Washington - Jimmy Carter, the 100-year-old former US president and Nobel peace laureate who rose from humble beginnings in rural Georgia to lead the nation from 1977 to 1981, has died, his nonprofit foundation said Sunday.
Carter had been in hospice care since mid-February 2023 at his home in Plains, Georgia -- the same small town where he was born and once ran a peanut farm before becoming governor of the Peach State and running for the White House.
Carter died "peacefully" at his home in Plains, "surrounded by his family," the Carter Center said in a statement.
"My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love," Chip Carter said in the statement.
Carter was the longest-lived US president -- an outcome that seemed unlikely back in 2015 when the Southern Democrat revealed he had brain cancer.
But the US Navy veteran and fervent Christian repeatedly defied the odds to enjoy a long and fruitful post-presidency, after four years in the Oval Office often seen as disappointing.
During his single term, Carter placed a commitment to human rights and social justice, enjoying a strong first two years that included brokering a peace deal.
But his administration hit numerous snags -- the most serious being the taking of US hostages in Iran and the disastrous failed attempt to rescue the 52 captive Americans in 1980.
He also came in for criticism for his handling of an oil crisis. In November that year, Republican challenger Ronald Reagan clobbered Carter at the polls, relegating the Democrat to just one term.
Reagan, a former actor and governor of California swept into office on a wave of staunch conservatism.
- Active post-presidency - As the years passed, a more nuanced image of Carter emerged that took into account his significant post-presidential activities.
He founded the Carter Center in 1982 to pursue his vision of world diplomacy.
He received the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless efforts to promote social and economic justice. He observed numerous elections around the world and emerged as a prominent international mediator, tackling global problems from North Korea to Bosnia. Carter, known for his toothy smile, said basic Christian tenets such as justice and love served as the bedrock of his presidency.
He taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist, his church in Plains, well into his 90s.
Outside the White House, where the flag was lowered to half-staff, tourist Yoni Neirman remembered Carter as a leader "who tried to do good things for this country and people."
"I think he was a real statesman, and that kind of person doesn't seem to exist, at least not in the near future," the Vermont resident said of the first president she had ever voted for.
In Georgia, retiree Dorner Carmichael expressed the same sentiment.
"Every time you lose a person of such integrity, who spent his life in service, you just wonder who will fill his shoes," the 75-year-old told AFP.
- 'Leader, statesman and humanitarian' -
As condolences came in, many focused on Carter's character, with President Joe Biden, in televised remarks, saying he "lived a life measured not by words, but by his deeds."
"The rest of the world looks to us... and he was worth looking to." White House leaders past and future joined Biden in issuing remembrances, with Bill Clinton saying in a statement that Carter "worked tirelessly for a better, fairer world." George W. Bush said Carter's legacy would "inspire Americans for generations," while Barack Obama said the former leader "taught all of us what it means to live a life of grace, dignity, justice, and service."
Donald Trump said Americans owed the Democrat "a debt of gratitude," later adding, in a second social media post, that "I strongly disagreed with him philosophically and politically."
One of Carter's defining foreign policy achievements -- negotiating the return of the Panama Canal to Panama -- has come back into focus as Trump has threatened to retake the channel.
Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday hailed Carter as "a symbol of humanitarian efforts" for his role in brokering the 1978 Camp David Accords, predicting his work would "remain etched in the annals of history."
Carter was preceded in death by Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years.
She died on November 19, 2023, at age 96. The former president, who looked frail, poignantly appeared at her memorial service in a wheelchair, with a blanket on his lap bearing their likenesses.
Carter is survived by the couple's four children, three sons and a daughter.
Jimmy Carter is known for brokering a famed peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. But he may have also prevented a war between the United States and North Korea 30 years ago — in an act of unilateral diplomacy that deeply angered the Clinton White House, and created a breach between the two Democratic presidents.
In the late spring of 1994, North Korea announced it was throwing international nuclear inspectors out of the country, and U.S. intelligence agencies assessed it could be racing to produce a nuclear weapon. Inside the White House of President Bill Clinton, there was debate over whether military action might be required to stop it — and whether that could rekindle the Korean War.
Into this breach stepped Carter, who wrote a letter to Clinton saying he had decided to go to North Korea — as a private citizen — to meet with Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder. The letter was intercepted by Vice President Al Gore, who asked Carter, a fellow Southerner, to soften the tone and ask for Clinton’s blessing for the trip. It was given, but grudgingly.
Carter spent two days in the North, negotiating with the aging Kim and ultimately extracting what he thought were binding commitments from him to keep inspectors in the country and to gradually give up his nuclear fuel — in return for energy help from the West. The details were vague, but Carter returned across the Demilitarized Zone to Seoul, South Korea, and declared that the “nuclear crisis is over” and that his two days of talks with North Korea’s communist leader had been a “miracle.” (If Americans weren’t paying much attention, it may be because just as Carter was emerging from the North, O.J. Simpson was in a live-on-TV, slow-motion car chase as police tried to arrest him on suspicion of murder.)
It didn’t look that way to Clinton, who contradicted Carter and continued seeking sanctions against the North at the United Nations. To him and other Carter critics, the former president’s diplomacy seemed naive, appearing to uncritically accept everything that Kim Il Sung said.
When I met Carter days later in Tokyo, where he was visiting the American ambassador, Walter Mondale, who had served as his vice president, he had another version of events. He said he was trying to box in the “Great Leader,’’ as Kim was known, and get him to publicly declare the terms of a deal so that his aides would carry them out. When I asked Carter about the health of Kim, who had ruled over North Korea for more than four decades, he smiled and said he looked “terrific.”
A few weeks later, Kim was dead. His son, Kim Jong Il, reached an accord of sorts with the Clinton White House, in which the West agreed to build two proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors to produce electricity, in return for the end of the North’s bomb project. But the reactors were never completed, and a dozen years later North Korea conducted its first nuclear test.
In retrospect, the meeting was the prelude, as it turned out, to President Donald Trump’s diplomacy with Kim Jong Un, the grandson of the dictator who met Carter. Those summits failed, too, and today North Korea is estimated to have 60 or more nuclear weapons. But while Carter failed to disarm the North, he also defused a crisis that, had it triggered a war, would have changed America and Asia.
On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took dozens of Americans hostage, beginning a 444-day crisis that would define the final year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency — and scar him and the American public.
The crisis had its origins in the Iranian revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Carter’s reluctant agreement to let Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Shah of Iran, travel to the United States for cancer treatment. The president had initially resisted pressure from some of his advisers to let the shah into the country, but he relented after learning that Pahlavi could not receive needed treatment in Mexico.
The shah arrived in New York on Oct. 24, 1979, and Iranians began to demonstrate outside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. On Nov. 4, about 3,000 of them overran the embassy and seized 66 hostages.
More than a dozen were released about two weeks later, eventually leaving a group of 52 diplomats, guards, and embassy employees in captivity. To pressure Khomeini and Iran for their release, Carter stopped the purchase of Iranian oil and froze all Iranian assets in the United States.
Carter and his advisers began planning a rescue operation as early as the second day of the takeover, discarding one plan after another. On April 24, 1980, he ordered a military rescue. The mission failed, leading to a disastrous loss of helicopters and the deaths of eight soldiers in the Iranian desert. Cyrus Vance, Carter’s valued secretary of state, who had counseled against the mission, resigned in protest four days later.
The public, which had rallied behind Carter at first, gradually turned against him, and the longer the crisis wore on, the more feckless he appeared. Over the objections of his advisers, he limited his campaigning for reelection and other activities to concentrate on freeing the hostages, ultimately making it look as if his presidency itself had been taken hostage. In their nightly broadcasts, network anchors such as Walter Cronkite of CBS News offered daily updates on the number of days since the hostages had been seized.
“I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” Carter told The Washington Post in 2018. “But I was so obsessed with them, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.”
A new and frantic effort to free the hostages was begun days before the end of the Carter presidency. Working through a half-dozen foreign capitals, the administration reached a general agreement with Iran, but the deal snagged on details of releasing Iranian assets held in United States banks.
He kept his successor, President-elect Ronald Reagan, informed with regular phone calls. Just after 6:47 a.m. on Jan. 20, 1981, Inauguration Day, Carter had good news to share. All the promised money for Iran was now in an escrow account, and the Bank of England was ready to forward it. “I place a call to Gov. Reagan to give him the good news,” Carter recorded in his diary, “and am informed that he prefers not to be disturbed, but that he may call back later.”
With the hostages’ release now imminent, Carter walked to his private quarters to get dressed for Reagan’s inauguration. Later he wrote, “As I looked at myself in the mirror, I wondered if I had aged so much as president or whether I was just exhausted.”
A little more than a half-hour after leaving the presidency, Carter learned that the hostages, after 444 days of captivity, had left Iran. It was one final indignity inflicted on him by Tehran, which had delayed their departure until after Reagan took the oath of office.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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