Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is set to be honored Thursday with a funeral at Washington National Cathedral before being buried in his home state of Georgia.
Carter’s living presidential successors – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden – are due to attend the Washington funeral, with Biden delivering a eulogy.
Mourners from the public were able to pay their final respects overnight at the U.S. Capitol, where Carter’s casket lay in state since Tuesday.
David Smith, a professor at the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, said the former president obviously impacted his career. He told VOA that he came to the Capitol to honor the man but also to honor Carter’s causes.
“He had such an impact on so many people,” he said. “His work on advancing minorities, appointments of women to the judiciary, protecting our environment, advocating for human rights – all those things are very important things to me.”
In the Capitol rotunda – where only about 50 Americans have been recognized with this distinct honor since 1852 – Senate Majority Leader Jon Thune, in a service late Tuesday, described Carter as: “Navy veteran, peanut farmer, governor of Georgia. And president of the United States. Sunday school teacher. Nobel Prize winner. Advocate for peace and human rights. And first and foremost, a faithful servant of his creator and his fellow man.”
Vice President Kamala Harris – who on Monday in the Capitol certified the victory of the next president – extolled Carter’s policy.
“He was the first president of the United States to have a comprehensive energy policy, including providing some of the first federal support for clean energy,” she said Tuesday. “He also passed over a dozen major pieces of legislation regarding environmental protection. And more than doubled the size of America’s national parks.”
Carter, who served as the 39th president, died Dec. 29 at the age of 100 after nearly two years in hospice care in the state of Georgia. Since then, his final journey has taken his remains over the skinny roads of his humble hometown of Plains; down the boulevards of Atlanta, the state capital, and through the skies to snowy Washington, for his state funeral.
At the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers told VOA what the 39th president meant to them.
Congresswoman Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democrat, said Carter was “a real moral person.”
“He taught Sunday school – I did, too!” she said, smiling. “But I think (it’s) the fact that he cared about all people. He was a people’s president.”
South Carolina Republican Representative Ralph Norman told VOA that while he did not align with Carter politically, “President Carter was a good man. President Carter was a man who served his country. He loved America. I didn’t agree with all of his policies, but you couldn’t (dis)agree with his patriotism, you couldn’t disagree. He just loved his country.”
In late December, after receiving news of Carter’s death, Biden said, “We may never see his like again. You know we can all do well to try to be a little more like Jimmy Carter.”
Analysts say the two men have a few things in common.
“There’s an obvious similarity; that is, that Carter turned out to be a one-term president, and Biden turned out to be a one-term president,” Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told VOA on Zoom. “And that’s never a reflection of the right combination of politics and policy. In both cases, I would say that the two presidents put the policy ahead of the politics. And they paid the price for that.”
When asked what Carter and Trump have in common, Galston paused.
“I don’t even know how to begin to answer that question,” he said finally. “The two are polar opposites in every respect that I can think of, except one. And that is, they both attained the presidency as outsiders.”
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
