How old is Jimmy Carter? – Deseret News

Drum roll, please — former President Jimmy Carter turns 100 on Tuesday!

Incredibly, Carter has lived through 40% of U.S. history since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and more than a third of all U.S. administrations since George Washington took office in 1789 — nine before Carter was president, his own and seven since.

In the 1920s, Plains, Georgia, had a population of fewer than 500 people. One hundred years later, it has grown — to about 700 residents. Carter still lives in the home he and his late wife Rosalynn bought in 1961.

When Warren G. Harding dedicated the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, he became the first U.S. president to speak over radio , a mere two years before Carter was born. The first presidential television appearance was Franklin D. Roosevelt , at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Carter was already a teenager.

A devoutly religious man seen as a political outsider during his time in elected office, Carter first stepped into politics in 1962 by challenging a local political boss who had tried to rig the election against him. Carter won that election for a state Senate seat. He ran for governor in 1966, lost, then ran again four years later and won. As governor, he bucked legislators with a reorganization of state government that he pitched as necessary efficiency. "He spent a lot of political capital making people mad, going after their fiefdoms," said Terry Coleman , a Carter ally in the Assembly.

His "outsiderness" continued on his way to the White House. When he decided to run, Richard Nixon was the only president he had ever met, and that was a brief encounter at a White House reception, reports The Associated Press . Carter "leaned on his extended family, close advisers and other Georgians to blanket key primary states throughout 1975 and early 1976. The inner circle was dubbed the 'Georgia mafia.' The rest constituted the 'Peanut Brigade.' By the time big-name candidates — senators, mostly — realized Carter was a contender, they could not stop him."

"His was a unique presidency in that it came from completely outside the party establishment and then continued to operate that way even in Washington," said Joe Trippi, who worked for Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, scion of a Democratic dynasty and Carter's perpetual liberal rival.

"There was something so outside of Washington about them, such a loyalty and pride about those people," Trippi said, noting that Carter mostly avoided appointing veterans of the Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson administrations. "The Democratic Party never belonged to Jimmy Carter," Trippi said. He simply refused to play the game.

Although the Times Square debt clock didn't debut until Carter was in his early 60s and out of the White House, the former president doesn't factor in to most discussions on the current $35 trillion debt. The man who would wash Ziploc bags to reuse them added less than $300 billion to the national debt, which stood below $1 trillion when he left office, reports the AP .

Carter ended up losing his reelection bid in a 1980 landslide to Ronald Reagan. He returned home to Plains, "humiliated by the voters" and "at least somewhat depressed," according to his biographer, Jonathan Alter. Then, just one year later, he and wife Rosalynn began their next great adventure — they founded The Carter Center , a nonprofit organization dedicated to "waging peace, fighting disease, and building hope." He ended up being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Nine years ago, at age 91, Carter held a press conference where he explained that he had been diagnosed with melanoma and that the cancer had spread to his brain. Expected to die within months, he rallied and went back to working on making the world a better place. At age 95, he showed up at a Habitat for Humanity site in Nashville with a smile — and a black eye. One day earlier, Carter, then 95, had fallen and needed 14 stitches , but he kept up his commitment to the organization.

The Carter Center works at home and abroad on some of the world's most difficult problems, including the eradication of the guinea worm, something that seemed impossible 40 years ago. When The Carter Center began its campaign to eliminate the Guinea worm worldwide, there were 3.5 million cases annually, in at least 21 countries in Africa and Asia. Carter once expressed a wish that he would live longer than the last guinea worm. He may get that wish. Last year, there were a total of 14 reported cases and this year so far , there have been four.

In February 2023, the former president was placed on hospice care, with what family members thought was only days to live. Nine months later, Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years, died. He attended the funeral looking incredibly frail. Yet another 10 months after the funeral, he is still hanging in there. His days now have fallen into a quiet routine of rising early, being cared for by six full-time caregivers, including his son, James Earl "Chip" Carter III, a 74-year-old grandfather himself. He still likes to talk about politics — and the Atlanta Braves.

In August, his grandson Jason Carter said while the former president was excited to make it to 100, he was even more excited to be able to cast a vote for Kamala Harris . It would be the 20th time Jimmy Carter has voted in a presidential election. His first vote came in 1948 for Democrat Harry S. Truman, who defeated Thomas E. Dewey.