Former President Jimmy Carter will be honored Thursday with a state funeral at Washington National Cathedral before being buried in his home state of Georgia. Four former US presidents and President Joe Biden will attend the funeral.
Former US President Jimmy Carter will 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 – will attend the funeral in Washington, and Biden will deliver a eulogy.
Mourners from the public were able to pay their last respects overnight at the U.S. Capitol, where Carter's casket has lain since Tuesday.
David Smith, a professor at George Mason University's Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, said the former president obviously influenced his career. He told the VOA who came to the Capitol to honor the man, but also to honor Carter's causes.
“It had a huge impact on so many people,” he said. “Her work advancing minorities, appointing women to the judiciary, protecting our environment, defending human rights, all of those things are very important things to me.”
In the Capitol rotunda, where only about 50 Americans have been recognized with this distinctive honor since 1852, Senate Majority Leader Jon Thune, at a service Tuesday night, described Carter as: “A veteran of Navy, peanut farmer, governor of Georgia. And president of the United States. Nobel Prize winner. And, above all, a faithful. servant of his creator and his neighbor”.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who on Monday at the Capitol certified the next president's victory, praised Carter's policy.
“He was the first president of the United States to have a comprehensive energy policy, which included the first federal support for clean energy,” he said Tuesday. “It also passed more than a dozen important environmental protection laws. And it more than doubled the size of America's national parks.”
Carter, who served as the 39th president, died on December 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 along the narrow roads of his humble hometown of Plains; along the boulevards of Atlanta, the state capital, and through the skies to the snowy city of Washington, for his state funeral.
At the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers told the VOA what the 39th president meant to them.
Rep. Alma Adams, D-North Carolina, 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 the people. He was a people's president.”
South Carolina Republican Rep. Ralph Norman told the VOA that while he did not align himself with Carter politically, “President Carter was a good man. President Carter was a man who served his country. He loved America. He did not agree with all of his policies, but you could not agree.” disagree with his patriotism, you couldn't disagree. He simply loved his country.
In late December, after receiving news of Carter's death, Biden said, “We may never see someone like him again. You know, we can all do well to try to be a little more like Jimmy Carter.” .
Analysts say the two men have some things in common.
“There's an obvious similarity: 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 the VOA on Zoom. “And that's never a reflection of the right mix of politics and policy. In both cases, I would say both presidents put politics before politics and 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 finally said. “The two are polar opposites in every way I can think of, except one. And that is that they both came to the presidency as outsiders“.
(Some information for this report came from The Associated Press)