Jimmy Carter’s state funeral takes place in Washington – NBC Chicago

Nearly 44 years after Jimmy Carter left the nation’s capital in humiliating defeat, the 39th president returns to Washington for three days of national funeral rites starting Tuesday.

Carter’s remains, which have been resting at the Carter Presidential Center since Saturday, will leave the Atlanta campus Tuesday morning, accompanied by his children and extended family. Special Air Mission 39 will depart Dobbins Air Reserve Base north of Atlanta and arrive at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, with a motorcade to Washington and the Capitol, where members of Congress will pay their respects during a service in the afternoon.

Carter, who died Dec. 29 at age 100, will next go on display Tuesday evening and again Wednesday. He will then receive a state funeral Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral. President Joe Biden will deliver a eulogy.

There will be the familiar rituals that follow the death of a president: the return of the Air Force to the beltway, a military honor guard carrying a flag-draped coffin on the steps of the Capitol, the Lincoln catafalque in the Rotunda. There will also be some symbolism unique to 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 is reminiscent of Carter’s place as the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to become commander in chief.

All this pomp will have a certain irony for the Democrat who rose from his family peanut warehouse to the Governor’s Mansion and eventually to the White House. Carter won the presidency as a smiling Baptist 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 from the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon. “The country was hungry for moral renewal and to see Carter, as an authentically religious figure, come in and clean house.”

From 1977 to 1981, Carter was the city’s highest-ranking resident. But he never mastered it.

“He could be irritable and have an unappealing personality” in a city that thrives on relationships, Alter said, describing a president who struggled with talkative lawmakers and journalists.

The gatekeepers of Washington society never embraced Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter either, not sure what to make of small-town Southerners who carried their own luggage and bought their clothes in stores. Carter sold what had been the presidential yacht, a perk his predecessors had used to win and dine with the Capitol’s power players.

Early in Carter’s presidency, Washington Post society columnist Sally Quinn called the Carters and their West Wing an “alien tribe,” incapable of “playing the game.” ” Herself an elite Georgetown hostess, Quinn praised Washington’s “frivolity” but nonetheless derided the “Carter people” as being “not, in fact, comfortable in limousines, yachts, or in elegant lounges, in black tie” or with “place cards, servants, six dishes, different forks, three wines… and after dinner, we mingle.

He endured four difficult years that left him without enough friends in the city’s power circles and, ultimately, within an electorate that delivered nearly 500 Electoral College votes to Ronald Reagan in the election. from 1980.

Long after leaving office, Carter still deplored a political cartoon published to mark his inauguration, which depicted his family approaching the White House with his mother, “Miss Lillian,” chewing a hayseed.

Carter often disregarded the ceremonial trappings that were on display in Georgia and will continue in Washington.

The former president was known for spending his post-White House years advocating for human rights and public health.

As president, he wanted to stop the Marine Band from playing “Hail to the Chief,” believing it elevated the president too much. His advisors convinced him to accept it as part of his job. And the song played Saturday as he arrived at his presidential center after a motorcade through his hometown of Plains and past his childhood farm.

He also never used his full name, James Earl Carter Jr., even while 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 in his museum and library. His remains now lie in a wooden coffin carried and guarded by military pallbearers in their impeccable uniforms.

“He was a simple man in many ways,” said Brad Webb, an Army veteran who came to pay tribute to the former president at his library, located on the same campus as the Carter Center, where the former president and first lady based their headquarters. decades of advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights in the developing world.

“He was also a complicated man, who accepted defeat and did so much good in the world,” said Webb, who voted for Republican Gerald Ford in 1976 and for Reagan in 1980. “And, looking back , some things in his presidency – inflation, the Iranian hostages, the energy crisis – were actually things that no president can actually control. We can look back with some perspective and understand that he was one. excellent former president, but that he also had a presidency that we can appreciate more we did what was happening.