US President Joe Biden has declared a national day of mourning forJimmy Carter, the peanut farmer who won the country's top office in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, endured humbling defeat after one tumultuous term and then redefined life after the White House as a global humanitarian.
January 9, 2025 has been designated to honour Carter as details are finalised for a state funeral.
The longest-lived US president died on Sunday at the age of 100, roughly 22 months after entering hospice care, at his home in Georgia, where he and his wife, Rosalynn, who died at 96 in November 2023, spent most of their lives.
“Our founder, former US President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia,” the Carter Centre said on the social media platform X. It added in a statement that he died peacefully, surrounded by his family.
As global and national reaction poured in, Joe Biden mourned Carter’s death, saying the world lost an “extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian” and he lost a dear friend. Biden cited Carter’s work to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil and human rights, promote free and fair elections and house the homeless as an example for others.
“To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning – the good life – study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith, and humility,” Biden said in a statement.
Biden spoke later on Sunday, recalling the former president being a comfort to him and his wife Jill when their son Beau died in 2015 of cancer. The president remarked how cancer was a common bond between their families, with Carter himself having cancer later in his life.
The 39th president governed amid Cold War pressures, turbulent oil markets and social upheaval over racism, women’s rights and America’s global role.
His most acclaimed achievement in office was a Mideast peace deal that he brokered by keeping Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the bargaining table for 13 days in 1978.
Yet Carter’s electoral coalition splintered under double-digit inflation, petrol lines and the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran. His bleakest hour came when eight Americans died in a failed hostage rescue in April 1980, helping to ensure his landslide defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan.
Ignominious defeat, though, allowed for renewal. The Carters founded The Carter Centre in 1982 as a first-of-its-kind base of operations, asserting themselves as international peacemakers and champions of democracy, public health and human rights.
“I was not interested in just building a museum or storing my White House records and memorabilia,” Carter wrote in a memoir published after his 90th birthday. “I wanted a place where we could work.”
That work included easing nuclear tensions in North and South Korea, helping to avert a US invasion of Haiti and negotiating ceasefires in Bosnia and Sudan. By 2022, The Carter Centre had declared at least 113 elections in Latin America, Asia and Africa to be free or fraudulent. Recently, the centre began monitoring US elections as well.
The Nobel committee’s 2002 Peace Prize cites his “untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Carter accepted the recognition saying there was more work to be done.
“The world is now, in many ways, a more dangerous place,” he said. “The greater ease of travel and communication has not been matched by equal understanding and mutual respect.”
The former president continued to regularly teach Sunday School lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church until his mobility declined and the coronavirus pandemic raged.
There was a common assessment that he was a better ex-president than president - but Carter lived long enough to see biographers and historians reassess his White House years more generously.
Jonathan Alter, who penned a Carter biography in 2020, said Carter should be remembered for “an epic American life” spanning from a humble start in a home with no electricity or indoor plumbing through decades on the world stage across two centuries.
“He will likely go down as one of the most misunderstood and underestimated figures in American history,” Alter said.
