Jimmy Carter, former president of the United States, has died at age 100 – Technologist

The longest-living American president, Jimmy Carter, has died. He was 100 years old. Carter died on Sunday, December 29, a little over a year after entering hospice care, at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he and his wife, Rosalynn, who died at 96 in November 2023, spent most of their lives, The Carter Center said.

“Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia,” the center said on the social media platform X. It added in a statement that he died peacefully, surrounded by his family.

At the end of his four-year term in the White House, Carter, the former Democratic governor of Georgia elected president in 1976 after the fall of Richard Nixon, did not leave an impression of greatness on Americans. In 1980, Jimmy Carter was severely defeated by Ronald Reagan, which gave the Republicans the opportunity to close what they thought was merely an unfortunate chapter of American history, a consequence of the Watergate scandal.

Criticized by his political opponents as a naive, weak and incompetent president, he nevertheless made his mark – after leaving the White House – by fighting the world’s injustices, those he had thought he could correct by governing its most powerful country. He had been suffering from complications from liver cancer, a condition he revealed in a brief statement on August 12, 2015.

With his eternally sad smile and heavy eyes, he never gave the impression of a charismatic man. He was a man of conviction pursuing his own path, indifferent to criticism. He grew up surrounded by the harsh reality of the American Deep South. While he may not have enjoyed great popularity at home, many Americans have paid tribute to him as a man who – instead of raking in money from big companies (like Gerald Ford, who sat on many boards of directors) or delivering one lecture after another (Ronald Reagan) or dreaming of striking gold with TV talk shows (Bill Clinton) – spent his time trying to negotiate ceasefires from rebel factions around the world, monitoring elections in fragile democracies and convincing Christians in Africa that God was not opposed to the use of condoms.

Human rights activism

James Earl Carter Jr. was born in Plains, Georgia, on October 1, 1924, into a staunchly religious, Baptist peanut-planting family. His early years were marked by the misery of the Great Depression, which ruined the country and led thousands of poor people to flee their native towns, especially in the southern United States.

After graduating from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, Carter returned home after seven years of service as an officer to help develop his family’s farm before becoming interested in politics.

When, in the early 1950s, an organization of white businessmen was formed in Plains, he refused to join it. When its members launched a boycott campaign to force him to join, he did not give in, discouraging them and managing to get the measures taken against him lifted. The South, still intensely racist at the time, left a powerful mark on his political commitment. In 1962, he was able to impose himself as the state’s Democratic governor, a step he considered essential to ensure that his ideas would be fulfilled at the highest level of government.

Middle East, Nicaragua, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, North Korea, Haiti and Bosnia: He was involved in numerous interventions after leaving the Oval Office.

He announced his candidacy for the presidential election in 1974 and, to everyone’s surprise, was elected two years later with one obsession: to form a “competent and attentive” government to meet Americans’ demands. While he could boast of an increase of eight million jobs and a decrease in the budget deficit by the end of his term, inflation and interest rates reached high levels. His efforts to rectify them would cause a short but sharp recession, which proved fatal for his political career.

His human rights activism led him to adopt a personal style and frosty relations with the Soviets and the leaders of many countries. In addition to the success of the 1978 Camp David Accords, which normalized relations between Egypt and Israel, he is credited with breathing new life into his country’s ties with China and completing the SALT II nuclear arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union. However, this treaty’s ratification was challenged after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which he was a powerless witness to, and which led him to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

The fall of the Shah of Iran and the hostage crisis in the US embassy in Tehran tarnished his final 14 months in office and prevented him from being reelected. The fiasco of the secret operation that was supposed to free the embassy staff, during which the corpses of American soldiers were put on display, completed the cruel association between his presidency and impotence and weakness, two words loathed by Americans. Severing diplomatic relations with Iran and implementing a trade embargo were not enough to offset this image. The release of the hostages, on the very day of his departure, was both a final humiliation and a relief.

If his successes were not spectacular, with the exception of the Camp David Accords, Carter’s diplomacy was notable in Latin America. It was because of his pressure that, defeated in the 1978 elections by the center-left candidate Antonio Guzman, the old caudillo of the Dominican Republic Joaquin Balaguer agreed to relinquish the presidency. It was also at his insistence that, in November 1977, the Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer announced the organization of general elections, in which he did not run.

During the Clinton administration, the best tribute to Carter came from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who publicly acknowledged in 1998 the errors of her country’s policy, which had made “serious mistakes in the area of human rights,” from Noriega in Panama to Augusto Pinochet in Chile, as well as in many other countries. She credited “the change in the attitude of the United States towards Latin America” to President Jimmy Carter, thanks to his determination to ensure respect for human rights. Lastly, he was the one who negotiated the agreements that allowed the Panama Canal to be handed back to the country’s authorities on January 1, 2000, and the withdrawal of the American troops stationed there.

After his departure from Washington, he began a new life that consisted of conducting international missions of good offices. In the Middle East, Nicaragua, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, North Korea, Haiti, Bosnia, etc., he was involved in numerous interventions. In addition, the Carter Center in Atlanta – a foundation that bears his name – has continually been involved under his authority in multiple projects related to health, education or development in the third world.

Nobel Peace Prize winner

After the election of George W. Bush to the White House in 2000, Carter, “the best ex-president,” became a ruthless critic of the new administration. Concerned about environmental issues, he was one of the figures who sent a protest letter to George W. Bush in April 2001, when the then-president announced that the United States would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

When interviewed about the possibility of a conflict with Iraq, the former president did not hesitate to explain why he did not agree with the idea of a “preventive war,” as suggested by George W. Bush. He then condemned, in an article published by The Washington Post, the “core group of conservatives who are trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism.”

His trip to Cuba, at the invitation of Fidel Castro, in 2002, was widely criticized, and, as a prelude to the ongoing debates on Iraq, he strongly opposed the Bush administration’s desire to maintain a hard line towards the communist Caribbean island. Carter, rejecting all objections, declared that “American specialists consulted before his trip to Cuba [had] assured him that they had no evidence implicating the communist island in the proliferation of biological weapons.” These statements provoked a strong reaction from then Secretary of State Colin Powell, assuring that “Cuba has research capabilities on biological attacks.”

Though he was castigated by the White House and by radical anti-Castroists, the image of this 77-year-old man speaking – in Spanish – amid an overwhelming heat, in Havana, on May 14, 2002, nevertheless had something powerful about it. He condemned the embargo that his country had maintained on the island for more than 40 years, and explained to Cubans, who had never heard of it, that a project for the democratization of institutions, named Varela and signed by more than 11,000 citizens, had been given to the authorities.

Carter never had any illusions about the consequences of this visit, during which he harshly criticized his own country. He mentioned the country’s death penalty that hit the poor, the blacks and the mentally ill the hardest and inequalities in health and education. Cuban dissidents, on the other hand, did not expect such support. “He has exceeded all the expectations of the human rights and democracy movement,” said Elizardo Sanchez, a leading spokesman for the moderate opposition, on the same day.

Yet Carter has often been criticized, either for his unilateralist implications or for his naivety and lack of long-term involvement in projects. Independent and unpredictable, he also provoked a lot of reservations among American officials, who were reluctant to call on him. Some of his interventions, such as in Bosnia, were strongly criticized by observers, who claimed that he was being manipulated by Ratko Mladic, the commander of the Bosnian Serb army, when he came to negotiate a cease-fire in December 1994, as the Bosnian Serbs were only seeking to break their diplomatic isolation at the time.

Carter, the man whom the Oslo jury chose, on October 11, 2002, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, embodied America as much as George W. Bush, against whom he fought politically. He symbolized an America that was generous, humanistic and open to others.