Updated 5:13 PM CST, December 29, 2024
Share
Former President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. The 39th president of the United States was a Georgia peanut farmer who sought to restore trust in government when he assumed the presidency in 1977 and then built a reputation for tireless work as a humanitarian. He earned a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
He died Sunday, more than a year after entering hospice care, at his home in Plains, Georgia.
“Everything to Gain,” a 1987 collaboration with his wife, Rosalynn, turned into the “worst threat we ever experienced in our marriage,” an intractable standoff for the facilitator of the Camp David Accords and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
According to Carter, Rosalynn was a meticulous author who considered “the resulting sentences as though they have come down from Mount Sinai, carved into stone.” Their memories differed on various events and they fell into “constant arguments.” They were ready to abandon the book and return the advance, until their editor persuaded them to simply divide any disputed passages between them.
“In the book, each of these paragraphs is identified by a ‘J’ or an ‘R,’ and our marriage survived,” he wrote.
His more than two dozen books included nonfiction, poetry, fiction, religious meditations and a children’s story. His memoir “An Hour Before Daylight” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002, while his 2006 best-seller “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” stirred a fierce debate by likening Israel’s policies in the West Bank to the brutal South African system of racial segregation.
In one recent work, “A Full Life,” Carter observed that he “enjoyed writing” and that his books “provided a much-needed source of income.”
To commemorate Carter’s death, officials with the Empire State Building said in a post on social media that the iconic New York City landmark would be lit in red, white and blue on Sunday night “to honor the life and legacy” of the late former president.
In a statement issued Sunday, former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama recalled Carter’s beloved Maranatha Baptist Church “will be a little quieter on Sundays” following Carter’s death, but noted that the late former president “will never be far away — buried alongside Rosalynn next to a willow tree down the road, his memory calling all of us to heed our better angels.”
Noting the “hundreds of tourists from around the world crammed into the pews” to see the former president teach Sunday school, as he did “for most of his adult life,” the Obamas listed Carter’s accomplishments as president and after his time in the White House as catalysts for making that trip.
But, they noted, “many people in that church on Sunday morning were there, at least in part, because of something more fundamental: President Carter’s decency.”
