WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 44 years after Jimmy Carter left the nation's capital after a humiliating defeat, the 39th president returned to the Washington area for a three-day state funeral starting Tuesday.
Carter's remains, which had been in state at the Carter Presidential Center since Saturday, left the Atlanta campus on Tuesday morning, accompanied by his children and relatives. Special Air Mission 39 departed from Dobbins Air Reserve Base, north of Atlanta, and arrived at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. A motorcade will carry the casket to Washington and the Capitol, where lawmakers will pay their respects at a service scheduled for 4:30 p.m. ET.
In Georgia, eight military pallbearers held Carter's casket as artillery fired on a nearby tarmac. They carried it to a vehicle and lifted it to the cabin of the aircraft. The iconic blue and white Boeing 747 is known as Air Force One when a sitting president is on board. Carter never flew on the plane as president, but the plane first flew as Air Force One in 1990, carrying President George H.W. Bush.
Mr. Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, will later lie in state Tuesday night and again Wednesday. He will receive a state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday. President Joe Biden is scheduled to pay his respects.
There is a familiar ritual that follows the death of a president. The Air Force returns to the Beltway, the military honor guard carries a flag-draped casket up the steps of the Capitol, and the catafalque of Lincoln Cathedral in the Rotunda.
There may also be symbolism specific to Carter. A military band played hymns as he was carried out of the Presidential Center. The hymns, “Amazing Grace'' and “Blessed Assurance,'' were dedicated to the outspoken Baptist evangelical who called himself a “born again Christian'' when he ran for president in 1976. In Washington, his hearse will stop at the U.S. Naval Memorial, where his remains will be transferred to a horse-drawn caisson for the remainder of the trip to the Capitol. This location is a reminder that Carter was the only Naval Academy graduate to become commander in chief.
All this pomp will provide a certain irony for Democrats who have gone from the family peanut warehouse to the governor's mansion and eventually the White House. Carter won the presidency as a smiling Southerner and technocratic engineer who promised to change the ways of Washington. And when he arrived in Washington, he circumvented many of those unspoken rules.
“Jimmy Carter was always an outsider,” said biographer Jonathan Alter, explaining how Carter used the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal to bring down Richard Nixon. “The country was in desperate need of moral renewal and for Carter, a truly religious man, to step in and clean things up.”
From 1977 to 1981, Carter was Washington's highest-ranking resident. However, he could not master it.
“He might be prickly and not the most appealing personality,” Alter said of the president, who has struggled with altercations with lawmakers and reporters in a town where relationships thrive.
The gatekeepers of Washington society never welcomed Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter either. I didn't really know what to make of small-town Southerners who carried their own luggage and bought clothes off the shelf. Carter sold what had been a presidential yacht that his predecessors had used to wine and dine the powerful on Capitol Hill.
Early in Carter's presidency, Washington Post society columnist Sally Quinn tagged the Carter family and its West Wing as an “alien tribe” incapable of “playing the game.” Ms. Quinn, herself an elite hostess at Georgetown, nods to Washington's “frivolity,” but still describes “Carter people” as “actually people who wear black ties and ride in limousines or yachts or elegant salons.” “It's not comfortable to ride,” he scoffed. Or, “Place cards, servants, six courses, different forks, three bottles of wine…and after-dinner socialization.”
He didn't have enough friends in the town's power circles, and ultimately lost enough friends throughout the district that delivered about 500 Electoral College votes to Ronald Reagan in 1980, leading to a checkered fourth season. endured for years.
Even after he left office, Mr. Carter lamented a political cartoon published around the time of his inauguration that showed his mother, Miss Lillian, nibbling on hayseed as the family approached the White House.
Mr. Carter often disparaged the ceremonial ornaments that have been on display in Georgia and will continue to be displayed in Washington.
As president, he wanted to prevent the Marine Corps band from playing “Long Live the Chief,” believing it would be too exalting of the president. His advisor convinced him to accept it as part of the job. The song played Saturday as his motorcade traveled through his hometown of the Plains, past his childhood farm, and arrived at the Presidential Center. The song was played again as his remains were taken on their way to Washington.
He also never gave his full name, James Earl Carter Jr., when taking the oath of office. His full name was printed on every memorial card commemorated in Atlanta.
He once addressed the nation from the White House residence wearing a cardigan, which is now on display in his museum and library. His remains now rest in a wooden coffin, carried and guarded by military pallbearers in impeccable uniforms.
“He was a simple man in many ways,” said Brad, a military veteran who was one of more than 23,000 people who came to honor the former president at his library, which is on the same campus as the Carter Center.・Mr. Webb said. The former president and first lady are building on decades of advocacy for democracy, public health, and human rights in developing countries.
“He was also a complicated man,” said Webb, who voted for Republican Gerald Ford in 1976 and for Reagan in 1980. “He was also a complicated man. He accomplished a lot in the world by accepting defeat.” Presidential terms – inflation, Iran hostages, the energy crisis – were really things that no president could control. We can look back with some perspective and understand that while he was an excellent former president, he also had a presidency that we appreciated more than what was actually happening. ”
As Carter's remains leave Georgia, President-elect Donald Trump criticized the late former president for ceding control of the Panama Canal to his home country at a press conference in Florida.
Asked whether it was appropriate to criticize Carter during the solemn funeral, Trump said: “I liked him as a person. I didn't agree with his policies. I thought it was a good thing to let go.”
“I didn't want to bring up the Panama Canal because of Jimmy Carter's death,” he added, despite initially mentioning it out of the blue.
