Jimmy Carter’s remains taken to Washington

(Washington) Nearly 44 years after Jimmy Carter left the American capital after a crushing defeat, on 39^e president returns to Washington for three days of state funeral rites starting Tuesday.

Mr. Carter’s remains, which have been resting at the Carter Presidential Center in Georgia since Saturday, will leave the Atlanta campus Tuesday morning, accompanied by his children and extended family. Special Air Mission 39 will depart from Dobbins Air Reserve Base, north of Atlanta, and arrive at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland. A procession will leave from there to Washington and the Capitol, where members of Congress will pay tribute to him in an afternoon ceremony.

Jimmy Carter, who died on December 29 at the age of 100, will then be exhibited Tuesday evening and again on Wednesday. He will receive a state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday. President Joe Biden will deliver a eulogy.

There will be the familiar rituals that follow the death of an American president – ​​the return of the Air Force to Washington, a military honor guard carrying the flag-wrapped casket up the steps of the Capitol, Lincoln’s catafalque in the Rotunda.

There will also be symbolism unique to Mr. Carter: His hearse will stop at the U.S. Navy Memorial, where his remains will be transferred to a horse-drawn caisson for the remainder of its journey to the Capitol. The location refers to Mr. Carter’s place as the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to become the military’s commander in chief.

All this pomp will carry a certain irony for the Democrat, who rose from his family peanut warehouse to the Georgia governor’s mansion and ultimately the White House. This technocratic, smiling Baptist engineer had won the presidency on a promise to change Washington’s ways — and he eschewed many of those unwritten rules when he arrived in the capital.

“Jimmy Carter has always been a outsider said biographer Jonathan Alter, explaining how he capitalized on the fallout from the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, which toppled Richard Nixon. “The country was hungry for moral renewal and to see Mr. Carter, this genuinely religious figure, come and clean things up. »

A simple man

From 1977 to 1981, Mr. Carter was the capital’s highest-ranking resident, but he never truly mastered the role. “He could be irritable and have an unappealing personality” in a city that thrives on connections, Mr. Alter said, describing a president who struggled to get along with elected officials and journalists.

Washington’s gatekeepers to polite society never welcomed Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter either, not sure what to make of these provincial southerners who carried their own luggage and bought their clothes in department stores. Mr. Carter sold what had been the presidential yacht, a perk his predecessors had used to entertain powerful players on Capitol Hill.

At the start of the Carter presidency, the society columnist of Washington Post Sally Quinn called the Carters and their White House inner circle a “foreign tribe” incapable of “playing the game” of the capital.

Long after leaving office, Jimmy Carter still deplored a political cartoon published around his inauguration that depicted his family approaching the White House with his mother, “Miss Lillian,” munching on a blade of wheat.

As president, he wanted to stop the Marine Corps band from playing ” Hail to the Chief » (Hail to the Chief), believing that this elevated the president too much. His advisors convinced him it was part of the job. And the anthem was played Saturday in Georgia as he arrived at his Presidential Center after a motorcade through his hometown of Plains and past his childhood farm.

He addressed the nation from the White House wearing a simple cardigan, now on display in his museum and library. His remains now rest in a wooden coffin, carried and guarded by soldiers in their impeccable uniforms.

“He was a simple man in many ways,” said Brad Webb, an Army veteran who was among more than 23,000 people who came to pay their respects to 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 accepted his defeat and did a lot of good in the world,” said Mr. Webb, who voted for Republicans Gerald Ford in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. “And, in Looking back, some of the events of his presidency – the inflation, the Iran hostages, the energy crisis – were really things that no president can really control.

“We can look back with some perspective and understand that he was a great former president, but he also had a presidency that we can better appreciate in hindsight. »