Jimmy Carter, 39th US President, enters hospice home care

ATLANTA (AP) — Former President Jimmy Carter, who at 98 is the longest-serving U.S. president, has entered hospice home care in Plains, Georgia, a Carter Center statement confirmed Saturday.

After a series of short hospital stays, the statement said, Carter “decided to spend the remainder of her time at home with her family and receive palliative care instead of additional medical intervention.”

The statement said the 39th President has the full support of his medical team and his family, who “request confidentiality at this time and are grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.”

Carter was a little-known Georgia governor when he began his bid for president ahead of the 1976 election. He went on to defeat then-President Gerald R. Ford, capitalizing as an outsider in Washington at the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that ousted Richard Nixon from office in 1974.

Carter served a tumultuous single term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, a crushing loss that finally paved the way for his decades of global advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights through the Carter Center.

The former president and his wife, Rosalynn, 95, opened the center in 1982. His work there won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Jason Carter, the couple’s grandson who now chairs the Carter Center’s board of directors, said in a tweet on Saturday that he “saw both my grandparents yesterday. They are at peace and, as always, their home is full of love.

Carter, who has lived most of her life on the plains, traveled extensively in her 80s and early 90s, including annual trips to build homes with Habitat for Humanity and frequent trips to the abroad as part of The Carter Center’s election monitoring and efforts to eradicate Guinea. parasitic worm in developing countries. But the former president’s health declined in his 10th decade of life, especially as the coronavirus pandemic limited his public appearances, including at his beloved Maranatha Baptist Church where he taught the Sunday school classes for decades before crowds of standing visitors.

In August 2015, Carter had a small cancerous lump removed from her liver. The following year, Carter announced that he no longer needed treatment because an experimental drug had cleared up all signs of cancer.

Carter celebrated his last birthday in October with his family and friends in Plains, the small town where he and Rosalynn were born between World War I and the Great Depression.

Last year The Carter Center celebrated 40 years of promoting its human rights program.

The Center has been a pioneer in election observation, monitoring at least 113 elections in Africa, Latin America and Asia since 1989. In perhaps its most widely acclaimed public health effort, the organization recently announced that only 14 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in 2021, the result of years of public health campaigns to improve access to clean water in Africa.

That’s a steep drop since The Carter Center began leading the global eradication effort in 1986, when the parasitic disease infected 3.5 million people. Carter once said that he hoped to outlive the last Guinea worm parasite.

Carter was born on October 1, 1924, to a prominent family in rural southern Georgia. He went to the US Naval Academy during WWII and pursued a career as a Cold War naval officer before returning to Plains, Georgia with Rosalynn and their young family to take over the family business. peanuts after the death of Earl Carter in the 1950s.

A moderate Democrat, young Carter quickly rose from the local school board to the state Senate and then to the office of Georgia governor. He began his bid for the White House as an outsider with a broad smile, outspoken Baptist morals, and political plans reflecting his engineering background. He bonded with many Americans because of his promise not to deceive the American people after Nixon’s disgrace and American defeat in Southeast Asia.

“If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I wouldn’t deserve to be your president,” Carter often said during his campaign.

Carter, who came of age politically during the Civil Rights Movement, was the last Democratic presidential candidate to sweep the Deep South, before the region quickly passed to Reagan and Republicans in the subsequent election.

He governed amid Cold War pressures, turbulent oil markets, and social upheaval related to racism, women’s rights, and America’s global role.

Carter’s foreign policy victories included brokering peace in the Middle East by keeping Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the negotiating table for 13 days in 1978. This Camp David experience inspired the post-presidential center where Carter would establish much of his legacy. At home, Carter partially deregulated the airline, railroad, and trucking industries and created the departments of education and energy, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He has designated millions of acres in Alaska as national parks or wildlife refuges. He appointed a then-record number of women and non-whites to federal positions. He was never nominated to the Supreme Court, but he elevated civil rights lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the nation’s second-highest court, positioning her for promotion in 1993.

Carter also built on Nixon’s openness to China and, although he tolerated autocrats in Asia, pushed Latin America from dictatorships to democracy.

Yet Carter’s electoral coalition shattered under double-digit inflation, gas lines and the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran. Its darkest hour came when eight Americans died in a failed hostage rescue in April 1980, helping to ensure its crushing defeat.

For years after his loss, Carter largely distanced himself from electoral politics. The Democrats were reluctant to embrace it. The Republicans have made a punchline of it, caricaturing it as an unhappy liberal. In reality, Carter governed more like a technocrat, more progressive on race and gender equality than he had in his campaign, but a budget hawk who often angered more liberal Democrats, including including Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who fought a damaging primary battle against the incumbent president in 1980.

Carter said after leaving office that he underestimated the importance of dealing with Washington’s power brokers, including the media and lobbying forces rooted in the nation’s capital. But he insisted that his overall approach was sound and that he had achieved his main objectives – “peacefully protecting the security and interests of our nation” and “strengthening human rights at home and abroad. — even though he dramatically missed a second term.

And years later, when he was diagnosed with cancer as a nonagenarian, he said he was happy with his long life.

“I’m completely comfortable with whatever comes,” he said in 2015. “I’ve had an exciting, adventurous and rewarding existence.”