Kamala Harris eulogized former President Jimmy Carter as a ‘gifted’ man of grace
Dignitaries, including Supreme Court justices and members of Congress, take part in lying-in-state ceremony at Capitol Rotunda
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Your support makes all the difference.Vice President Kamala Harris eulogized former President Jimmy Carter on Tuesday at the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC, where Carter lay in state, remembering him as a leader who was "ahead of his time" and deeply empathetic to the needs of the people he represented.
Carter, the 39th President of the United States, died on December 29, at the age of 100.
Harris praised Carter for leaving the world "better than he found it," and praised him for his progressive actions, including appointing more Black Americans to the federal bench than all of his predecessors combined. He also appointed five times as many women, Harris noted.
The vice president also praised Carter's commitment to diplomacy, noting the success of the Camp David Accords in 1978.
She did not just praise his time as president; Harris said Carter "established a new model for what it means to be a former president and leave an extraordinary post-presidential legacy."
Harris praised his Carter Center, his public health workers, and his "tireless advocacy for peace and democracy" around the world.
The vice president called Carter a "rare example" of a "gifted man who also walks with humility, modesty, and grace," and said it was clear that he "loved our country."
"He lived his faith, he served the people, and he left the world a better place than he found it," she said.
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It never got old.
No matter how many times one crammed into the modest sanctuary at Maranatha Baptist Church, there was always some wisdom to be gleaned from the measured, Bible-inspired words of Jimmy Carter.
This was another side of the 39th president, a down-to-earth man of steadfast faith who somehow found time to teach Sunday school classes when he wasn’t building homes for the needy, or advocating for fair elections, or helping eradicate awful diseases.
For young and old, straight and gay, believers and nonbelievers, Black and white and brown, Maranatha was a far-off-the-beaten path destination in southwest Georgia where Carter, well into his 90s, stayed connected with his fellow citizens of the world.
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Carter’s passing Sunday has unearthed memories from his 1977-1981 presidency. Somewhere between his greatest foreign-policy success (the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt) and his greatest failure (the Iran hostage crisis) sits the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.
It was Carter who called for that boycott — a Cold War power play intended to express America’s disdain for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In his 1980 State of the Union Address, Carter said the invasion “could pose the most serious threat to world peace since the second World War.”
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How Jimmy Carter became the Rock’n’Roll President
On Saturday, 4 May 1974, Jimmy Carter took the stage at the University of Georgia School of Law to address an audience that included lawyers, journalists and the Democratic Party luminary Ted Kennedy. At the time, Carter was governor of Georgia but could not run for reelection, so was starting to mull a longshot bid to become the next President of the United States.
He used his speech to tear into the justice system in his own state and other parts of the country, arguing bluntly that it favored the rich and powerful at the expense of everybody else. Carter explained he got his understanding of justice from two sources. One was the work of the American Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. “The other source of my understanding about what’s right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan,” said Carter. “After listening to his records about ‘The Ballad of Hattie Carroll’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘The Times, They Are a-Changing,’ I’ve learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.”
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The death of Jimmy Carter on Sunday is causing many Americans to look back at the political legacy of the nation’s 39th president.
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Carter came to the presidency at the end of a chaotic decade in American life, as the U.S. still bore the scars of the bloody culmination of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, with the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy. The country also faced desperate economic problems, stemming from an OPEC boycott of the U.S. in the Middle East and persistent inflation at home.
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Following the death of Jimmy Carter at the age of 100, the nation will now see the first funeral for a Democratic president in more than 50 years.
Carter is the longest-living president, who also had the longest post-presidency after leaving office at the age of 56 in 1980.
There are a number of traditions and customs that govern the death of a US president, but the wishes of the family are also heavily considered, meaning the proceedings can be quite different from each other.
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