Former President Jimmy Carter honored at state funeral – CNN

• Today’s service: Former President Jimmy Carter was honored at a state funeral today at the Washington National Cathedral, where President Joe Biden delivered a eulogy. Tributes to the former president praised him as an honest man who was a leader ahead of his time.

• Carter’s legacy: The 39th president, who died last month in Georgia, was the oldest living former US president and the first to reach 100. He led enduring foreign policy initiatives, including a peace deal between Israel and Egypt, the normalization of relations with China and the treaties that gave Panama control of the Panama Canal from the US.

• Presidents in attendance: President-elect Donald Trump and former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in attendance at the service. It’s an exceedingly rare convening, and marked the first time all of them have come face-to-face since the funeral of George H.W. Bush in December 2018.

We’ve wrapped up our live coverage of former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral. Read about today’s events below.

Observances honoring the late President Jimmy Carter concluded with an interment on Thursday evening in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, following a private service at Maranatha Baptist Church where the humanitarian and farmer taught Sunday school for decades.

Carter, who was the oldest living former US president, died December 29 at the age of 100. Over the weekend, Carter’s motorcade traveled through Plains, past his boyhood home and the Georgia State Capitol, and arrived at the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, where Carter lay in repose. Carter’s casket was then taken to Washington, DC, to lie in state at the US Capitol Rotunda ahead of a state funeral.

After the private funeral service Thursday evening, Carter’s motorcade travelled through his hometown to his residence for interment — the same location his wife, Rosalynn, was buried following her death last year.

Eulogizing Carter at the state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral this morning, President Joe Biden remembered him as “a man who never let the ties of politics divert him from his mission to serve and shape the world.”

Biden, who marked Thursday, January 9, 2025 as a National Day of Mourning, has also directed the US flag to be flown at half-staff for 30 days.

Former President Jimmy Carter’s motorcade has arrived at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, where a private funeral will be held for the 39th president.

The church’s pastor stood outside the main door to welcome him before the casket was taken inside the church. Navy pilots conducted a flyover outside the church as Carter’s direct family watched.

Earlier Thursday, Carter was honored at a state funeral in Washington that was attended by former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, along with President-elect Donald Trump. In one of his final acts in office, President Joe Biden delivered a euology.

Former Carter adviser Stuart Eizenstat said the purpose of his eulogy at Jimmy Carter’s funeral was to “redeem” Carter’s presidency from the notion that is was not successful.

“Well, first of all, if I had a purpose in this speech, it was to redeem his presidency from the notion that he was only a great ex-president and implicitly, therefore, an unsuccessful president,” Eizenstat said on CNN after Thursday’s service.

Eizenstat added that Carter “would be really very concerned with the tremendous polarization that we have in the country today.”

“You can’t govern this country if you view the other side, not just as your honored opponent, but as the enemy,” Eizenstat said. “He never did. He had very good relations with the Republican leaderships on both sides.”

He described the late president as an “exemplar of an era which we need to get back to, of more bipartisanship, where we don’t, again, feel that the opponent is our enemy.”

Former President Jimmy Carter was eulogized as a humanitarian, farmer and nuclear engineer who was deeply devoted to his family and country and remained true to his faith throughout his 100 years of life.

Here are some key lines from Carter’s funeral service in Washington on Thursday:

The body of President Jimmy Carter is making its final journey to Plains, Georgia, the tiny town that shaped the enduring character that was eulogized during his speech in Washington on Thursday.

Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson, said at his funeral on Thursday that the family wanted the world to know that Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter “were just regular folks.”

“Yes, they spent four years in the governor’s mansion and four years at the White House, but the other 92 years, they spent at home in Plains, Georgia,” Jason Carter said. Their no-frills home demonstrated that while Carter was once the most powerful man in the world, he craved a simple life, Jason Carter said.

“They were small-town people who never forgot who they were and where they were from,” he added.

Carter’s body is en route to Plains, where he will be interred Thursday night after a service at the Maranatha Baptist Church, where he taught Sunday school for decades.

Michael Posner, a human rights adviser to the late President Jimmy Carter in his post-presidency years, told CNN that Carter’s “principled government advocacy” has been in “short supply” in current politics, advocating Carter’s brand of “practical idealism” in diplomacy.

“So much of what he stood for personally is the mixing of his own values, his own religious faith. And that kind of principled government advocacy is something that’s in short supply, and we need to sort of reflect on it and figure out … how we can reclaim some of those values,” Posner said.

Regarding the Biden administration, Posner said, “We could have a whole conversation about how well they did on human rights. I give them generally good grades. They’re good people, senior in the administration, who cared a lot about human rights.”

But Posner expressed concern about President-elect Donald Trump’s approach to alliances and international institutions, which he said vastly differed from Carter’s. “I think, as we’re looking forward to the next four years, those (alliances) are going to be some of the things that are going to be challenged most directly by … the new administration.”

Former President Jimmy Carter was honored at a state funeral Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral.

Carter died December 29 at the age of 100. People were able to pay their respects this week at the US Capitol Rotunda, where Carter had been lying in state.

See photos from the service:

The first two pews at the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter should be a diagram of acrimony.

Former President Barack Obama sat next to President-elect Donald Trump. They were behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Former President George W. Bush sat in front of former Vice President Al Gore. There was former Vice President Mike Pence and Hillary Clinton, not to mention President Joe Biden.

But this meeting of current and former presidents to mark the passing of one of their own offered an important lesson in how to put politics in its place.

It turns out that Carter and former President Gerald Ford, the man he defeated to gain the White House, became close friends after Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980.

They mutually agreed in a phone call to deliver eulogies at their respective funerals. Ford died in December 2006, and Carter did speak at his predecessor’s funeral in January 2007.

“There is an old line to the effect that two presidents in a room is one too many,” Ford said in a tribute, read by his son Steven on Thursday, noting that he was worried about sharing a flight with Carter to the funeral of assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

“It was somewhere over the Atlantic that Jimmy and I forged a friendship that transcends politics,” Ford said. “We then decided to exercise one of the privileges of a former president, forgetting that one of us had ever said any harsh words about the other one.”

It was at about this moment that Obama could be seen nodding as he shared some words with Trump.

Carter and Ford, like Clinton, W. Bush and Obama, adhered to the philosophy of retreating from day-to-day politics after leaving the White House. Trump, so far the anomaly, never left the political fight and fought his way back to the White House. And he still has animosity, at least in public, for both Obama and Biden.

But Trump is barred by the Constitution from running in a fourth presidential election, which means he will officially join the former presidents club four years from January 20. Perhaps then he and the presidents who came before and after him will find some kind of peace.

While the body of former President Jimmy Carter was carried out of the Washington National Cathedral, the US Coast Guard Band performed “Hail to the Chief,” a song Carter once asked to not be played when he made public entrances.

“They just played ‘Hail to the Chief’ … a song that Jimmy Carter famously did not like and did not allowed to be played when he first took the White House. And then finally aides convinced him, ‘You know the American people like this, they like this part of the presidency and the majesty that comes with it in that sense,’” according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

Carter once told CBS that “one of the most unpleasant things that surprised me was when I quit having ‘Hail to the Chief’ every time I entered a room, but there was an outcry of condemnation.”

Following the funeral service for the late president, the motorcade carrying Jimmy Carter’s body will depart the Washington National Cathedral.

Carter’s motorcade will next go to Joint Base Andrews, and then the former president’s body will travel to Plains, Georgia, for a private internment at the family residence.

Blue was the shade du jour for politicians paying their respects at the state funeral of former President Jimmy Carter.

Each was varying in hue and vibrancy — former President George W. Bush opted for a sky blue tie and navy suit, while President Joe Biden selected a deeper, indigo shade of neckwear. Even President-elect Donald Trump, renowned for his wide scarlet red ties, swapped in acerulean option. It was a subtle, visual nod to Carter’s Democratic legacy.

More uniformed were the first ladies, each arriving in traditional all-black. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accessorized her tailored suit with a gold bald eagle brooch with a US flag — the national emblem since 1782. First lady Jill Biden chose to re-wear the Schiaparelli knee-length skirt suit first debuted at Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in 2022, complete with four golden buttons on the front of her jacket. The flourish of Melania Trump’s outfit was different, with the returning first lady dressed in a long-sleeved black shift dress and an oversized white church collar.

The Rev. Andrew Young, the US ambassador to the United Nations during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, praised the “tough mind and tender heart” of the late president.

“Jimmy Carter, for me, was something of a miracle,” Young said. “I was born in the Deep South shortly a few years after him. And it was always a place of miracles. I couldn’t see how we could have had the differences in background, the coming from different places on the planet, the experiences of slave and slave owner, the diversity of color and creed and national origin, and still become the great nation that we are in the United States of America. It was something of a miracle.”

“Time and time again, I saw in him the ability to achieve greatness by the diversity of his personality and his upbringing,” he said.

“Dr. (Martin Luther King Jr.) used to say that greatness is characterized by antithesis, strongly marked. You have to have a tough mind and heart,” Young said. “And that was Jimmy Carter.”

He added: “I’ve known President Carter for more than half of my life. And I never cease to be surprised, I never cease to be enlightened, I never cease to be inspired by the little deeds of love and mercy that he shared with us every day of his life. It was President James Earl Carter that for me symbolized the greatness of the United States of America.”

President Joe Biden said there is an obligation to stand up to the abuse of power in an eulogy honoring former President Jimmy Carter.

“We have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor. And to stand up to what my dad used to say is the greatest sin of all, the abuse of power. That’s not about being perfect, because none of us are perfect,” Biden said.

He continued, “We’re all fallible. But it’s about asking ourselves, are we striving to do things, the right things? What value – what are the values that animate our spirit? Do we operate from fear or hope? Ego or generosity? Do we show grace? Do we keep the faith when it’s most tested?”

Biden highlighted Carter’s life and referred to the late president as “a man who never let the ties of politics divert him from his mission to serve and shape the world.”

“We’re keeping the faith with the best of humankind and the best of America, is a story, in my view, from my perspective, of Jimmy Carter’s life. The story of a man, to state the obvious, you’ve heard today, some great, great eulogies, who came from a house without running water, nor electricity, and rose as a pinnacle of power,” Biden said

After Biden finished his eulogy and started walking back to his seat, he gently touched Carter’s casket.

President Joe Biden said Jimmy Carter’s enduring attribute was his strong character while eulogizing the former president on Thursday.

Recalling his early endorsement of Carter’s candidacy for president while he was a young senator, Biden said he based that endorsement based “on what I believe is Jimmy Carter’s enduring attribute: character, character, character.”

“Because of that, character I believe is destiny. Destiny in our lives, and quite frankly, destiny in the life of the nation. It’s an accumulation of a million things built on character, that leads to a good life and a decent country. Life of purpose, life of meaning. Now, how do we find that good life? What does it look like What does it take to build character? Do the ends justify the means?”

“Jimmy Carter’s friendship taught me, and through his life, taught me, strength of character is more than title or the power we hold,” Biden continued.

The US Marine Orchestra & Cathedral Choir and Armed Forces Chorus performed “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” during former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral service.

During the performance, a naval officer’s hat was on display, signifying the late president’s Navy experience.

After studying reactor technology and nuclear physics at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Carter was assigned to the submarine force. The future peacemaker served in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets before he was tapped by Adm. Hyman Rickover, the crotchety “Father of the Nuclear Navy,” to serve as a senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second US nuclear submarine.

After leaving active Navy duty in 1953, Carter spent time raising his children, running the family peanut farm and taking his first political steps, winning election to the Georgia Senate in 1962.

Jason Carter, Jimmy Carter’s grandson, jokingly described his grandfather as “the first millennial” after listing many of his progressive stances.

“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, who pushed for a world where we conserved energy, limited emissions, and traded our reliance on fossil fuels for expanded renewable sources,” Jason Carter said.

“And by the way, he cut the deficit, wanted to decriminalize marijuana, deregulated so many industries that he gave us cheap flights, and as you heard, craft beer. Basically, all of those years ago, he was the first millennial,” he said.

But in the end, Jason Carter said, Jimmy Carter’s “life is a love story.”

“And of course, it’s a love story about Jimmy and Rosalynn and their 77 years of marriage and service,” he said.

“Rest assured that in these last weeks, he told us that he was ready to see her again,” he said.

Jason Carter also spoke about his grandfather’s pivotal involvement in working to eradicate Guinea worm disease.

About 3.5 million people had the parasite in the mid-1980s, when Carter turned his attention to the problem, but case numbers were down to just 13 as of 2022, according to preliminary totals from the Carter Center at that time.

“Essentially, he eradicated the disease with love and respect. He waged peace with love and respect. He led this nation with love and respect,” Jason Carter said.

Ex-Carter aide Stuart Eizenstat described the former president as “as close to being a Renaissance man as any president entering the Oval Office in modern times.”

“He was skilled in an astonishing array of activities: farmer, businessman, nuclear engineer, naval submarine officer, woodworker, painter, fly flisherman, music lover, poet, author, Sunday school teacher, creator of the Carter Center and yes, loving husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather and Nobel Peace Prize winner.”

“As we lay our 39th president to rest,” Eizenstat continued, “it’s time to redeem his presidency and also lay to rest the myth that his greatest achievement came only as a former president. The test of American presidents is not the number of years they serve, but the duration of their accomplishments. By this measure, Jimmy Carter was among the most consequential one-term presidents in history.”

“President Carter parked politics at the Oval Office door to do what he believed was the right thing: taking controversial challenges on, regardless of the political consequences. And frankly, there were many,” he said.

“Much of his agenda passed with bipartisan support, a quaint notion in today’s hyper-polarized politics,” he said.

Eizenstat noted some of Carter’s accomplishments, touting his record on civil rights, education, energy and emergency services.

“He may not be a candidate for Mount Rushmore, but he belongs in the foothills making the US stronger and the world safer,” he added.

In a room filled with the most powerful people in the world, including all living US presidents, everyone stood silently and watched as President Jimmy Carter’s casket was carried into the Washington National Cathedral during a very moving and somber moment.

Carter’s casket was carried to the front of the cathedral as Rev. Andrew Young, former US ambassador to the UN, read from scripture.

Ted Mondale, the son of the late Vice President Walter Mondale, read a letter written by his father at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. Mondale, who died in 2021, was Carter’s vice president.

“I was surprised when then-candidate Carter asked me to join him as his running mate in 1976,” Walter Mondale wrote in the 2015 letter read at Carter’s funeral on Thursday. “He amazed me then as he has every year since.”

“He of course was brilliant, he also had a great sense of humor,” the letter read. “And while we had only four years in the White House, he achieved so much in that time. It stood as a marker for Americans dedicated to justice and decency.”

Mondale wrote that he and Carter became very close friends while “working on real problems, not wasting time.”

“Carter was farsighted; he put aside his short-term political interests to tackle challenges that demanded sacrifice, to protect our kids and grandkids from future harm,” he said.

Mondale also noted that Carter was ahead of his time on many issues, including climate change and women’s equality.

Once bitter political rivals, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford later became close friends. The two presidents would promise each other to deliver a eulogy at the other’s funeral.

Carter fulfilled his promise after Ford died in 2006. At Carter’s funeral on Thursday, Ford’s son, Steven Ford, realized his end of the deal.

“God did a good thing when he made your dad,” Steven Ford told the Carter children.

He then read from a letter that Gerald Ford had written for Carter.

“During our 1976 contest, Jimmy knew my political vulnerabilities and he successfully pointed them out,” the letter read. “Now, I didn’t like it, but little did I know that the outcome of that 1976 election would bring about one of my deepest and most enduring friendships.”

It continued: “We immediately decided to exercise one of the privileges of a former president, forgetting that either one of us had ever said any harsh words about the other one in the heat of battle.”

“For Jimmy Carter, honesty was not an aspirational goal, it was part of his very soul.”

Ford also wrote that the two men had experienced the “harsh reality” of defeat at the polls.

“But we also came to know a more important consequence. Political defeat and writing can also be liberating if it frees you to discuss topics that aren’t necessarily consistent with short-term political popularity,” he said.

Former President Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize for his worldwide peace and human rights work in 2002.

The five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Carter’s decades of “untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

During today’s funeral service, his grandson Joshua Carter said the former president announced the news during one of his Sunday school classes at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.

Carter was repeatedly nominated for the prize, worth $1 million, and came close to winning in 1978, when he brought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat together to sign the Camp David peace accord, but his presidency faltered under the weight of the Iran hostage crisis.

At the time, Carter told a news conference that he would give most of the $1 million prize to the Carter Center, which he founded after losing his 1980 re-election bid to Ronald Reagan. He said he shared the honor with his wife, Rosalynn, and the staff at the Carter Center.

“When I left the White House I was a fairly young man and I realized I maybe have 25 more years of active life,” Carter said, “so we capitalized on the influence that I had as a former president of the greatest nation in the world and decided to fill vacuums.”

Carter traveled around the globe monitoring elections, promoting human rights, and helping provide health care and food to the world’s poor.

Joshua Carter opened the funeral of his grandfather, Jimmy Carter, by talking about how devoted the former president was to his Sunday school class at Maranatha Baptist Church is his hometown of Plains, Georgia.

“He taught the Bible every Sunday from World War II to Covid,” Joshua Carter said. “For all my grandfather has traveled, he structured his life so that he was home to teach on Sundays. It was essential to his life.”

“Before he delivered his Bible lesson, my grandfather talked about his week. If he monitored an election, he would talk about it. If he stopped a conflict, he would talk about it. If he eliminated disease, from a village or a country, he would talk about it.”

“And when my brother died,” Joshua Carter continued, “he announced that news in Sunday school, and in fact I remember that my brother died on a Sunday because it was the only time my grandfather was ever late to teach.”

Carter said his grandfather spent his entire time “helping those in need.”

“He built houses for people who needed homes, he eliminated diseases in forgotten places. He waged peace, anywhere in the world. Wherever he saw a chance. He loved people. And whenever he told these stories in Sunday school, he always did it for one simple reason: He worshiped the Prince of Peace and he commanded it.”

In the summer of 1945, Jimmy Carter, then a fresh-faced US Naval Academy student, met Eleanor Rosalynn Smith.

After their first date, Carter told his mother: “She’s the girl I want to marry.”

Rosalynn rejected his first proposal but accepted the second a few weeks later. They wed in 1946 and would eventually become the longest-married presidential couple in history.

Carter was asked the secret of his enduring marriage on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” in July 2015.

“Rosalynn has been the foundation for my entire enjoyment of life … First of all, it’s best to choose the right woman, which I did. And secondly, we give each other space to do our own things,” Carter said. “We try to be reconciled before we go to sleep at night, and try to find everything we can think of that we like to do together. So we have a lot of good times.”

When he published his book “A Full Life” shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015, Carter contemplated his own mortality. He wrote that he was at peace with his accomplishments as president as well as his unrealized goals.

He said he and Rosalynn were “blessed with good health and look to the future with eagerness and confidence, but are prepared for inevitable adversity when it comes.”

Former President Jimmy Carter’s National Funeral Service has begun at the Washington National Cathedral, with his casket entering the cathedral.

After the service, the late president leaves Washington for the last time. Carter’s body will be transported back to his beloved hometown of Plains, Georgia, for a private internment at the family residence that evening.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden have arrived to Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

The president and first lady are seated in the first row, next to Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

President-elect Donald Trump, and former presidents Barack Obama, Bush and Clinton are seated behind the Bidens and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden will deliver a eulogy later in the service.

Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff have arrived to the funeral service for former President Jimmy Carter.

The couple is seated in the row ahead of all the living former presidents.

President-elect Donald Trump, along with former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, have all arrived to Washington National Cathedral ahead of Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

Trump and Obama are sitting next to each other and engaging in extended conversation. Melania Trump is seated at the end of the row. Laura Bush is seated at Obama’s other side. Next to her is former President Bush. Bill and Hillary Clinton are at the end of the row. Michelle Obama had a scheduling conflict, her advisers told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, and is presently still in Hawaii on an extended holiday vacation.

Trump shook hands with his former Vice President Mike Pence, as well as former Vice President Al Gore.

This post has been updated with additional information.

Several world leaders, former vice presidents and other dignitaries are in the Washington National Cathedral ahead of former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

Former vice presidents Mike Pence and Al Gore have taken their seats near the front of the church. Vice President-elect JD Vance is also seated with his wife, Usha.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who this week announced his resignation as his party’s leader, is also in the cathedral.

Not a lot of men get to see what their own funerals are going to look like.

Even fewer get to speak at them.

For all the valedictory moments that Joe Biden and his staff lined up for his quiet final weeks in the White House — ceremonies awarding medals to supportive celebrities and political friends, receptions and fleeting moments of reflection with the dwindling number of top aides left around — Thursday is unique.

Biden will start the day at the National Cathedral, delivering a eulogy for the first presidential candidate he endorsed as a young senator. Standing there, he’ll see what fellow leaders do and say when they send off a president who left office under a cloud of disappointments and regrets.

And even in the closing days, came another: Biden’s planned trip to see Pope Francis, the likeminded leader of the Catholic faith that has defined Biden’s life from his childhood through the Masses he has continued to attend every Saturday evening of every week, was suddenly scrapped, days after his trip to Los Angeles to welcome his new great grandson was redefined by the massive wildfires that broke out while he was there.

“Is seeing all this coverage of Carter being a one-term president impacting his psyche about the last days of his presidency?” one former Biden aide told CNN. “The man set out to be president from the day he ran for office. Did he accomplish what he set out to accomplish? Is his legacy good enough for him?”

Biden has long thought about fate, endings, mortality. Now he is 82 years old, the strains of age bearing down on him more clearly than ever as he prepares to turn the presidency back to the man he had felt called into a battle for the soul of the country against.

He knows there are only so many years left ahead. Only so many years with his grandchildren and new great-grandchild, in a family that has both benefited and been buffeted from the 50 years he’s put them in the political spotlight. Only so many years left to round up donations and work on plans for his presidential library, wherever it ends up back home in Delaware. Only so many years until his is the funeral that lowers the flags to half-staff and brings the country to pause, at least for a moment.

Read the full story.

President Joe Biden will deliver a eulogy at Jimmy Carter’s funeral service at the Washington National Cathedral today, according to the White House, a marquee moment for the Democrat to pay tribute to his longtime friend in the waning days of his own presidency.

In October, Biden celebrated Carter, who he called a “beloved friend,” with a video marking his 100th birthday, and when Carter died, the president delivered heartfelt remarks detailing how their families provided each other support in their shared battles against cancer.

“This is a sad day, but it brings back an incredible amount of good memories,” Biden said, taking time from his St. Croix vacation to deliver the previously unscheduled speech. “America and the world, in my view, lost a remarkable leader. He was a statesman and humanitarian, and Jill and I lost a dear friend.”

The president, who said he’d been “hanging out with Jimmy Carter for more than 50 years,” said Carter “lived a life measured not by words, but by his deeds.”

“To know his core, you need to know he never stopped being a Sunday school teacher at that Baptist school in Plains, Georgia,” he said.

Biden called Carter “just as courageous in his battle against cancer as he was in everything in his life,” and talked about how the illness had impacted both of their lives.

The late president’s casket is on its way to the Washington National Cathedral, where the National Funeral Service will take place at 10 a.m. ET.

The motorcade will pass by the White House as it makes its way to the cathedral.

Former President Jimmy Carter’s casket is being brought down the steps of the US Capitol, where he was laid in state this week.

Cannons sounded to salute the 39th president.

Next, his motorcade will depart the Capitol.

It’s the world’s most exclusive fraternity and, on Thursday, all five members of the so-called presidents club will gather to honor one of their own.

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are expected to attend the state funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, who died December 29.

It’s an exceedingly rare convening, and it will mark the first time all of the club’s living members will come face to face since the funeral of George H.W. Bush in December 2018.

Six years later, the group has a sharply fractured dynamic that will be closely watched at the Washington National Cathedral service. The former presidents have directly, and indirectly, spoken forcefully against Trump, who mounted a successful political comeback after his defeat four years ago and who in less than two weeks will return to the White House.

“Definitely in modern history — from Kennedy on — there hasn’t been a more contentious moment between these men,” said Kate Andersen Brower, the author of “Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump.”

Linked by the shared experience of having served in what one of their predecessors — William Howard Taft — once described as “the loneliest place in the world,” the five living American presidents will gather “at a funeral for a man who always stood a bit, figuratively, apart from them,” said Brower.

The presidents club, by nature, is complicated by past rivalries and future legacies. Those complications have only intensified as Trump, who has railed against all of his fellow presidents, is returning to the White House. Yet regardless of party, the members — so far, all men — are bound by the singular experience of serving in the Oval Office.

Keep reading here about the group’s attendance of the funeral.

When all the living former presidents gather in Washington for former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral Thursday, it will also mark the first time Donald Trump and his former vice president, Mike Pence, will be in the same room in the last four years, as both are expected to be in attendance.

Family and even some world leaders will gather on Thursday for the National Funeral Service for former President Jimmy Carter.

It will take place at the Washington National Cathedral at 10 a.m. ET.

Biden will deliver a eulogy, a White House official said previously, a marquee moment for the Democrat to pay tribute to his longtime friend in the waning days of his own presidency. And President-elect Donald Trump told reporters that he plans to attend the service.

After the service, Carter will be transported back to his beloved hometown of Plains, Georgia, for a private internment at the family residence that evening. The public is invited to line the motorcade route as Carter and his family travel through Plains to the late president’s final resting place.

In 1979, former President Jimmy Carter did himself significant political damage in an extraordinary address to the nation on the energy crisis.

Carter listed criticisms of his presidency, painting a picture of a listless nation trapped in a moral and spiritual funk.

“It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation,” Carter said.

Ultimately, the speech came back to haunt Carter and made it easy for opponents, not least Ronald Reagan, to portray him as a pessimistic and uninspiring leader.

Still, in the late 1970s, it seemed conceivable that Carter’s command of foreign policy at the height of the Cold War would give him a fair shot at a second term.

But a swelling of revolutionary Islam – heralding a trend that would confound future presidents — conspired to sweep him out of the White House.

The Iran hostage crisis: In October 1979, the United States let the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi — who had been overthrown by the Iranian Revolution a few months earlier — enter the country for medical treatment. That infuriated Islamic revolutionaries who saw him as an oppressive US puppet and wanted him returned to Iran for trial.

On November 4, a year before the US election, students who supported the Islamic revolution seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage.

The 444-day standoff transfixed the nation, souring the national mood day by day as television news bulletins tallied how long the hostages had been in custody. Gradually it dashed Carter’s hopes of a second term.

His fortunes were also battered by a daring and ultimately disastrous rescue bid in which a US helicopter carrying special forces crashed in the desert, killing eight US servicemen.

At the same time, the Cold War was approaching a pivotal point. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter decided to boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow and asked the Senate to delay ratification of SALT II.

As November 1980 approached, a sense of Soviet belligerence and the lengthening humiliation of the hostage crisis fostered an impression of US power under siege. Carter wrote in his memoirs that his destiny was out of his hands as the election approached, but prayed the hostages would be released.

“Now, my political future might well be determined by irrational people on the other side of the world over whom I had no control,” he said.

“If the hostages were released, I was convinced my election would be assured; if the expectations of the American people were dashed again, there was little chance I could win.”

Throughout the campaign, Reagan berated Carter as an ineffectual leader consigning America to perpetual decline.

“A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his,” Reagan charged.

The actor-turned-California governor pulled off a stunning landslide on Election Day 1980, winning 489 electoral votes. In the final humiliation for Carter, on January 20, 1981, 20 minutes after Reagan was sworn in, Iran released the hostages.
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Source: https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/jimmy-carter-funeral-01-09-25/index.html