Jimmy Carter will be honored in Washington, a city where he remained an outsider

WASHINGTON — Almost 44 years later Jimmy Carter After leaving the nation’s capital in humbling defeat, the 39th president returned to Washington for three days state funeral rituals that begin on Tuesday.

Carter’s remains, which have been at rest at the Carter Presidential Center since Saturdaywill leave the Atlanta campus Tuesday morning, accompanied by his children and extended family. Special Air Mission 39 will depart from 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 an afternoon service.

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

There will be the familiar rituals that follow the death of a president: the Air Force riding back to the Beltway, a military honor guard carrying a flag-draped casket down the steps of the Capitol, the Lincoln catafalque in the Rotunda. There will also be symbolism unique to Carter: His hearse will stop at the US Navy Memorial, where his remains will be transferred to a horse-drawn caisson for the remainder of its journey to the Capitol. The location refers to Carter’s place as the only US Naval Academy graduates to become Commander in Chief.

All this pomp and circumstance will bring some irony for the Democrat who went from his family’s peanut warehouse to the governor’s mansion and eventually the White House. Carter won the presidency as the smiling Baptist and technocratic engineer who promised to change the way Washington worked — and eschewed many of those unwritten rules when he got there.

“Jimmy Carter was always an outsider” said biographer Jonathan Alter, explaining how Carter benefited from the fallout of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. “The country was longing for moral renewal and for Carter, as this genuinely religious figure, to come in and clean things up.”

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

“He could be prickly and not a very attractive personality” in a city that thrives on relationships, Alter said, describing a president who has struggled with deceiving lawmakers and reporters.

The gatekeepers of Washington society never embraced Jimmy Rosalynn Carternor quite knowing what to make of the small-town Southerners who carried their own luggage and bought their clothes off the rack. Carter sold what had been the presidential yacht, a perk his predecessors had used to wine and dine Capitol power players.

Early in Carter’s presidency, Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn labeled the Carters and their West Wing as “an alien tribe,” unable to “play the game.” Quinn, herself an elite Georgetown hostess, nodded to Washington’s “frivolity” but nevertheless derided “the Carter people” as “in fact not at ease in limousines, yachts or in elegant salons, in evening dress” or with ” place cards, servers, six courses, several forks, three wines… and a nice get-together after dinner.’

He endured four difficult years that left him without friends in the city’s power circles and ultimately in an electorate that had earned Ronald Reagan nearly 500 Electoral College votes in the 1980 election.

Long after leaving office, Carter continued to complain about a political cartoon published around his inauguration his family depicted as he approached the White House with his mother, “Miss Lillian,” munching on a hay seed.

Carter often ignored the ceremonial trappings on display in Georgia that will continue to exist in Washington.

As president, he wanted to prevent the Marine Band from playing “Hail to the Chief,” because he felt it would elevate 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., or even took the oath of office. His full name was printed on memorial cards given to all mourners paying their respects in Atlanta.

He once addressed the nation from the White House residence while wearing a vest, which is now on display in his museum and library. His remains now rest in a wooden coffin and are carried and guarded by military pallbearers in their immaculate dress uniforms.

“He was a simple man in so many ways,” said Brad Webb, an Army veteran who came to honor the former president at his library, which is on the same campus as The Carter Center, where the former president and first lady had their offices . decades of advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights in developing countries.

“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 Reagan in 1980. presidency – the inflation, Iran’s hostages, the energy crisis – were in reality matters over which no president had any real control. We can look back with some perspective and understand that he was an excellent former president, but also had a presidency that we can appreciate more than we did when it happened.”