The last farewell: Jimmy Carter and the longest American life

Jimmy Carter died on Sunday, December 29, at his home in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family. He was one hundred years old, the longest-lived president in the country’s history, and he had spent his final years in the same small town where he had been born, under hospice care since early 2023, the longest presidential retirement ever recorded giving way, at the end, to the longest presidential life. The statement from the Carter Center announced the death in the plain language that suited him, and the national mourning that follows will be conducted over the weeks of the state funeral that the country reserves for its presidents.

His presidency lasted four years, from 1977 to 1981, and the record of those years is complicated in the way that the era was: the Camp David accords that brought Egypt and Israel to a peace treaty, the Panama Canal treaties, the human rights language that he made a fixture of American foreign policy, and also the inflation, the hostages in Iran, the energy crisis and the defeat of 1980. The historians have reworked that record several times, and the reworking has tended upward, but the remarkable thing about Carter’s life is that the presidency became the preface rather than the peak.

The decades after office built what no president had built before. He returned to Plains, taught Sunday school in the same church, and ran the Carter Center from Atlanta, and the center’s work, the election monitoring, the disease eradication, the conflict mediation, carried the human rights commitments of his presidency into the world’s most difficult rooms. The Nobel Peace Prize came in 2002, two decades after he left office, for the work that had no official title; the Habitat for Humanity hammering, the homes built well into his nineties, became the image that the public came to associate with him more than the Oval Office.

The post-presidency he created is his real legacy, and the legacy is a standard. Before Carter, former presidents withdrew into memoirs and libraries; after him, the expectation was set that a former president would keep working, would keep travelling, would keep taking the calls that no one else would take. His successor presidents, whatever their politics, inherited the shape of the role that he had carved out, and the shape is the one that every retirement since has been measured against.

The country he leaves is in the middle of its own difficult season, and the farewell has landed at a moment that makes the contrast sharp. A man who governed by the book, who treated the truth as a political asset and lost office partly for it, dies as the political culture has grown louder and more careless with the norms he embodied; the tributes from across the spectrum will be genuine, and the genuineness is the measure of the distance.

Jimmy Carter died at one hundred in the town where he began, and the life between the beginning and the end was the fullest arc that American public life has produced: farmer, governor, president, peacemaker, builder, and, at the last, the country’s oldest living example of what it means to serve after the office is gone. The state funeral will bury a president, and the country will bury with him the last of the century’s older manners. The house in Plains, the church, the small town, remain, and they are the most fitting monument, because he never left them, not really, not even when the world came calling.