Written By: Richard Jerome
The following is from the introduction to LIFE’s special tribute issue, Jimmy Carter: A Noble Life, which is available online and at newsstands.
When James Earl Carter died at his home in Plains, Georgia, on December 29, 2024, he was 100, and many people who as 18-year-olds had voted for or against him in the 1970s were contemplating retirement—an unthinkable concept for Carter. To the end, the nation’s longest-lived President remained passionately engaged in American life and global affairs, his body buffeted by illness but his intelligence undimmed.
Jimmy Carter’s protean career saw soaring triumphs and crushing defeats, but one theme ran through it like a river—a call to service, deeply rooted in devout Christian faith. He’d risen meteorically to the White House, suffered a precipitous fall, then rebuilt his legacy through good works at home and abroad, whether it was promoting public health and welfare or safeguarding the environment or protecting human rights. His dogged resilience was a lesson in the human capacity for renewal. It seemed Jimmy Carter would go on forever.
He was 96 when he and his wife, Rosalynn, appeared with three other former Presidents and their first ladies—the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas—in a two-ad campaign urging Americans to sign up for the COVID-19 vaccine in March 2021. One spot showed clips of the couples receiving their shots; in the other, the ex-Presidents stood together, each addressing the camera.
It was Carter’s second time in the news that week. Days earlier, he’d released a statement blasting Georgia Republicans for a slate of measures restricting absentee ballots and eliminating Sunday voting, widely seen as a reaction to GOP losses in his traditionally red home state. Georgia had favored Joe Biden in the 2020 election and sent Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate, partly on the strength of mail-in and Sunday votes from majority Black districts. “I am disheartened, saddened, and angry,” said Carter, who had backed both senators and endorsed Biden. “We must not promote confidence among one segment of the electorate by restricting the participation of others.”
Carter became such a fixture in public life, it was hard to believe he’d burst onto the national scene seemingly out of nowhere in 1976 to wrest the presidency from Gerald Ford. A polarizing war, racial division, and Watergate had left the nation starving for change—and the unpretentious governor/peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, fit the bill. Physically unprepossessing, Carter was hardly magnetic in stump speeches, but he won 297 electoral votes, 50 percent of the popular vote, and on Inauguration Day became the first incoming President to walk from the Capitol to the White House. In the Oval Office, Carter saw himself as a technocratic problem solver, but he was an insular President, reliant on a tight inner circle of friends and advisers nicknamed the Georgia Mafia. Bluntly honest, he seemed incapable of schmoozing legislators.
Still, backed by a Democratic Congress, Carter could claim substantial achievements, including enacting strong new pollution controls, bolstering consumer protections, establishing the Energy and Education departments, and appointing many female and Black federal judges. And then there was his crowning foreign policy triumph, brokering peace between Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat—the Camp David Accords.
But other crises overwhelmed Carter’s presidency: runaway inflation, energy shortages, and the humiliating hostage standoff with Iran. In 1980, Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in an epic landslide, 489 electoral votes to 49; he returned to Plains depressed, and roundly dismissed as a failure. As it turned out, he was just getting started.
Other one-term Presidents have enjoyed distinguished second acts. John Quincy Adams served 18 years in the House as a fierce abolitionist; William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But Carter’s four-decade post-presidency, the longest in American history, was unmatched for its breadth and depth of accomplishment. Much of it sprang from the Carter Center, the nonprofit he and Rosalynn started in 1982, which has launched programs in 80 countries to promote health, sanitation, economic justice, and democracy. Carter became a leading authority on election integrity, roaming the globe to monitor voting. His most visible humanitarian work, though, was when he rolled up his sleeves and built houses with Habitat for Humanity, helping to provide some 4,400 families with safe, affordable shelter.
Carter won hearts around the world with his grace in the face of a 2015 cancer diagnosis—melanoma had metastasized and spread to his brain. He thought he had weeks to live but recovered and kept going. Social media immortalized him as a humanitarian action hero—a viral meme depicted him on the job with Habitat, hammer in hand, captioned, “You May Be Badass, But You’ll Never Be 91-Year-Old Jimmy Carter Battling Cancer While Making a House for the Unfortunate Badass!”
Even in his final years, Carter continued to show up for his convictions and his community. In May 2022, he filed a friend of the court brief to prevent a road being built through an Alaskan refuge. The following year, he and Rosalynn surprised attendees of the annual Peanut Festival in Plains when they waved to the crowd from a car. It would be the beloved couple’s last appearance at the event; Rosalynn died on November 19, 2023, at age 96. Carter’s tribute to his wife of 77 years summed up his own character as well. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in this world, I knew someone loved and supported me.”
Here are a selection of photos from LIFE’s special tribute issue to Jimmy Carter.
Cover image: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders/Corbis/Contour RA/Getty
A young Jimmy Carter, in his naval uniform, with wife Rosalynn. They were married for 77 years.
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
Jimmy Carter was sworn in as the 39th President of the United States by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger on January 21, 1977
Hulton Archive/Getty
Carter met with Israel’s Menahem Begin and Anwar Sadat of Egypt at Camp David, 1978. The agreements that resulted from the meetings, known as the Camp David Accords, led to a historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.
Everett/Shutterstock
Even before his Habitat for Humanity days, Jimmy Carter enjoyed building things. Here the former President made use of the woodworking tools given to him as a going away gift from his Cabinet and staff. Carter was sanding a table he built for Rosalynn to use as a typewriter stand.
Bettmann/Getty
Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, visited children suffering from schistosomiasis during their Feb. 15, 2007, trip to Nasarawa North, Nigeria. The Carters traveled to the community to bring national attention to the country’s need to make disease prevention methods and treatments with the medicine praziquantel more accessible in its rural and impoverished communities.
Emily Staub/The Carter Center
Jimmy Carter helped an Egyptian voter to cast his ballot at a polling station in Cairo on May 24, 2012 during the country’s second day of the country’s first free presidential election. Representatives from the Carter Center came to the country to serve as election monitors.
Wissam Saleh/AFP/Getty
Carter met with the locals while in Kathmandu on November 18, 2013, to monitor Nepal’s elections.
Deborah Hakes/ The Carter Center
