ATLANTA — Former President Jimmy Carter, the longest-living US president at age 98, has entered home hospice care in Plains, Georgia, a statement from the Carter Center confirmed Saturday.

After several short hospital stays, the statement said, Carter “decided to spend the remainder of her time at home with her family and receive hospice care rather than additional medical intervention.”

The statement said the 39th president has the full support of his medical team and family, which “asks for privacy at this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many fans.”

Carter was a little-known governor of Georgia when he launched his bid for the presidency ahead of the 1976 election. That then-President Gerald R. Ford, capitalizing on Washington’s status as an outsider in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that ousted Richard Nixon from office in 1974.

Carter served a single, tumultuous term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, a heavy loss that eventually paved the way for his decades of global advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights through The Carter Center Did.

The former president and his 95-year-old wife Roslyn opened the center in 1982. His work there received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Jason Carter, the couple’s grandson who chairs The Carter Center Governing Board, said in a tweet on Saturday that he “saw both of my grandparents yesterday. They are at peace and—as always—their home is full of love.” ”

Carter, who has spent most of his life in the Plains, traveled extensively in his 80s and early 90s to build houses with Habitat for Humanity as part of the Carter Center’s election monitoring and effort to eradicate Guinea. This includes annual trips and frequent trips abroad. Worm parasites in developing countries. But the former president’s declining health in his 10th decade of life, especially as the coronavirus pandemic has limited his public appearances, including at his beloved Maranatha Baptist Church, where he preached for decades before crowds of onlookers Taught Sunday school lessons.

In August 2015, a small cancerous mass was removed from Carter’s liver. The following year, Carter announced that he needed no further treatment, as the experimental drug had eliminated any signs of cancer.

Carter celebrated his most recent birthday in October with family and friends in Plains, the small town where he and Rosalyn were born in the years between World War I and the Great Depression.

The Carter Center last year celebrated 40 years of promoting its human rights agenda.

The center has been a pioneer of election observation since 1989, monitoring at least 113 elections in Africa, Latin America and Asia. In perhaps its most comprehensive public health effort yet, the organization recently announced that there had been only 14 human cases of Guinea worm disease. Reported in all of 2021, the result of years of public health campaigns to improve access to safe drinking water in Africa.

That’s a staggering decline from when The Carter Center began leading the global eradication effort in 1986, when the parasitic disease infected 3.5 million people. Carter once said that he expected to live longer than the last Guinea worm parasite.

Carter was born on October 1, 1924, to a prominent family in rural South Georgia. He went to the US Naval Academy during World War II and served as a Cold War naval officer before returning with Rosalyn and her young family to Plains, Georgia, to take over the family peanut business after the death of Earl Carter in the 1950s. made his career as

A moderate Democrat, the younger Carter rapidly ascended from the local school board to the state senate and then the office of Georgia’s governor. He began his White House bid as an underdog with a broad smile, outspoken Baptist ethics and policy plans reflecting his education as an engineer. Nixon’s infamy and his promise not to betray the American people following the American defeat in Southeast Asia endeared him to many Americans.

“If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I won’t be fit to be your president,” Carter said frequently during the campaign.

Carter, who came of age politically during the civil rights movement, was the last Democratic presidential candidate to sweep the Deep South, before the region shifted increasingly to Reagan and Republicans in subsequent elections.

He ruled amid Cold War pressures, turbulent oil markets, and social upheaval over racism, women’s rights, and America’s global role.

Carter’s foreign policy victories included brokering Middle East peace by placing Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the bargaining table for 13 days in 1978. At home, Carter partially controlled the airline, railroad, and trucking industries, and established the Departments of Education and Energy and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He designated millions of acres of land in Alaska as national parks or wildlife refuges. He appointed a then record number of women and non-whites to federal positions. He never had a Supreme Court nomination, but he did promote civil rights lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the nation’s second highest court, which she promoted in 1993.

Carter also built on Nixon’s opening with China, and although he tolerated autocrats in Asia, pushed Latin America from dictatorship to democracy.

Yet Carter’s electoral coalition crumbled under double-digit inflation, gas lines and a 444-day hostage crisis in Iran. His most disappointing time came when eight Americans died in a failed hostage rescue in April 1980, helping to ensure his massive defeat.

In the years following his loss, Carter largely shied away from electoral politics. Democrats were hesitant to embrace him. Republicans made it a punchline portraying him as a hapless liberal. Indeed, Carter governed as more of a technocrat, more progressive on race and gender equality than he had campaigned, but a budget hawk who often angered more moderate Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator , who waged a damaging primary fight against the incumbent Pres. 1980.

Carter said after leaving office that he had underestimated the importance of dealing with Washington’s power brokers, including the media and lobbying forces in the nation’s capital. But he insisted that his overall approach was sound and that he had achieved his primary objectives – “peacefully defending the security and interests of our country” and “advancing human rights here and abroad” – even though he was seeking a second term. missed spectacularly for.

And years later, upon his cancer diagnosis as a non-politician, he expressed satisfaction at his long life.

He said in 2015, “I’m completely comfortable with whatever comes next.” “I have had an exciting, adventurous and gratifying existence.”