WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 44 years after Jimmy Carter left the nation’s capital in humiliating defeat, the 39th president returned to the Washington area starting Tuesday to take part in three days of state funeral rites.
Carter’s remains, which had been resting at the Carter Presidential Center since Saturday, left the Atlanta campus Tuesday morning accompanied by his children and extended family. Special Air Mission 39 departed Dobbins Air Reserve Base north of Atlanta and arrived at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. A motorcade will carry the casket to Washington and the Capitol, where members of Congress will pay their respects at a service scheduled for 4:30 p.m. EST.
In Georgia, eight military pallbearers held Carter’s casket while cannons fired on the nearby tarmac. They carried it to a vehicle that lifted it into the passenger compartment of the plane, the iconic blue-and-white Boeing 747 variant known as Air Force One when the sitting president is aboard. Carter never traveled as president on the jet, which first flew as Air Force One in 1990 with President George HW Bush on board.
Carter, who died on December 29th at the age of 100, will be laid in state on Tuesday evening and again on Wednesday. A state funeral will be held at the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday. President Joe Biden will deliver a eulogy.
There are the familiar rituals that follow a president’s death — the Air Force ride back to the Beltway, a military honor guard carrying a flag-draped casket up the Capitol steps, the Lincoln catafalque in the Rotunda.
There will also be symbolism unique to Carter. As he was carried out of his presidential center, a military band played hymns – “Amazing Grace” and “Blessed Assurance” for the outspoken Baptist evangelical, who described himself as a “born-again Christian” when he sought and won the presidency in Washington, D.C. in 1976 Hearse will stop at the US Navy Memorial, where his remains will be transferred to a horse-drawn caisson for the remainder of his journey to the Capitol. The site commemorates Carter’s role as the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to become commander in chief.
There will be some irony in all the pomp for the Democrat, who went from his family’s peanut warehouse to the governor’s mansion and finally to the White House. Carter won the presidency as a smiling Southerner and technocratic engineer who promised to change the ways of Washington — and when he got there, flouted many of those unwritten rules.
“Jimmy Carter was always an outsider,” said biographer Jonathan Alter, explaining how Carter capitalized on the fallout from the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon. “The country was thirsting for moral renewal and for Carter to come in as this truly religious figure and clean things up.”
From 1977 to 1981, Carter was Washington’s highest-ranking resident. But he never mastered it.
“He could be irritable and an unappealing personality” in a city that thrives on relationships, Alter said, describing a president who has had to contend with snarky lawmakers and reporters.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter had also never been welcomed by the gatekeepers of Washington society, unsure what to make of small-town Southerners who carried their own luggage and bought their clothes off the rack. Carter sold the former presidential yacht, a perk his predecessors had used to entertain and dine the Capitol’s power brokers.
Early in Carter’s presidency, Washington Post society columnist Sally Quinn called the Carters and their West Wing “an alien tribe” incapable of “playing the game.” Quinn, herself an elite Georgetown hostess, nodded at Washington’s “frivolity” but nonetheless mocked “the Carter people” for being “in limousines, yachts, or in elegant salons, in black tie” or with “place cards, servants , six courses, different forks, three wines… and after dinner social gatherings.”
He endured four hard years in which he lacked enough friends in the city’s power circles and, ultimately, in an electorate that delivered nearly 500 Electoral College votes to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Long after he left office, Carter lamented a political cartoon published in conjunction with his inauguration that showed his family with his mother, “Miss Lillian,” chewing on a hay seed and approaching the White House.
Carter often disrespected the ceremonial regalia that was displayed in Georgia and continues to be displayed in Washington.
As president, he wanted to stop the Marine Band from playing “Hail to the Chief” because he felt it elevated the president too much. His advisors convinced him to accept this as part of the job. The song played Saturday as he arrived at his presidential center after a motorcade through his hometown of Plains and his childhood farm. It sounded again as his remains were carried on the way to Washington.
He also never used his full name, James Earl Carter Jr., or even took the oath of office. His full name was printed on memorial cards given to all mourners who paid their respects in Atlanta.
He once addressed the nation from the White House residence wearing a cardigan that is now on display in his museum and library. His remains now rest in a wooden coffin carried and guarded by military pallbearers in their impeccable dress uniforms.
“He was a simple man in many ways,” said Brad Webb, an Army veteran who was one of more than 23,000 people who came to honor the former president at his library, located on the same campus as the Carter Center The former president and first lady established their decades-long advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights in the developing world.
“He was also a complicated man who endured defeat and did so much good in the world,” said Webb, who voted for Republican Gerald Ford in 1976 and Reagan in 1980. were really things that no president can actually control. We can look back with some perspective and understand that he was an excellent former president, but also had a presidency that I can appreciate more than we did when it happened.”
As Carter’s remains left Georgia, President-elect Donald Trump criticized the slow former president during a news conference in Florida for ceding control of the Panama Canal to his home country.
Asked whether criticism of Carter was appropriate during the funeral ceremonies, Trump replied: “I liked him as a man.” I didn’t agree with his politics. He thought it would be a good thing to give away the Panama Canal.”
“I didn’t want to mention the Panama Canal because of Jimmy Carter’s death,” he added, although he had initially mentioned it unprompted.
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Cooper reported from Phoenix.
