Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter speaks at an Ethical Elections Pact signing ceremony in Panama City, Friday, March 14, 2014. (Photo: AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco)
BREAKING: Former President Jimmy Carter says his cancer has spread to his brain, and that he will begin treatments today.
Carter, 90, who served as the nation’s 39th president, announced he had been diagnosed with cancer in a brief statement issued on Wednesday August, 12. He also announced on Aug. 3 that he had surgery to remove a small mass from his liver. In today’s press conference he revealed that they discovered a tumor on his liver while he was monitoring an election in Guyana.
Carter defeated Republican President Gerald Ford in 1976 with a pledge to always be honest, and adopted an early foreign policy akin to current President Barack Obama, which focused on disengagement under the banner of human rights and lessened America’s role around the world as the go-to global leader. However, a number of foreign policy blunders quickly sank the credibility of such a strategy and, unlike Obama, Carter pivoted to a more aggressive posture. Nevertheless, it was too late to save his bid for a second term in the White House, and Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide.
In 1982, following his defeat, Carter founded the Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta and would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. In his memoir A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, Carter revealed his family’s history of pancreatic cancer, noting that his father, brother and two sisters all succumbed to the disease, which “concerned” his doctors at Emory.
Carter said he “would dramatically cut down his activities at Emory, as well as the Carter Center.”
