Nearly 44 years after Jimmy Carter left the nation's capital in humbling defeat, the 39th president returns to Washington for three days of state funeral rites starting on Tuesday.
Carter’s remains, which had been lying in repose at the Carter Presidential Center since Saturday, left the Atlanta campus Tuesday morning, accompanied by his children and extended family. Special Air Mission 39 departed Dobbins Air Reserve Base north of Atlanta and will arrive at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, with a motorcade into Washington and the Capitol, where members of Congress will pay their respects at a service scheduled for 4:30 p.m. ET.
In Georgia, eight military pallbearers held Carter's casket as canons fired on the tarmac nearby. They carried it to a vehicle that lifted it to the passenger compartment of the aircraft, the iconic blue and white Boeing 747 variant that is known as Air Force One when the sitting president is on board. Carter never traveled as president on the jet, which first flew as Air Force One in 1990 with President George H.W. Bush on board.
Carter, who died Dec. 29 at the age of 100, will then lie in state Tuesday night and again Wednesday. He receives a state funeral Thursday at Washington National Cathedral. President Joe Biden will deliver a eulogy.
We've got the news you need to know to start your day. Sign up for the First & 4Most morning newsletter — delivered to your inbox daily. >Sign up here.
There are the familiar rituals that follow a president’s death — the Air Force ride back to the Beltway, a military honor guard carrying a flag-draped casket up the Capitol steps, the Lincoln catafalque in the Rotunda.
There also will be symbolism unique to Carter. As he was carried from his presidential center, a military band played hymns — “Amazing Grace” and “Blessed Assurance” for the outspoken Baptist evangelical who called himself a “born-again Christian” when he sought and won the presidency in 1976. In Washington, his hearse will stop at the U.S. Navy Memorial, where his remains will be transferred to a horse-drawn caisson for the rest of his trip to the Capitol. The location nods to Carter’s place as the lone U.S. Naval Academy graduate to become commander in chief.
All of the pomp will carry some irony for the Democrat who went from his family peanut warehouse to the Governor’s Mansion and eventually the White House. Carter won the presidency as the smiling Southerner and technocratic engineer who promised to change the ways of Washington — and eschewed many of those unwritten rules when he got there.
“Jimmy Carter was always an outsider,” said biographer Jonathan Alter, explaining how Carter capitalized on the fallout of the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon. “The country was thirsting for moral renewal and for Carter, as this genuinely religious figure, to come in and clean things up."
From 1977 to 1981, Carter was Washington's highest-ranking resident. But he never mastered it.
“He could be prickly and a not very appealing personality” in a town that thrives on relationships, Alter said, describing a president who struggled with schmoozing lawmakers and reporters.
The gatekeepers of Washington society never embraced Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, either, not quite knowing what to make of the small-town Southerners who carried their own luggage and bought their clothes off the rack. Carter sold what had been the presidential yacht, a perk his predecessors had used to wine and dine Capitol power players.
Early in Carter’s presidency, Washington Post society columnist Sally Quinn tagged the Carters and their West Wing as “an alien tribe,” incapable of “playing ‘the game.’” An elite Georgetown hostess herself, Quinn nodded to Washington’s “frivolity” but nonetheless mocked “the Carter people” as “not, in fact, comfortable in limousines, yachts, or in elegant salons, in black tie” or with “place cards, servants, six courses, different forks, three wines ... and after-dinner mingling.”
He endured a rocky four years that left him without enough friends in the town’s power circles and, ultimately, across an electorate that delivered nearly 500 Electoral College votes to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.
Long after leaving office, Carter still bemoaned a political cartoon published around his inauguration that depicted his family approaching the White House with his mother, “Miss Lillian,” chewing on a hayseed.
Carter often flouted the ceremonial trappings that have been on display in Georgia and will continue in Washington.
As president, he wanted to keep the Marine Band from playing “Hail to the Chief,” thinking it elevated the president too much. His advisers convinced him to accept it as part of the job. And the song played Saturday as he arrived at his presidential center after a motorcade through his hometown of Plains and past his boyhood farm.
He also never used his full name, James Earl Carter Jr., even taking the oath of office. His full name was printed on memorial cards given to all mourners who paid their respects in Atlanta.
He once addressed the nation from the White House residence wearing a cardigan, now on display at his museum and library. His remains now rest in a wooden casket being carried and guarded by military pallbearers in their impeccable dress uniforms.
“He was a simple man in so many ways,” said Brad Webb, an Army veteran who came to honor the former president at his library, which is on the same campus as The Carter Center, where the former president and first lady based their decades of advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights in the developing world.
“He was also a complicated man, who took his defeat and did so much good in the world," said Webb, who voted for Republican Gerald Ford in 1976 and Reagan in 1980. “And, looking back, some of the things in his presidency — the inflation, the Iran hostages, the energy crisis — were really things that no president can actually control. We get to look back with some perspective and understand that he was an excellent former president but also had a presidency we can appreciate more than we did as it was happening.”
