The New Yorker:

During a week of funerals, supporters and loved ones reflect on the former President’s legacy. “He understood that the arc of history is long,” his grandson said.

By Charles Bethea

Some four thousand people, my mother and I among them, filled Atlanta’s historic Fox Theatre, in September, to celebrate Jimmy Carter’s centenary with a night of music, which the thirty-ninth President probably loved more than any other. Carter himself was in Plains, his home town. He’d watch a taping from hospice care, where he’d been already for the better part of two years. I imagined the amusement he might have felt as the evening’s events unfolded, some of which were surely unusual for a gathering to honor a former President: a few old guys vaping in the men’s room; a trippy light display onstage; a graying member of the B-52s inquiring, “Who’s ready to take a trip to the love shack?” (My mom’s hand shot up.) The former Atlanta Braves star Dale Murphy, the actress Renée Zellweger, the singer Angélique Kidjo, and the band Drive-By Truckers took the stage to appreciate Carter in word and song. Joe Biden did so onscreen, standing beside a White House portrait of Carter, who backed Biden’s first Senate run. In a taped tribute of his own, Jon Stewart marvelled at the manual labor Carter did, well into his nineties, with Habitat for Humanity. “There are people in the world who live in houses built by Jimmy Carter,” Stewart said. Another distinction: “This is the first time ever that people have come together to celebrate the hundredth birthday of an American President,” Jason Carter, one of Jimmy’s grandsons, told the crowd. There seemed to be justice in it: the kindest President living longer than the rest.

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