He never could warm to Washington nor did Washington fully know what to make of him.
During those turbulent years from 1977 to 1981 when he occupied the White House, Jimmy Carter made no secret of his indifference to the pomp and hauteur that came with the office of president. He frustrated the city’s gilded set, the power-brokers and dinner party hosts and jostling insiders of their day with his indifference to it all. He was there to do the job as president and nothing more and left the place without a backwards glance.
But when the steadfast outsider returned to Washington, ferried on a horse drawn caisson to the steps of the Capitol, where he lies in state until Thursday morning, it was to the full, dazzling force of military and presidential flourish. Carter died on December 29th, aged 100, and his nine-day journey to his final resting place is mirroring his life in its epic and contradictory nature. Humility and an unshowy goodness were Carter’s calling cards and even the fiercest political sceptics were convinced by the end that his had been a special life.
So, when he was brought back to this town which he had tolerated rather than loved, it was to be honoured with the high spectacle of a state funeral and a flood of reverence and affection that he could never have imagined when he left office having been eviscerated by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. “I promised you four years ago that I would never lie to you,” he said in opening his concession speech that evening. “So, I can’t stand here tonight and say it doesn’t hurt.”
Carter’s final visit to Washington began in the winter sun of Atlanta where his remains were flown on Air Force One, landing at Joint Base Andrews in the early afternoon. The Airforce Band played Abide With Me as the casket, draped in the national flag, was transferred to its hearse. A lonely 20-minute drive, then, through snow-lined roads and the unlovely suburbs of the capital city to the US Navy Memorial in the heart of the city, before the lavish, black-gleaming motorcade made its sharp turn towards the Capitol, where the remains of the 39th president were carried on horse-drawn caisson.
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It would be foolish to pretend the streets of Washington were crowded with mourners. The day was snowy, the cold perishing and the passing of a 100-year-old man is not the stuff to jolt the blood into mass shows of grief. He has been out of official politics for four decades. Many of those Americans who loved and revered Carter the president have themselves long since died. And there will be many hours for mourners to file through the Rotunda and pay their respects.
If anything, Tuesday’s slow journey of military choreography gave those who knew Carter time to consider a life that, apart from his Herculean humanitarian contributions, is extraordinary for its longevity.
The United States of America is 248 years old. Jimmy Carter lived through 100 of those. He was born in the year when J Edgar Hoover was appointed to head up the FBI, when Cal Coolidge defeated John W Davis in the 1924 presidential election.
The tales came thick and fast across the airwaves all day: how he had placed the family’s battery-operated radio on the windowsill of the family farmhouse in Plains, Georgia (he could not have been born into a homeplace whose name more perfectly suited his sensibility) so the sharecroppers could listen to the Joe Louis -Max Schmelling fight. Later, Carter would recall that they were unsure of whether to rejoice when Louis knocked his opponent down. Schmelling was German, but he was also white. In a memoir on childhood he wrote in 2001, Carter described the correct way to cook possum: “baked whole” and “smothered in sweet potatoes, apples, or other fruits and vegetables that never adequately concealed their unique taste”.
Who, among the politicians and ambassadors and military figures gathered in the Rotunda to await the arrival of Carter’s casket, could claim to know that recipe? No, Carter was sprung from an American South closer in time and ethos to that of Lee and Jeff Davis than to today. He shook off the frustrations of his presidency to devote a full half century to humanitarian and political causes, a whirling dervish of one-man diplomacy and energy with uncompromising moral integrity who was only getting started when awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
In the Rotunda, the ornate dome that forms the centrepiece of the Capitol, Carter’s family – his four children Jack (76), Chip (74), Jeff (71) and Amy (56), grandchildren and other relatives – filed in. They were placed on seating between the bronze statue of Gerald Ford, whom Carter had greatly liked, and Ronald Reagan, whom he had not. Other watching statues included George Washington himself and Andrew Jackson, looking slightly ridiculous in his cape and breeches.
If and when they unveil the copper statue of Jimmy Carter, they could do worse than depict him in the Levi’s jeans and the Allman Brothers Band T-shirt he famously wore in 1976, because Carter remains one of the quintessentially 1970s symbols, like Elvis or Jack Nicklaus. House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson, one of the three political figures, along with vice-president Kamala Harris and Senate majority leader John Thune, to pay tribute, told the gathering that he was four years old when Carter was elected. “He is the first president I remember.”
Carter rose from the segregationist and nakedly discriminatory old South to become a progressive governor of Georgia, who told his voters in his inaugural speech in 1970: “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial prejudice is over.” Only two per cent of the American public recognised his name when he decided he would campaign for the highest office, sensing an insipid Democratic field ahead of the 1976 race. He was such an unlikely presidential candidate that when he told his family of his ambitions, in 1974, his mother Lilian, who gifted her son her liberal instincts and capacity for blunt talking, famously replied, with genuine mystification: ‘’President of what?’’
To many critics of his one-term presidency, he never fully answered that question. The early dazzle of his election success dissolved in a fog of high inflation, the fallout of the Iran hostage crisis and the official Washington judgement that he never got to grips with the politesse and social intricacies inside the Beltway.
“When it came to the politics of Washington, DC, he never really understood how the system worked,” was the summation of Tip O’Neill, the late House speaker, in his memoir while Kay Graham, the celebrated owner of the Washington Post, wrote that: “Jimmy Carter was one of those outsider presidents who found it difficult to find the right modus operandi for Washington.”
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Perhaps so, but the idea that Carter was just too Southern, too hick, for the Washington elite doesn’t fully stack up. There was plenty of old money and high society snobbery in 1970s Georgia, too, and Carter won them over in a jiffy. And everyone in Washington comes from somewhere else, anyway. He was bright, cultured, multifaceted, a farmer and engineer, a devout Christian and a prototype alt-country hipster around whom celebrities flocked and when he chose to, he could charm anyone. No, Carter’s refusal to play the insider’s game seems less to do with any sense of inferiority than the opposite.
Even as he became a revered figure around the world, Carter had a habit of getting under the skin of his successors, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. He sometimes wielded his moral vision like a sabre and could be caustic of those holding office. Joe Biden’s 2021 trip was the first of any president to visit Carter at his home in Plains, where he lived with Rossalyn, his wife of 77 years, until her death in 2023.
And in the Rotunda, as the sky darkened and the navy choir sang, Kamala Harris led a procession of guests who paid their respects. Ireland’s ambassador to the United States, Geraldine Byrne Nason, was among those who paused before the casket. There was something very profound and lovely about the minutes when the Carter family filed by, pausing to touch the beflagged casket of their figurehead before exiting the room. They looked, in the moment, just as Jimmy Carter would surely have wished: like a family of ordinary Americans, that you might meet in church or at a bar, lively fun, you’d guess, at family gatherings; respectful of the weight of history and the august building, certainly, but not remotely fazed by it.
On Thursday, Jimmy Carter will bring all the living presidents to the National Cathedral on Wisconsin Avenue for a funeral service. And then, at last, it is back to Plains, where he will be buried alongside Rossalyn.
Forty four Januarys ago, Washington bade Jimmy Carter a merciless goodbye. This week, the city is finally saying farewell.
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