JIMMY CARTER 1924-2024

THE PEANUT FARMER WHO BECAME THE NATION’S 39TH PRESIDENT BUILT A LEGACY AS A HUMANITARIAN AFTER HE LEFT OFFICE

- By SANDRA SOBIERAJ WESTFALL and EILEEN FINAN,With reporting by KYLER ALVORD, ADAM CARLSON and DIANE HERBST

In July 2019, one day after Jimmy Carter, then 95, suffered a fall at his Georgia home that left him with stitches, the former President of the United States showed up with a black eye and construction tools to help build a Habitat for Humanity home in Nashville. “I won’t stop until I have to,” Carter told reporters that day. And nearly until his death in Plains, Ga., on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, he didn’t.

“He taught all of us what it means to live a life of grace, dignity, justice, and service,” wrote former President Barack Obama, one of the dignitaries—along with President Joe Biden, President-elect Donald Trump and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—expected to attend Carter’s state funeral on Jan. 9 in Washington, D.C.

The nation began a long goodbye to its 39th President in February 2023, when Carter, who’d been living with cancer for nearly a decade, went into hospice care at his Plains home, for what many assumed would be his final days. But the longest-lived President defied those expectations, just as he defied those who thought his legacy would be defined by his troubled one-term Presidency.

In the four-plus decades after leaving office, Carter rewrote the standard for former Commanders in Chief, building a reputation as a humanitarian, peace broker and hammer-in-hand aid worker with 32 books, 114 election-monitoring missions abroad, 13 conflict mediations and an untold number of Habitat construction projects to his credit. “He is, by popular consensus, the most successful ex-President in American history,” says his biographer Jonathan Alter.