Former presidents and Biden honor Jimmy Carter at funeral

Washington
CNN
—

It is the world’s most exclusive fraternity, and on Thursday, all five members of the so-called presidents club gather to honor one of their own.

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are expected to attend the state funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, who died on December 29.

It is an extremely rare convocation and will mark the first time that all living members of the club have come face to face since the funeral of George HW Bush in December 2018.

Six years later, the group has a sharply fractured dynamic that will be closely watched at the Washington National Cathedral service. The former presidents have directly and indirectly spoken strongly against Trump, who made a successful political comeback after his defeat four years ago and who will return to the White House in less than two weeks.

“Absolutely in modern history — from Kennedy onward — there has not been a more contentious moment between these men,” said Kate Andersen Brower, the author of “Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump.”

Bonded by the shared experience of having served in what one of their predecessors – William Howard Taft – once described as “the loneliest place in the world”, the five living US presidents will gather “at a funeral for a man who always stood a little, figuratively apart from them,” said Brower.

The Presidents Club is inherently complicated by past rivalries and future legacies. These complications have only intensified as Trump, who has challenged all his fellow presidents, returns to the White House. But regardless of party, the members — so far all men — are bound by the unique experience of serving in the Oval Office.

Jimmy Carter’s long life spanned 17 US presidents, an extraordinary stretch from Calvin Coolidge to Biden. At 100, he was the oldest living president — and the longest-serving member of the Presidents’ Club, though he charted his own course during his 43 years after leaving the White House.

In death, Democrats and Republicans alike rushed to pay tribute to Carter’s legacy and the post-presidency example he set for decades.

But in life, Carter’s relationship with presidents was often more fraught, with Democrats like Clinton and Obama rarely seeking his guidance or approaching him publicly for fear of being too closely associated with a presidency that ended in defeat after one term.

In a tribute to Carter’s life last week, Obama highlighted a line from Carter’s 2002 Nobel Peace Prize speech: “God gives us the ability to choose. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace.”

But when Obama won his Nobel Prize in 2009, which came as a surprise during his first year in office, he did not mention Carter. However, he singled out John F. Kennedy.

In 2014, Carter candidly said that Obama did not reach out to him during his presidency. asked by NBC News on Obama seeking his advice, Carter said, “Unfortunately, the answer is no. President Obama does not.”

He cited the Carter Center’s “strong and public position on equal treatment between the Palestinians and the Israelis” as a reason for his distance from Obama: “I think it was a sensitive area that the president didn’t want to get involved in.”

Some presidents relied on Carter’s experience and advice, as well as his diplomatic skills. But Carter did not shy away from using his platform to speak out against his followers when he felt it was justified, sometimes causing them difficulties.

Carter was critical of the George W. Bush administration, publicly criticizing the president and his handling of the Iraq War in a 2007 interview.

“I think in terms of the negative impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter told Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, criticizing Bush’s “flagrant reversal of America’s founding values.”

But Carter later offered Bush praise; at the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in 2013, Carter extended his “admiration” to the 43rd president and called on Bush to keep his word and act to end a 20-year civil war in Sudan.

As president, Clinton took Carter up on an offer to help de-escalate tensions with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

“President Carter’s approach to resolving this conflict proved complicated when he announced an unofficial agreement with North Korea to end the standoff on CNN before allowing Clinton administration officials to review the agreement,” the Clinton Library said in a concise notice. history of their relationship.

Carter later joined a diplomatic team with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia to help “avoid an armed conflict with the military leaders in Haiti,” the Clinton Library said.

But the two reportedly sparred when Carter “went on CNN before meeting Mr. Clinton for breakfast and a planned joint news conference,” according to New York Times.

Clinton presented Carter with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 1999. Still, new tensions arose when Carter chose Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.

Carter was in contact with Trump and his administration several times during the president-elect’s first term.

In 2018, Carter said he received a briefing on North Korea following Trump’s announcement of new sanctions against the country and that he would be willing to travel to North Korea on behalf of the administration, an offer Trump never took him up on. In 2019, Carter wrote a letter to Trump about US-China trade relations and spoke with him on the phone.

But relations soured later that year when Carter called for a full investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, suggesting it “would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election.” Carter later issued stark warnings about Trump’s decision to withhold funding from the World Health Organization amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump, for his part, called Carter a “nice man” and a “terrible president” during a G20 summit news conference in June 2019.

In the days before and after Carter’s death, Trump railed against a pair of treaties Carter negotiated during his tenure regarding the Panama Canal.

At a press conference Tuesday, Trump went off on an unsolicited tangent, criticizing Carter: “Giving the Panama Canal is why, in my opinion, Jimmy Carter lost the election — maybe more than the hostages,” he said, referring to the Iran hostage. crisis.

Admitting that it is “inappropriate” to discuss the Panama Canal in light of Carter’s death, Trump added: “It’s a bad part of the Carter legacy. He was a good man. Look, he was a good man. I knew him a little bit, and he was a very nice person, but it was a big mistake.

Trump offered warm condolences after Carter’s death in a formal statement, describing the former president as “a really good man” and “very consistent.” Days later, however, he took to social media to complain that flags on federal buildings would be at half-mast during his inauguration, a standard month-long procedure to commemorate the death of a US president.

Carter, a child of the Great Depression, was the last president to routinely ask his fellow Americans to make sacrifices. Whether he turned down the heat and donned a sweater to curb driving and gas mileage, Carter’s requests fell flat politically and created a caricature of a president his predecessors were eager to distance themselves from.

At the height of the Great Recession, when the George W. Bush presidency ended and the Obama era began, Democrats in the West Wing were loathe to seek Carter’s guidance or even mention his name. He was far more likely to be invoked by Republicans in a more derogatory and mocking tone.

But for Biden there were no such reservations. He has long worn his love and loyalty to Carter on his sleeve, paying an early visit to the former president’s home in Plains, Georgia, and proudly recalling how he was the first senator to endorse Carter’s unlikely presidential bid.

“We believe that in 1976 it is not enough to be ‘right’ on the issues. Our nation and our party need a president who is not only right, but who has demonstrated the ability to achieve our common goals,” Biden and then-Sen. Writing in a joint letter at the time, Birch Bayh added, “We believe that person to be Jimmy Carter.”

Four years ago, Biden’s inauguration was the first Carter had missed since his own inauguration in 1977. His health was failing, but the relationship Carter had with Biden was the strongest he forged with any of his successors.

Biden is set to make remarks Thursday during the state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral. In the waning days of his presidency, after decades of delivering tributes and send-offs, Biden will do something for the first time: pay tribute to another member of the Presidents Club.

With his successors and his predecessors, Carter marched to his own beat. He forged relationships with some presidents—notably extending an olive branch early and often to Gerald Ford, whom he defeated in 1976—while never forming a genuine connection with Ronald Reagan, whom he lost to in 1980.

Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, were slow to get over official Washington minutiae — perceived or real — after they left the White House. Carter was the last to follow the Harry Truman model of not profiting from a post-presidency through paid speeches or other endeavors.

Chip Carter, the late president’s son, made passing reference to his parents’ lingering feelings as they returned home to Georgia and took control of creating their own legacy.

“Dad’s legacy from Georgia, from the governor’s office and from the presidency was a little rough at the end of it because of our opposition and the way they framed us,” Chip Carter said Saturday in Atlanta, “which was probably somewhat true. and a little not.”