Global Courant 2023-05-24 05:28:35
NORCROSS, Georgia — Three months after receiving end-of-life home care, former President Jimmy Carter remains in high spirits during his family visits, follows public discussion of his legacy and receives updates on The Carter Center’s humanitarian work on the whole world, says his grandson. He even enjoys regular servings of ice cream.
“They’re just meeting with family right now, but they’re doing it the best way possible: at home together,” Jason Carter said of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, now 98 and 95 years old.
‘They’ve been together 70-plus years. They also know they are not in charge,” the younger Carter said in a short interview Tuesday. “Their faith is really grounded right now. That way it’s as good as it can be.”
The longest-lived US president, Jimmy Carter announced in February that after a series of brief hospitalizations he would forgo further medical intervention and spend the rest of his life in the same modest one-story Plains home where they lived when he was first elected to the Senate in 1962. No illness was revealed .
Ongoing tribute
The announcement of hospice care led to continued tributes and media attention to his 1977-81 presidency and the global humanitarian work the couple has done since co-founding The Carter Center in 1982.
“That’s been one of the blessings of the past few months,” Jason Carter said after speaking at an event in honor of his grandfather on Tuesday. “He’s definitely getting to see the outpouring and it’s certainly been gratifying for him.”
The former president also gets updates on The Carter Center’s guinea pig worm extermination program, launched in the mid-1980s when millions of people suffered from the parasite spread through unclean drinking water. Last year there were fewer than two dozen cases worldwide.
And in less serious moments, he also continues to enjoy peanut butter ice cream, his favorite flavor, in keeping with his political brand as a peanut farmer, his grandson said.
Carter’s legacy
Andrew Young, who was Carter’s UN ambassador, told the AP that he too visited the Carters “a few weeks ago” and was “very happy that we could laugh and joke about old times.”
Young and Jason Carter joined other friends and admirers Tuesday at a celebration of the former president along Jimmy Carter Boulevard in Norcross, a suburb just northeast of Atlanta. Young said the setting — in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse suburbs in America — reflected the former president’s broader legacy as one who pursued peace, conflict resolution and racial justice.
When the nearly 10-mile stretch of highway in Gwinnett County was renamed in 1976 — the year he was elected president — the small towns and bedroom communities on the fringes of metropolitan Atlanta were only beginning to flourish. Now Gwinnett alone has a population of about 1 million people, and Jimmy Carter Boulevard is thriving, with many businesses owned by black owners, immigrants, or first-generation Americans.
Young, a top associate of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement, said Carter started out as a white politician from South Georgia in the days of Jim Crow segregation, but he proved his values were different.
As governor and president, Carter believed “the world can come to Georgia and show everyone how to live together,” Young said.
Now Georgia “looks like the whole world,” said Young, 91.
Nicole Love Hendrickson, elected in 2020 as the first black chair of the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners, praised Carter as “a man with an exceptional respect for the humanity of others.”
Reassess the past
Referring to Carter’s landslide re-election defeat, Young said he’s personally enjoyed watching historians and others find success stories as they reassess Carter’s presidency — relinquishing control of the Panama Canal, developing a national energy strategy, being more involved with Africa than any American president ever did. . Such achievements were unpopular at the time or overshadowed by Carter’s inability to contain inflation, contain energy crises, or free the American hostages in Iran before the 1980 election.
“I told him, ‘You know, it’s taken them over 50 years to appreciate President Lincoln. It can take that long to appreciate you,” Young said.
“Nobody thought about the Panama Canal. No one had thought of bringing Egypt and Israel together. I mean, I thought about trying something in Africa, but no one else in Washington did it, and he did. He always had an idea about everything.”
But when Jason Carter addressed his grandparents’ admirers on Tuesday, he pleaded not to think of them as world celebrities.
“They’re just like your grandparents — I mean, insofar as your grandparents are rednecks from South Georgia,” he said with a laugh. “If you go down even today, they have a little rack next to their sink where they dry Ziplock bags.”
The most remarkable thing, said Jason Carter, is that such a meeting took place while his grandfather was still alive.
“We thought the end was near when he went to hospice,” he told those in attendance. “Now, I’m just going to tell you he’s turning 99 in October.”
