Jimmy Carter, who considered himself an outsider even as he sat in the Oval Office as the 39th president of the United States, will be honored Thursday with funeral processions at Washington National Cathedral before a second Mass and burial in his small Georgia hometown.
President Joe Biden, who was the first senator to endorse Carter’s campaign in 1976, will eulogize his fellow Democrat 11 days before he leaves office. All of Carter’s living successors are expected to attend Washington’s funeral, including President-elect Donald Trump, who paid his respects in front of Carter’s casket on Wednesday in the Capitol Rotunda.
This rare gathering of military leaders provides an extraordinary moment of comity for the nation in an age of factionalism and hyper-partisanship. Days of official celebrations and remembrances from political leaders, business titans and ordinary citizens honored Carter, who died on December 29 at the age of 100, for decency and using an incredible work ethic to do more than just gain political power.
“He set the bar very high for presidents, how you can use voice and leadership for issues,” said Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder whose foundation funded Carter’s work to eradicate treatable diseases like Guinea worm. Gates spoke to The Associated Press on Wednesday shortly before he headed to Washington for the funeral.
“Whatever status and resources you are fortunate enough to have, it is better to take them and build a broader societal perspective in your career after working in the private sector,” Gates said.
Bernice King, daughter of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., compared Georgians to Nobel Peace Prize winners.
“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 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 death in 2021. Steve Ford, grandson of President Gerald Ford, will read a tribute from his father. His grandfather, who died in 2006. Carter defeated Ford in 1976, but the couple and their first ladies became close friends, and Carter eulogized Ford at his funeral.
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Mourners will also hear from Stu Eisenstat, who was a senior White House staffer under Carter, and 92-year-old Andrew Young, a former Atlanta mayor, congressman and UN ambassador during the Carter administration. Carter outlived his cabinet and inner circle, but he remained especially close to Young — a friendship between a white Georgian and a black Georgian who grew up in the era of Jim Crow segregation.
Thursday concludes six days of patriotic ritual that began in Plains, Georgia, where Carter was born in 1924, lived most of his life and died 22 months later in hospice care. Celebrations 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 several hours in frigid temperatures to pass past his flag-draped coffin in the rotunda, where tributes focused as much on the humanitarian work Carter did after leaving the White House as on what he did as president from 1977 to 1981.
After the morning service in Washington, Carter’s remains, his four children and his extended family will return to Georgia aboard a Boeing 747 that serves as Air Force One when the sitting president is on board.
The outspoken Baptist, who campaigned as a born-again Christian, will next be remembered at an afternoon funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church, the small edifice where he taught Sunday school for decades after leaving the White House and where his casket will be placed under a log. A cross he made in his wood shop.
Music — sacred, patriotic and popular — will feature prominently throughout the day for the evangelical president who campaigned with the Allman Brothers Band, befriended Willie Nelson and quoted Bob Dylan in his 1977 inaugural address. In Washington, the U.S. Marine Corps Orchestra and the Armed Forces Choir will sing “Fr. Eternal, Strong to the Rescue,” the naval anthem, by the only graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy to become Commander-in-Chief. Country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, who succeeded Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter as Habitat for Humanity ambassadors, will perform John Lennon’s “Imagine,” reprising their role at the former first lady’s funeral in 2023.
Hymns include “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” and, on the plains, “Let There Be Peace on Earth.”
After a final drive through his hometown, past the old train depot that served as the headquarters for his 1976 presidential campaign, he will be buried on his family’s land in a plot next to Rosalynn, to whom Carter had been married for more than 77 years of marriage.
Carter, who won the presidency promising good government and honest talks to voters disillusioned by the Vietnam War and Watergate, signed important legislation and negotiated a historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. But Carter also oversaw 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 an NGO that takes them around the world to fight disease, mediate conflicts, monitor elections, and advocate for racial and gender equality. The center, where Carter rested before coming to Washington, employs 3,000 employees and contractors worldwide.
Besides commemorating the longest-living president, the National Day of Mourning highlights the continuities and conflicts across US administrations. Carter normalized relations with China, based on Richard Nixon’s outreach to Beijing. Trump proposes escalating the trade war with the world’s most populous country. The Department of Education was created during the Carter administration. Trump has suggested removing them.
Carter streamlined American energy research by creating the Department of Energy, implementing energy standards for household appliances and extending federal protections to large tracts of land, particularly in Alaska. Trump returns to office promising to “drill, baby, drill.”
