Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, turned 100 years old on Oct. 1, making him the longest-living former president. Only five other former presidents have lived past the age of 90: John Adams, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Shortly before he reached the century mark, Carter endorsed Kamala Harris for president and said that he hoped to live long enough to vote for her. He probably got that wish. Georgia’s absentee ballots were mailed out on Oct. 7, and early voting in this state began on Oct. 15.
Carter still lives in his home town of Plains, where he and his wife Rosalynn enjoyed a long and loving marriage for 77 years until her death last year. Of his long life, Carter said, “The virtues of aging include both the blessings that come to us as we grow older, and what we have to offer that might be beneficial to others.”
Carter served only one term as president, but his post-presidency included beneficial achievements like hands-on helping with Habitat for Humanity and founding the Carter Center in Atlanta that, in Carter’s words, “works with victims of oppression and gives support to human rights heroes.”
Last month a tribute to Jimmy Carter packed the stage of Atlanta’s iconic Fox Theatre with bands and solo artists, including some with Athens connections, like the B-52s, Drive-By Truckers and Chuck Leavell. Carter was called the first rock and roll president, and he said that the Allman Brothers Band helped him win the White House in 1976. Carter has had a lifelong affinity for music. As Georgia’s governor he met songsmith Bob Dylan when Dylan performed in Atlanta in 1974. Dylan later called Carter “a kindred spirit to me of a rare kind.”
Here in Athens, on May 4, 1974, Carter gave a speech at the University of Georgia Law School that got him on the coveted “cover of the Rolling Stone.” Bad-boy journalist and Rolling Stone magazine correspondent Hunter S. Thompson was in the audience for what he called “a king hell bastard of a speech that rang every bell in the room” that was filled with law professors, politicians and distinguished law school alumni. Though Ted Kennedy was the featured speaker, he was upstaged by Carter’s angry words against injustice and inequity spoken in a room filled with wealthy and powerful Georgians.
In his remarks, Carter said that martyred civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. “was perhaps despised by many in this room because he shook up our social structure.” He reminded his audience that King “wasn’t greeted with approbation and accolades by the Georgia Bar Association or the Alabama Bar Association. He was greeted with horror.” On the then-brewing Watergate scandal that would bring down Richard Nixon’s presidency later in 1974, Carter fumed, “I can’t imagine somebody like Thomas Jefferson tiptoeing through a minefield on the technicalities of the law, and then bragging about being clean afterwards, and I think our people demand more than that.” In 1976 Carter won the presidency after defeating GOP incumbent Gerald Ford, who had pardoned Nixon for his Watergate crimes.
When he ran for governor in 1970, Carter angered many Georgians by inviting Alabama’s segregationist Gov. George Wallace to the state. When he became governor in 1971, Carter said “the time for racial discrimination is over.” Those words repudiated Wallace’s pugnacious inaugural speech that had called for “segregation forever.” As governor, Carter had supported the Vietnam War. As president he pardoned thousands of young men who had evaded the military draft during that war. Carter later received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, three Grammy Awards and membership in the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame for his authorship of more than 30 books. On his 100th birthday he received greetings from every living former president—except Donald Trump.
In a CBS interview in 2018, Carter scorned Trump as “careless with the truth” and “a disaster.” Long before Trump was elected in 2016, Carter spoke words that still apply today: “It’s a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.”
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