Three months after entering end-of-life care at home, former President Jimmy Carter stays in good spirits as he visits with family, follows public discussion of his legacy and receives updates on The Carter Center’s humanitarian work all over the world, his grandson says. He’s even having fun with regular servings of ice cream.
“They’re just meeting with family right away, but they’re doing it in one of the best possible way: the 2 of them together at home,” Jason Carter said of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, now 98 and 95 years old.
“They have been together 70-plus years. In addition they know that they are not in charge,” the younger Carter said Tuesday in a temporary interview. “Their faith is basically grounding on this moment. In that way, it’s nearly as good as it might be.”
The longest-lived U.S. president, Jimmy Carter announced in February that after a series of temporary hospital stays, he would forgo further medical intervention and spend the rest of his life in the identical modest, one-story house in Plains where they lived when he was first elected to the state Senate in 1962. No illness was disclosed.
The hospice care announcement prompted ongoing tributes and media attention on his 1977-81 presidency and the worldwide humanitarian work the couple has done since co-founding The Carter Center in 1982.
“That is been considered one of the blessings of the last couple of months,” Jason Carter said after speaking Tuesday at an event honoring his grandfather. “He’s actually attending to see the outpouring and it has been gratifying to him needless to say.”
The previous president also gets updates on The Carter Center’s guinea worm eradication program, launched within the mid-Nineteen Eighties when hundreds of thousands of individuals suffered from the parasite spread by unclean drinking water. Last 12 months, there have been fewer than two dozen cases worldwide.
And in less serious moments, he also continues to enjoy peanut butter ice cream, his preferred flavor, in line with his political brand as a peanut farmer, his grandson said.
Andrew Young, who served as Carter’s U.N. Ambassador, told the AP that he too visited the Carters “a number of weeks back” and was “more than happy we could laugh and joke about old times.”
Young and Jason Carter joined other friends and admirers Tuesday at a celebration of the previous president along Jimmy Carter Boulevard in suburban Norcross, just northeast of Atlanta. Young said the setting — in one of the vital racially and ethnically diverse suburban swaths in America — reflected the previous president’s broader legacy as someone who pursued peace, conflict resolution and racial equity.
When the just about 10-mile stretch of highway in Gwinnett County was renamed in 1976 — the 12 months he was elected president — the small towns and bedroom communities on the sting of metropolitan Atlanta were only starting to boom. Now, Gwinnett alone has a population of about 1 million people, and Jimmy Carter Boulevard is prospering, with many businesses owned by Black proprietors, immigrants or first-generation Americans.
Young, a top aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. throughout the Civil Rights Movement, said Carter began as a white politician from south Georgia in the times of Jim Crow segregation, but he proved his values were different.
As governor and president, Carter believed “that the world can come to Georgia and show everybody how you can live together,” Young said.
Now, Georgia “looks just like the whole world,” said Young, 91.
Nicole Love Hendrickson, elected in 2020 as the primary Black chair of the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners, praised Carter as “a person with an exceptional regard for the humanity of others.”
Alluding to Carter’s landslide re-election defeat, Young said he has personally relished seeing historians and others finding success stories as they reassess Carter’s presidency — ceding control of the Panama Canal, developing a national energy strategy, engaging more in Africa than any U.S. president had. Such achievements were either unpopular on the time or overshadowed by Carter’s inability to corral inflation, tame energy crises or free the American hostages in Iran before the 1980 election.
“I told him, ‘you already know, it took them over 50 years to understand President Lincoln. It could take that long to understand you,'” Young said.
“No person was fascinated with the Panama Canal. No person would have thought of bringing Egypt and Israel together. I mean, I used to be fascinated with attempting to do something in Africa, but no one else in Washington was, and he did. He’s all the time had an idea about all the pieces.”
Still, when Jason Carter addressed his grandparents’ admirers Tuesday, he argued against fascinated with them like global celebrities.
“They’re similar to all of y’all’s grandparents — I mean, to the extent y’all’s grandparents are rednecks from south Georgia,” he said to laughter. “When you go down there even today, next to their sink they’ve somewhat rack where they dry Ziplock bags.”
Most remarkable, Jason Carter said, is the very fact such a gathering occurred together with his grandfather still living.
“We did think that when he went into hospice it was very near the tip,” he told attendees. “Now, I’m just going to let you know, he’ll be 99 in October.”
