Thousands of people braved freezing temperatures to come to the U.S. Capitol to pay their respects to former President Jimmy Carter, who lay in state Wednesday in the heart of American democracy ahead of his pomp-filled state funeral.
Mourners, who included numerous elected officials and Vice President Kamala Harris, highlighted the achievements and the humanity of the100-year-old, who died last month.
David Smith, a professor at the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, said that the former president obviously impacted his career. He told VOA that he came to the Capitol to honor the man but also to honor Carter’s causes.
“He had such an impact on so many people,” he said. “His work on advancing minorities, appointments of women to the judiciary, protecting our environment, advocating for human rights – all those things are very important things to me.”
The former president’s flag-draped coffin arrived in the Capitol rotunda Tuesday, ahead of Thursday’s national funeral.
In that soaring space – where only about 50 Americans have been recognized with this distinct honor since 1852 – Senate Majority Leader Jon Thune, in a service late Tuesday, described Carter as: “Navy veteran, peanut farmer, governor of Georgia. And president of the United States. Sunday school teacher. Nobel Prize winner. Advocate for peace and human rights. And first and foremost, a faithful servant of his creator and his fellow man."
And Vice President Harris – who a day earlier, in this building, certified the victory of the next president – extolled Carter’s policy.
"He was the first president of the United States to have a comprehensive energy policy, including providing some of the first federal support for clean energy,” she said Tuesday. “He also passed over a dozen major pieces of legislation regarding environmental protection. And more than doubled the size of America's national parks."
Carter, who served as the 39th president, died December 29 at the age of 100 after nearly two years in hospice care in the state of Georgia. Since then, his final journey has taken his remains over the skinny roads of his humble hometown of Plains; down the boulevards of Atlanta, the state capital, and through the skies to snowy Washington, for his state funeral.
In photos: Mourners pay respects to Jimmy Carter
At the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers told VOA what the 39th president meant to them.
Congresswoman Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democrat, said Carter was “a real moral person.”
“He taught Sunday school – I did, too!” she said, smiling. “But I think (it’s) the fact that he cared about all people. He was a people’s president.”
South Carolina Republican Representative Ralph Norman told VOA that while he did not align with Carter politically, “President Carter was a good man. President Carter was a man who served his country. He loved America. I didn’t agree with all of his policies, but you couldn’t (dis)agree with his patriotism, you couldn’t disagree. He just loved his country.”
President Joe Biden will deliver the eulogy for his fellow Democrat on Thursday.
"We may never see his like again, you know we can all do well to try to be a little more like Jimmy Carter,” Biden said in late December after receiving news of Carter’s death.
Analysts say the two men have a few things in common.
“There's an obvious similarity; that is, that Carter turned out to be a one-term president, and Biden turned out to be a one-term president,” Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told VOA on Zoom. “And that's never a reflection of the right combination of politics and policy. In both cases, I would say that the two presidents put the policy ahead of the politics. And they paid the price for that.”
Thursday’s funeral will bring together President Biden and former presidents, including Biden’s predecessor and successor, Donald Trump. When asked what Carter and the next and previous president have in common, Galston paused.
“I don't even know how to begin to answer that question,” he said finally. “The two are polar opposites in every respect that I can think of, except one. And that is, they both attained the presidency as outsiders.”
And now, here lies this outsider, decades after his presidency ended, inside his nation’s most venerated space.
Paris Huang, Mykhailo Komadovsky and Kim Lewis contributed to this report.