Jimmy Carter, 39th US President, Enters Hospice Care At Home

ATLANTA, Ga. — Former President Jimmy Carter, the longest-living American president at 98 years old, has entered home hospice care in Plains, Georgia, according to a statement from The Carter Center on Saturday.

Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention” after a series of short hospital stays, according to the statement.

The 39th president has the full support of his medical team and family, who “ask for privacy at this time and are grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers,” according to the statement.

Jimmy Carter was a little-known Georgia governor when he launched his presidential campaign ahead of the 1976 election. He went on to defeat then-President Gerald R. Ford, capitalizing on his status as a Washington outsider in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, which forced Richard Nixon out of office in 1974.

Jimmy Carter served a single turbulent term before being defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, paving the way for his decades of global advocacy for democracy, public health, and human rights through The Carter Center.

The Center was founded in 1982 by the former president and his wife, Rosalynn, 95. In 2002, his work there earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jimmy Carter, Who Spent Most Of His Life In the Plains

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

Jimmy Carter, who spent most of his life in the Plains, traveled extensively into his 80s and early 90s, including annual trips to Habitat for Humanity and frequent trips abroad as part of the Carter Center’s election monitoring and efforts to eradicate the Guinea worm parasite in developing countries. However, the former president’s health has deteriorated in his tenth decade, particularly as the coronavirus pandemic has limited his public appearances, including at his beloved Maranatha Baptist Church, where he taught Sunday School lessons for decades to standing-room-only crowds.

Former President Jimmy Carter is receiving hospice care at the Carter Center.

Carter had a small cancerous mass removed from his liver in August 2015. Carter said the next year that he didn’t need any more treatment because an experimental drug had taken care of all the cancer.

Carter’s most recent birthday was celebrated in October with 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 agenda.

Jimmy Carter Was Born In Rural South Georgia

Since 1989, the Center has been a leader in the field of election observation. At least 113 elections in Africa, Latin America, and Asia have been watched by the Center. The organization recently said that there were only 14 cases of Guinea worm disease in humans in all of 2021. This is the result of years of public health campaigns in Africa to make it easier for people to get clean drinking water.

This is a dramatic reduction from when The Carter Center took the lead on global eradication efforts in 1986 when the parasitic disease infected 3.5 million people. Carter once stated that he hoped to outlive the last Guinea worm parasite.

Carter was born in rural south Georgia on October 1, 1924, to a prominent family. During WWII, he attended the United States Naval Academy and served as a Cold War Naval officer before returning to Plains, Georgia, with Rosalynn and their young family to take over the peanut business after Earl Carter’s death in the 1950s.

The younger Carter, a moderate Democrat, rose quickly from the local school board to the state Senate and then to the governorship of Georgia. He launched his presidential campaign as an underdog with a broad smile, outspoken Baptist beliefs, and policy proposals that reflected his engineering education. He was popular among many Americans because he promised not to deceive the American people following Nixon’s disgrace and defeat in Southeast Asia.

“Don’t vote for me if I lie or make a false statement. “I would not deserve to be your president,” Carter frequently said during his campaign.

Jimmy Carter, who came of age politically during the civil rights movement, was the last Democratic presidential nominee to sweep the Deep South before Reagan and the Republicans swept the region in subsequent elections.

He governed amid Cold War tensions, volatile oil markets, social unrest over racism, women’s rights, and America’s global role.

At 100 Years Old, The Man Is Still An Active Volunteer

Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy triumphs included keeping Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the negotiating table for 13 days in 1978. That Camp David experience inspired the post-presidential Center where Carter would leave his imprint. Domestically, Jimmy Carter deregulated the airline, railroad, and trucking industries and established the departments of Education and Energy and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He established national parks and wildlife refuges on millions of acres in Alaska. He appointed a record number of women and non-whites to federal positions. He never received a Supreme Court nomination, but he did appoint civil rights lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the nation’s ≥second-highest court, putting her in line for a promotion in 1993.

Jimmy Carter also expanded on Nixon’s opening to China, and while tolerating autocrats in Asia, he pushed Latin America away from dictatorships and toward democracy.

Despite this, Jimmy Carter’s electoral coalition splintered due to double-digit inflation, gasoline lines, and Iran’s 444-day hostage crisis. In April 1980, eight Americans were killed in a failed hostage rescue, contributing to his landslide defeat.

Jimmy Carter largely disappeared from electoral politics in the years following his defeat. Democrats were wary of embracing him. Republicans used him as a punchline, portraying him as a helpless liberal. In reality, Jimmy Carter governed as a technocrat, more progressive on race and gender equality than he had campaigned, but a budget hawk who frequently irritated more liberal Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who ran a damaging primary campaign against the sitting president in 1980.

Carter said after he left office that he had underestimated how important it was to deal with Washington power brokers, such as the media and lobbying groups in the nation’s capital. However, he insisted that his overall strategy was sound and that he had achieved his primary goals — to “protect our nation’s security and interests peacefully” and “enhance human rights here and abroad” — despite falling dramatically short of a second term.

Years later, when he was 100 and was told he had cancer, he said he was happy with his long life.

“I’m perfectly fine with whatever happens,” he said in 2015. “I’ve had an exciting, adventurous, and rewarding life.”

SOURCE – (AP)