Jimmy Carter is remembered as a humanitarian and public servant
WASHINGTON – The nation bade farewell to former President Jimmy Carter on Thursday with a majestic state funeral for a man who saw himself as anything but, remembering a peanut farmer from Georgia who rose to the heights of power and used it to fight for justice, eradicate disease and wage peace not war.
Five living presidents and a broad array of other leaders gathered at Washington National Cathedral to pay tribute to the 39th president, not only for his accomplishments during four years in the nation’s highest office but also for his relentless humanitarian work in the four decades after he left the White House.
“Throughout his life, he showed us what it means to be a practitioner of good works, a good and faithful servant of God and of the people,” President Joe Biden said in a eulogy, delivered just 11 days before he too leaves office as a one-term Democrat. “Today, many think he was from a bygone era. But in reality, he saw well into the future.”
The grand service in the ornate cathedral on a hill was a classic Washington spectacle with all the rituals of a presidential passing and all the intrigues of a political convention. As organs played and choirs sang, many had their minds on the soon-to-be-inaugurated president as much as the one in the flag-draped coffin. Mourners craned their necks to gauge the body language as President-elect Donald Trump sat near his four peers, none of whom care for him and most of whom ignored him.
Adding to the unspoken drama, two leading figures from countries that Trump has threatened in recent days sat barely 30 feet away: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and former President Martín Torrijos of Panama. Both of their fathers served in the same positions during Carter’s presidency, but more urgent at the moment was Trump’s talk of annexing Canada and seizing the Panama Canal.
Most of the tributes to Carter avoided the pointed commentary of recent funerals at the cathedral for President George H.W. Bush and Sen. John McCain that were at times seen as rebukes of Trump. But it was hard not to hear the implicit contrast drawn between Carter’s fundamental decency, integrity and commitment and Trump’s rough-hewed, combative and grievance-filled politics.
In his eulogy, Biden said that Carter’s most enduring attribute was “character, character, character” – a trait that he has maintained is missing in his predecessor turned successor.
“We’re all fallible, but it’s about asking ourselves, are we striving to do things, the right things?” Biden asked. “What value? What are the values that animate our spirit? To operate from fear or hope, ego or generosity? Do we show grace? Do we keep the faith when it’s most tested?”
“For keeping the faith with the best of humankind and the best of America,” he added, “is a story in my view, from my perspective, of Jimmy Carter’s life.”
The service on a bitterly cold Washington day amid a more expansive security cordon than previous such events represented the pinnacle of America’s honors to Carter. From the splendor of the cavernous cathedral, he was flown to Georgia, where he was buried later in the day in a simple plot outside the modest $240,000 one-story ranch house in Plains, Georgia, where he lived most of his life.
James Earl Carter Jr., who died in that house last week at age 100, lived longer than any president in history, long enough to see his legacy transformed from that of a failed commander in chief to that of a public servant embodying faith, virtue and patriotism.
Carter was elected in 1976 on a promise to heal the nation after the traumas of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War only to find his presidency fatally damaged by runaway inflation, oil shortages and a hostage crisis in Iran.
He brokered the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt and established diplomatic relations with China. He advanced ahead-of-their-time environmental and energy policies and created the departments of Education and Energy. He deregulated airlines and other industries and appointed more women as judges than all 38 predecessors combined, including a young appellate judge named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
But his failure to free the hostages in Iran before the election or turn around a flailing economy contributed to an erosion of public support that cost him a second term when he lost re-election to Ronald Reagan in 1980. For years, his name became a metaphor for weakness for Republicans even as Democrats tried to keep their distance.
Still, time has a way of polishing a president’s reputation. Funerals, of course, are about highlighting the good. After leaving office, Carter embarked on a new Nobel Peace Prize-winning career of negotiating ends to conflicts, combating diseases like Guinea worm, monitoring elections and serving the poor. For a week each year, he picked up a hammer to personally build houses for the needy with Habitat for Humanity. He wrote 32 books, more than any other president in a century.
“Essentially, he eradicated a disease with love and respect,” said Jason Carter, his grandson, who serves as chair of the Carter Center. “He waged peace with love and respect. He led this nation with love and respect. To me, this life was a love story from the moment that he woke up until he laid his head.”
Speaking for the family, Jason Carter humanized his grandfather, describing a “regular guy” he called Pawpaw who proudly displayed decades-old fishing trophies, greeted visitors wearing 1970s-style “short shorts” and Crocs and was so frugal that he and his wife hung used Ziploc bags to dry.
He told a story many younger Americans could identify with as his grandfather fumbled with a newly acquired cellphone and accidentally called him.
“Who’s this?” the former president asked.
“This is Jason,” his grandson answered.
“What are you doing?” Carter asked.
“I’m not doing anything. You called me!”
“I didn’t call you,” the former president insisted. “I’m taking a picture.”
Jason Carter smiled as he told that story. “A nuclear engineer, right?” he said with loving sarcasm about his grandfather’s pre-political role in the Navy.
But if Jimmy Carter in his later years was, in effect, the nation’s grandfather – sometimes the eat-your-vegetables kind, who lectured and preached, to the annoyance of his successors who resented his interventions – one of his closest confidants argued Thursday that he was also a better president than he is given credit for.
“As we lay our 39th president to rest, it’s time to redeem his presidency and also lay to rest the myth that his greatest achievements came only as a former president,” said Stuart E. Eizenstat, who served as Carter’s White House domestic policy adviser. “The test of American presidents is not the number of years they served but the duration of their accomplishments. By this measure, Jimmy Carter was among the most consequential one-term presidents in American history.”
In addition to Biden and Trump, former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton attended, along with former first ladies Melania Trump, Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton. Vice President Kamala Harris, her husband, Doug Emhoff, and several former vice presidents were on hand as well. Michelle Obama, who has expressed deep personal disdain for Trump and by protocol would have been seated next to him, stayed away, attributing her absence to a scheduling conflict.
This was the first time the five surviving presidents have gathered in the same place since Trump defeated Harris in November to win a second term. Neither Biden nor Harris engaged with him, nor did the Clintons. Bush strode past Trump without acknowledgment but gave Obama a friendly pat on the belly and shook hands with others nearby.
Positioned near the far edge of the second row, not the alpha dog position that he is used to, Trump kept leaning over to speak to Obama, who smiled and indulged him in cordial chitchat.
It was also the first time in four years that Trump was in the same place as his estranged vice president, Mike Pence. The two shook hands briefly and politely but otherwise did not appear to say much to each other.
Pence challenged Trump for the Republican nomination last year and, after losing, refused to endorse his former running mate who, he said, sought to violate the Constitution by pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election that they lost to Biden and Harris.
Trump replaced Pence on last year’s ticket with JD Vance of Ohio, who sat during the service with the congressional delegation, as he is still a senator until the Jan. 20 inauguration. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the new Republican leader, both attended, but relatively few other Republican lawmakers did.
Sitting in the pews were all four of Carter’s children: Jack, Chip, Jeff and Amy. Two of his other grandsons, Joshua and James, gave readings. Phyllis Adams performed “Amazing Grace.” Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
The tributes included eulogies from former President Gerald Ford and former Vice President Walter Mondale, written before their deaths and read by their sons, Steven Ford and Ted Mondale. Carter defeated Ford in the 1976 election but they later became friends, while Mondale was his close partner for four years in the White House.
In folksy reminiscences, Ford noted that Carter sometimes “got under my skin” but called him “this beloved man, this very special man” who understood that “defeat at the polls can be painful” but “can also be liberating.”
“As for myself, Jimmy,” Ford concluded, “I’m looking forward to our reunion. We have much to catch up on. Thank you, Mr. President. Welcome home, old friend.”
Still, for all the obvious contrasts with today’s politics, some of the speakers sought to avoid delving too deeply into punditry. Even as he praised Carter for welcoming Vietnamese refugees, Mondale’s son left out a phrase from the written text previously shared with The New York Times contrasting that to the way the nation is “tragically dealing with the crisis of immigrants today.”
But it was Carter’s personal story that proved so resonant. The Rev. Andrew Young, a civil rights leader who served as his ambassador to the United Nations, expressed astonishment even now at how the former president rose from the dirt of Georgia to the White House.
“It was something of a miracle, and I don’t mean this with any disrespect, but it’s still hard for me to understand how you could get to be president from Plains, Georgia,” Young, 92, sitting in a chair, said during the homily.
During the quiet moments of the service, the sound of the howling wind from the blustery day outside was powerful and haunting. Yet at the end, the pipe organ music filled the cathedral and conveyed a final sense of awe.
After being flown to Georgia, Carter’s coffin was brought for a final private service to Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, where he taught Sunday school deep into his 90s. Navy jets conducted a flyover tribute in missing-man formation. A motorcade with the coffin was to make a last journey through Plains to the Carter home.
And then after that, after all the pomp and all the circumstance, Carter was to be interred next to a willow tree near the edge of a pond alongside Rosalynn Carter, his wife of 77 years, who died in late 2023. After all the campaigns and the summit meetings and the around-the-world trips, his story would end in the same small town where it all began a century ago.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.