Jimmy Carter obituary: A great ex-president who struggled in the White House

Described by the Queen Mother as the only man since her husband “to have had the effrontery to kiss me on the lips”, .

Her Majesty would later recall how the moment – just months after he was sworn in as US leader – caused her to take “a sharp step backwards, although not far enough”.

It was just one of the numerous mishaps that plagued Carter during his ill-fated time in the White House.

winner died this afternoon after living out his final months in his hometown.

Confirming his death, the Carter Centre posted on X: “Our founder, former US President , passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia.”

Following his death at 100, the outpouring of tributes to America’s 39th leader showed the depth of affection felt more for what he did after his presidency than during it.

Before his death today, Carter defied illness and death for years.

When his melanoma spread to his brain in 2015, he drew praise for announcing it publicly.

Even as he underwent treatment, he continued to teach Sunday school in his home town’s Baptist church. Within months, he announced that he was cancer-free.

Four years later, Carter fell at least three times, at one point breaking a hip and at another requiring 14 stitches. Each time he bounced back, even showing up for a Habitat for Humanity home-building project shortly after one stumble.

But he has slowly retreated from public life lately, making fewer and fewer appearances or statements and was unable to attend President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021.

However, he lived long enough to outlast two presidents who followed him and his own vice president, Walter Mondale.

He became the longest-living president in March 2019 when he passed former President George H.W. Bush, who died four months before.

Although Carter, nicknamed Jimmy Cardigan after once wearing a jumper for a televised speech, left the White House after one of the biggest landslide defeats of the modern era, he was one of very few US leaders to be memorialised while still alive.

The evolution of his legacy was unusual as he had such a long period between the end of his unpopular presidency and the announcement at the weekend that he would undergo no further treatment to die peacefully at his home.

Carter’s time in the White House was marred by his struggles to respond to formidable challenges, including a major energy crisis, high inflation, and unemployment.

He took office after Gerald Ford left the entire US government in disarray. Carter entered the Oval Office facing mounting challenges – an energy crisis, Soviet aggression and, above all, a deep mistrust of leadership by voters.

In foreign affairs, he reopened US relations with China and tried to broker peace in the historic Arab-Israeli conflict, but was damaged late in his term by a hostage crisis in Iran.

Carter’s diagnosis of America’s “crisis of confidence” did little to boost his flagging popularity, and in 1980 he was defeated in the general election by Ronald Reagan.

Over the following decades, Carter built a distinguished career as a diplomat, humanitarian and author, pursuing conflict resolution in countries around the globe. He was awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 2002 “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

Born in Plains, Georgia, in October 1924, Carter attended the US Naval Academy graduating in 1946.

Already, he had a solid moral compass installed in him by his nurse mother, “Miz” Lillian.

She set an example for her son by crossing the strict lines of segregation in 1920s Georgia to counsel poor African American women on health care.

Shortly after passing out of the navy, he married Rosalynn Smith, having four children together.

But tragedy struck in July 1953 as while he was preparing to serve as an engineering officer on the submarine Seawolf, his father, Earl, died from cancer.

Carter returned home and was able to rebuild his family’s struggling peanut warehouse business after a crippling drought. Ironically the legume became the symbol of his presidential campaign.

Active in community affairs and a deacon at the Plains Baptist Church, he launched his political career with a seat on his local board of education.

In 1962, he won the election to the Georgia State Senate as a Democrat, running for the governor’s office four years later, finishing a disappointing third.

The loss sent Carter into a depression, which he overcame by finding renewed faith as a born-again Christian.

He ran again for the governorship in 1970 and won. A year later, Carter was featured on the cover of Time magazine as one of a new breed of young political leaders in the South, known for their moderate racial views and progressive economic and social policies.

Initially, Carter was a political phenomenon, a new-generation Democrat who, after a single term as governor of the Peach State, shocked the political world by beating a host of better-known rivals to capture his party’s presidential nomination in 1976. A year later, he would oust the incumbent Republican president, Ford.

Over four years in office, he sought to restore trust in government following the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, ushering in reforms meant to transform politics.

He mediated the historic Camp David Accords, making peace between and Egypt, an agreement that remains the foundation of Middle East relations.

But a sour economy, rocketing inflation, and a 444-day hostage crisis in Iran where 52 American diplomats were held captive undercut his public support. Ultimately, it cost him his re-election bid, losing to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Carter spent his post-presidency, however, on a series of philanthropic causes around the world, like building houses for the poor, combating disease, promoting human rights in places of repression, monitoring elections and seeking to end conflicts.

His work as a former president in many ways came to eclipse his time in the White House, eventually earning him the Nobel Peace Prize and rehabilitating his image in the eyes of many Americans.

“Between the time he left office and entered hospice care, he got to sit back and enjoy the adulation of a grateful nation,” Jeffrey Engel, the director for the presidential history centre at Southern Methodist University, said.

“The passage of time smoothed out the rough edges of his political career.

“If Carter had died in 1982, there would be less adulation than he is receiving right now.”

Joseph Crespino, the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University, called his resilience “remarkable.”

“Instead of sulking about not winning the second term, he used his influence and prominence from his position in politics to help millions of people and win the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said.

When asked about regrets, Carter spoke of his in his autobiography “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety.”

The former president said he was upset by how his kiss with the Queen Mother was portrayed.

He wrote how he didn’t regret puckering up to Her Majesty, describing it as “lightly on the cheek” as the pair said goodnight after dinner at Buckingham Place in May 1977.

However, much like his presidency, its impact never left those affected most by his actions.

To her dying day, the Queen Mother had two hates, as detailed in her 2009 biography – oysters and being kissed by a US president.