Jimmy Carter, longest-lived US president, dies at 100 | Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, a broker of peace in the Middle East and a tireless advocate for global health and human rights, has died, it was announced Sunday. He was 100 years old.

Carter, a Democrat from Georgia, was the longest-living president in U.S. history. He served only one term in the White House and was soundly defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1981. But Carter spent the following decades focused on international relations and human rights, efforts that won him the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

Carter had previously had a number of hospital stays, with his family announcing on February 18 last year that he had decided to “spend his remaining time at home”, in hospice care and with his loved ones. The decision had “the full support of his family and medical team,” a family statement said.

Carter’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, died last November, two days after she transitioned into hospice care. The former first lady was 96 years old. The couple married in 1946 and the former president attended their memorial service, traveling from the couple’s longtime home in Plains, Georgia, to Glenn Memorial Church in Atlanta.

The Carters’ eldest grandson, Jason Carter, said in a media interview in June this year that the former president was not awake every day but was “experiencing the world as best he could” as his days were coming to an end.

Carter took office in 1977 as “Jimmy Who?”, a one-time Georgia governor and devout Christian whose ignorance of Washington was viewed as a virtue after the war years of Watergate and Vietnam.

However, hopes for the Carter presidency were dashed by economic and foreign policy crises that began with high unemployment and double-digit inflation and culminated in the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. An ongoing energy crisis caused the price of oil to triple from 1978 to 1980, leading to queues at US gas stations.

Such struggles belied early promises. In 1977, Carter secured a treaty that had eluded his predecessors, returning control of the Panama Canal to his host country. In 1978, at Camp David, Carter brought together Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in an agreement that would create a peace that endures to this day.

Carter’s unsuccessful attempts to slow the economic downturn led Republicans to nickname him “Jimmy Hoover,” after the Depression-era president. But as Carter prepared to run for re-election in 1980, it was the Iran hostage crisis that most clearly hurt Americans. Television host Ted Koppel devoted his show five days a week to the plight of 52 Americans held in Tehran. A failed rescue attempt killed eight U.S. soldiers and raised doubts about Carter’s leadership.

Reagan, a former governor of California, won 44 states. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, hours after Carter left office, leading to speculation that Republicans had struck a deal with Iran.

Largely unpopular at the time, Carter not only became the longest-living president but also had one of the most distinguished post-presidential careers. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of tireless commitment” to human rights and peacemaking. His humanitarian work was carried out through the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which he co-founded with Rosalynn in the early 1980s.

Carter traveled the world as a peace ambassador, election observer and public health advocate. He visited North Korea in 1994 and Cuba in 2002. The Carter Center is credited with helping to cure river blindness, trachoma and Guinea worm disease, which rose from millions of cases in Africa and Asia in 1986 to a handful of cases today increase.

Carter was a critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, drone warfare, warrantless government surveillance and the Guantánamo Bay prison. He earned both admiration and loathing for his commitment to Middle East peace, calling for a two-state solution in speeches and books including “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

He met Shimon Peres, Israel’s then-president, on a trip to Jerusalem in 2012, but senior Israeli leaders generally avoided Carter after the book’s publication. As recently as 2015, requests to meet the prime minister and the president were rejected.

Carter played a central role in promoting Habitat for Humanity, which provides housing for the needy, and was an alternative energy pioneer, installing solar panels in the White House. (Reagan removed them.)

The Carters had four children and several grandchildren, including James Carter IV, who is credited with playing a crucial role in the 2012 election when he discovered a video of Mitt Romney denigrating 47% of Americans.

James Earl Carter Jr. grew up in Plains, Georgia, a town of fewer than 1,000 people about 150 miles south of Atlanta. A graduate of the US Naval Academy, he rose to the rank of lieutenant and worked on the emerging nuclear submarine program. After his father’s death in 1953, he began farming peanuts. He was elected to the Georgia Senate and won the governor’s office in 1970. He called on the state to move beyond racial segregation.

Carter’s mix of moral authority and popular charisma led to moments of unusually open national dialogue. In a 1979 speech, he spoke for half an hour, semi-spontaneously, about a “crisis of confidence” – “a fundamental threat to American democracy…that is almost invisible in ordinary ways.” Americans had fallen into a cult of “indulgence and consumption,” he said, only to learn “that the accumulation of material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives without self-confidence and meaning.”

The speech hit the nerve of the times: Carter’s popularity rose by 11 points. But after Reagan and others reframed the speech as a self-congratulatory exploration of personal malaise, the speech became a liability.

James Fallows, a former Carter speechwriter, wrote in 1979 that the president suffered from an inability to make a splash but “in the Lord’s judgment would certainly eclipse most other leaders.”

Carter outlived them both Presidents who followed him, Reagan and George HW Bush. He will be buried in Georgia.