Jimmy Carter was celebrated Thursday for his personal humility and public service before, during and after his presidency during a funeral at Washington National Cathedral featuring the kind of pageantry the 39th U.S. president typically eschewed.
All of Carter’s living successors were in attendance, with President Joe Biden, the first sitting senator to endorse his 1976 run for the White House, delivering a eulogy. Biden and others took turns praising Carter’s record — which many historians have appraised more favorably since losing his bid for a second term in 1980 — and extolling his character.
“He built houses for people who needed homes,” said Joshua Carter, a grandson who recalled how Carter regularly taught Sunday school in his native hamlet of Plains, Georgia, 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, praised his grandfather and his wife Rosalynn, who died in 2023. He wryly noted the couple’s frugality, such as washing and reusing Ziploc bags, and the former president’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, who chairs the Carter Center, a global humanitarian operation founded by the former president after leaving office.
The extraordinary gathering offered an unusual moment of comity for the nation in a factionalized, hyper-partisan era. Former President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump, political rivals who have mocked each other for years, sat next to each other Thursday and talked for several minutes, even sharing a laugh.
Biden, who will leave office in 11 days, hinted at politics in repeating several times that “character” was Carter’s chief attribute. Biden said the former president taught him the imperative that “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, his predecessor and successor.
As Trump went to his seat before the service began, 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. Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November, entered afterwards and was not seen interacting with him. Michelle Obama, the former first lady, did not attend.
“By fate of a brief season, Jimmy Carter and I were rivals,” said the eulogy from Ford, which was read by his son Steven. “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 presidents and their wives became close friends, and Carter eulogized Ford at his own funeral.
Days of formal ceremonies and remembrances from political leaders, business titans and rank-and-file citizens have honored Carter for decency and using a prodigious work ethic to do more than obtain political power.
The proceedings began 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.
Mourners also heard from 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.
“Jimmy Carter was a blessing that helped create a great United States of America,” Young said.
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“Hail to the Chief” was performed by the band as his casket was carried out. Carter once tried to stop the traditional standard from being played for him when he was president, seeing it as an unnecessary flourish.
Thursday concludes 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.
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.
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 in a landslide to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Former White House aide Stu Eizenstat used his eulogy to make an effort to reframe the Carter presidency as more successful than voters appreciated at the time.
He noted Carter deregulated U.S. transportation industries, streamlined energy research and created the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He emphasized that Carter’s administration secured the release of the American hostages in Iran, though they were not freed until after his 1980 defeat.
“He may not be a candidate for Mount Rushmore, but he belongs in the foothills,” Eizenstat said.