Former President Jimmy Carter fell Sunday at his home in Georgia and needed some stitches above his brow, but “feels fine,” his spokeswoman said. Deanna Congileo said in an email that the 39th president fell Sunday in Plains, Georgia, and received stitches.
Mr. Carter turned 95 on Tuesday, becoming the first U.S. president to reach that milestone.
Congileo said Mr. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, who is 92, were eager to be at a Habitat for Humanity build in Nashville, Tennessee. The opening ceremony for the project was scheduled for Sunday evening and it runs through Friday.
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Mr. Carter appeared at the ceremony with a black eye and a bandage. He received 14 stitches. Despite his injuries, the Carters said volunteering was their top priority. The Nashville project marked Mr. Carter’s 36th build.
Mr. Carter 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 has had some trouble walking after a hip replacement in May, but regularly teaches Sunday School.
Meanwhile, he has continued with his humanitarian work. And he also has occasionally weighed in on politics and policy, recently 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,” Mr. 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, adding that every U.S. military conflict from the Korean War onward has been a war of “choice.”
Mr. Carter also has been accepting visits from several 2020 presidential candidates, but he’s held back on endorsing any of his fellow Democrats, offering only clues to his thinking.
