Jimmy Carter, who considered himself an outsider even as he sat in the Oval Office as the 39th U.S. president, will be honored Thursday with the pageantry of a funeral at Washington National Cathedral before a second service and burial in his tiny Georgia hometown.
The proceedings began in the morning as military service members carried Carter’s flag-draped casket down the east steps of the U.S. Capitol, where the former president had laid in state, to be transported to the cathedral. There was also a 21-gun salute.
President Joe Biden, who was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s 1976 campaign, will eulogize his fellow Democrat 11 days before he leaves office. All of Carter’s living successors are expected to attend the Washington funeral, including President-elect Donald Trump, who paid his respects in the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday.
The rare gathering of commanders in chief offers an unusual moment of comity for the nation in a factionalized, hyper-partisan era. Days of formal ceremonies and remembrances from political leaders, business titans and rank-and-file citizens have honored Carter, who died Dec. 29 at the age of 100, for decency and using a prodigious work ethic to do more than obtain political power.
“He set a very high bar for presidents, how you can use voice and leadership for causes,” said Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder whose foundation funded Carter’s work to eliminate treatable diseases like the Guinea worm. Gates spoke to The Associated Press on Wednesday shortly before flying to Washington for the funeral.
“Whatever prestige and resources you are lucky enough to have, ideally you can take those and take a even broader societal view in your post private sector career,” Gates said.
Bernice King, daughter of slain civil rights leader 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 love-centered place,” said King, who also is planning to attend the Washington service.
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 from his grandfather, who died in 2006. Carter defeated Ford in 1976 but the pair, and their first ladies, became close friends, and Carter eulogized Ford at his funeral.
Mourners also will hear from Stu Eizenstat, who was a top White House staffer for 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 especially close to Young — a friendship that brought together a white Georgian and 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 lain in state since Tuesday.
Long lines of mourners waited several hours in frigid temperatures to file past his flag-draped casket in the rotunda, as tributes focused as much on Carter’s humanitarian work after leaving the White House as what he did as president from 1977 to 1981.
After the morning service in Washington, Carter’s remains, his four children and extended family will return to Georgia on a Boeing 747 that serves as Air Force One when the sitting president is aboard.
The outspoken Baptist, who campaigned as a born-again Christian, will then be remembered in 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 sit beneath a wooden cross he fashioned in his own woodshop.
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 Orchestra and Armed Forces Chorus will sing “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” the Navy hymn, for the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to become commander in chief. Country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, who succeeded Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter as ambassadors for Habitat for Humanity, 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, in Plains, “Let there be Peace on Earth.”
Following a final ride through his hometown, past the old train depot that served as his 1976 presidential campaign headquarters, he will be buried on family land in a plot next to Rosalynn, to whom Carter was married for more than 77 years.
Carter, who won the presidency promising good government and honest talk for an electorate disillusioned by 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 with Americans held in Tehran for more than a year. Carter lost a landslide to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Two years later he and Rosalynn established The Carter Center in Atlanta as a nongovernmental organization that took them across the world fighting disease, mediating conflict, monitoring elections and advocating for racial and gender equity. The center, where Carter lay in repose before coming to Washington, currently has 3,000 employees and contractors globally.
Besides memorializing the longest-lived president, the day of national mourning highlights both the continuity and conflicts across U.S administrations. Carter normalized relations with China, building on Richard Nixon’s outreach to Beijing. Trump is proposing to ratchet up a trade war with the world’s most populous country. The Department of Education was created during Carter’s administration. Trump has proposed eliminating it.
Carter streamlined American energy research by creating the Department of Energy, implemented energy standards for home appliances and extended federal protections to substantial tracts of land, notably in Alaska. Trump is returning to office promising to “drill, baby, drill.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.