By Peter Baker
Former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral at Washington National Cathedral will be held Jan. 9, featuring a eulogy by President Joe Biden and culminating more than a week of ceremonies and tributes, organizers said earlier this week.
Biden ordered the federal government to close Jan. 9 and declared it a national day of mourning. The New York Stock Exchange will also close on that day out of respect for the 39th president.
Because of the New Year’s holiday, the eight-day plan that organizers had long envisioned for Carter’s memorial services will not begin until later this week. The former president’s body will be taken by motorcade on Saturday through his hometown of Plains, Georgia, to his boyhood home for a brief pause in front of his family’s farm. A historic farm bell will ring 39 times.
The former president’s body will then be taken to Atlanta to the Georgia State Capitol for a moment of silence by Gov. Brian Kemp and other officials, and then transported to the Carter Center, the home of Carter’s post-presidential humanitarian work. It will lie in repose at the center for mourners to visit Saturday night, Sunday and Monday, according to a detailed schedule released by the U.S. military task force that organizes presidential funerals.
The body of Carter, who died at his home in Plains at 100 on Sunday, will be flown by presidential plane on Tuesday, Jan. 7, to Washington, where it will be taken to the U.S. Navy Memorial in honor of Carter’s service as a submariner. It will then be taken by horse-drawn caisson up to the Capitol, where the body will lie in state through Jan. 8, as have the bodies of several presidents going back to Abraham Lincoln. Thousands of people are expected to file through the Rotunda to pay their respects, including lawmakers, diplomats and everyday Americans.
The service at the cathedral, which traditionally hosts state funerals for presidents as well as other major American figures, will be the highlight of the remembrances. Other former presidents are expected to attend, but it was not clear whether President-elect Donald Trump, who has regularly denigrated Carter, would be invited or attend.
The military task force statement did not include a program for the cathedral ceremony, but others close to the planning said that in addition to Biden, Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson and chair of the board of the Carter Center, will speak, as will Stuart E. Eizenstat, who was the former president’s domestic policy adviser.
Eulogies will also be read from two people who were close to Carter but who have already died: former President Gerald Ford, the Republican who was defeated by Carter in 1976 but went on to become a friend, and former Vice President Walter Mondale, Carter’s running mate. Ford died in 2006 and Mondale in 2021. The eulogies are set to be read by their sons, Steven Ford and Ted Mondale.
After the cathedral service, Carter’s body will be taken back to Georgia for burial. Initial plans once called for it to be transported by train, but Carter objected. “If you take my cold, dead body across the U.S. by train, I’ll haunt you until the day you die,” he told a staff member. So instead, his body will return to Georgia on a military flight.
A private funeral service will be held that afternoon at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, where Carter taught Sunday school well into his 90s. After a missing-man formation flyover by U.S. Navy jets, his body will be interred next to that of former first lady Rosalynn Carter, his wife of 77 years who died at 96 in November 2023, in a family plot next to a willow tree at the edge of a pond in the town where both grew up and spent most of their lives.
The events will be the first presidential funeral since George H.W. Bush died in 2018 and come at a contentious time in U.S. politics, as a president of one party prepares to turn over the White House to a president from the other. In accordance with federal law, Biden ordered flags lowered to half-staff for the next 30 days, meaning they will still be lowered on Jan. 20, when Trump is inaugurated.
That the services will occur on Biden’s watch during his final days in office spares at least some awkward moments and decisions, since he and not Trump will be the sitting president at the time of the service.
Biden in some ways had the closest relationship with Carter among the other members of the rarefied presidents’ club. He was the first Democratic senator to endorse Carter’s long-shot bid for the White House in 1976, and in 2021 he became the first sitting president to honor Carter by visiting him at his home in Plains.
“His compassion and moral clarity lifted people up and changed lives and saved lives all over the globe,” Biden said in televised remarks Sunday night from his vacation in St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. “Jimmy Carter is an example of simple decency.”
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