Former President Jimmy Carter, who at 98 years old is the longest-lived American president, has entered home hospice care in Plains, Georgia, a press release from The Carter Center confirmed Saturday.
After a series of short hospital stays, the statement said, Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home together with his family and receive hospice care as an alternative of additional medical intervention.”
The statement said the thirty ninth president has the complete support of his medical team and family, which “asks for privacy at the moment and is grateful for the priority shown by his many admirers.”
Carter was a little-known Georgia governor when he began his bid for the presidency ahead of the 1976 election. He went on to defeat then-President Gerald R. Ford, capitalizing as a Washington outsider within the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office in 1974.
Carter served a single, tumultuous term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, a landslide loss that ultimately paved the best way for his many years of worldwide advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights via The Carter Center.
The previous president and his wife, Rosalynn, 95, opened the middle in 1982. His work there garnered a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Jason Carter, the couple’s grandson who now chairs The Carter Center governing board, said Saturday in a tweet that he “saw each of my grandparents yesterday. They’re at peace and — as at all times — their home is stuffed with love.”
Carter, who has lived most of his life in Plains, traveled extensively into his 80s and early 90s, including annual trips to construct homes with Habitat for Humanity and frequent trips abroad as a part of the Carter Center’s election monitoring and its effort to eradicate the Guinea worm parasite in developing countries. But the previous president’s health has declined over his tenth decade of life, especially because the coronavirus pandemic limited his public appearances, including at his beloved Maranatha Baptist Church where he taught Sunday School lessons for many years before standing-room-only crowds of tourists.
In August 2015, Carter had a small cancerous mass faraway from his liver. The next 12 months, Carter announced that he needed no further treatment, as an experimental drug had eliminated any sign of cancer.
Carter celebrated his most up-to-date birthday in October with family and friends in Plains, the tiny town where he and his wife, Rosalynn, were born within the years between World War I and the Great Depression.
The Carter Center last 12 months marked 40 years of promoting its human rights agenda.
The Center has been a pioneer of election commentary, monitoring a minimum of 113 elections in Africa, Latin America, and Asia since 1989. In perhaps its most generally hailed public health effort, the organization recently announced that only 14 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in all of 2021, the results of years of public health campaigns to enhance access to secure drinking water in Africa.
That is a staggering drop from when The Carter Center began leading the worldwide eradication effort 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 Oct. 1, 1924, to a outstanding family in rural south Georgia. He went on to the U.S. Naval Academy during World War II and pursued a profession as a Cold War Naval officer before returning to Plains, Georgia, with Rosalynn and their young family to take over the family peanut business after Earl Carter’s death within the Fifties.
A moderate Democrat, the younger Carter rapidly climbed from the local school board to the state Senate after which the Georgia governor’s office. He began his White House bid as an underdog with outspoken Baptist mores and technocratic plans reflecting his education as an engineer. He connected with many Americans due to his promise to not deceive the American people after Nixon’s disgrace and U.S. defeat in southeast Asia.
“If I ever misinform you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I’d not need to be your president,” Carter said often as he campaigned.
Carter, who got here of age politically in the course of the civil rights movement, was the last Democratic presidential nominee to comb the Deep South, before the region shifted quickly to Reagan and the Republicans in subsequent elections.
He governed amid Cold War pressures, turbulent oil markets and social upheaval over racism, women’s rights and America’s global role.
Carter’s foreign policy wins included brokering Mideast peace by keeping Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on the bargaining table for 13 days in 1978. That Camp David experience inspired the post-presidential center where Carter would establish a lot 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. He designated thousands and thousands of acres in Alaska as national parks or wildlife refuges. He appointed a then-record number of ladies and non-whites to federal posts. He never had a Supreme Court nomination, but he elevated civil rights attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the nation’s second-highest court, positioning her for a promotion in 1993.
Carter also built on Nixon’s opening with China, and though he tolerated autocrats in Asia, pushed Latin America from dictatorships to democracy.
Yet Carter’s electoral coalition splintered under double-digit inflation, gasoline lines and the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran. His bleakest hour got here when eight Americans died in a failed hostage rescue in April 1980, helping to make sure his landslide defeat.
For years after his loss, Carter largely receded from electoral politics. Democrats were hesitant to embrace him. Republicans made him a punchline, caricaturing him as a hapless liberal. In point of fact, Carter governed more as a technocrat, more progressive on race and gender equality than he had campaigned but a budget hawk who often angered more liberal Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who waged a dangerous primary battle against the sitting president in 1980.
Carter said after leaving office that he had underestimated the importance of coping with Washington power brokers, including the media and lobbying forces anchored within the nation’s capital. But he insisted his overall approach was sound and that he achieved his primary objectives — to “protect our nation’s security and interests peacefully” and “enhance human rights here and abroad” — even when he fell spectacularly wanting a second term.
And years later, upon his cancer diagnosis as a nonagenarian, he expressed satisfaction together with his long life.
“I’m perfectly comfortable with whatever comes,” he said in 2015. “I’ve had an exciting, adventurous and gratifying existence.”
