Jimmy Carter at 100

At this memorable milestone, I recount some personal stories and explain why he's the "UnTrump" and a moral exemplar for our times

This is how I remember him: My snapshot of Carter next to a cabinet he built in his home in Plains, 2015

I thought I’d use the occasion of Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday to convey a few of my encounters with him and to offer short excerpts from my 2020 biography, His Very Best, and from an article I wrote about him this week in the New York Times entitled “Jimmy Carter is the unTrump.”

Carter had half-expected to die in the 1980s of pancreatic cancer, which killed his father and all three siblings when they were in their fifties. But after researching the disease and learning that being a non-smoker had likely spared him, he settled into an astonishingly long and productive post-presidential life. 

I’ve long suspected that Carter would make it to 100. Like all presidents, he has always been exceptionally competitive. When he announced after a February 2023 hospital stay that he was going into hospice, which was largely because he didn’t want to spend another night apart from Rosalynn, I sensed that he would break the unofficial hospice record set by humorist Art Buchwald–11 months–even if he didn’t know he was doing so. Thanks to healthy habits, modern medicine (Keytruda, a potent immunotherapy drug that knocked out his metastatic melanoma in 2016), and, as he told me, prayer, he already owned the longevity record for American presidents.

Carter’s family thought he wouldn’t last long following Rosalynn’s death late last year, but after a period of deep bereavement, he re-engaged with the world. And he told members of the tiny circle who were still allowed to visit him that because he was no longer capable of taking care of her, she was in better hands now — God’s.

The last time I saw Carter was in July of 2021 when Emily and I were invited to the Carters’ 75th wedding anniversary, which was held at Plains High School. (They met in Plains more than 98 years ago. Jimmy’s mother, a nurse, delivered Rosalynn, then brought her nearly three-year-old toddler over to see the new baby.) Sam Donaldson and I chased down a rumor that Carter had been hospitalized the week of the festivities but had insisted on leaving his sick bed to attend the party. It was true. 

I remembered that stubbornness from 2015 when Carter fell fully clothed into a pond by his late mother’s house (where his transition team had met when he was president-elect) and badly sprained his wrist. I assumed the interview we had scheduled for that afternoon had been canceled, but he insisted that it go on as scheduled. When I arrived at his modest ranch-style home with my son, Tommy, he told me that the Secret Service had wrapped his hand in a bandage and treated his scrapes. His clothes were drying on a clothesline behind the house, whose beautiful wooden furniture he had crafted.

The following year, I saw his carpentry skills firsthand when I spent a day with the Carters building a Habitat for Humanity house in Memphis. I had hoped to build houses with them in Nepal, but the trip was canceled because of unrest there. This was probably just as well because Emily had ratted me out to the former president and first lady, telling them I would be hopeless with the bamboo building materials.

The Carters laughed and said they would teach me, as they went on to do in Memphis. When we arrived in the morning, the local Habitat director asked Carter if he wanted to be the site's foreman. He said no but immediately assumed the role anyway, barking out orders as if he were captain of a nuclear submarine, a position he would have no doubt attained had he not chosen to leave Admiral Rickover’s navy and return to Plains after his father died in 1953.

Like Bill Clinton on a Habitat site when he was running for president in 1992, I did my very best with a hammer, but it was not good enough. Carter had joked on a late-night show that he had to teach Clinton how to properly use a hammer, and the same was true for me. He came over to my corner and gave me lessons. At 91, he could drive a nail into a board with, if I remember right, four strokes. Moments later, he was off to the band saw, which he wielded like a pro. Rosalynn, then 89, was also among the most proficient workers on the site. Afterward, they told me the story of how, on the night before Amy’s wedding at Memphis’s legendary Peabody Hotel, she got cold feet and canceled the nuptials. Jimmy was philosophical about it; Rosalynn less so, though she thought it was the right call. 

Habitat site in Memphis, 2016: I'm second full image from left in white shirt. Carter is in the middle in a blue shirt.

Speaking of Amy, she had never granted an extensive interview until her parents convinced her to sit down with me. Amy was only nine when her father was elected president, and she didn’t want to talk, she said, because she claimed she recalled little. But she turned out to be a great interview, not only because she told me that her mother kept her father’s love letters (which I included in my book) within easy reach wherever she lived. When I asked Amy about her aunt, Jimmy’s sister, the late Gloria Spann, whose headstone reads: “She Rides in Harley Heaven Now” (Gloria was the den mother of the Hell’s Angels), Amy told me that Gloria had tattoos. I pressed her a little: Of what? “Tweety Bird pushing a lawn mower.” 

That gives you some indication of how eccentric the Carter family was. When Carter launched his campaign in 1975, his brother Billy, who owned the local gas station, would tell reporters: “My mother [Lillian] went into the Peace Corps when she was 68 years old, my one sister [Gloria] is a motorcycle freak, my other sister [Ruth] is a holy roller evangelist, and my brother is running for president. I’m the only sane one in the whole damn family.”

My connection to Jimmy Carter did not begin auspiciously. I first met him — for a split-second handshake — on the South Lawn of the White House on the Fourth of July 1978, when I was a college intern in his speech-writing office. In early 1980, like so many Americans, I grew disillusioned with him and made the mistake of working for a few weeks as a part-time volunteer on Ted Kennedy’s campaign against him in the Democratic primaries. Kennedy should never have challenged a fellow Democrat–a good president, whatever his perceived shortcomings among liberals. In late 2000, I interviewed Carter for my Newsweek column on a Habitat site in the Bronx. He told me Yasir Arafat would have been assassinated if he had accepted the Clinton-engineered deal for a Palestinian state.

Other than that, I had no contact with Carter. But 15 years later, I found myself drawn back to a perplexing leader and his virtuoso achievement: the 1978 Camp David Accords, which brought peace to Israel and Egypt after four wars and became the most durable major treaty of the postwar era. If he pulled that off, I figured, there must be more to him than the easy shorthand: an inept president who becomes a noble ex-president. When I learned that he would almost certainly have begun to address global warming in the early 1980s had he been reelected, I was hooked. 

Carter’s prescience of the environment (including 15 major pieces of legislation) and several other issues were not the only things that surprised me. I knew about his human rights policy but had no clue how much it advanced democracy around the world.  

I had no idea that ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties — a squeaker in the US Senate — prevented a major war in Central America. Several of Carter’s unheralded accomplishments are especially relevant today: normalizing relations with China, which helped set in motion four decades of breath-taking global change; insisting on the first genuine racial and gender diversity in the federal judiciary; curbing redlining, which had so damaged black neighborhoods; providing the first whistle-blower protections and the first inspectors general; and extending the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for the first time into global health, which presaged the work of his post-presidency. There is much, much more to his record. I concluded he was a surprisingly consequential president—a political and stylistic failure but a substantive and far-sighted success. 

Carter’s journey from barefoot farm boy to global icon has always struck me as an American epic. He’s the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: His early life on the farm in the 1920s, without electricity or running water, might as well have been in the nineteenth. He was connected — before, during, and after his presidency — to many of the significant events and transformative social movements of the twentieth. The Carter Center, the nongovernmental organization he founded, is focused on conflict resolution, global health, and strengthening democracy—cutting-edge challenges of the twenty-first. 

Carter is warm in public and brisk — sometimes peevish — in private, with a biting wit beneath the patented smile. When I asked his son, Jeff, to describe him in one word, he replied: “Intense.” Whether sprinting as a naval officer through the core of a melted-down nuclear reactor, laboring to save tens of millions of acres of wilderness,  or driving a hundred miles out of his way on rutted roads to talk to a single  African farmer, or turkey hunting at age ninety-five — Carter was all in, all the time. Calling him the least lazy American president is not to damn him with faint praise; his long life is a master class in making every minute count.

When awarding Carter the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the chairman of the  Nobel committee said, “Carter himself has taken [from Ecclesiastes 11:4]  as his motto: ‘The worst thing that you can do is not to try.’ Few people, if  any, have tried harder.” 

I concluded that the intensity of Carter’s commitments in the second half of his life had been at least partial atonement for too often staying silent amid the brutal abuses of civil rights in his backyard during the 1950s and 1960s. This stutter-step journey from silence to action on race, rights, and reconciliation has many redemptive lessons for citizens of the twenty-first century. 

When I was working on His Very Best, I found that Carter offered me a much-needed vacation from Donald Trump. For five years, Trump couldn’t live rent-free in my brain because Carter already occupied the premises. Nowadays, I’m not so lucky. As I wrote in the Times:

The contrast could not be starker. Trump is corrupt, chaotic and vulgar; Carter is honest, disciplined and respectful. Trump is a physically big man who acts small; Carter is a physically small man who acts big. Trump appeals to the worst in us; Carter to the best in us. Trump is a nationalist and an authoritarian. Carter is an internationalist and devoted to the promotion of democracy. Trump has told thousands of well-documented lies; Carter promised in his 1976 campaign not to lie to the American people and — despite plenty of exaggerations — never did.

Trump’s a grifter who is selling gold watches; Carter’s an uplifter who lives in a modest home in Plains, Ga. Trump thinks he’s really smart; Carter actually is. Trump is on wife No. 3 and was found liable for sexual assault; Carter was married for 77 years and lusted only in his heart. Trump refused to release his tax returns; Carter originated the practice. Trump botched his handling of the Covid pandemic; Carter (with the help of Rosalynn) convinced most states to require vaccination before children can enter school and has spent his post-presidency eradicating diseases and otherwise advancing global health.

Whatever happens in November, I’m convinced that Jimmy Carter’s moral example will help light our way forward. May he live another 100 years.

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I have material about both Carter and Trump in my forthcoming book, American Reckoning: Inside Trump's Trial — And My Own, which will be published this month. Please consider pre-ordering it now. On jonathanalter.com, I give you several options for doing so.

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