Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, has died. He was 100.
The born-again peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia rose was a nuclear engineer in the Navy who served as his state's governor from 1971 to 1975. The Democrat's long-shot election as president in 1976 ended Gerald Ford's hopes for returning to the office he was appointed to and stymied racist George Wallace's hopes of a third-party insurgency.
While he brought a high degree of soft-spoken intelligence, moral clarity and thoughtful balance to the office, Carter's one-term presidency is generally thought of as a failure, and remembered largely for the hapless handling of the Iran hostage crisis, failure to prevent the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, his loose-cannon brother's Billy Beer and a gloomy 1979 address to the nation called "A Crisis of Confidence."
After leaving office, Carter became an active author, speaker and charity leader, devoting himself -- often right along with other volunteers -- to Habitat for Humanity.
In 2015, he was diagnosed with brain cancer but was able to overcome the disease.
In October 2019, he was injured in two falls at home, cutting his head in the first, and fracturing his pelvis in the second.
After a series of hospitalizations in 2022 and 2023, Carter underwent hospice care at home in Georgia. Until recently, he'd still be working at job sites for Habitat.
Jimmy Carter leaves behind his wife since 1946, Roslyn Carter, four children and a bunch of grandchildren.
