The former President is 98 and has decided to enter hospice care rather than continue to seek treatment. No specific mention of what he has been undergoing treatment for in the statement. From the NYT here (gift link) but I’m sure it will be on other news sources.
Even though he is at a very advanced age this makes me very sad. Although he was a one-term President and is often ranked as a less successful one he has lived a life of exceptional public service. I hope he and his family are able to enjoy what time they have left together.
So much this. Regardless of how we each might feel about his presidency. Jimmy Carter is a fantastic human. May we all follow his examples of how to support a community and participate in it. Jimmy, may your passing be gentle and wonderous.
Sunday School teacher almost to the end. An incredible human being, and someone who embodied Christ’s teachings better than almost any other politician around.
I didn’t care for him much as a President. He seemed like genuinely a nice guy (which is probably what got him elected), and it was a breath of fresh air to not have a corrupt sleazebag in the office for a change. Unfortunately, he just didn’t do well in the job. I was glad to see him go.
The things I remember about his president were Billy Beer, the Killer Rabbit, and getting so bogged down in the Iran hostage crisis that it completely shut down his presidency. I can’t think of any major accomplishments during his presidency that he should be proud of.
But everything that he did after his presidency was just phenomenal. He was an incredible man and a tremendous humanitarian. I can’t think of any president who had a more positive and impactful post-presidency.
He stood up for human rights in Latin America. He drove the juntas in Argentina and Chile nuts. His actions helped restore democracy in those countries.
He rebuilt the military from its post-Vietnam slump. I was there, I saw it.
Jimmy Carter embodies the ‘road not taken’ by many White evangelical Christians
Long before he was called a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a humanitarian and the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter was known as something else: a “Goddamn n***er lover.”
That’s the racial slur a White classmate of Carter’s at the US Naval Academy assigned to him right after World War II when the future president befriended the academy’s only Black midshipman.
Carter was called the same racial epithet when he took over his family’s peanut farm in South Georgia during the Jim Crow era. He repeatedly refused to join a segregationist group called the White Citizens’ Council despite threats to boycott his peanut business. A delegation representing the council confronted Carter at his warehouse one day, with one member even offering to pay his five-dollar membership fee.
“As one of his biographers has noted, Carter was so angry that he walked over to his cash register, pulled out a five-dollar bill, and declared: “I’ll take this and flush it down the toilet, but I am not going to join the White Citizens’ Council.”
I wish we could have left him a better, more hopeful world for him to depart from. And may his end be peaceful, filled with love. I believe it will be.
