Former United States President Jimmy Carter, who occupied the White House between 1977 and 1981 and won the Nobel Peace Prize, died this Sunday at the age of 100, as confirmed by his son.
Carter, who was at home in hospice care and voted in the last election, had been treated for an aggressive form of melanoma skin cancer, with tumors that had spread to the liver and brain.
His death was confirmed by his son without giving more details, according to The Washington Post. “Our founder and former president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family,” the Carter Center published in a statement.
Considered one of the most progressive leaders the United States has ever had, Carter saw his mandate reduced to four years (1977-1981) due to the American hostage crisis in Iran, an episode that deeply wounded the country’s morale and caused the More conservatives will forever label him as a weak leader.
Time put things in their place and his presidency came to be considered positively, to the point that he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
“My life after the White House has been the most rewarding for me,” Carter admitted at a press conference in August 2015. Ambitious, competitive and with a strong sense of morality, Carter set a new standard for life after of the presidency, by using his political capital to continue influencing the public life of the country and generating changes in the world.
His inseparable wife Rosalynn, to whom he was married for 69 years and died in November 2023, recalled that Carter woke her up one night in 1982 and told her: “We have to invent a place like Camp David,” the presidential residence where he negotiated the peace between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
A few months later, the Carter Center was born, which fights against conflict, poverty, disease and hunger in the world. “What Rosalynn and I wanted to do was fill gaps, solve problems that others didn’t want or couldn’t deal with,” Carter explained in an interview with the magazine Rolling Stone in 2011.
According to one of his White House advisers, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s most characteristic trait was his drive to solve intractable challenges without thinking about their duration or political cost. It was that attribute that sealed the most important achievement of his presidency after negotiating for twelve days with Israel and Egypt, and that made him bet from the Carter Center on long-term causes.
Born in 1924 in a town of just 600 inhabitants called Plains, Carter grew up on a peanut and cotton farm in the poorest area of the southern state of Georgia; and his father, Earl, “was a segregationist, like all the other men in the county,” as the former president acknowledged in an interview in July (2015).
The one who most influenced his character was his mother Lillian, a nurse who disdained the racial prejudices of her environment. In 1946 he graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, married Rosalynn and joined the Navy, but in 1953 he returned to Plains to take charge of the family farm.
