Jimmy Carter becomes 1st former US president to turn 100 years old

One of Brian Browne’s earliest memories is watching President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration on television. He remembers his mother being surprised at Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter walking from the Capitol to the White House following the swearing-in ceremony – something that had never been done before.

“This was just a few years after the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King,” said Browne, Adjunct Professor of Political Science at St. John’s University in New York, highlighting the feeling that Carter was doing something highly risky. But the gesture demonstrated that the new president was someone who wanted to be close to the people. It set the tone for the next four years.

Carter served for only one term, and his presidency was considered by many to be largely a failure. But he has gone on to live another 43 years – the longest post-presidency in American history. And while many ex-presidents spend that period of their lives enriching themselves through high speaking fees and book contracts, Carter has worked to enrich others.

The former Democratic president, who occupied the White House from 1977 to 1981, turned 100 on October 1, making him not only the oldest ex-president in history but the first to become a centenarian.

President Carter entered hospice care in his home in Plains, Georgia, on February 18, 2023. Atlanta Archbishop Gregory J. Hartmayer, OFM Conv., at that time asked that all join him in prayer "for President Jimmy Carter as he nears the end of his life, and for his family."

Carter has defied most people's expectations, however, continuing to live for another 19 and a half months so far and, according to family members, continuing to take an interest in world events.

After his wife, Rosalynn, died on November 19, 2023, at age 96, Carter attended a memorial service, wheeled into an Atlanta church in a reclining wheelchair, looking frail. The couple had been married more than 77 years – the longest presidential marriage in US history.

As the 2024 presidential election got into full swing, Carter expressed his hope that he would live in order to cast his ballot.

What has turned out to be a long farewell has also led many Americans to reassess his presidency.

“When Carter left office, he certainly was not an appreciated president; he was seen as a disappointment, a failure,” said John K. White, a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America and a columnist for The Hill. But there’s been a renewed appreciation among commentators recently for those four years, White said, based on Carter’s ground-breaking emphasis on human rights as part of foreign policy, his foresight in energy policy and environmentalism, and his own personal character.

Elected president just a few years after the Watergate scandal, Carter sought to restore trust in government, said Browne at St. John’s University, where he also serves as the primary liaison to elected officials and government agencies. The president intended to focus on domestic issues but got caught up in foreign affairs, such as the energy crisis, Cold War geopolitics, Middle East concerns, and the Iran hostage crisis. He struggled to fix a bad domestic economy.

But Browne believes history will be kind to Carter – especially because of his post-presidential career, which he used trying to do good around the world. He didn’t capitalize on that period of his life with high speaking fees, and lived in the same house that he and Rosalynn had built in 1960 in Plains, Georgia. 

That’s the small farming town where James Earl Carter, Jr., was born October 1, 1924, the son of James Earl Carter, Sr., a farmer and businessman, and Lillian Gordy Carter, a nurse. Jimmy grew up in the nearby community of Archery, was educated in the public school of Plains, attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946, according to his biography on the website of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta. 

In the Navy, he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, New York, where he did graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine.

On July 7, 1946, he married Rosalynn Smith of Plains. When his father died in 1953, he resigned his naval commission and returned with his family to Georgia. He took over the Carter farms, and he and Rosalynn operated Carter’s Warehouse, a general-purpose seed and farm supply company in Plains. He quickly became a leader of the community, serving on county boards supervising education, the hospital authority, and the library. 

In 1962 he won election to the Georgia Senate. He lost his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966, but won the next election, becoming the Peach State's 76th governor on January 12, 1971. He was the Democratic National Committee campaign chairman for the 1974 congressional and gubernatorial elections.

On December 12, 1974, he announced his candidacy for president of the United States. He won his party’s nomination on the first ballot at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, and was elected president on November 2, 1976.

Carter was a practicing Southern Baptist and, by most accounts, a serious man of faith. But his honesty at one point threatened to sink his presidential campaign. His admission in an interview with Playboy magazine – and the fact that he even gave an interview to such a periodical – made a lot of supporters uneasy.

“I try not to commit a deliberate sin,” he said in the interview. “I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, ‘I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.’"

“I've looked on a lot of women with lust,” the governor confessed. “I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do — and I have done it — and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.”

By election day, he managed to overcome the scandal and win – albeit by a narrow margin. He defeated incumbent President Gerald R. Ford, who had succeeded President Richard M. Nixon in August 1974, when Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Ford’s presidential pardon of Nixon was unpopular, and Carter came on the scene as an outsider “untainted” by Washington. 

“The unpleasant experience of Watergate and a president resigning directly led to the election of Carter – there’s no question about that,” Catholic University’s White told Aleteia. “The 1976 election was about a lot of things, but primarily I think it was about character.”

Browne, at St. John’s University, pointed out that Carter lost the Catholic vote both in his first election and in his unsuccessful reelection bid. He lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The 1976 race was the first presidential contest since the U.S. Supreme Court liberalized the nation’s abortion laws in Roe v. Wade. Carter said that while he was against abortion, he did not support a constitutional amendment banning the practice. As president, he did not support increased federal funding for abortion.

Years later, in a 2012 interview with Laura Ingraham, Carter expressed his wish to see the Democratic Party becoming more anti-abortion, allowing it only in the case of rape, incest, or risk of maternal death.

As a presidential candidate, he was criticized for the fact that the Archbishop of New York – Cardinal Terence Cooke – had not been invited to give the invocation at the Democratic National Convention, which was held in New York City in the summer of 1976. But, apparently trying to make up for that, he invited the Archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, John R. Roach, to give the benediction at his inauguration – a nod to his running mate Walter Mondale’s homestate. 

When Chief Justice Warren E. Burger administered the oath of office on January 20, 1977, Carter placed his hand on a family Bible, opened to Micah 6:8, where Micah says that God requires man "to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."

Carter began his inaugural address by quoting that text and went on to express his desire that someday "the nations of the world might say that we had built a lasting peace, built not on weapons of war but on international policies which reflect our own most precious values."

Significant foreign policy accomplishments of his administration included the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David Accords (the treaty of peace between Egypt and Israel), the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union, and the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. 

A recently discovered letter from Pope John Paul I to Carter encouraged the American head of state to achieve a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. After two weeks of intense negotiations and the adoption of the peace treaty, Carter responded to the Pope, assuring him he was “greatly inspired” by his prayers.

White said that human rights had never been made a real focus of American foreign policy before Carter. 

“It was a politically smart strategy because it united the old Cold War Democrats with the McGovern wing of the party,” he said.

Carter emphasized the importance of human rights and put the spotlight on it at the United Nations and in places like South Korea and Central and South America.

Carter believed that the nation’s foreign policy should reflect its highest moral principles, says the Office of the Historian at the US Department of State. In 1977, Carter said, “For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs.”

He also ended more than 30 years of U.S. political and military support to one of Latin America’s most abusive leaders, President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, the office says.

Carter’s new emphasis on human rights led to a Congressional requirement for the annual submission by the Department of State of “a full and complete report” on human rights practices around the world.

On the domestic side, the administration’s achievements included a comprehensive energy program conducted by a new Department of Energy; deregulation in energy, transportation, communications, and finance; major educational programs under a new Department of Education; and major environmental protection legislation, including the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

Carter has also expressed opposition to the death penalty and support for same-sex “marriage.” 

Carter’s post-presidential career is “unlike any other president in history,” in White’s estimation. “Most ex-presidents are making lots and lots of money with high speaking fees, writing their memoirs, that sort of thing. I think the interesting thing about Carter is that he really only saw himself as two things: one is citizen, and the other is public servant.”

That was manifested in Carter’s work with Habitat for Humanity, teaching Sunday school and serving as a deacon in the Maranatha Baptist Church of Plains (photo above, in 2019), and his founding of the Carter Center.

The main concerns of the Carter Center have included human rights, conflict resolution, public health, and helping countries around the world hold free elections. On the public health side, the Carter Center has made great strides in eliminating Guinea worm disease, which affects poor communities in remote parts of Africa that do not have safe water to drink. There were just 13 cases of the disease in 2023, a stunning improvement over the figure of 3.5 million in 1986, when the Carter Center took up the cause.

Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

Carter’s books include several with religious themes: Living Faith, 1996; Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith, 1997; Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, 2005; as general editor, NIV Lessons from the Life Bible: Personal Reflections with Jimmy Carter, 2012, and Faith: A Journey for All, 2018.

Said White, “Carter’s last book is called A Full Life. I think I would call it An Exemplary Life.”