President Joe Biden has said he plans to give a posthumous address to former President Jimmy Carter, who remains in hospice care at his home in south Georgia.
Biden made the announcement Monday night to donors in a California fundraiser following a “recent” visit with the 39th president of the United States, whom he has known since he was the now-presidential junior senator from Delaware who supported Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. .
“He asked me to give a speech at his funeral,” Biden said, before pausing to say more. “I’m sorry, that’s not what he said.”
Carter, who is the 98th longest-serving US president, announced on February 18 that he would spend his last days at home, receiving end-of-life care and bypassing further medical interventions after a series of brief hospital stays. The Carter Center in Atlanta and close relatives of the president have not released details of his health, though Biden alluded to Carter’s 2015 diagnosis of cancer and his subsequent recovery.
“I spent time with Jimmy Carter and he finally got (cancer), but they found a way that it took much longer than they expected because they found that I broke through” medically, Biden said in Rancho Santa Fe, California.
Biden, 80, and first lady Jill Biden Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, now 95, in Plains, Georgia, a few months after Biden, took office in 2021.
Biden was the first US senator in 1976 to urge President Carter to dissolve the Washington order. Later, Carter – then a former governor of Georgia – won the Democratic nomination.
Biden’s presidency represents something of a sea change and political approach to Carter, who served only one four-year term and lost to Republican Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980. Major Democrats held their ground after that. Carter, at least officially; decades after he left the White House.
But when humanitarian aid and popular support gained respect through the Carter Center, Democratic politicians flocked to South Georgia before the 2020 election cycle, and with the election of Biden, Carter once again had a close friend and partner in the Oval Office.
In 2007, Carter delivered a eulogy at the funeral of Republican Gerald Ford, the man he defeated to become president. Two acquaintances of the officers had met, the one who had survived was going to give a speech at the other’s funeral.
