Thousands of people braved freezing temperatures to pay their respects to former President Jimmy Carter at the U.S. Capitol. Carter’s casket was laid to rest in state Wednesday in the Rotunda, the heart of American democracy. A state funeral will be held on Thursday.
Mourners, including many elected officials and Vice President Kamala Harris, highlighted Carter’s accomplishments and character. The former president died last month at the age of 100.
David Smith, a professor at the Carter School of Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, said Carter clearly had an impact on his career. He told VOA that he came to the Capitol to pay tribute to Carter both as a person and as a career.
“He had such an impact on so many people,” he said. “The work he did to advance minorities, to appoint women judges, to protect our environment, to advocate for human rights—those are things that are important to me.”
Carter’s flag-draped casket arrived in the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday ahead of Thursday’s state funeral.
Only about 50 Americans have been honored in the Rotunda since 1852. At a memorial service Tuesday night in the high-ceilinged hall, Senate Majority Leader Jon Thune described Carter as: “Navy veteran, peanut farmer, governor of Georgia. President of the United States. Sunday school teacher. Nobel Peace Prize winner. Advocate for peace and human rights. First and foremost, a devoted servant of his Creator and his fellow human beings.”
Vice President Harris praised Carter’s policies Tuesday, a day after she certified the next president’s victory in the Capitol.
“He was the first president to have a comprehensive energy policy, including some of the earliest federal support for clean energy,” Harris said Tuesday. “He also passed more than a dozen major pieces of legislation on environmental protection and more than doubled the size of America’s national parks.”
Carter, the 39th president, died Dec. 29 at age 100. For nearly two years, he was in hospice care in Georgia. After his death, Carter’s body’s final journey included passing through the back roads of his hometown of Plains, through the avenues of the state capital of Atlanta, and flying through the sky to the snow-covered capital of Washington, D.C., for a state funeral.
At the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers spoke to VOA about what Carter meant to them.
Representative Alma Adams, a Democrat from North Carolina, said Carter was “a real moral man.”
“He taught Sunday school—I do it too!” she said with a smile. “But I think the fundamental fact is that he cared about all the people. He was the president of the people.”
Republican Representative Ralph Norman from South Carolina told VOA that although he and Carter had different political positions, “President Carter was a good man. President Carter was a man who served his country. He loved America. I didn’t agree with all his policies, but you could agree that he loved his country. You couldn’t disagree with that. He just loved his country.”
President Joe Biden will deliver a eulogy for his fellow Democrat, Carter, on Thursday.
“We may never see another like him, and you know, it would be good for all of us if we tried to be a little bit more like Jimmy Carter,” Biden said in late December after hearing the sad news of Carter’s death.
Analysts say the two men have several things in common.
“There’s an obvious similarity, which is that Carter ended up being a one-term president; Biden ended up being a one-term president,” Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told VOA via Zoom. “And that never reflects the right mix of politics and policy. I think in both of their cases, both presidents put policy ahead of politics. And they paid the price for it.”
Thursday’s funeral will bring President Biden together with former presidents, including Donald Trump, Biden’s predecessor and successor. Asked what Carter had in common with Trump, both the former president and the president-elect, Galston was at a loss for words.
“I don’t even know how to answer that question,” he said finally. “They were polar opposites on every level I can think of, with the exception of one, that they both won the presidency as outsiders.”
And now, here in the Capitol Rotunda, that outsider lies in the most revered hall of America, decades after his presidency ended.
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