WASHINGTON — Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson who now chairs the Carter Center board, remembered his grandfather with a mix of personal touches and humor, recognizing Jimmy Carter’s intensity and ambition, and his determination to help people, both through politics and outside the office.
The younger Carter portrayed the 39th president as an ordinary “PawPaw” from a “small town” who was able to connect with marginalized people around the world.
Here is a transcript of his remarks at state funeral for Jimmy Carter:
At my church we sing a song that says, “From the moment I wake until I lay my head down, I will sing of the goodness of God.”
I don’t know how many people here can say that. I know I can’t. But my grandfather certainly can. From the moment he woke up until he laid his head down, his life was a testament to the goodness of God.
And I thank you all for being here to celebrate this life.
To the Presidents and First Ladies: It is a great honor to have you here. You know the human side of the American presidency better than anyone. And we appreciate you.
To the Vice Presidents, other distinguished guests, and friends of all kinds, thank you for joining us.
To those of you who have come from all over the world, thank you for being here to celebrate and pay tribute to my grandfather.
I say grandfather, but we call him PawPaw, as many of you know. And we called my grandmother Mama Carter. So we spent our time talking about Mom and PawPaw and especially the human side of the presidency, just letting people know that they were regular people.
Yes, they spent four years in the governor’s mansion and four years in the White House. But they spent the remaining 92 years at home in Plains, Georgia. And one of the best ways to show that they were ordinary people is to bring them to that house.
First of all, it looks like they built it themselves. Second, my grandfather would probably show up at the door in shorts and 70s Crocs.
And then you walked into the house and it looked like the homes of thousands of other grandparents all over the South. Fishing trophies on the walls. The refrigerator was, of course, covered with photos of grandchildren and then great-grandchildren. Their headphones, of course, had a cord and were stuck to the wall in the kitchen like a museum piece. And to demonstrate their Depression-era roots, they had a small rack next to the sink where they could hang Ziploc bags to dry.
And to show that they changed with time, he eventually got a cell phone. And one time he called me early in that process, and my phone said, “PawPaw mobile.” So of course I answered.
I said, “Hey, PawPaw.”
He said, “Who is this?”
I said, “This is Jason!”
He said, “What are you doing?”
I said, ‘I’m not doing anything. You called me!”
He said, ‘I didn’t call you. I’ll take a picture.”
A nuclear engineer, right? I mean.
They were small-town people who never forgot who they were and where they came from, no matter what happened in their lives. But I recognize that we are not here because he was just an ordinary boy.
As you have heard from the other speakers, for me his political life and his presidency were not only ahead of his time. It was prophetic.
He had the courage and strength to stick to his principles even when they were politically unpopular. As governor of Georgia half a century ago, he preached an end to racial discrimination and an end to mass incarceration. As president in the 1970s, as you’ve heard, he protected more land than any other president in history.
Fifty years ago, he was a climate warrior pushing for a world in which we conserved energy, cut emissions and traded our dependence on fossil fuels for expanded renewables.
By the way, he reduced the budget deficit, decriminalized marijuana, deregulated so many industries that he gave us cheap flights and, as you heard, craft beer. Actually, all those years ago, he was the first millennial. And he could make great playlists, as we also heard.
Maybe this is unbelievable to you, but in my 49 years I have never noticed a difference between his public face and his private face. He was the same person no matter who he was with or where he was. And to me that is the definition of integrity.
That honesty was accompanied by love. It involved faith. And both publicly and privately, my grandparents lived their lives fundamentally trying, as the Bible says, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God.
Sometimes I feel and feel as if I have shared my grandfather with the world. Today is one of those days. But in reality he shared the world with me. The power of an atom. The beauty and complexity of a South Georgia forest. As we fished, he celebrated the majesty of everything from the smallest roach to the great circulation of water. And he shared this love with my boys, taking these Atlanta public school kids into the fields to show them about row crops and wild plums.
Ultimately, his life is a love story. And of course it is a love story about Jimmy and Rosalynn and their 77 years of marriage and service. As the song says, they were the flagship of the fleet. And rest assured, he told us in recent weeks that he was ready to see her again.
But his life was also a broader love story about love for his fellow human beings, and about living out the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. I believe that love taught him and told him to preach the power of human rights, not just for some people, but for all people. It focused him on the power and promise of democracy, the love of freedom, the requirements and fundamental belief in the wisdom of ordinary people raising their voices and the requirement that you respect all those voices, not just some.
That belief made him a naval officer who believed and demonstrated, as you have heard, that America’s greatest power was not its military, but its values. Those values were personal to him and he lived them both publicly and privately. As you heard (former Carter White House aide) Stu (Eizenstat) say, as president he gave voice to dissidents, stood up to dictators and brought countries together in peace.
His heart broke for the people of Israel. Things broke for the people of Palestine. And he spent his life trying to bring peace to that holy land. And he talked about it at the dinner table. In public it was the same as in private. And for the past forty years, as you have heard, he has spent his time living out that love and that faith with the poorest and most marginalized people in the world. And that work is again fundamentally based on love and respect.
The Carter Center has 3,500 employees, but only a few hundred in the United States. The rest is spread across the countries where we work. Ethiopia, South Sudan, Chad, Bangladesh. And all of the Carter Center’s programs are based on respect, that same respect for the power of ordinary people, even if they are in small towns, miles away from anywhere else.
To give an example, we’ve all been hearing a lot about guinea worm disease lately. It is an age-old and debilitating disease of poverty, and that disease will have existed from the dawn of humanity until Jimmy Carter. When he started working on this disease, there were 3.5 million human cases annually. Last year there were fourteen.
And the remarkable thing is that this disease cannot be eliminated with drugs. It is being eliminated mainly by neighbors talking to neighbors about how to collect water in the world’s poorest and most marginalized villages. And those neighbors were really my grandfather’s partners for the past forty years.
And as this disease has been eradicated from every village in Nigeria, every village in Sudan or Uganda, what is left in those small villages of six hundred people is an army of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carters who have demonstrated their own power to change their world.
And that is a fundamental truth about my grandfather. It starts where it ends. When he saw a small village of six hundred inhabitants that everyone considered poor, he recognized it. That’s where he came from. That’s who he was. And he never saw it as a place to send pity. It was always a place to find partnership and strength, and a place to carry out the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.
Essentially, he eradicated a disease with love and respect.
He made peace with love and respect.
He led this nation with love and respect.
To me, this life was a love story from the moment he woke up until he laid his head down.
I’ll close with this. As Andy Young (a civil rights leader, former mayor of Atlanta, and Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations) told me, he may be gone, but he’s not far away.
The outpouring of love and support we have felt from you and from around the world has shown how many lives he touched and how his spirit will live on in many ways.
He is in the kitchen making pancakes for us. Or finishing a cradle for a great-grandchild in his woodshop. Standing in a trout stream with Mother Carter. Or for me, just walking through the fields and woods in Georgia, where he is from.
Thank you.