Chicago group worked on planning Jimmy Carter's state funeral for decades

WASHINGTON — The meticulous planning for former President Jimmy Carter's state funeral Thursday at the National Cathedral started decades ago with a group of Chicagoans — present and former employees at the Jasculca-Terman public affairs and events planning firm — among those centrally involved.

“My first meeting was in 2006,” said Lauren Foley, a Park Ridge resident who is the chief operating officer of the Chicago-based firm and the daughter of the co-founder, Rick Jasculca, an Oak Park resident who has worked on Carter’s funeral planning for years.

Jasculca and business partner Jim Terman, a Highland Park resident, became part of the team planning for the Carter funeral in 1987 or 1988.

They come out of the world of Carter and his vice president, Walter Mondale, working stints in the campaign and the Carter/Mondale White House. They have been part of the Carter/Mondale network through the post-presidential years, helping them with events at the Carter Center in Atlanta and other places, and doing advance work when they travel.

Indeed, Terman and Jasculca told me they did their first cathedral funeral “walk-through” some 25 years ago.

I talked with Foley, Jasculca, Terman and Jessica Smith, a Sauganash resident who is a senior vice president of the firm, about the work that goes into a state funeral — meeting them at their makeshift office set up at the Omni Shoreham hotel, not far from the cathedral.

Their role, established years ago, was to represent the Carter family and friends in Washington these past few days — from meeting the family at Joint Base Andrews to briefing them and being with them at all their stops: the Navy Memorial; the Capitol where Carter lay in state in the Rotunda; the cathedral; and the return to Andrews for a departure ceremony before Carter’s final trip home to Georgia.

Smith and Foley over the years have gotten to know the Carter family members. They led a team mainly of Jasculca-Terman present and past staffers, helping to manage requests for tickets to the events and other details. Smith started on the Carter funeral team also in 2006, a bit after Foley.

She was also with the family for their stops, making sure "they were getting to where they needed to be,” Smith said.

Invited guests on Wednesday streamed into the hotel to pick up their tickets and get information about logistics from past and present Jasculca-Terman staffers involved in the operation.

All former presidents do funeral planning when it comes to the state funerals, to which they are entitled. Indeed, one could only wonder what the presidents at the Carter service — Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — were thinking, knowing that one day this magnificent cathedral in northwest Washington would host their own state funerals.

In the beginning, Foley said there are funeral meetings every two to three years where planners “take a look at the plans, you revisit things, you change things based on the circumstances, and then you start to put teams in place. It becomes, I like to say, the advance team for the president’s final trip.”

The moving tribute to Carter in the Episcopal cathedral was highly choreographed with the military in the lead, working with various partners, including the Jasculca-Terman group.

While certain aspects of a presidential state funeral — the military honors for example — are pretty much set in stone, the family provides the plans that make it special.

Carter lived so long, he was 100 when he died on Dec. 29, that the plans had to be updated through the years as others passed before him. Steve Ford read a tribute his father, President Gerald Ford, wrote before he died in 2006 about the “unlikely partnership” forged with Carter, who defeated him in 1976.

Ted Mondale, the son of Vice President Mondale, Carter’s running mate who died in 2021, read a speech he said his father wrote in 2015. Mondale provided what to me was the most moving line of the service, about how his father wanted the Carter and Mondale administration to be remembered:

“We told the truth. We obeyed the law. And we kept the peace.”

Pritzker, Bill Daley at Carter funeral; Michelle Obama skips tribute

Gov. JB Pritzker and wife MK attended the funeral, sitting with a group of other governors. While the other living first ladies attended, Michelle Obama did not. A source close to the family told the Sun-Times she remained at the Obama home in Hawaii. The family normally spends the holidays in Obama's native state.

Former Commerce Secretary and Obama chief of staff Bill Daley was also there. He met Carter in 1974, at a Democratic National Committee meeting in Kansas City. Daley was with his father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, an early Carter presidential supporter. I asked Daley to share his thoughts about the funeral.

“It combined the pomp and circumstance that goes with a presidential funeral, the military presence, with what was (Carter’s) essence: A very strong religious person, who in the music, in the readings, represented what he represented — the humble, religious and decent life.”