Jimmy Carter: tributes pour in as ex-president celebrates 99th birthday
The former US president Jimmy Carter will celebrate his 99th birthday on Sunday by putting off watching church services online and instead celebrating with his wife, Rosalynn, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Plains, Georgia.
The gathering will take place in the same one-story house where the Carters lived before he was elected to the Georgia Senate in 1962.
“The remarkable piece to me and I think to my family is that while my grandparents have accomplished so much, they have really remained the same sort of South Georgia couple that lives in a 600-person village where they were born,” said Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson who leads the Carter Center, which his grandparents founded in 1982, after leaving the White House.
The younger Carter said his grandparents had always “made it easy for us, as a family, to be as normal as we can be”.
The family announced in February that Jimmy Carter was entering home hospice care. Yet Carter, who overcame cancer diagnosed at 90 and learned to walk after having his hip replaced at age 94, defied all odds again.
“If Jimmy Carter were a tree, he’d be a towering, old Southern oak,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic national chair and presidential campaign manager who got her start with Carter. “He’s as good as they come and tough as they come.”
Carter has been able to enjoy months of accolades typically reserved for when a former president dies. The latest round includes messages from world leaders and pop culture figures, many focusing on his four decades of humanitarian work.
The news anchor Katie Couric praised Carter for his “relentless effort every day to make the world a better place”. She pointed to work to eradicate Guinea worm disease and river blindness, while advocating for peace and democracy. She noted he has written 32 books and worked with Habitat for Humanity, building houses for low-income people.
“Oh, yeah, and you were governor of Georgia. And did I mention president of the United States? When are you going to stop slacking off?”
Bill Clinton, the 42nd president, said: “Jimmy! Happy birthday. You only get to be 99 once. It’s been a long, good ride, and we thank you for your service and your friendship and the enduring embodiment of the American dream.”
In Atlanta, the Carter Library & Museum and the Carter Center were holding events including a naturalization ceremony for 99 new citizens. Festivities at the museum, which offered 99-cent admission, were slated to continue after Congress came to an agreement to avoid a government shutdown.
Jason Carter said his grandfather has found it “gratifying” to see reassessments of his presidency. Carter’s term often has been seen as a failure because of inflation, global fuel shortages and the American hostage crisis in Iran. Yet Carter’s focus on diplomacy, his emphasis on the environment and his focus on efficient government have attracted second looks.
Carter’s disease-eradication work occurs mostly in developing countries. But Jimmy and Roslaynn Carter were first exposed to river blindness growing up surrounded by crushing poverty during the Great Depression.
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Carter’s global democracy advocacy has now come home. In recent years, Carter has declared his own country to be more of an “oligarchy” than a well-functioning democracy. The Center has become involved in monitoring US elections.
Joe Biden was a young Delaware politician in 1976, the first US senator to endorse Carter. Now, as the 80-year-old president seeks re-election, he faces headwinds of inflation Republicans compare to Carter’s economy. On Saturday, Biden had a wooden birthday cake placed on the White House lawn.
The year Carter was born, Congress passed sweeping immigration restrictions. Now, Republicans have moved well to the right of Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, on the issue.
Carter was born into Jim Crow segregation, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan marched openly. As governor and president, he set new marks for appointing Black Americans to top posts. At 99, his Sunday online church circuit includes watching Georgia’s first Black US senator, Raphael Warnock, preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. At the same time, some white state lawmakers are defying the US supreme court in an effort to curtail Black voters’ strength.
Jason Carter said understanding his grandfather’s impact meant resisting the urge to assess whether he solved every problem he confronted. Instead, he said, the takeaway is to recognize a sweeping impact rooted in respecting other people.
“You don’t get more out of a life than he got, right?” Carter said. “It is a incredible, full rich life with a long marriage, a wonderful partnership with my grandmother, and the ability to see the world and interact with the world in ways that almost nobody else has ever been able to do.”