The Carter Center announced Saturday that former President Jimmy Carter has entered home hospice care.
The charity, founded by the 98-year-old former president, said on Twitter that after a series of brief hospitalizations, Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical procedures.”
He has the full support of his medical team and family, who “request privacy at this time and are grateful for the concerns of his many admirers.”
Carter, a Democrat, became the 39th US President when he defeated former President Gerald R. Ford in 1976. He only served a single term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
In August 2015, Carter had a small cancerous mass removed from his liver. The following year, Carter announced that he needed no further treatment because an experimental drug eliminated all signs of cancer.
Former US President Jimmy Carter has decided to seek hospice care and “spend the rest of his time at home with his family” instead of undergoing additional medical procedures, the Carter Center said Saturday
Carter has been married to his wife Rosalynn Carter for over 76 years, the longest marriage of any American president and first lady.
Born on October 1, 1924 with the rarely used full name James Earl Carter, Jr., he grew up during the Great Depression.
Carter is the son of a Georgia peanut farmer, and peanut growing, talking about politics, and devotion to the Baptist faith are said to have been the pillars of his upbringing.
She graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland in 1946 and married Rosalynn Smith shortly thereafter.
The couple have three sons, John William (Jack), James Earl III (Chip), Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff) and a daughter, Amy Lynn.
Carter served seven years as a naval officer before returning to Georgia, where he entered state politics in 1962.
Eight years later he was elected governor of Georgia.
He launched a bid for the White House in 1974 and built momentum over the next two years by beating President Gerald R. Ford.
As President, he created two new cabinet-level departments: the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.
He said his goal is to make government “competent and compassionate.”
By the end of his tenure, inflation and interest rates were near record highs, but Carter still managed to add nearly eight million jobs and narrow the budget deficit.
He had also worked on the energy shortage by introducing a national energy policy and liberalizing domestic oil prices to boost production.
And he sought to improve the environment by expanding the national park system to include the protection of 103 million acres of Alaskan land.
Carter is pictured here in 2018 on the first day of Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter’s week-long work project
Carter here in 2018 with his wife Rosalynn, to whom he has been married for 76 years
President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter dance at a 1977 White House Convention Ball. The couple celebrated 76 years of marriage earlier this year
Carter with his wife Rosalynn and their daughter Amy at the Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, in 1976. Last year Carter said he would not have made it to become president by the time he was 80 and seemed the age of Joe Biden and Donald Attacking Trump before the election
Both during and after his presidency, he became known as an international advocate for human rights.
Carter was at the forefront of brokering the Camp David Accords between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978.
He saw the beginning of the Iran hostage crisis and the first efforts to develop energy independence policies.
According to VOA, his decision in 1980 to authorize a military rescue of American hostages in Iran contributed to his re-election defeat that year.
Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 after founding the Carter Center to advance human rights around the world.
Jimmy Carter photographed at his peanut farm in Plains, Georgia in 1976
He has also spent time after his presidency building Habitat for Humanity homes, the nation’s best-known housing charity, and has written more than two dozen books.
In 2015, Carter was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, which was discovered in his liver and spread to his brain.
About six months after the diagnosis, Carter announced that he no longer needed cancer treatment, in part because of a breakthrough drug that trains the immune system to fight cancerous tumors.
He was hospitalized for dehydration two years later while building homes with Habitat for Humanity in Canada.
The next day after his release, he was back at the site.
Carter has also traveled the world for elections and worked with the Carter Center to eradicate disease.
The center began eradicating Guinea worm disease in 1986, affecting 3.5 million people. Last year, it was just 54, according to the Atlanta Journal constitution.
In Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Guatemala, the center established a river blindness eradication program that helped eradicate the disease.
Though Carter has stepped down from the public eye due to ill health, he remains a silent force in politics at home and through his post-presidential center on public health and human rights defense around the world.
Although Carter remained neutral in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, he took calls and visits from several candidates.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, now 95, recorded audio addresses for the virtual Democratic National Convention urging the election of candidate Joe Biden, who was a young senator from Delaware when Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976.
Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd on the floor at the 1980 Democratic National Convention
President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan meet with former President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter at the Carter Center in October 1986
Carter, a World War II veteran, prides himself on the fact that the US was not involved in any foreign wars during his tenure. He is pictured here with his wife (left) and running mate Walter and his wife Joan Mondale after accepting the Democratic nomination for president at the DNC in New York City in 1977
“Joe Biden was my first and most effective supporter in the Senate,” Carter told the convention. “For decades he has been my faithful and devoted friend.”
Carter also gained renewed attention following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Carter is the only president since 1850 not to make a single Supreme Court nomination, but he has transformed the lower courts with a record number of nominations from women and nonwhite jurists, Ginsburg being the most notable.
In 1980, Carter Ginsburg, then the nation’s most accomplished civil rights attorney, elected to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is considered the nation’s second highest court.
She was the second woman to nominate Carter for the DC Circuit, which set her up for a promotion to the Supreme Court 13 years later.
“He looked around the federal judiciary and said, ‘You all look like me, but that’s not what the great United States looks like,'” Ginsburg said at a 2016 forum at Fordham University Law School.
Then-Democratic vice presidential nominee Walter Mondale (left) and presidential nominee Jimmy Carter, pictured in 1976, speak to reporters during their 1976 campaign
The former president announced that he voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary but did not endorse anyone in the 2020 Democratic primary
Carter, a World War II veteran, said that presidents feed the cycle of entering war, in part because “we make heroes out of wartime commanders.” Pictured meeting Robert Mugabe
Perhaps most notable of Carter’s electoral maneuvers in 2020 is the Carter Center calling the United States a “breakaway” democracy for the first time.
The center announced after the Democratic convention that it would devote resources to ensuring free and fair US elections this fall.
The Carters founded the center in 1982, two years after he lost his re-election bid to Republican Ronald Reagan.
The center has observed more than 110 elections in 39 countries since 1989, but it was a notable development for the institution to focus on Carter’s homeland, the world’s leading Democratic superpower since World War II.
In a statement from the Carter Center explaining the decision to monitor a U.S. election, a Carter Center statement said that “relapsed” democracies “are often characterized by polarization, lack of public trust, ethnic or racial divisions, and injustice and concerned that election results will not be viewed as credible or may provoke violence”.
Carter remained neutral in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. He took calls and visits from several candidates in May 2019, including Pete Buttigieg (pictured).
Carter had warned Democrats against going too far left in the upcoming 2020 election
Siding with Biden over Trump was not surprising for a former Democratic president, but it means Carter is ignoring one of his own recent observations about the presidency.
Weeks before his 95th birthday, Carter alluded to the advanced age of several candidates.
“I hope there’s an age limit,” Carter said jovially at his town hall when asked if he would run again.
Then he became more serious: “If I were only 80 years old, if I were 15 years younger, I don’t think I could take on the tasks that I experienced as president.”
Only a handful of past presidents have lived past 90, including former President Ronald Reagan, Carter’s successor, who lived to be 93.
America’s founding President George Washington died in April 1789, almost three years after leaving office, at the age of 57 years and 67 days, becoming the youngest former President.
The announcement comes just a day after a building at the US Naval Academy named after a Confederate Navy leader was renamed Friday in honor of former President Carter, who graduated from the academy in 1946.
The decision to rename the Engineering Building at Annapolis came after a commission appointed by Congress determined that several military assets across all branches of the service had to be renamed due to Confederate ties.
Named Maury Hall, the building was constructed in the early 1900s and named for Matthew Fontaine Maury, a naval officer and scientist who aligned with the Confederates.
The home of the Naval Academy Superintendent and a nearby street are named for Franklin Buchanan, the Academy’s first superintendent who joined the Confederate Navy at the beginning of the Civil War. The academy is also renaming the house and street, but has yet to announce those changes.
Carter did not attend the ceremony, but some of his relatives did.
“It’s impossible to overstate what this academy and the Navy meant to my grandfather and, by extension, to my family,” said Josh Carter, Jimmy Carter’s grandson, in a Navy press release.