Look at their faces: formal, steeped in experience, burdened with the weight of momentous decisions. Add up their years: 379 to be exact, enough time to take you back to the mid-17th century, when the idea of the American nation was still more than a century away.
Remember why they were there: to say goodbye to a member of their fraternity who was the last of his generation and whose own life began just a few years after the ashes of World War I stopped smoldering.
Bill Clinton. George W Bush. Barak Obama. Donald Trump. Joe Biden.
Inside Washington National Cathedral On Thursday, the five men who have occupied the Oval Office since 1993 entered for a rare moment together Jimmy Carter’s state funeral. In that one action they created a snapshot timeline of American historya thread that connects them to the Roosevelts, to Lincoln and to Washington, the first of them. Immediately next to the five were also visible three people who were only a heartbeat away from the same position – Al Gore, Mike Pence And Kamala Harristhe current vice president.
The three equal branches of the US government are designed to transcend just one person. But somehow, with our love of great personalities and our elevation of the individual, the President of the United States became a different breed altogether – an amalgam of person and office that now occupies a place in the culture unlike any other .
The American presidency is shrouded in ritual. “Hail to the chef” is played when a president participates in an official event. People stand when a president enters the room. A protective cocoon envelops a president’s every move. Speeches are made behind a presidential seal. The office radiates an aura that lasts until the moment of an extensive, days-long commemoration.
That charisma – and the fact that many were hardly ideological kindred spirits – makes images like those in Carter’s service so extraordinary.
Yet it is not just the case that these are the fellow citizens who guided the Americans through the crisis Kosovo warthrough the aftermath of 9/11 and the War in Iraqdue to the rise of the internet and economic calamities, climate change and pandemic. It is not that, worship or despise, they have come to lead the nation and do consequential things – positive and negative – in the name of Americans.
It’s quite the opposite, actually.
To see these men of history shoulder to shoulder in the pews shows that they are people like all of us, and on this day of mourning they dressed up for a funeral and said goodbye to a touchstone of an earlier generation, in an exhibition of unity and continuity. Viewing them in one snapshot, when no one – not even the sitting president – was in charge of the proceedings, humanizes them. It reinforces the idea that Abraham Lincoln spoke of so many years ago: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
“The power of ordinary people,” Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, said in his eulogy.
In a country where political money is unfathomable in size and power, this does not mean that these five men are ‘ordinary people’. The power they commanded, commanded or will command is astonishing.
But their power is ultimately limited, and not just by checks and balances. Whatever history thinks about the end of Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton, it will always have the last word for the five who gathered on Thursday — and the sixth, Carter, for whom they gathered.
Stuart Eizenstat, a longtime friend and advisor to Carter, had this to say about the 39th president in office, but it probably applies to all the commanders in chief present: “He may not be a candidate for Mount Rushmore, but he belongs in the foothills. ”
___
Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation, regularly writes about American culture. Find it online at http://twitter.com/anthonyted or https://bsky.app/profile/anthonyted.bsky.social