Former President Jimmy Carter turns 99 today. There were celebrations yesterday at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta, Georgia.
Happy Birthday to Former President Jimmy Carter
Americans celebrated the 99th birthday of former President Jimmy Carter this weekend, with the White House putting up a wooden cake display on its north lawn and the Carter library in Georgia hosting a party for the public.
Carter, a Democrat who served as U.S. president from January 1977 to January 1981, is in hospice care after deciding in February to decline additional medical intervention. He turns 99 on Sunday.
Nearly eight months after first announcing he would receive hospice care, Jimmy Carter receives the title of the oldest living former president in history..
His grandson Jason Carter is marking the occasion by celebrating his legacy.
“I think his time in the private sector and the work that he did at the Carter Center, really spending his life among the most marginalized and poorest people in the world and believing in their power to change their own lives and in the power of human rights for them and democracy for them, will be the biggest part of his legacy,” the younger Carter, a former state senator and gubernatorial candidate, told ABC News.
Despite being global figures, the younger Carter said his grandparents have always “made it easy for us, as a family, to be as normal as we can be.”
The Carters announced in February that their patriarch was forgoing further medical treatments and entered in hospice care after a series of hospitalizations. Yet Carter, who overcame cancer diagnosed at age 90 and learned to walk after having his hip replaced at age 94, defied all odds again.
“If Jimmy Carter were a tree, he’d be an towering, old Southern oak,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic national chairperson and presidential campaign manager who got her start on Carter’s campaigns. “He’s as good as they come and tough as they come.”
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