Former President Jimmy Carter, who at 98 is the longest-lived American president, has entered hospice care in Plains, Georgia, a statement from The Carter Center confirmed on Friday.
After a short hospital stay, the statement said, Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care rather than additional medical intervention.”
The statement said the 39th president had the full support of his medical team and his family, who “asked for privacy at this time and are grateful for the concern shown by his admirers.”
Carter was an unpopular governor of Georgia when he began his bid for the presidency before the 1976 election. He went on to defeat President Gerald R. Ford, capitalizing on being a Washington outsider after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that removed Richard Nixon from office in 1974.
Carter served a single term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, a landslide loss that eventually paved the way for global advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights through The Carter Center.
The former president and his wife, Rosalynn, 95, opened the center in 1982. Their work there earned them the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Jason Carter, the couple’s grandson who is now chairman of the Carter Center’s board of directors, said Saturday in a tweet that he “saw both of my grandparents yesterday. They are at peace and – as always – their home is full of love.”
Carter, who has lived most of his life in the Plains, traveled extensively in the ’80s and early ’90s, including annual trips to build homes with Habitat for Humanity and frequent trips abroad as part of the Carter Center’s election monitoring and efforts to wipe out Guinea. worm parasites in developing countries. But the former president’s health has declined during his 10-year career, particularly as the coronavirus pandemic has limited public appearances, including at his beloved Maranatha Baptist Church where he taught Sunday School lessons for decades before only visitors.
In August 2015, Carter had a small cancerous mass removed from his liver. The following year, Carter announced that he no longer needed treatment, as an experimental drug had eliminated the signs of cancer.
Carter celebrated his most recent birthday in October with family and friends in Plains, the small town where he and his wife, Rosalynn, were born in the years between World War I and the Great Depression.
The Carter Center last year marked 40 years of promoting the human rights agenda.
The center is a pioneer in election observation, monitoring at least 113 elections in Africa, Latin America, and Asia since 1989. In perhaps its most lauded public health effort, the organization recently announced that only 14 cases of Guinea worm disease have occurred in humans. reported throughout 2021, the result of a public health campaign to increase access to safe drinking water in Africa.
That’s a staggering decline since The Carter Center began leading global eradication efforts in 1986, when the parasitic disease infected 3.5 million people. Carter once said he hoped to live longer than the last Guinea worm parasite.
Carter was born on October 1, 1924, to a prominent family in rural south Georgia. He went on to the US Naval Academy during World War II and pursued a career as a Cold War Navy officer before returning to Plains, Georgia, with Rosalynn and her young family to take over the family peanut business after Earl Carter’s death in the 1950s.
A moderate Democrat, the younger Carter quickly rose from the local school board to the state Senate and then the Georgia governor’s office. He began the White House field as an underdog with outspoken Baptist traditions and technocratic plans reflecting his education as an engineer. He connected with many Americans because of his promise not to lie to the American people after Nixon’s humiliation and the US defeat in Southeast Asia.
“If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I don’t deserve to be your president,” Carter said often during the campaign.
Carter, who came of age politically during the civil rights movement, was the last Democratic presidential candidate to sweep the Deep South, before the region quickly shifted to Reagan and the Republicans in the next election.
He ruled amid the pressures of the Cold War, turbulent oil markets and social upheaval over racism, women’s rights and America’s global role.
Carter’s foreign policy wins included brokering Middle East peace by keeping Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the bargaining table for 13 days in 1978. The Camp David experience inspired the post-presidential center where Carter would create much of his legacy. At home, Carter partially deregulated the airline, railroad and trucking industries and established the departments of Education and Energy, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They designated millions of acres in Alaska as national parks or wildlife refuges. He elected record numbers of women and non-whites to federal office. He was never nominated to the Supreme Court, but he did appoint civil rights lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the nation’s second highest court, a position he promoted in 1993.
Carter also built on Nixon’s opening with China, and although he tolerated autocrats in Asia, he pushed Latin America from dictatorship to democracy.
But Carter’s election coalition fell apart over double inflation, gas lines and the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran. The darkest hour when eight Americans died in a failed hostage rescue in April 1980 helped ensure their defeat.
For years after his loss, Carter largely withdrew from electoral politics. Democrats were hesitant to embrace him. Republicans made him a punchline, a caricature of him as a hapless liberal. In fact, Carter ruled more as a technocrat, more progressive on race and gender equality than he campaigned for, but a budget hawk who often angered liberal Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who fought the primary war to destroy the sitting president in 1980.
Carter said after leaving office he had underestimated the importance of dealing with Washington’s power brokers, including the media and lobbying forces anchored in the nation’s capital. But he insisted that his overall approach was good and that he had achieved his main goals – to “peacefully protect the security and interests of the country” and “promote human rights here and abroad” – despite falling short of a second term.
And years later, when he was diagnosed with cancer as a nonagenarian, he expressed satisfaction with his long life.
“I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” he said in 2015. “I’ve been there exciting, adventurous and gratifying.”