President Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981 and awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, photographed at the Peninsula Hotel in New York on March 26, 2018.
Nineteen months ago, my editor asked me, the team’s Georgia native, to write an obituary for former President Jimmy Carter. At the time, Carter had just gone into hospice, and according to the National Institutes of Health, more than 90% of patients who enter hospice care die within the first six months. About a third die within a week.
More than a year and half later, it seems we’ve all underestimated Carter once again. Today we mark his 100th birthday.
I was 12 when Carter was elected president, and many people I knew, even some who liked and voted for him, felt he’d been a mediocre Georgia governor who’d won the White House by accident. They dismissed him as the charming everyman who’d been chosen to purge the nation of the cynicism and disgust still flowing from the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. Many Georgians felt he was in over his head.
As president, he had his accomplishments, none bigger than brokering peace between Israel and Egypt. But to many, he never seemed forceful enough for the job. In 1979 came the famous “malaise speech” in which he told Americans facing high inflation, high unemployment, and an energy crisis that they should turn inward and reconsider their values.
The long hostage crisis in Iran made Carter seem small and lost. In 1980, Ronald Reagan easily defeated him, making Carter the first president to lose a reelection bid since Depression-era Herbert Hoover in 1932.
But ask a Georgian today, or any day really, what they think of Jimmy Carter now, and you’ll hear some variant of, “A disappointing president, but a truly good man.”
That’s because, since his stinging defeat, Carter has spent decades helping to build homes for people who couldn’t afford them, building the Carter Center as a global philanthropic organization of note, and offering his services wherever they might be accepted. These were his greatest achievements.
Jimmy Carter wasn’t a political performer. He farmed peanuts. He served in war. He and his late wife Rosalynn Carter supported one another through 77 years of marriage – they had four children and 22 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. For decades, he taught Sunday school every Sunday.
Today, Carter will mark his birthday in Plains, Ga., the same town where he was born a century ago. In honor of the occasion, the Carter Center will honor the former president with the planting of 101 trees over the next several months as a salute to his work on environmental issues. Carter’s birthday was also celebrated last weekend at the annual Plains Peanut Festival.
The former president says he wants to stay alive long enough to vote for fellow Democrat Kamala Harris, and I wouldn’t underestimate his chances.