WASHINGTON: Hundreds of mourners including all five living current and former US presidents packed into Washington’s National Cathedral on Thursday to mourn, Jimmy Carter, the former US president who struggled with a bad economy and a hostage crisis.
As the somber ceremony began and a bitterly cold wind blew, Carter’s flag-draped coffin was carried up the stone steps of the cathedral by a military honor guard after its trip from the Capitol, where his body had lain in state for two days.
Fellow Democratic President Joe Biden will eulogize the 39th president who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100. Republican President-elect Donald Trump was among the luminaries at the funeral, before Carter’s body is returned to Georgia, where Carter was raised as a peanut farmer.
Entering the cathedral with his wife, Melania, Trump shook hands with his former vice president, Mike Pence, who he had clashed with after Pence refused to go along with his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
Trump, who will return to office on Jan. 20, sat next to former President Barack Obama, with whom he chatted as introductory music played. To Obama’s right were Laura and George W. Bush and Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden walked hand in hand and took seats in the first row next to Vice President Harris and second gentleman Douglas Emhoff.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Vice President-elect JD Vance and Biden’s son Hunter were also among the mourners. Former vice presidents Al Gore and Pence sat side by side.
Tens of thousands of Americans over the past two days filed through the Rotunda of the US Capitol to pay their respects to Carter, who served from 1977 to 1981, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his humanitarian work.
Some said they admired the former Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher who played a key role in the negotiation of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty as a gentle man, rather than a partisan combatant.
“We’ve come so far from where Jimmy Carter was as a person and it’s kinda sad,” said Dorian DeHaan, 67, who traveled some 275 miles (440 km) from Sugar Loaf, New York, to pay her respects. “I hope that this will be a reminder to people of what we need to get back to — that it’s not about the power, it’s about the people.”
As she waited in the public viewing line outside the Capitol, DeHaan said her daughter married into the family of the president’s younger sister, Ruth, presenting the opportunity to meet the former president in Plains, Georgia.
“But it’s a sad moment,” DeHaan said. “It’s the end of an era and I think we kind of have lost this real belief in humanity, in our presidency.”