Jimmy Carter, who considered himself an outsider even as he sat in the Oval Office as the 39th U.S. president, was honored Thursday with spectacular funeral services at the Washington National Cathedral before a second service and burial in his diminutive Georgia hometown.
The first speaker was Joshua Carter, the former president’s grandson, who recalled how Carter regularly taught Sunday school after leaving the White House.
“He built houses for people who needed houses,” Joshua said. “He eliminated diseases in forgotten places. He brought peace anywhere in the world, wherever he saw opportunity. He loved people.”
Jason Carter, another grandson, praised his grandfather and wife Rosalynn, who died in 2023.
“These were small-town people who never forgot who they were and where they came from, no matter what happened in their lives,” said Jason, who chairs the Carter Center, a global humanitarian operation founded by the former president shortly after he left office. positions.
President Joe Biden, who was first sitting senator to support Carter’s 1976 campaign, he praised his fellow Democrat just over a week before he left office.
“Many today think he was from a bygone era, but in fact he saw the future clearly,” Biden said.
“I miss him,” he added. “But I take comfort in knowing that he and his beloved Rosalynn are reunited.”
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The funeral in Washington was attended by all of Carter’s living successors, including President-elect Donald Trump, who paid his respects on Wednesday in the Capitol Rotunda. The uncommon gathering of commanders-in-chief provided an extraordinary moment of solace for the nation in an era of factionalization and hyperpartisanship; they met privately before the service began.
As Trump took his seat, he shook hands with Mike Pence in a uncommon conversation with his former vice president. The two men had a falling out over Pence’s refusal to support Trump reverse his election loss to Biden four years ago.
Trump sat next to former President Barack Obama and they could be seen talking for several minutes. Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November, entered later but did not engage with him.
Carter died on December 29 at the age of 100, having lived so long that two of the eulogies were written by those who died before him — his vice president, Walter Mondale, and his predecessor in the White House, Gerald Ford.
“The fate of the short season made Jimmy Carter and I rivals,” says Ford’s eulogy, which was read by his son Steven. “But in the many wonderful years that followed, friendship united us as not two presidents since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.”
Carter defeated Ford in 1976, but the presidents and their wives became close friends, and Carter eulogized Ford at his own funeral.
Days of formal ceremonies and remembrances from political leaders, business titans and rank-and-file citizens honored Carter for his decency and application of a remarkable work ethic to do more than gain political power.
The proceedings began Thursday morning when military service members carried Carter’s flag-draped casket down the east steps of the Capitol, where the former president had laid it, for transport to the cathedral. There was also a 21-gun salute.
At the cathedral, the Armed Forces Choir sang the hymn “Be Still My Soul” before Carter’s casket was carried inside.
Mourners also heard from 92-year-old Andrew Young, former mayor of Atlanta, congressman and UN ambassador during the Carter administration. Carter outlived most of his cabinet and inner circle, but he remained especially close to Young – a friendship that united a white Georgian and a black Georgian who grew up in the era of Jim Crow segregation.
“Jimmy Carter was a blessing who helped create the great United States of America,” Young said.
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Thursday will end six days of national ceremonies which began in Plains, Georgia, where Carter was born in 1924, lived most of his life, and died 22 months later hospice care. Ceremonies continued in Atlanta and Washington, where Carter, a former Navy officer, engineer and peanut farmer, was laid to rest as of Tuesday.
Long lines of mourners waited several hours in freezing temperatures to file past his flag-draped casket in the rotunda, while tributes focused as much on Carter’s humanitarian work after leaving the White House as on what he did as president from 1977- 1981.
After the morning service in Washington, the remains of Carter, his four children and extended family will return to Georgia on the Boeing 747 that serves as Air Force One when the sitting president is on board.
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The a committed Baptistwho campaigned as a born-again Christian, will then be remembered at an afternoon funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church, the miniature building where he taught Sunday school for decades after leaving the White House and where his casket will lie beneath a wooden cross he made in his own home. carpentry shop.
After a final ride through his hometown, past the vintage train station that served as the headquarters of his 1976 presidential campaign, he will be buried on his family’s land, in a plot next to Rosalynn, to whom Carter was married for more than 77 years.
Carter, who won the presidency on the promise of good government and straightforward talks to an electorate disillusioned with the Vietnam War and Watergate, signed significant legislation and negotiated a landmark peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. But Carter also presided over inflation, rising interest rates and international crises – most notably the Iran hostage situation in which Americans were held in Tehran for more than a year. In 1980, Carter lost to Republican Ronald Reagan.
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Former White House adviser Stu Eizenstat used his praise to try to reframe Carter’s presidency as more effective than voters believed at the time.
He noted that Carter deregulated the U.S. transportation industry, improved energy research and created the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He emphasized that the Carter administration secured the release of American hostages in Iran, although they were released only after his defeat in 1980.
“He may not be a candidate for Mount Rushmore, but he belongs in the foothills,” Eizenstat said.
