At Carter’s Funeral, 5 Presidents Shaped in Their Own Way By His Example

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

No one would credibly mistake the dignitaries on the north side of the National Cathedral as diehard fans of the man being honored Thursday for one last time in Washington, former President Jimmy Carter. In fact, until recently Carter may have been the most unwelcome member of the exclusive fraternity on the planet known as The Presidents Club.

Yet, as the world gave Carter one final salutation in a city he never fully mastered, those five successors all carried with them a piece of a presidency he remade.

Bill Clinton’s ascent as a pragmatic Southern Governor was paved thanks to the former Georgia practicalist. George W. Bush’s folksiness came to be a selling point rather than a detriment thanks to Carter’s time as a peanut farmer—never much lingering on his pedigree as a Naval Academic-trained nuclear engineer any more than the Yale- and Harvard-degreed Texan hung his credentials. Barack Obama’s ice-cold clinician certainly found a compatriot in his 1970s predecessor in an era of global strife. And Joe Biden’s sanctimony and moralizing seem less jarring when Americans recall that Carter until recently continued to teach a Sunday school class in his home church in Plains, Ga.

Then there is Donald Trump, a similarly unexpected gate-crasher who does not fit the mold of Washington insiders yet is back in Washington for Carter’s send-off and will be starting his second term as President in 11 days. In a way, Trump is the logical conclusion of the disruption of the institution of the presidency that Carter began nearly half a century ago. Just as Carter came to Washington with his own ideas about the presidency and an open contempt for its norms, Trump, too, has left his mark on the most American of power structures, even if that mark could not be more different from Carter’s. 

In giving Carter one last salute, the former Presidents rallied in the most unlikely of showings: national unity, the likes of which emerge only when one of their own dies or is about to join their rarified ranks. In fact, the living former Presidents and their spouses all crowded into the front pews of the cavernous cathedral with a quiet dignity that is remarkable for just how rare such showings are. The last such confab was in 2018 for the death of President George H.W. Bush. (Michelle Obama, the lone missing spouse, had a scheduling conflict this week that kept her in Hawaii, an aide said. There is no word if she plans to attend the Jan. 20 inauguration of Trump.) 

The show of tradition was but one of the hellish contradictions embedded in Carter’s coda—exactly as he scripted with his signature mischievous smirk.

Carter, perhaps the most decent man to ever occupy the Oval Office, was long written off as a country bumpkin, one who perhaps unsurprisingly left office as a one-term anomaly. Yet he is now celebrated as an unrivaled defender of democracy, a globe-trotting (if occasionally freelancing) diplomat.

It was, as Jonathan Alter summarized in his TIME cover story commemorating Carter’s passing, as if the former President used the White House as the most inelegant stepping stone to his more powerful role as a global conscience for a half-century of consequence, including Thursday—his last hurrah in D.C.

Carter, who died Dec. 29 at age 100, drew the standard slate of political insiders and global leaders on Thursday. The soft-glow tributes have been a steady stream, readied for years and updated periodically. The script for this week has been baked in a binder longer than many White House aides idling by the many motorcades have been alive. The day lacked the urgency of mourning that many events in that space carry, in no small measure because Carter had been preparing the nation for it for decades. (Former President Gerald Ford and former Vice President Walter Mondale were among the eulogists whose tributes were read by their surviving sons.)

Still, the enormity of the day is unavoidable, no matter how predictable it arrives.

The grand canyon of Washington’s National Cathedral is seldom an easy venue for any speaker. On big days, the cameras are aimed at the raised platform. The coffin seems far larger than any should be. Emotions are already amped beyond what an otherwise nerve-dulling day should expect. And a who’s-who of dignitaries stacked in the pews like a trick question on any diplomatic quiz as to who gets to sit closest to the front row. Just witness how Obama got loaded into the row next to Trump, while Mike and Karen Pence sat in the seats behind them, and an awkward Kamala Harris parked in isolation right ahead of all.

So as Washington—and the world—bade farewell to the 39th President of the United States in that mountain of Indiana limestone, the day took on the air of inevitability. Biden, who fancies himself a masterful eulogist, did his bit even as it was impossible to set aside the open question about which of the marquee insiders would be the next to get a global send-off in the same venue. 

"Today, many think he was from a bygone era," Biden said. "But in reality, he saw well into the future."

To be sure, the day was about as off-tone as could be for Carter, who puttered around the White House in a cardigan and preferred paper plates to china. But Carter understood the day of mourning was not solely about him, but rather the country and the office he never stopped promoting. Carter, who as President initially banned the playing of “Hail to the Chief” because it smacked of elitism, allowed one final nod to the institution: As his casket left the cathedral, military bands let forth one last flourish of that personal anthem of Presidents. As much as Carter wanted to humanize the office, he could bend it only so far. His successors were each a byproduct of his desire to move the office closer to the people, and the smart ones understood their place in history was set in motion in part by the man they were honoring.

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.