Jimmy Carter has added another year to an already-remarkable life, turning 96 on Oct. 1.
While Carter has shown signs of slowing down — he did not appear in person at the recent Democratic National Convention but did send a video message — the man who is inarguably the nation’s most active ex-president in history is still making his presence felt on political and global stages.
With a historic presidential election like no other just more than a month away, Carter has endorsed Democrat Joe Biden, and his Carter Center has, for the first time, asked U.S. election officials to allow observers to watch this year’s presidential voting.
The Carter Center has monitored more than 100 foreign elections for fairness and honesty since 1989.
Earlier this week, Carter announced his endorsement of Ebenezer Baptist Church Senior Pastor Rev. Raphael Warnock in Georgia’s crowded U.S. Senate race.
Carter is also focusing attention on his support of absentee ballots, pushing back against senior Trump administration officials who cited his 2005 study on mail-in voting to question the practice in recent days.
Carter’s comments came after Attorney General William Barr referenced a bipartisan report by the Federal Election Reform Commission, which Carter co-chaired with former Secretary of State James Baker in 2005, to cast doubt on mail-in voting.
Carter was also in the news following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom he’d appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. Carter called Ginsburg “a beacon of justice.”
A new biography has also been released, titled “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life,” by Jonathan Alter.
A former senior editor at Newsweek, Alter has written incisive biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama. He fixed on writing about Carter, “the most misunderstood president in American history,” after he discovered that Carter would certainly have addressed global warming in a second term and was the first world leader to consider the impact of carbon dioxide gases on climate change.
On March 21, 2019, Carter officially became the oldest living ex-president, surpassing George H.W. Bush, who died in November 2018. Prior to Bush, previous record holders were Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Herbert Hoover and John Adams.
Carter was elected president in 1976 at age 52. He has been out of office for almost four decades, losing a reelection bid in a landslide loss to Reagan in 1980.
Carter was born in Plains, a tiny town in southwest Georgia. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 and married Rosalynn Smith.
After his service with the Navy, Carter returned to Plains in 1962 where he and Rosalynn operated a seed and farm supply company, according to The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. In 1962, the Democratic candidate entered politics and was elected to the Georgia State Senate. In 1966, he lost his first bid for the governorship but won in a second shot at the seat in 1970.
In 1976, his long-shot presidential bid won him the White House when Carter defeated incumbent Ford to become the 39th president of the United States.
Carter’s presidency is known for various historic milestones, such as the Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978 and establishing diplomatic relations with China, his library noted. He also was responsible for the creation of the departments of Education and Energy, as well as implementing new environmental protection legislation such as the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the library said.
He failed to win reelection in 1980 during a sluggish economy and the Iranian hostage crisis. After more than a year in captivity, the hostages were released the same day President Reagan was sworn into office — Jan. 20, 1981.
Carter managed to repair his image during the last several decades through his work helping the less fortunate. In 1982, he founded The Carter Center, which works to address national and international issues through public policy. The nonprofit organization has dispatched 100 election observers to countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia.
To younger generations, Carter is probably best known for his work with Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit that works to provide housing to less fortunate citizens. The author of several books, Carter also continued in his mission to engage in international diplomacy and advancing human rights around the world. He also worked to promote democracy, prevent diseases and ensure secure and fair elections in developing countries.
In recent years, Carter also spoke out against anti-gay and rising racist sentiment. In 2000, he announced he would leave the Southern Baptist Convention due to the body’s literal interpretation of the Bible, a move The New York Times said was mostly symbolic because he didn’t serve in an official capacity with the organization.
In 2015, he told the Huffington Post he believed Jesus would be in favor of marriage equality. In 2016, he told the Times that Republican criticism of former President Barack Obama had “heavy” racial overtones and then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s successful campaign “tapped a waiting reservoir there of inherent racism.”
In recent weeks, Carter has stepped up his criticism of Trump.
Carter also said he could not have undertaken the duties of a president when he was 80, according to Fox News. “If I were just 80 years old, if I was 15 years younger, I don’t believe I could undertake the duties I experienced when I was president,” he said.
Carter said he voted for Bernie Sanders in the last Democratic presidential primary.
In June, Carter said Trump was an “illegitimate” president while participating in a C-SPAN panel on human rights in Washington, D.C., along with his vice president, Walter Mondale. Carter said Trump won the 2016 presidential election because of Russian interference, despite the fact several congressional and judicial inquiries and investigations have uncovered no substantive evidence that Trump colluded with Russian agents to discredit Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Carter was diagnosed with cancer in August 2015 at age 91 after having surgery to remove a lesion on his liver. After the surgery, Carter announced the cancer had spread to other parts of his body. Doctors had found melanoma lesions on his brain. He announced that he would significantly cut back on his schedule while undergoing treatment.
In November of that year, the Carter Center issued an update on the former president’s health, saying he had received good news from his doctors. Recent tests had shown there was no new evidence of malignancy and he was responding well to treatment. In March 2016, he announced to his Sunday school class at Maranatha Baptist Church of Plains that he was cleared of the disease.
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