Jimmy Carter honored with Washington funeral before burial in his Georgia hometown
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 the pageantry of a funeral at Washington National Cathedral before a second service and burial in his tiny 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 homes,” Joshua said. “He eliminated diseases in forgotten places. He waged peace anywhere in the world, wherever he saw a chance. He loved people.”
Joshua said his grandfather explained his dedication by saying that, as a Christian and a follower of Jesus Christ, “he worshipped the Prince of Peace, and He commanded it.”
Steven Ford, the son of President Gerald Ford, spoke next and told Carter’s children “God did a good thing when he made your dad.”
Ford read a tribute from his own father, who died in 2006.
“By fate of a brief season, Jimmy Carter and I were rivals,” the eulogy said. “But for the many wonderful years that followed, friendship bonded us as no two presidents since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.”
Carter defeated Ford in 1976 but the pair, and their first ladies, became close friends, and Carter eulogized Ford at his own funeral.
President Joe Biden, who was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s 1976 campaign, will also eulogize his fellow Democrat 11 days before he leaves office. All of Carter’s living successors attended 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 offered an unusual moment of comity for the nation in a factionalized, hyper-partisan era. They met privately before the service began. As Trump went to his seat, he shook hands with Mike Pence in a rare interaction with his former vice president. The two men had a falling out over Pence’s refusal to help Trump overturn his election defeat to Biden four years ago.
Trump was seated next to former President Barack Obama and the two could be seen chatting for several minutes. Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November, entered afterwards but did not interact with him.
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.
The proceedings began on Thursday 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.
At the cathedral, the Armed Forces Chorus sang the hymn “Be Still My Soul” before Carter’s casket was brought inside.
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.
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.
___
Associated Press writers Chris Megerian in Washington, Michael Liedtke in Indian Wells, California, and Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.