Former US president Jimmy Carter dies at 100

Former US president Jimmy Carter died on Sunday at the age of 100. Carter served one term in office as the 39th president of the United States (1977-1981) during a turbulent period both domestically and internationally.James Earl Carter, Jr. was the first US president to be popularly elected after Watergate forced the resignation of former president Richard Nixon. As the 1976 election season got under way, a US electorate wearied by political scandal and the ceaseless grind of the Vietnam War decided to take a chance on a virtually unknown peanut farmer from Georgia running as a folksy, centrist Democrat who was untainted by insider Washington. politics.But Carter’s one-term presidency was destined to preside over a challenging period both at home and abroad, from the US energy crisis and the runaway inflation of the 1970s to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the start of the Iranian hostage crisis as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan late that same year.Carter’s commitment to public service did not end when he left the White House, however; He and his wife remained active in humanitarian causes, global health issues and international election-monitoring in the decades that followed. They founded the non-partisan Carter Center in Atlanta based on a “commitment to human rights and the alleviation of human suffering” in 1982.The Nobel Committee recognized Carter’s lifetime of service by awarding him the 2002 Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”.EARLY LIFECarter was born in the farming town of Plains, Georgia, on October 1, 1924, the first US president to be born in a hospital rather than at home. He grew up in the nearby town of Archery, where his father was a peanut and cotton farmer who owned a local store while his mother, born Bessie Lillian Gordy, was a registered nurse who crossed racial lines in the segregated South to counsel Black women on healthcare matters.Carter attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology before earning a Bachelor of Science degree from the US Naval Academy in 1946.He was stationed on submarines in both the Atlantic and Pacific US fleets while serving in the Navy, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant. He was subsequently stationed at Schenectady, New York, where he took graduate classes at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics before serving as the senior officer for the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf nuclear submarine.Carter married Eleanor Rosalynn Smith on July 7, 1946. “She’s the girl I want to marry,” he reportedly told his mother after their first date. Smith had been a Carter family friend and neighbor in Plains when the two were growing up.When his father died in 1953, the younger Carter faced the difficult choice of whether to pursue his Naval career or return to his hometown to run the family business. He chose to resign his naval commission and took over the family farm, eventually opening Carter’s Warehouse, a seed and farm supply company. He soon became a community leader, serving on county boards that oversaw the administration of schools and hospitals as well as the local library.ENTRY INTO POLITICSCarter soon set his sights on bigger ambitions, and in 1962 he was elected to the Georgia state Senate. He lost his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966 but tried again a few years later, becoming Georgia’s 76th governor in 1971.In a first foray into national politics, in 1972 he became chairman of the Democratic Governor’s Campaign Committee and then chairman of the Democratic National Committee’s campaigns for the congressional and gubernatorial elections of 1974. These positions gave him access to influential Democrats nationwide but he still remained a relative unknown. On December 12, 1974, Carter announced his candidacy for the US presidency, which seemed a rather lofty ambition for a former farmer and one-term governor.But his timing proved right on target. The US electorate approached the 1976 election season wearied by a decade of division over the Vietnam War and still angered by the Watergate scandal that had engulfed former president Richard Nixon. Running as a center-right Democrat, Carter’s simple message was one of honesty and integrity.”The fact that he was unknown was part of his appeal,” Carter’s former speechwriter, Hendrik Hertzberg, told PBS.Carter was elected by a razor-thin margin on November 2, 1976, beating out incumbent Gerald Ford, who had taken office in the wake of Nixon’s resignation.MIDDLEAST PEACE, ENERGY REFORMAmong the most significant foreign policy successes of the Carter administration was the 1978 signing of the Framework for Peace in the Middle East by Israeli premier Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat, known as the Camp David Accords, which paved the way for a