Life in Pictures: Jimmy Carter

Former US President Jimmy Carter has died aged 100.

The 39th President of the United States lived longer than any president in history.

Here, we take a look at his life in pictures.

James Earl Carter Jr was born on 1 October 1924 in the small town of Plains, Georgia, the eldest of four children.

His segregationist father had started the family peanut business, and his mother, Lillian, was a registered nurse.

As a child, Carter was expected to work long hours on the farm, and home life was austere.

A star basketball player in high school, Carter's experience of the Great Depression and staunch Baptist faith underpinned his political philosophy.

He spent seven years in the US Navy - during which time he married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister's - and became a submarine officer.

When his father died of cancer in 1953, Carter abandoned a seven-year career in the navy to take control of the ailing family peanut farm. Carter turned the business round and made himself wealthy in the process.

He entered politics in the 1960s, elected first as Georgia state senator during a special election - starting his campaign only two weeks before voting.

After an initial defeat for the governorship of Georgia, he was elected to the state's top office in 1970 - a position he would use as a springboard to the White House.

On becoming Georgia governor in 1970, he became more overt in his support of civil rights. He placed pictures of Martin Luther King on the walls of the capitol building. Here, Carter dedicates a painting of Dr King in 1974. It was the first portrait of an African American to be represented in the state's official portrait gallery.

As Carter launched his campaign for the presidency in 1974, the nation was still reeling from the Watergate scandal. He put himself forward as a simple peanut farmer, untainted by the questionable ethics of professional politicians on Capitol Hill.

Americans wanted an outsider and Carter fitted the bill. He won a narrow election victory against incumbent Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election. The newly elected President, with his wife and mother, saluted the crowd of supporters at a victory rally in his home town of Plains Georgia.

Carter took the oath of office from Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger on stage in front of the White House in January 1977 as his wife Rosalynn looked on.

On his first full day in office, he pardoned hundreds of thousands of men who had evaded service in Vietnam - either by fleeing abroad or failing to register with their local draft board.

The high-point of the Carter years was the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978 in which Egypt formally recognised the state of Israel. He also signed a treaty returning the Panama canal to Panama.

Subsequent events conspired against him. First, the Shah of Iran was overthrown and 66 Americans were taken hostage in Tehran. Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

The public did not believe he was being tough enough and his popularity slumped. When an attempt to rescue the hostages failed, and eight members of the US military were killed, Carter appeared even weaker. Advertisement

Carter fought off a serious challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination but it was not enough to see off his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan. The former actor swept into the White House with an electoral college landslide.

Instead of disappearing, Jimmy Carter used the prestige of his former office to become a diplomat and mediator across the world under the auspices of his newly founded Carter Centre. The former president and his wife began work with the Habitat for Humanity charity in 1984, and helped to repair more than 4,000 homes in the years since.

He very quickly added election monitoring to the Carter Centre, famously denouncing the 1989 election in General Manuel Noriega's Panama.

In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts".

In 2007 Carter became a part of The Elders, a group founded by Nelson Mandela for elder global leaders who no longer hold public office, along with Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt and Mary Robinson.

At a news conference at the Carter Center in August 2015, the former president announced that he was being treated for cancer, the disease that killed both his parents and three sisters

Carter also continued to teach at a Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains.

Former President Carter and wife Rosalynn attended the inauguration ceremony of Donald J. Trump in 2017.

After a fall in his home in 2019, the former US president made a public appearance with black eye. He spoke at an event for the non-profit, Habitat for Humanity.

In 2021 Carter and Rosalynn celebrated 75 years of marriage. President Joe Biden, and his wife Jill, visited the couple in their home in in Georgia

In a rare public appearance since entering hospice care, the former president attended a memorial service for his wife Rosalynn in Georgia. She died aged 96 in November 2023. She was diagnosed with dementia in May and entered hospice care in Georgia in the days before her death.

Carter watched on from the front row, sitting in a wheelchair with his legs covered by a blanket. "He's coming to the end, and he's very, very physically diminished," Jason Carter, one of the former president's grandsons, said in an interview before the service.

 

Life in Pictures: Jimmy Carter

Life in Pictures: Jimmy Carter