Former US president Jimmy Carter’s coffin arrives in Washington
Mr Carter’s remains had been lying in repose at the Carter Presidential Centre since Saturday.
Nearly 44 years after Jimmy Carter left the nation’s capital in humbling defeat, the 39th president returned to Washington, DC for three days of state funeral rites starting on Tuesday.
Mr Carter’s remains, which have been lying in repose at the Carter Presidential Centre since Saturday, left the Atlanta campus on Tuesday morning, accompanied by his children and extended family.
A bipartisan delegation of members of Congress were led into the Capitol rotunda by Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, Democrats who represent Mr Carter’s home state.
Vice President Kamala Harris, members of President Joe Biden’s cabinet and three of the nine US Supreme Court justices also were present. Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan stood next to Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser in the rotunda.
The US Army Band Brass Quintet played as people awaited the casket’s arrival.
The room fell silent as three knocks on the rotunda door marked Carter’s arrival. The casket was placed in the middle of the room on the Lincoln catafalque, a platform built in 1865 to hold slain president Abraham Lincoln’s casket in the same place.
“Jimmy Carter was that all too rare example of a gifted man who also walks with humility, modesty and grace,” Ms Harris said, recalling his unpretentious approach to campaigning.
He slept in the homes of his supporters to “share a meal with them at their table and listen to what was on their minds,” she said.
The US Naval Academy Glee Club performed the hymn My Country, ‘Tis of Thee before bipartisan congressional leaders and Ms Harris, accompanied by her husband Doug Emhoff, placed wreaths beside the casket.
Members of Mr Carter’s family, including some of his grandchildren, wiped away tears.
Mr Carter, who died December 29 at the age of 100, will then lie in state on Tuesday night and again on Wednesday. He receives a state funeral on Thursday at Washington National Cathedral. President Joe Biden will deliver a eulogy.
There will also be symbolism unique to Mr Carter. As he was carried from his presidential centre, a military band played hymns — Amazing Grace and Blessed Assurance for the outspoken Baptist evangelical who called himself a “born-again Christian” when he sought and won the presidency in 1976.
In Washington, his hearse will stop at the US Navy Memorial, where his remains will be transferred to a horse-drawn caisson for rest of his trip to the Capitol. The location nods to Mr Carter’s place as the lone US Naval Academy graduate to become commander-in-chief.
All of the pomp will carry some irony for the Democrat who went from his family peanut warehouse to the Governor’s Mansion and eventually the White House.
Mr Carter won the presidency as the smiling southerner and technocratic engineer who promised to change the ways of Washington — and eschewed many of those unwritten rules when he got there.
“The country was thirsting for moral renewal and for Carter, as this genuinely religious figure, to come in and clean things up.”
From 1977 to 1981, Mr Carter was the city’s highest-ranking resident. But he never mastered it.
“He could be prickly and a not very appealing personality” in a town that thrives on relationships, Mr Alter said, describing a president who struggled with schmoozing politicians and reporters.
The gatekeepers of Washington society never embraced Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, either, not quite knowing what to make of the small-town Southerners who carried their own luggage and bought their clothes off the rack. Mr Carter sold what had been the presidential yacht, a perk his predecessors had used to wine and dine Capitol power players.
Early in Mr Carter’s presidency, Washington Post society columnist Sally Quinn tagged the Carters and their West Wing as “an alien tribe” incapable of “playing ‘the game’”.
Mr Carter endured a rocky four years that left him without enough friends in the town’s power circles and, ultimately, across an electorate that delivered nearly 500 Electoral College votes to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Mr Carter often flouted the ceremonial trappings that have been on display in Georgia and will continue in Washington.
As president, he wanted to keep the Marine Band from playing Hail to the Chief, thinking it elevated the president too much. His advisers convinced him to accept it as part of the job.
The song played on Saturday as he arrived at his presidential centre after a motorcade through his hometown of Plains and past his boyhood farm. It played again as his remains were carried out on their way to Washington.
He also never used his full name, James Earl Carter Jr, even taking the oath of office. His full name was printed on memorial cards given to all mourners who paid their respects in Atlanta.
His remains now rest in a wooden casket being carried and guarded by military pallbearers in their impeccable dress uniforms.
“He was a simple man in so many ways,” said Brad Webb, an Army veteran who was one of more than 23,000 people who came to honour the former president at his library, which is on the same campus as The Carter Centre, where the former president and first lady based their decades of advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights in the developing world.
“He was also a complicated man, who took his defeat and did so much good in the world,” said Mr Webb, who voted for Republican Gerald Ford in 1976 and Mr Reagan in 1980.
“And, looking back, some of the things in his presidency — the inflation, the Iran hostages, the energy crisis — were really things that no president can actually control.
“We get to look back with some perspective and understand that he was an excellent former president but also had a presidency we can appreciate more than we did as it was happening.”
