Remembering Jimmy Carter’s life in photos

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, died on December 29 at the age of 100. His presidency was preceded by time as a U.S. Navy officer, a peanut farmer and a Georgia state politician. After he failed to win a second term as president, he pursued a long career as an advocate for the poor and for democratic values.

In the 1977 photo above, Carter breaks with earlier presidents’ Inauguration Day tradition of riding in a motorcade from the U.S. Capitol to the White House. Carter and his family got out of the limousine and walked along Pennsylvania Avenue, to the delight of well wishers along the route. The photos below start with Carter’s college graduation and continue through his White House years to his later life in a small town in Georgia.

Graduate

Carter studied at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Here, his wife, Rosalynn (left), and his mother, Lillian, pin his ensign bars — signifying his new rank as a junior officer — to his uniform at graduation in June 1946. After his father died in 1953, Carter left the service and returned to Georgia to run the family’s peanut business.

Campaigner

In this December 1974 photo taken in Atlanta when Carter was governor of Georgia, he shares the spotlight with his 7-year-old daughter, Amy, after announcing he will seek the Democratic nomination for president. After the resignation of Richard Nixon due to the Watergate scandal, Carter gained popularity in large part because of his image as a common man with a strong moral core.

Carter had four children, but his youngest, Amy, was the only one who would live in the White House. The president helped her plan the location and design of a tree house on the White House grounds. At 9, she would become the youngest guest ever to attend a state dinner.

World figure

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin clasp hands on the north lawn of the White House on March 26, 1979, as they complete the signing of a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. The treaty reflects the Camp David Accords, brokered by Carter a few months earlier and representing a breakthrough in Egyptian-Israeli relations.

Volunteer

After Carter’s presidency, he and his wife, Rosalynn, regularly volunteered to work for Habitat for Humanity, a charity that builds houses for needy families. (According to recent statistics, nearly a fourth of Americans volunteer to help others.) Here, Carter marks a board to be cut for a 1987 construction project underway in Charlotte, North Carolina, to build 14 homes in five days.

Laureate

Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 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.” Robert Strong, a professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, says that many people consider Carter to be “the nation’s greatest former president.” Here, Carter and his wife greet well-wishers during a December 2002 torchlight procession in downtown Oslo, Norway, prior to a Nobel Committee banquet.

Election observer

As a former president, in 1982, Carter founded the Carter Presidential Center at Emory University in Atlanta. The center is devoted to issues relating to democracy and human rights and pioneered election observation missions to countries with histories of fraudulent voting. Here, Carter is thanked by a Liberian woman for coming to observe a 2005 election in Monrovia, Liberia, that was considered a landmark achievement.

Man of faith

In recent years, until his health declined, Carter taught Sunday school lessons at the Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains. Despite his effort to live a quiet, humble life, people from all over the world came to hear Carter speak, often lining up the night before to get a seat. Here, Carter prays while teaching a Sunday school class on August 23, 2015.

Husband

Carter met his future wife — Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s — when she was just 17 and he was 20. When he first proposed, she refused him. The following year, he proposed again, and she accepted. Their marriage, begun in 1946, spanned 77 years, the longest of any U.S. presidential couple’s in history. (Rosalynn died in November 2023, at age 96.) This 2018 photo shows the Carters as they walked along West Church Street in Plains, following dinner at a friend’s home.