All five living presidents were present at the Washington funeral of former US President Jimmy Carter today.
Carter, who considered himself an outsider even as he sat in the Oval Office as the 39th US president, is being honoured today in the capitol before he will be buried in his small hometown in Georgia.
President Joe Biden, who was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, will give the eulogy for him.
Former presidents Barack Obama, George Bush and Bill Clinton; along with current president Joe Biden and president-elect Donald Trump all sat somberly in the church as Carter’s coffin was brought in.
Prior to the start of the service, some of the former commander-in-chiefs were seen exchanging niceties.
It’s unclear what the two presidents chatted about, but both seemed to chuckle.
The service is a sombre sendoff for a president revered for his faith, charity work and simple way of living.
The rare gathering of commanders-in-chief is one example of how Thursday will be an unusual moment of coming together for the nation.
Formal ceremonies and remembrances from political leaders, business titans and rank-and-file citizens have honoured Carter for decency and for using a prodigious work ethic to do more than obtain political power.
Carter is preceded in death by his wife, Rosalynn, who died in 2023.
Bernice King, daughter of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, who was assassinated in 1968, 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-centred place,’ she said.
Carter taught Sunday school in his small town of Plains, Georgia, from 1981 onwards after he left the White House.
He and his wife, Rosalynn, built a life for themselves in the small town – only leaving to serve the nation briefly for four years.
Rosalynn told a magazine shortly after her husband won the presidency: ‘What Jimmy and I hope to bring to the White House is a bit of that elusive pleasure we call Southern hospitality.
‘We enjoy having people in, and we know that we can help them feel welcome, whatever the occassion.’
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 on December 29 at the age of 100.
Ceremonies continued in Atlanta and Washington, where Carter, a former naval officer, engineer and peanut farmer, had been lying 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.
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