Former President Jimmy Carter dead at 100

Yet just four years later, in the aftermath of a presidency that was widely seen as failed, it sometimes seemed as if all that was left of Carter was the smile — the wide, toothy grin that helped elect him in the first place, then came to be caricatured by countless cartoonists as an emblem of naïveté.

But it was Carter’s great fortune to enjoy a post-presidency more than 10 times as long as his tenure in office — in March 2019, he became the longest-lived president ever — and by the time he died at 100, he had lived to see history’s verdict soften.

Carter entered home hospice care after a series of hospital stays, the Carter Center confirmed Feb. 18. His wife, Rosalynn Carter, passed away Nov. 19, 2023.

If the 39 ^th president did not achieve all he sought in four years in the White House — and he did not — his abiding concern for human rights in international affairs, and for energy and the environment as a defining challenge of our time, can now be seen as prescient. If, in later years, his unyielding support for Palestinian rights (and his frequent sharp criticisms of Israel) drew many detractors, his brokering of the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt stands as a milestone of modern diplomacy.

If he was the first president to confront what we now call “Islamic extremism,” he was far from the last. And if he sacrificed his re-election to the super-powerlessness of the Iranian hostage crisis — and a botched military raid to rescue the captives — his administration’s persistence nevertheless brought all 52 diplomats safely home in the end.

At a time when only six women had ever served a president’s Cabinet, Carter had appointed three of them — along with three of the five women ever to serve as departmental undersecretaries, and 80 percent of those to serve as assistant secretaries. There is almost no battle over policy or public image that Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama ever faced as first lady that Carter’s trusted wife, Rosalynn, did not fight first — whether campaigning for mental health, or sitting in on Cabinet meetings.

James Earl Carter Jr. could be pious (“I’ll never lie to you,” he pledged while campaigning in 1976). He could be petty (his micromanagement of the White House tennis court was roundly mocked). He could be tone-deaf (lecturing his countrymen on a national “crisis of confidence” in a way that only accented the problem, and dispensing with some of the pomp of the presidency that ordinary people actually liked and expected).

But he could also be disarmingly candid, in a political culture that almost never rewards that trait (who can forget his confession to Playboy magazine that he had lusted after women not his wife and committed adultery many times in his heart?) And he had a gift for improbable friendships — not least with the man he so narrowly and bitterly defeated, Gerald Ford, and with John Wayne, the arch-conservative whose support nevertheless helped him pass the 1977 treaty surrendering the Panama Canal.

He grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, on a dirt road in rural Georgia, surrounded by poor blacks, and was the only president ever to live in public housing — upon his discharge from the Navy, when he went home to take over his family’s peanut business after his father’s death. He was the son of a staunch segregationist, and in his early career, right up to his election as governor of Georgia in 1970, he often finessed the issue of race. But on taking office in the state house, he proclaimed that “the time for discrimination is over,” and Time magazine hailed him on its cover as the face of America’s New South.

Carter’s life had a classic Horatio Alger arc. As a teenager, he joined the Future Farmers of America and cultivated, packed and sold his own acre of peanuts. He fulfilled his dream of an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, and went on to become a protégé of Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, in the post-World War II submarine fleet. He married a childhood friend of his sister Ruth, and raised four children.