A century of Jimmy Carter: Longest-living former president turns 100

In 1998, at the ripe age of 74, former President Carter put some of his thoughts about getting older to paper.

“The virtues of aging,” Carter wrote in a book that year, “include both the blessings that come to us as we grow older and what we have to offer that might be beneficial to others.”

It turns out that Carter, who hit 100 on Tuesday, still had a lot more to offer. A year after the book’s release, he would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, picked up three Grammy Awards and, in 2002, claimed the Nobel Peace Prize. A Navy submarine and a fish species — the bluegrass darter, with the scientific name “Etheostoma jimmycarter” — have been named in his honor.

And now the 39th president, who was in office from 1977-81, is the first former commander in chief to reach the century mark.

When James Earl Carter Jr. was born in 1924 in the small farming town of Plains, Ga., the U.S. still had 48 states. Wheaties cereal was just making its debut on grocery store shelves, President Coolidge was in office and Babe Ruth slugged his way to becoming MLB’s American League batting champion.

“My family lived in relative isolation in a rural community; we didn’t have electricity or running water in our house until I was 14 years old,” Carter wrote in “The Virtues of Aging.”

The lifestyle for him and his wife, Rosalynn, whom he married in 1946, “was more like that of our distant ancestors than that of our grandchildren.”

“People of my generation have experienced astonishing societal changes in our own lives and among our acquaintances,” he said.

The naval engineer-turned-peanut farmer won election to the Georgia state Senate in 1962, before triumphing in the Peach State’s gubernatorial race in 1970. 

Journalist Andrea Mitchell first met Carter in 1972 while covering the Democratic National Convention.

“I didn’t know who he was when he first ran for president. People referred to him as ‘Jimmy who?’ because he had come in as such an outsider to national politics,” said Mitchell, who serves as NBC News’s chief foreign affairs correspondent. 

Then-Pennsylvania Gov. Milton Shapp (D) called Mitchell over and told her, “I want you to meet our next Democratic [nominee] four years from now: my friend Jimmy Carter from Georgia.”

Carter won his Democratic presidential bid against incumbent President Ford in 1976 and entered the White House. 

“He’s sworn into office, and Carter makes it very clear early that this is going to be a presidency unlike anything we’ve seen before,” said Matthew Costello, the White House Historical Association’s chief education officer.

“Carter is deeply committed to the idea of civil rights and human rights. It’s something that’s going to shape not only his domestic agenda for citizens of the United States, but also for foreign policy going forward,” Costello said.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Kai Bird described Carter’s years in the White House as “underappreciated.”

“He changed the economy in the country by deregulating the national airlines, the trucking industry, alcohol. Under his presidency they, for the first time, mandated seatbelts and airbags in all newly manufactured automobiles, thus saving 10,000 American lives every year ever since,” said Bird, who penned the 2021 biography “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.”

“He accomplished many things in the field with foreign policy: the Camp David Accords that brought a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. He placed human rights as a core principle behind all U.S. foreign policy, and that’s been a factor ever since,” added Bird, the executive director of the City University of New York’s Leon Levy Center for Biography.

Nonetheless, he continued, “The perception is that Carter failed because he couldn’t get reelected, and he failed because of the Iran hostage crisis that lasted 444 days.”

“I was just 56 years old when I was involuntarily retired from my position in the White House,” Carter wrote of his landslide loss in the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan. 

“What made losing the job even worse was that it was a highly publicized event, with maybe half the people in the world knowing about my embarrassing defeat!” he recalled.

After reflecting and leaning on family, Carter said he and his wife made a conscious choice to “explore completely new commitments. We had done it several times when we were younger; why not now?”

That exploration led to Carter completely reshaping the role of a former commander in chief.

Before him, Costello said, ex-presidents would typically leave office and go back to their hometowns and private lives. Carter instead used his high profile to carve out a transformative new model — with a focus on humanitarian and charitable work and diplomacy efforts — for former presidents.

“Humanitarian crises, political crises, promotion of democracy and individual rights — all these things that Carter did expound upon as president, but he had more leeway as a former president,” said Costello, who teaches a course on White House history at American University.

“He wasn’t bound by many of the same things that a president in office is,” he said.

The longtime Sunday school teacher and champion for Habitat for Humanity, Costello said, “really dedicated his life to public service and peace.”

The Carter Center, the nonprofit he and the former first lady founded in 1982, was created based “on a fundamental commitment to human rights and the alleviation of human suffering.” 

Volunteer efforts became a hallmark of Carter’s post-White House life. In 2019, a day after suffering a fall and receiving stitches, then-95-year-old Carter was seen using a power drill while volunteering at a Habitat for Humanity building project in Tennessee. 

After countless interviews covering Carter, Mitchell said she got to know him and “really cherish the relationship after he left the White House more than he was in the White House.”

“It’s remarkable what he accomplished, coming from the peanut farm and becoming a Southern model of someone who changed and adapted for what became the new South — on civil rights, as well,” NBC News’s chief Washington correspondent and host of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” said. 

On a personal level, Mitchell said, “His eyes twinkle, and he is so friendly, and so outgoing and so humble — that’s the most remarkable thing. He introduces himself as Jimmy, and just never thought he was better than anyone else.”

Rosalynn Carter died last November at 96. The former president entered hospice care in February of last year.

“He joked with one of his grandchildren a couple of months ago that he’s had a long life and a successful life, and accomplished many things, but apparently he is not very successful at this dying business,” Bird said with a laugh.

And he has since indicated he has more living to do as November approaches.

“I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” Carter told his son, Chip, his grandson Jason Carter revealed in an interview last month. 

“It’s a remarkable thing for anybody to live to 100 — we’ve never had a former president live to be 100 years old,” Costello said.

“To think about this person who’s really lived through really the American century — the United States becoming a global superpower after World War II, him being in the Navy and being part of that shaped by the Cold War, his upbringing in the South and Democratic politics, his views on race and the need for social justice shaped by the 1960s and 1970s — I mean, his life really is the story of America in the last 100 years.”

“I think his legacy is really his service to the country, and not just the longevity, but the way he served and has served, and the model that he represents of commitment to human rights and to empowering people,” Mitchell said.

“I think people admire his resilience, his endurance, his faith,” she added.

In his book on aging, Carter mused on the foundation for leading a successful life, writing, “Too many folks spend their lives aging rather than maturing.”

“You are old when regrets take the place of dreams,” he wrote.

“The simple things — our own happiness, peace, joy, satisfaction, and the exploration of love in all its forms — are the keys to the virtues of life, at any age.”

Updated Oct. 1 at 12:06 a.m. EDT