WASHINGTON — The nation’s capital said its final goodbye to Jimmy Carter, America’s longest-lived president, on Thursday morning with a formal funeral packed with pageantry at Washington National Cathedral. 

The service to honor the nation’s 39th president who died last month at 100 years old concluded six days of events intended to celebrate the former Naval officer, engineer and peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. 

Following the funeral, Carter’s body departed Washington – where he has lain in state in the Capitol building since Tuesday – and traveling to his hometown. There, a second service was held in the afternoon for the former Democratic president before he is buried at the Carter Home and Garden, alongside his wife of 77 years, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023.  

All five living U.S. presidents, Presidents Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton along with all of their wives except for former first lady Michelle Obama were in attendance for the service. Obama and Trump – who visited Carter’s remains in the Capitol Rotunda and said he met with members of the former president’s family at Blair House on Wednesday – were seated next to one another and were spotted chatting multiple times. 

As Trump went to his seat, he shook hands with Mike Pence in a rare interaction with his former vice president. The two men had a falling out over Pence's refusal to help Trump overturn his election defeat to Biden four years ago and the Indiana Republican declined to endorse his old boss in 2024 after mounting a brief primary challenge.

Outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost the 2024 election to Trump, also attended alongside second gentleman Doug Emhoff. Former Vice President Al Gore was also in attendance. 

Biden, who is leaving office in just over a week, delivered a eulogy in which he focused on the strength of Carter’s “character.” He recounted he and first lady Jill Biden visiting the Carters at their home Plains in 2021, sitting in their living room and sharing memories over nearly six decades of friendship. 

Biden noted he was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter's 1976 campaign. 

“It was an endorsement based on what I believe is Jimmy Carter’s enduring attribute: character, character, character,” Biden said. 

Performances at the service included John Lennon's "Imagine” by country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood — who succeeded Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter as ambassadors for Habitat for Humanity — “Amazing Grace” by Phyllis Adams and Lelia Bolden and "Eternal Father, Strong to Save," by the U.S. Marine Orchestra and Armed Forces Chorus.

Hymns include "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" and, in Plains, "Let there be Peace on Earth."

Steve Ford, the grandson of former President Gerald Ford, read a tribute from his grandfather, who died in 2006 while Ted Mondale, the son of Vice President Walter Mondale, delivered a eulogy on behalf of his father, Carter's running mate who died in 2021.

Stu Eizenstat, a former advisor in the Carter White House, honored the 39th president’s legacy in office bycalling him the “greatest environmental president since Theodore Roosevelt” and noting he created the Department of Education, something Trump pledged on the campaign trail to eliminate. Eizenstat called the Camp David Accords, the landmark peace agreement Carter helped negotiate between Israel and Egypt, the former president’s “most lasting achievement” and the one he was most proud of. 

The former president’s eldest grandson, Jason Carter, meanwhile, remembered his grandfather and grandmother as “small town people who never forgot who they were and where they were from no matter what happened in their lives,” recounting how they had a “little rack” next to the sink in their Georgia house where they would hang Ziplock bags to dry. 

“In my 49 years I never perceived a difference between his public face and his private one,” Jason Carter said. “He was the same person no matter who he was with or where he was. And for me, that’s the definition of integrity.” 

Carter, who served one term from 1977 to 1981, beat Ford in 1976 in the first post-Watergate presidential election and lost to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide election in 1980. 

Two years later he and Rosalynn established The Carter Center in Atlanta as a nongovernmental organization that took them across the world fighting disease, mediating conflict, monitoring elections and advocating for racial and gender equity. Biden on Thursday’s service referred to Carter’s life after the White House a “model post-presidency.” 

After the morning service in Washington, Carter’s remains, his four children and extended family left on a return trip to Georgia on a Boeing 747 that serves as Air Force One when the sitting president is aboard. The second service in Plains will take place at Maranatha Baptist Church, where the evangelical president taught Sunday School for decades after leaving Washington. 

The outspoken Baptist, who campaigned as a born-again Christian, will be remembered in an afternoon funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church, the small edifice where he taught Sunday school for decades after leaving the White House and where his casket will sit beneath a wooden cross he fashioned in his own woodshop.

Following a final ride through his hometown, past the old train depot that served as his 1976 presidential campaign headquarters, he will be buried on family land in a plot next to Rosalynn, to whom Carter was married for more than 77 years.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.