatest nation on Earth — and then you have freedom from political obligations. You have an almost unlimited menu of things that you can either choose or say no."

Indeed, Carter's adventurous agenda led to occasional run-ins with the official U.S. line. In 1994, the White House under President Bill Clinton balked when Carter reached a deal with North Korea to freeze its nuclear program. In 2002, Carter made waves during a visit to Cuba when he called for an end to the decades-long U.S. embargo. And through the 2000s, he was a vocal critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and of America's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

From time to time, the former president would also open up about domestic politics. While fielding questions at a Carter Center event, he revealed that he supported Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent, in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. He bemoaned the prospect of former President Donald Trump winning a second term in office and openly doubted whether he could have handled the duties of the presidency at the age of 80, a dig at the septuagenarians who ran for president in 2020.

READ MORE: Jimmy Carter was the longest-living president in U.S. history

His center, which has observed elections around the world for decades, also deployed monitors to observe Georgia's official audit of votes cast in the 2020 presidential contest — the first time it had taken such a step for any event related to a U.S. election.

Carter himself briefly returned to the campaign trail in 2014, around his 90th birthday, in the hopes that another Carter — his grandson Jason — might become Georgia's governor. But in the years after, his health became a bigger obstacle.

In the summer of 2015, it was cancer, which Carter said had spread to his liver and brain. His treatment, combining targeted radiation and a new immunotherapy drug, was a success and he announced that he was cancer-free before year's end.

He bounced back from injuries sustained in three falls at his Plains home in 2019, building homes with Habitat for Humanity a day after getting a black eye and stitches, and leading Sunday school at his local church within two weeks of a minor hip fracture.

Both he and Rosalynn had to dial back their activities during the coronavirus pandemic, choosing to skip Biden's inauguration.

He said in a 2022 interview with the News Hour that the physical challenges of their older years had brought the couple even closer. "That's one thing for which I'm thankful," Carter told Judy Woodruff.

The couple spent their last months together at home in The Plains.

After Rossalyn died, Carter attended her funeral, sitting in a wheelchair alongside former U.S. presidents and first ladies.

Carter had said that it was the bout with cancer that pushed him to come to terms with his own mortality. It was apparent during the news conference he held in the summer of 2015 to tell the world he was fighting the disease.

"I was, surprisingly, at ease," he admitted that day, long before he discovered he would live on for several more years. "You know, I've had a wonderful life, I had thousands of friends, and I've had an exciting and adventurous — gratifying — existence.