Jimmy Carter, who considered himself an outsider when he sat in the Oval Office as the 39th U.S. president, will be honored with a lavish funeral at Washington National Cathedral on Thursday before a second service and funeral in his petite Georgia hometown be held.
President Joe Biden, the first sitting senator to support Carter’s 1976 campaign, will praise his fellow Democrat 11 days before he leaves office. All of Carter’s living successors are expected to attend the funeral in Washington, including President-elect Donald Trump, who paid his respects Wednesday in front of Carter’s casket in the Capitol Rotunda.
The uncommon gathering of commanders in chief offers the nation an unusual moment of connection in a factional, bipartisan era. Days of formal ceremonies and memorials by political leaders, business leaders and ordinary citizens honored Carter, who died Dec. 29 at the age of 100, for his decency and amazing work ethic that did more than just gain political power .
“He set the bar very high for presidents on how to use voice and leadership for good causes,” said Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder whose foundation funded Carter’s work to eliminate treatable diseases like Guinea worm. Gates spoke to The Associated Press on Wednesday shortly before flying to Washington for the funeral.
“Whatever prestige and resources you have, ideally you can leverage them and take an even broader societal perspective in your post-private sector career,” Gates said.
Bernice King, daughter of the murdered civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., compared the two Georgians and Nobel Peace Prize winners.
“Both President Jimmy Carter and my father showed us what is possible when your faith compels you to live and lead from a place of love,” said King, who also plans to to attend the service in Washington.
At the cathedral, Ted Mondale, son of Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, is expected to read a eulogy his father wrote for Carter before his own death in 2021. Steve Ford, the grandson of President Gerald Ford, will read a tribute to his grandfather, who died in 2006. Carter defeated Ford in 1976, but the couple and their first ladies became close friends and Carter praised Ford at his funeral.
Mourners will also hear from Stu Eizenstat, who was a top White House aide to Carter, and 92-year-old Andrew Young, a former Atlanta mayor, congressman and U.N. ambassador during the Carter administration. Carter outlived much of his cabinet and inner circle, but remained particularly close to Young – a friendship that brought together a white Georgian and a black Georgian who grew up in the era of Jim Crow segregation.
Thursday will conclude six days of national rites that began in Plains, Georgia, where Carter was born in 1924, lived most of his life and died after 22 months in hospice care. Ceremonies continued in Atlanta and Washington, where Carter, a former naval officer, engineer and peanut farmer, has been in state since Tuesday.
Long lines of mourners waited for several hours in freezing temperatures to pass his flag-draped coffin in the Rotunda as tributes focused on both Carter’s humanitarian work after leaving the White House and his accomplishments as president from 1977 to 1981 concentrated.
After the morning service in Washington, Carter’s remains, his four children and his extended family will return to Georgia on a Boeing 747 that will serve as Air Force One when the sitting president is aboard.
The outspoken Baptist who became a born-again Christian will then be remembered at a funeral in the afternoon at Maranatha Baptist Church, the diminutive building where he taught Sunday school for decades after leaving the White House and where his coffin lies A cross that he made in his own wood workshop will rest on a wooden bench.
For the evangelical president who campaigned with the Allman Brothers Band, befriended Willie Nelson and quoted Bob Dylan in his 1977 inaugural address, music – sacred, patriotic and popular – will be at the forefront throughout the day. In Washington, the U.S. Marine Orchestra and Armed Forces Chorus will sing “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” the Navy’s anthem, for the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to become commander in chief. Country stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood have joined Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter as Habitat for Humanity ambassadors to perform John Lennon’s “Imagine” and reprise their roles at the former first lady’s funeral in 2023.
Hymns include “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” and, in Plains, “Let there be Peace on Earth.”
After a final drive through his hometown, past the ancient train depot that served as headquarters for 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 and promised good government and straightforward conversation to an electorate disaffected by the Vietnam War and Watergate, signed significant legislation and negotiated a groundbreaking peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. But Carter also caused inflation, rising interest rates and international crises and lost in a landslide to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Two years later, he and Rosalynn founded the Carter Center in Atlanta as a nongovernmental organization that took them around the world to combat disease, mediate conflict, monitor elections, and advocate for racial and gender justice. The center, where Carter rested before coming to Washington, currently employs 3,000 people and contractors worldwide.
In addition to commemorating the longest-living president, the day of national mourning highlights both the continuity and conflicts between U.S. governments. Carter normalized relations with China, building on Richard Nixon’s outreach to Beijing. Trump is proposing to intensify a trade war with the world’s most populous country. The Department of Education was created during Carter’s term. Trump has proposed abolishing it.
Carter streamlined American energy research through the creation of the Department of Energy, established energy standards for household appliances, and extended federal protection to vast tracts of land, particularly in Alaska. Trump returns to office promising: “Drill, baby, drill.”
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Associated Press writers Michael Liedtke in Indian Wells, Calif., and Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.
