Former President Jimmy Carter celebrates his 95th birthday
ATLANTA » Jimmy Carter celebrated his 95th birthday on Tuesday, becoming the first U.S. president to reach that milestone as he continues his humanitarian work and occasionally weighs in on politics and policy.
Carter still lives in tiny Plains, Georgia, and planned no public celebrations on Tuesday. But he’s had plenty to say recently, warning that reelecting President Donald Trump would be “a disaster” and expressing hopes that his Carter Center will become a more forceful advocate against armed conflicts in the future, including “wars by the United States.”
“I just want to keep the whole world at peace,” Carter said as he presented his annual Carter Center report last month.
“We have been at war more than 226 years. We have been at peace for about 16 years” since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he said. And every U.S. military conflict from the Korean War onward has been a war of “choice,” he said.
The 39th president survived a dire cancer diagnosis in 2015 and surpassed George H.W. Bush as the longest-lived U.S. president in history this spring. He’s had some trouble walking after a hip replacement in May, but still teaches Sunday school in Plains, and with his wife of 73 years, Rosalynn, now 92, still plans an upcoming trip to help build houses with Habitat for Humanity in Nashville, Tennessee.
In his latest appearances at the Carter Center and in a town hall at Emory University, Carter blasted money in politics, urged action to combat the climate crisis, and celebrated the Carter Center’s work on public health, election monitoring and conflict resolution. But he said the center can do more to constructively criticize U.S. military engagements. The Carter Center has “never voiced an opinion publicly” on individual wars, he said with some regret, adding: “This is primarily my fault.”