A Public Funeral For A Man Out Of Step With The Public

The Thirty-Ninth President greets someone who will become one of his successors, though neither know it yet, on 16 October 1979 in the Oval Office.

I was originally going to offer a comment about Jimmy Carter’s passing in the obituary post. Then I read this piece in The Bulwark about state funerals, and then I read Merrie Soltis’ lovely pre-obituary. It got me thinking about how best we as a nation can commemorate the man. No one else in our history has ever held anything like the place Carter does: many of our ex-Presidents have gone on to be honored in their retirements, but I can’t think of any that have become beloved. Certainly not any one-termers. So I took some time to reflect a little more deeply.

Regarding the imminent funeral, I come down somewhere about where the Bulwark piece does: it’s probably basically harmless that we have elaborate governmental funerals for our departed Presidents, even if it is a bit… well… monarchial. And somewhat inappropriate here. President Carter himself would probably have been a little bit uncomfortable with that but gone along with it, just as he was with all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the job of President back when he held office. Because what else are we realistically going to do?

As I write on 30 December 2024, I don’t know the plans for Carter’s funeral; the man’s death was just announced this morning. Still, it’s quite likely it’ll look something like this: for a day or two, he’ll lie in repose in his home of Plains, Georgia. Then his body will be flown with full military honors to Washington, D.C., where an all-services honor guard will carry him to the rotunda of the Capitol. There, his casket will be opened and he’ll lie in state upon the Lincoln Catafalque. An allergy-inducing display of flowers (many of which will have been flown within 24 hours beforehand from the nations of Colombia or Ecuador and imported duty-free under a leftover War on Drugs law) will be arranged around him. There will be a time for family visitation, political officials’ visitation, and then about a day for public visitation in which a long line of people will queue up for a chance to walk through and pay the most decent man anyone can remember being President a few seconds’ respects. After that, he might get a funeral service at the National Cathedral, and then will be flown back down to Plains for burial at his Presidential library, again with all-services honor guards along the way, or perhaps a special detachment of nuclear submariners, because that’s a branch of the Navy Carter helped originate.

How do I know that? Because that’s more or less what we do for very important public people when they die. It’s what we’ve done for other Presidents who have passed. It’s what we did when Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed. We can tune this a little bit for Carter, but this is roughly the template. Just as the Brits had a plan in place for when London Bridge fell, we too have a template so we can know what to do.

The whole affair will cost millions of dollars. And again, maybe that’s okay even if President Carter himself would have counseled thrift. Presidents are important people, doing them honor after their death is part of how we communicate the gravity of the office they discharge and acknowledge the impact they had on the nation. Carter’s Presidency is far enough in the past that many of the controversies surrounding his tenure in office seem silly in retrospect. …Right?

Well, maybe. Carter was maligned so while in office had to do more with symbolism rather than substance. For instance: on a cold February evening in 1977, Carter had grown concerned about the still-escalating global energy crisis resulting from, among other things, a thoroughly mercenary embargo on oil exports by the newly-powerful OPEC cartel, a problem that went back to 1973 when his predecessors similarly failed to prevent it from happening and then, like Carter, failed to conjure cheap and plentiful gasoline out of thin air.

He gave a speech to the American people pointing out that we’d grown so used to cheap energy prices for so long that we’d forgotten what it was like to even bother to budget for things like gas, and maybe we ought to consider getting our manufacturers to build smaller, more efficient cars, and maybe if we were cold, we could wear sweaters before turning the thermostats up in our homes. (Millions of homes still burned oil for heat in the winter back then!) Here’s the whole speech:

He was mocked for the idea that Americans ought to show some restraint in their energy consumption then, and he is still mocked for it today (although probably only in subdued tones right about now). But the thing of it is, he was right, and we can see that with the benefit of more than forty years’ perspective. Here in the last few hours of 2024, with our hybrid or electric cars and solar panels on our roofs and concerns about carbon emissions on our social media feeds and star energy certifications on our refrigerators and experiences of fleeting pleasure when gas falls below $2.50 a gallon as it occasionally does, it feels like we should criticize him instead for not having been ambitious enough in his ask.

In office and on the re-election campaign trail, he was also castigated for (again, quite correctly) diagnosing the mood of the American people in the late 1970’s as suffering from a “great malaise.” Well, actually he didn’t. Although the “Malaise Speech” is now analyzed as a huge political own-goal for Carter, it’s a bit of a misnomer. The speech was titled “Crisis of Confidence,” and the word “malaise” does not appear in the speech at all. Don’t believe me? Here’s the transcript. Reading it now, I’m struck by how many of the citizen complaints Carter chose to read sound like they could have been written in 2024 on Twitter. X. Whatever.

At the time, the speech was reasonably well-received (moreso by Democrats than Republicans, but that is the natural course of things, isn’t it?). Carter reminds us that an optimistic, all-for-one-one-for-all attitude had got us through much worse times, and could play a part in reviving America out of the doldrums people complained of in 1979. Most of his policy proposals did not become law, and in some cases I’m glad. “Let’s burn more coal than oil!” would have worked out badly, modern environmental science tells us. But these were, for the day, practical enough proposals, and it wasn’t the policy points that wound up being used against Carter. It was, then as now, all about the vibes.

The speech did age poorly. It was followed by the 444-day long Iranian hostage crisis, which as we all know, left Carter looking hapless and unable to respond. In fact, a rather audacious military rescue of the hostages was attempted but failed because of a confluence of bad weather and lack of coordination between the different branches of the military involved. Carter took responsibility for it, although it’s unclear to me exactly what Carter personally did that caused any of those things to happen or what he could have done differently at the time: those lessons about inter-branch communication had not been learned yet. Moreover, many people, including the folks who lived through it themselves and wrote the linked article linked here, have come to believe that the hostage crisis was prolonged and diplomacy obstructed by Republican political operatives during the election.

Whether that’s true or not, on the campaign trail, Ronald Reagan referred to the “malaise” speech often and derisively, calling Carter a pessimist obsessed with making America live within its limitations and claiming Carter was really talking about his own weaknesses rather than America’s.  And the whole time people were thinking about American hostages and Carter failing to bring them home. That’s probably how Carter’s Presidency is most remembered.

Carter did much better setting a powerful moral example of selflessness and public service after his Presidency, in particular his work with Habitat for Humanity was well-known. I’ve heard it said many times that he wasn’t a great President, but was one of the greatest ex-Presidents we’ve ever had. I disagree with that today: Carter got a shit hand dealt to him in 1976 and I’m very dubious Gerald Ford would have done any better with it. But I take the lesson, as have politicians from Reagan forward, that Carter’s symbolic calls for individual sacrifice for the common good, his challenges to people to pick up their spirits and try harder for their country, his propensity to directly address unpleasant facts, and to patiently wait for diplomacy to work its course–these were the things that ultimately cost Carter the election in 1980 and they are things American Presidents have simply not done, or at minimum not done without suffering political pain, since.

The American people in 1980 demonstrated, and for all practical purposes continue to demonstrate, zero taste for privation, patience, facing facts, or grit in the face of adversity. They wanted lower taxes, not higher ones even if said higher taxes were only going to be paid by big corporations and very wealthy individuals (which is how Carter proposed paying for his new energy policies). They wanted cheap gas today, not a ten-year plan to convert to solar and they certainly didn’t want to be told “If you’re cold, wear a sweater, dummy.” They had moms for that. They wanted the hostages home NOW, and didn’t care about the cost. Someone ought to knock some sense into those damn Iranian students burning Old Glory on the TV every night. They wanted to go to the 1980 Olympics and show up the damn Rooskies with a pile of gold medals in a bunch of sports they would immediately forget existed, and Carter took that away from them too, just because the Soviets had invaded some weird country no one cared about and certainly wouldn’t ever be of any consequence to the likes of us.

Patience, restraint, truth, sacrifice, empathy: these were things Jimmy Carter personified, things President Carter urged for all of us, and things that we Americans rejected after Carter proposed them. Even today, I’m pretty skeptical that those kinds of virtues can carry a politician very far.

And that brings me back to Carter’s upcoming public funeral. How do we publicly honor a man whose public virtues first gained him, then cost him, the nation’s highest honor? As recently as eight weeks ago, we chose as Carter’s successor a man whose political appeal, governing style, and personal life all personify the antithesis of these virtues. That man had served as President before, and we all knew the book on him, and chose him anyway. How can we even dare to attempt to honor a man who, most among all of our leaders in living memory personified patience, restraint, truth, sacrifice, and empathy?

That’s a very tall order. Carter’s memory is too recent, too subject to partisan lensing even half a century later. There’s folks who still make fun of that beige cardigan, who equate a call for moral betterment with condescension.

So what we will do instead is rely on ritual. What did we do for George H.W. Bush? What did we do for Gerald Ford? For some of our other honored leaders, like Justices Scalia and Ginsburg? We keep that catafalque around for a reason, and this is it. Well, there is comfort in ritual. There is the ability to act because there is a plan, and a precedent to follow. A horse-drawn hearse, the Blue Angels in the Missing Man formation, a special place of honor for submariners in the public procession. We know how to do these things.

But they will miss the point. We really have lost a good man, a man who urged us to be better than we are. Jimmy Carter was a man who was always out of step with America. This statement is to praise Carter.

I wouldn’t mind, then, if some atypical kinds of funeral arrangement, some sort of way of symbolically underlining the virtues of patience, restraint, sacrifice, and empathy that Carter stood for but America rejected, were put front and center for us to consider. I don’t pretend to know what that symbol might be. Perhaps, if the right cleric can be found, it can go in Carter’s eulogy. Maybe that could be Carter’s preferred eulogist and political fellow-traveler, President Joe Biden. It would make a nice opportunity for Biden to offer a farewell speech, if the President is feeling up to it.

Whoever delivers it, let them use Jimmy Carter’s eulogy to re-make his call to Americans to become better than we are, a call we will finally hear, understand, and answer in the affirmative.