Three months after entering home care, former president

Jimmy

Carter stays in good spirits as he visits family, follows public discussion of his legacy and receives updates on the Carter Center’s humanitarian work around the world, his grandson says. He even enjoys regular servings of ice cream.

They’re just meeting with family now, but they’re doing it the best way possible: They’re home together, Jason Carter said of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, now 98 and 95 years old.

They have been together for over 70 years. They also know they are not in charge, the younger Carter said in a brief interview Tuesday. Their faith is really grounded right now. That way it’s as good as it gets.

The longest-lived US president, Jimmy Carter, announced in February that after a series of brief hospitalizations, he will forego further medical interventions and will spend the rest of his life in the same modest one-story Plains home where they then lived. he was first elected to the Senate in 1962. No illness was disclosed.

The announcement of hospice care led to continued tributes and media attention to his presidency from 1977-81 and the global humanitarian work the couple has done since co-founding the Carter Center in 1982.

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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 certainly gets to see the outpouring and it certainly pleased him.

The former president also gets updates on the Carter Center’s eradication program, which began 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.

Andrew Young, who was Carter’s UN ambassador, told the AP he also visited the Carters a few weeks ago and was very happy that we could laugh and joke about the old days.

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 suburban parts of America reflected the former president’s broader legacy as one who pursued peace, conflict resolution and racial equality.

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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 91-year-old Young.

Nicole Love Hendrickson, elected in 2020 as the first black chair of the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners, hailed Carter as a man with an exceptional respect for the humanity of others.

Referring to Carter’s landslide reelection defeat, Young said he personally enjoyed watching historians and others find success stories as they reassess Carter’s presidency as he relinquished control of the Panama Canal, developed a national energy strategy and was more involved with Africa than any American president anyway. Such feats 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.

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I told him, you know, it took you over 50 years to appreciate President Lincoln. It can take that long to appreciate you,” Young said.

“Nobody thought about the Panama Canal. Nobody would have thought about bringing Egypt and Israel together. I mean, I thought about doing something in Africa, but nobody else was in Washington, and he did it. He always has an idea had about everything.

But when Jason Carter addressed his grandparents’ admirers on Tuesday, he pleaded not to think of them as world celebrities.

They’re like all 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 small rack next to their sink where they dry Ziploc

k

Bags.

The most remarkable thing, said Jason Carter, is that such a meeting took place while his grandfather was still alive.

We thought that when he went to hospice, the end was near, he told those present. Now, I’m just going to tell you he’s turning 99 in October.