President Joe Biden said he plans to deliver the posthumous tribute speech to former President Jimmy Carter, who remains in hospice care at his home in south Georgia.
Biden made the disclosure Monday night to donors at a California fundraiser following a “recent” visit with the 39th president of the United States, whom he has known since the now-president was a junior senator from Delaware. who supported Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976.
“He asked me to give the tribute speech” during his funeral, Biden said, before deferring to say more. “Sorry, she shouldn’t have said this.”
Carter, who at 98 is the longest-serving US president, announced on February 18 that he would spend his final days at home, receiving end-of-life care and forgoing further medical interventions after a series of brief hospital stays. The Carter Center in Atlanta and the former president’s relatives have not released details of his health, although Biden alluded to Carter’s cancer diagnosis in 2015 and his subsequent recovery.
“I spent time with Jimmy Carter and he finally got (cancer), but they found a way for him to live much longer than they expected because they found a breakthrough” medically, Biden said in Rancho Santa Fe, California.
Biden, 80, and first lady Jill Biden visited Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, now 95, at their home in Plains, Georgia, a few months after Biden took office in 2021.
Biden was the first US senator to endorse Carter’s presidential bid in 1976, breaking with the established order in Washington. Subsequently, Carter—then a former governor of Georgia—surprised by winning the Democratic nomination.
Biden’s presidency represents something of a sea change and political approach for Carter, who only served one four-year term and lost to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. Major Democrats kept their distance after that. of Carter, at least publicly, for decades after he left the White House.
But as the Carters’ humanitarian aid and democracy promotion work through the Carter Center gained respect, Democratic politicians again flocked to South Georgia ahead of the 2020 election cycle. And with the election of Biden , Carter once again had a genuine friend and ally in the Oval Office.
In 2007 Carter delivered a tribute speech at the funeral of Republican Gerald Ford, the man he defeated to become president. The two became close friends after their presidencies and had agreed that the one who survived would give the speech at the other’s funeral.
