An image of unity, if only for a couple of hours. The five living presidents of the United States, Republicans and Democrats, past, present and future, attended this Thursday the state funeral in honor of Jimmy Carter, the longest-serving president in history, who left the White House in 1981 under the shadow of the hostage crisis in Iran and a declining economy, but who developed a long and admired humanitarian career until his death on December 29 at the age of 100.
In the pews of the Washington National Cathedral, the outgoing head of state, Joe Biden, and his wife, Jill, presided over the ceremony alongside Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff. Behind them, the former presidential couples of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and George W. and Laura Bush. At his side, together for protocol reasons, two men who heartily reject each other: Barack Obama, who attended without his wife, Michelle, and Donald Trump, accompanied by his wife, Melania. While waiting for the event to begin, the first black president of the United States and the man who will occupy the White House starting on the 20th exchanged some smiling words. Among those present, in addition to Carter’s own family, were also former vice presidents such as Al Gore and Mike Pence, legislators and Supreme Court judges. The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, also attended.
“Many people may think that he [Carter] “He belonged to an era of the past, but in reality he saw the future clearly,” said Biden, in his funeral eulogy for the 39th president of the United States. During his time as senator, the outgoing president was the first member of the Upper House to support Carter’s presidential candidacy in 1974, as he recalled in his speech. During his term (1977-1981), Carter, who had been a farmer, was the first to install solar panels in the White House, was concerned about the environment and ordered the creation of the Department of Education within the US Government.
Biden highlighted the dichotomies in the life of his predecessor: a white man from the South who defended civil rights and fought for decades for human rights, a nuclear engineer who led the fight against proliferation, a farmer who defended the protection of land. Above all, the president declared, touching the coffin at that moment, Carter was a man of deep faith, who put the teachings of his religion into practice. Loving your neighbor as yourself “is easy to say, but very, very difficult to achieve” and the Nobel Peace Prize winner also achieved it, the Democratic president stressed.
SAMUEL CORUM / POOL (EFE)
The solemn ceremony, on a windy and freezing cold day in Washington, began with an intervention by Joshua Carter, grandson of the deceased president, who recalled how after leaving the White House his grandfather went to his Church on Sundays to teach about the Bible. He was only late one day: his grandson Jeremy had died. “He built houses for people who needed housing. He eliminated diseases in forgotten places. He sought peace anywhere in the world, wherever he saw an opportunity. “He loved people,” he recalled.
Steven Ford, son of former President Gerald Ford – who died in 2006, whom Carter defeated in the 1976 elections and with whom he formed a lasting friendship – read the funeral eulogy that his father had written about his successor and friend. “God did something good when he created your father,” he conveyed to the president’s family.
After the funeral, the coffin will return to the State of Georgia, where Carter will be buried in Plains, his hometown. The former president’s remains had rested for the past two days in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, where tens of thousands of people have come to pay their last respects to the man who played a key role in signing the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1979 and whose humanitarian work earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
The founder of the Carter Center, dedicated to humanitarian work ranging from observing elections around the world to fighting pests, had spent the last two years of his life under palliative care. His last public appearance, in a wheelchair, came at his wife Rosalynn’s funeral in November 2023.
