The former US president, Democrat Jimmy Carter, passed away on Sunday at the age of 100. He led America from 1977 to 1981. Towards the end of his life, Carter was in poor health: he spent his last two years in hospice care. Five years before his death, he suffered a fractured pelvis and then doctors had to give him 14 stitches after another fall.
Jimmy Carter became the longest-lived of all former US presidents. Analysing the reasons for the politician’s longevity, his relatives and experts singled out several factors that contributed to it. In addition to genetics, they emphasised Carter’s ability to learn something new at a very advanced age: for example, he mastered skiing at the age of 62. Physical activity played a big role: until the age of 80, the former US president ran, and then, when it became difficult for him, he swam and walked a lot.
If we talk about Carter’s political career, his victory in the presidential elections is compared to the current triumph of Republican Donald Trump. A graduate of the US Naval Academy, who was a farmer (the family business was growing peanuts) was elected senator from Georgia, then became governor of his home state, but at the federal level remained a little-known politician.
In the race to the White House, he outpaced Republican Gerald Ford, in part due to the support of the African-American electorate, for whose rights he advocated. During Carter’s administration, the war in Afghanistan and the storming of the American embassy in Tehran by the Organisation of Muslim Students, when 52 Americans had to stay in captivity for more than a year.
Carter signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT-II) with Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, but NATO deployed American medium-range missiles in Western Europe. Moreover, the Democrat signed, in fact, a new nuclear doctrine of the United States, which considered the possibility of launching a nuclear war against the USSR.
The chair of President Carter ceded to the charismatic Republican, actor Ronald Reagan. The Democrat made many blunders, and sometimes looked like an inadequate: once, for example, admitted that while fishing he was attacked by a “killer rabbit.”
After leaving office, Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize, not while in office, but for his work afterwards. He worked in human rights, among other things, he succeeded in freeing an American hostage in North Korea and fighting disease in Africa.
The former US president has been in contact with Vladimir Putin, they met in 2015. In October of the same year, Carter handed over to the Kremlin maps of Syria with ISIS positions marked on them.
In August 2015, the politician was diagnosed with cancer, melanoma of the liver. The tumour was removed, but it managed to metastasise. After the next stage of treatment, a period of remission began.
Carter assessed his illness in public philosophically: “I am completely calm about everything that happens. After all, I have lived a wonderful life.”
The former American president has led a rather busy life since he was hospitalised with a pelvic fracture. A second serious fall required a large number of stitches. Jimmy Carter’s condition was deteriorating, as a result, he began to receive palliative care. The politician will be buried next to his wife in a plot visible from the porch of their home.
Carles Puigdemont, Catalonia’s JxCat party leader, wrote on X:
“Jimmy Carter was a great president, a man of values who, despite misunderstanding some, took a stand that others would have abandoned. History will leave him a place of honour. I will never forget the conversation I had with him, courtesy of the beloved Embler Moss. May he rest in peace.”
