Former US president Jimmy Carter on Thursday was celebrated for his personal humility and public service before, during and after his presidency in a funeral at Washington National Cathedral featuring the kind of pageantry that the 39th US president typically eschewed.
It was followed by an intimate hometown funeral near where he was born a century ago.
All of Carter’s living successors attended in Washington, with US President Joe Biden, who was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s 1976 run for the White House, eulogizing his longtime friend.
Photo: Reuters
Biden and others took turns in the morning praising Carter’s record — which many historians have appraised more favorably since he lost his bid for a second term in 1980 — and extolling his character.
The dual ceremonies in Washington and Plains, Georgia, provided a moment of national comity.
“He built houses for people who needed homes,” said Joshua Carter, a grandson who recalled how Jimmy Carter regularly taught Sunday school in Plains after leaving the White House. “He eliminated diseases in forgotten places. He waged peace anywhere in the world, wherever he saw a chance. He loved people.”
Jason Carter, another grandson, wryly noted his grandparents’ frugality, such as washing and reusing Ziploc bags and his grandfather’s struggles with his cellphone.
“They were small-town people who never forgot who they were and where they were from, no matter what happened in their lives,” said Jason Carter, who chairs the Carter Center, a global humanitarian operation founded by Jimmy Carter and his late wife, Rosalynn Carter.
At the national service, former US president Barack Obama and US president-elect Donald Trump, who have mocked each other for years, sat next to each other and talked for several minutes, even sharing a laugh.
As Trump went to his seat, he shook hands with Mike Pence in a rare interaction with his former vice president.
US Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November’s election, entered afterward and was not seen interacting with him. Former first lady Michelle Obama did not attend.
All politics were not left outside the cathedral, though. Biden, who leaves office in 11 days, repeated several times that “character” was Carter’s chief attribute.
Biden said that Carter taught him “everyone should be treated with dignity and respect.”
“We have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor,” Biden said, also noting the importance of standing up to “abuse in power.”
Those comments echoed Biden’s typical criticisms of Trump.
In Plains, Carter’s personal pastor, Tony Lowden, touched on the political as well, saying Carter was “still teaching us a lesson” with the timing of his death as a new Congress begins its work and Trump prepares for a second administration.
Lowden, who did not name Trump or others, urged the nation to follow Carter’s example: “not self, but country.”
“Don’t let his legacy die. Don’t let this nation die,” Lowden said. “Let faith and hope be our guardrails.”
Carter died on Dec. 29 at age 100, living so long that two of Thursday’s eulogies were written by people who died before him — his vice president, Walter Mondale, and his presidential predecessor, Gerald Ford.
“By fate of a brief season, Jimmy Carter and I were rivals, but for the many wonderful years that followed, friendship bonded us as no two presidents since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,” Ford said in his eulogy, which was read by his son Steven.
Carter defeated Ford in 1976, but the presidents and their wives became close friends, and Carter eulogized Ford at his own funeral.
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