By BILL BARROW, Associated Press
Jimmy Carter, who considered himself an outsider even as he sat in the Oval Office as the 39th U.S. president, will be honored Thursday with the pageantry of a funeral at Washington National Cathedral before a second service and burial in his tiny Georgia hometown.
President Joe Biden, who was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, will eulogize his fellow Democrat 11 days before he leaves office. All of Carter’s living successors are expected to attend the Washington funeral, including President-elect Donald Trump, who paid his respects before Carter’s casket Wednesday.
The rare gathering of commanders in chief is one example of how Thursday will be an unusual moment of comity for the nation. 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.
“He set a very high bar for presidents, how you can use voice and leadership for causes,” said Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder whose foundation funded Carter’s work to eliminate treatable diseases like the Guinea worm. Gates spoke to The Associated Press on Wednesday shortly before flying to Washington for the funeral.
“Whatever prestige and resources you are lucky enough to have, ideally you can take those and take a even broader societal view in your post private sector career,” Gates said.
Bernice King, daughter of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., compared the two Georgians and Nobel Peace Prize winners.
“Both President Jimmy Carter and my father showed us what is possible when your faith compels you to live and lead from a love-centered place,” said King, who is also planning to attend the Washington service.
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.
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 Dec. 29 at the age of 100. 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 Capitol 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 evangelical, 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 former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023 after more than 77 years of marriage.
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 he also presided over inflation, rising interest rates and international crises and 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 Michael Liedtke in Indian Wells, California, and Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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