Jimmy Carter, who rose from Georgia farmland to become the 39th president of the United States on a promise of national healing after the wounds of Watergate and Vietnam, then lost the White House in a cauldron of economic turmoil at home and crisis in Iran, died on Sunday at his home in Plains, Ga. He was 100.

 

The Carter Center in Atlanta announced his death.

 

Mr. Carter, the longest-living president in American history, died nearly three months after he turned 100, becoming the first former commander in chief to reach the century mark. In August, his grandson Jason Carter told the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that the former president was “holding on.”  “Though his body may be weak tonight, his spirit is as strong as ever,” he said, adding that Mr. Carter “can’t wait to vote for Kamala Harris.”

 

The former president cast his absentee ballot for her in mid-October after making his final public appearance on his birthday when he was rolled out to his yard in a wheelchair to watch a flyover of military jets in his honor. Other than interludes in the White House and the Georgia governor’s mansion, he and his wife, the former first lady Rosalynn Carter, lived in the same simple home in Plains for most of their adult lives and each of them passed away there, Mrs. Carter in November 2023.

 

A lifelong farmer who still worked with his hands building houses for the poor well into his 90s, Mr. Carter had long defied death and outlived not only his wife but his vice president, most of his cabinet, key aides and allies as well as the Republican president he defeated and the Republican challenger who later defeated him. Over the years, he beat back a series of health crises, including a bout with the skin cancer melanoma, which spread to his liver and brain, and repeated falls, one giving him a broken hip.

 

The Carter Center announced in February 2023 that Mr. Carter, “after a series of short hospital stays,” had decided to forgo further life-prolonging medical treatment and would receive hospice care at home.

 

News that he seemed to be in his final days prompted a wave of tributes and remembrances of his extended and eventful life but even then he upended expectations by hanging on for 22 months. He lived long enough to bid farewell to Mrs. Carter, who died at 96 yrs, culminating a marriage of 77 years.

 

Mr. Carter’s death sets the stage for the first presidential funeral since that of George H.W. Bush in 2018. Such occasions traditionally prompt a cease-fire in America’s fractious political wars as the nation’s leaders pause to remember and bid farewell to one of their own. President Biden, who as a young senator supported Mr. Carter’s bid for the White House in 1976, visited the former president in Plains in 2021, three months after taking office.

 

With his peanut farmer’s blue jeans, his broad, toothy grin and his promise never to tell a lie, Mr. Carter was a self-professed outsider intent on reforming a broken Washington in an era of lost faith in government. He became one of his generation’s great peacemakers with his Camp David accords, bringing together Israel and Egypt, but he could not turn around a slumping economy or free American hostages seized by militants in Iran in time to win a second term.

 

While his presidency was remembered more for its failures than for its successes, his post-presidency was seen by many as a model for future chief executives. Rather than vanish from view or focus on moneymaking, he established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease and combat social inequality. He transformed himself into a freelance diplomat traveling the globe, sometimes irritating his successors but earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

 

Mr. Carter was outspoken into his final years. He condemned the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters trying to overturn Mr. Trump’s election defeat, and he denounced new voting limits subsequently passed by Republicans in Georgia. In an essay for The New York Times on the first anniversary of Jan. 6, he warned that “our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss” and called for changes to avoid “losing our precious democracy.”

 

Long a favorite target for Republicans, Mr. Carter’s name came up repeatedly as a foil for Mr. Trump to mock Mr. Biden even after the incumbent president withdrew from this year’s race. “Jimmy Carter is the happiest man because Jimmy Carter is considered a brilliant president by comparison,” Mr. Trump said on Mr. Carter’s 100th birthday. Mr. Biden’s critics compared high inflation on his watch to the price increases of Mr. Carter’s presidency, and the fall of Afghanistan to the Iran hostage crisis.

Mr. Carter went to Washington with an outsider’s promise to “drain the swamp” and make America great again four decades before Mr. Trump expressed those same aims. But the two could hardly have come from more different origins. Unlike the thrice-married New York playboy mogul with the flashy golf resorts and the private airliner, Mr. Carter grew up on a peanut farm with no electricity or running water. He was a frugal born-again Christian who taught Sunday school and was married to the same woman for more than three-quarters of a century.

 

He was a man of the people, or so he wanted to be perceived. Minutes after his Inaugural Address in January 1977, he surprised the crowds lining Pennsylvania Avenue when he and Rosalynn Carter and their 9-year-old daughter, Amy, got out of the presidential limousine and walked the parade route to the White House, smiling and waving in the sunshine as spectators cheered.

Mr. Carter once said that he had gone to the capital to restore the country’s faith in itself after the twin traumas of Watergate and Vietnam — to build a “new foundation,” as he put it, of trust, decency and compassion.

 

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker