Jimmy Carter turns 100 today. He is the only U.S. president to ever do that.
It's just one more evidence of the deep determination in a man that most people miss
“Don’t pay any attention to that smile. That don’t mean a thing.”
That is one of my favorite quotes about Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States. It was uttered by a Georgia politician, Ben Fortson, who got to see Carter’s determination up close when he was governor of that state.1
Now the whole world sees another example of Jimmy Carter’s determination. He has made it to 100 years old. A few thoughts on what he’s overcome to do that:
All three of Carter’s siblings, and both his parents, died of pancreatic cancer. Most of them died fairly young. His father was felled by this cancer at age 58. His brother Billy died at 51. His two sisters, Ruth and Gloria, died at 54 and 63, respectively. Only Carter’s mother, Lillian, made it to her 80’s, passing on at 85, also due to pancreatic cancer.
Jimmy Carter was diagnosed nine years ago with melanoma, and doctors found it had spread to his brain, though it was still early. He was 91 years old. He received treatment and was an early recipient of immune therapy. By the end of that same year he was cancer free.
Carter began receiving home hospice care 19 months ago, in February of 2023. Most people who enter hospice do not live longer than 6 months.
Carter’s wife of more than 77 years, Rosalynn, died at age 96 almost one year ago, on Nov. 19, 2023. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished. She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me,” Carter said then.
All of these factors suggest that former President Carter should not be here today. I myself doubted many times over the past several years that he’d make it to today. But the lesson, as Carter has proven repeatedly in his life, is not to underestimate him. 2
There will be more complete remembrances of Carter’s life and career at a later date. But for now, I wanted to share a story about one of the biggest examples of Carter’s determination from his presidency, which also is a reflection on his Christian faith.
Jimmy Carter was a devout Christian whose life and presidency were deeply formed and driven by his faith.
He also engineered one of the great interfaith accomplishments of any American president: the Camp David Accords.
Over a staggering 13 days in September of 1978, Carter met repeatedly with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, seeking — and ultimately achieving — a peace agreement between the two nations who had been at war for most of the period between the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War which began with a surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria.
Spending nearly two weeks in one place, on one problem, is something few presidents have ever done. And it's not as if there was nothing else competing for Carter's attention. Inflation was at crisis levels. Carter's landmark energy legislation was a month away from passage. Riots in Iran were bringing that nation to a point of crisis that would ultimately explode into the American embassy in Tehran.
But Carter, who underwent a renewal of his Christian faith in the late 1960's, "had come to believe that God wanted him to bring peace," Lawrence Wright wrote in his book Thirteen Days in September.
Similarly, Begin and Sadat had plenty on their plates. In Israel, Palestinian terrorists had killed 34 Israelis just a few months earlier, in a surprise attack on March 11.
But they too, were formed by and representative of their respective faiths. Together, the trio were "exemplars of the Holy Land’s three internecine religious traditions," according to Joe Klein.
"Begin was an Orthodox Jew whose parents had perished in the Holocaust; Sadat was a pious Muslim inspired since boyhood by stories of martyrdom; Carter, who knew the Bible by heart, was driven by his faith to pursue a treaty, even as his advisers warned him of the political cost," Wright wrote.
The summit opened with a prayer and a statement prepared with input from several interfaith groups. Over the course of the next two weeks, Begin and his wife Aliza Arnold hosted a Shabbat dinner that Carter and his wife Rosalynn attended. Carter attended church services.
And friendship also played a role. Carter and Sadat had already established a deep bond, though Begin held himself at more of a distance. Sadat had extended the hand of friendship to Israel in 1977 by visiting Jerusalem, even though he was condemned by other Arab leaders for doing so. He would end up dead by assassination in 1981, killed by religious extremists angered by his compromise.
But the many days of meetings, and the road to the ultimate agreement, while motivated by faith, was nothing but hard, grinding work. "It was not a happy two weeks for the participants; Begin and Sadat could barely look at each other; no one sang 'Kumbaya,'" Klein wrote.
The ultimate agreement also failed to include much of what both parties had sought. But a decade ago, Klein called the agreement "the most profound diplomatic achievement to emerge from the Arab-Israeli conflict," and that still stands.
The Camp David accords are “the only Middle East peace agreement to have endured,” James Fallows wrote. And although things have often been quite violent and grim in that region, and are definitely filled with foreboding and death today, the agreement that Carter brokered through his faith, friendship and determination has kept that entire part of the world much safer and more peaceful than it otherwise would have been without the treaty. To this day, Egypt has remained a partner in talks to try to achieve a ceasefire to the current conflict.
Despite all of his accomplishments, Carter has lived a modest and simple life in his ex-presidency, even while brokering ceasefires to other conflicts and using the Carter Center to help alleviate and even eradicate disease in poorer parts of the world. “He is expected to mark his birthday in the same one-story home he and Rosalynn built in the early 1960s — before his first election to the Georgia state Senate,” the Associated Press writes.
Happy 100th Birthday to you, President Carter. You have undoubtedly made an impact for good on the world around you, many times over.
This is from page 96 of my book Camelot’s End: Kennedy vs Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party
“He is by far the longest-tenured former president, having spent nearly 44 years in that role. In distant second place is Herbert Hoover, who lived for 31 years after he left office. Five others former presidents—John Adams, Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and the first George Bush—survived into their early 90s. Only Carter has made it this far,” writes James Fallows.