Sep 30, 2023 3 min read

When the news came in February that Jimmy Carter was entering hospice care, it was widely assumed that the announcement of his death would be coming within days, maybe even hours. A recent story in The New York Times noted that some members of Carter’s family made the same assumption.

And, yet, the 39th president of the United States is still here, and is celebrating his 99th birthday this weekend. Carter is the United States’ longest-lived president, exceeding the lifespan of the second longest-lived, George H.W. Bush, by five years. Given how Carter has in recent years overcome a brain tumor and a broken hip, no one should presume that Carter will not make it to the century mark.

The reports about Carter being in hospice gave him, and the rest of the world, a taste of how he will be remembered. Commentators offered mostly laudatory summations of Carter’s life, putting special emphasis on his long, activist post-presidential career, which has seen him involved in humanitarian endeavors around the globe, brokering peace deals between warring parties, building homes with Habitat for Humanity and working to eradicate Guinea worm disease. Experts say the disease has nearly been wiped out, and that very well might not have been the case without Carter’s persistence and dedication. When Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, few argued that it was undeserved – in fact, the more convincing argument was that it was well overdue.

The retrospective looks at Carter’s presidency that are coming not too far over the horizon will be an educational experience for many Americans. Since the Democrat has been out of the White House for 42 years, more than half of the U.S. population was not alive when he was commander in chief, and if you were just old enough to vote for Carter when he won the White House in 1976, you would now be at retirement age. Offered up as a breath of fresh air and an outsider after the scandals surrounding Richard Nixon, and promising to return honesty and rectitude to the White House, it’s easy now to forget the excitement Carter stirred when he was out on the hustings as the peanut farmer and the Baptist Sunday school teacher who hailed from a dot on the map in the Georgia outback.

Carter’s four years at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. were a decidedly mixed bag. On the one hand, Carter was dealt an extraordinarily bad hand, with raging inflation at home and foreign policy crises abroad. While his tenacity helped bring about a historic peace accord between Israel and Egypt in 1979, his stubbornness and self-righteousness led to rocky relations with Congress, even though the Democratic Party had commanding majorities in both chambers. His insistence on doing what he believed was right in policy and letting the chips fall where they would politically also did him no favors. When voters were given the option of four more years, Carter was handily beaten by Ronald Reagan in a landslide.

Still, the eventual eulogies for Carter will highlight both his candor and his compassion. The epitaph of Nixon’s tombstone says, “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” That would be just as fitting, if not more so, for Carter.