The surviving Carter family includes more than 30 people and they have traveled between Georgia and Washington to honor Mr. Carter’s life.
Three grandsons — Josh Carter, James Carter and Jason Carter — are the only family members who spoke during the service at the National Cathedral in Washington. Jason Carter, who frequently spoke publicly on behalf of the family, offered a tribute. Josh Carter also gave a tribute, and James gave a reading.
Mr. Carter is survived by the four children from his long marriage to Rosalynn Carter, who died on Nov. 19, 2023, at age 96.
Amy Carter, 56, is perhaps the best known of the Carter children, because she was still a young child during her father’s presidential campaign and time in the White House. (Her brothers — John William, now 76, who is known as Jack; James Earl III, 74, who is known as Chip; and Donnel Jeffrey, 71, who is known as Jeff — were all in their 20s.)
The four children attended the funeral services in Washington and are expected to do so in Plains, along with their spouses and Mr. Carter’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
The Carter family has also been accompanied by Ms. Carter’s sister, Lillian Allethea Smith Wall, Mr. Carter’s personal pastor, and a few longtime family staff members.
Here are brief profiles of Mr. Carter’s children and two grandsons who spoke at his funeral service.
Jason Carter, grandson
The son of Jack Carter, Jason Carter is the chairman of the Carter Center, the nonprofit founded by his grandfather after leaving the White House, and is a partner at an Atlanta law firm. He is the first descendant of Mr. Carter to follow him into Georgia politics: He was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee in the 2014 governor’s race, and he served in the State Senate from 2010 to 2015.
Josh Carter, grandson
The son of Jeff Carter, he worked as a project manager and engineer for Coca-Cola and Lockheed Martin. He has also hosted a sporadic podcast called “Unchanging Principles,” about his family and the work of his grandparents. He helped start a foundation devoted to very early onset inflammatory bowel disease, a rare gastrointestinal ailment in children, which his son was diagnosed with.
Jack Carter, son
John William Carter, known as Jack, is the oldest son of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. He worked in finance and moved to Las Vegas in the early 2000s, where he mounted a failed 2006 bid for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, challenging a Republican incumbent.
Chip Carter, son
James Earl Carter III, who goes by Chip, is his second son. He worked in the family’s peanut business and his father’s political campaigns. He also served on the Plains City Council. Willie Nelson shared in a book and in interviews that he had smoked marijuana at the White House; the former president disclosed in a documentary that it was Chip Carter who smoked with Mr. Nelson. In a speech at the Carter Presidential Library on Saturday, Chip Carter said that, later in life, he grew closer to his parents and admired them even more. “The two of them together changed the world,” he said, “and it was an amazing thing to watch from so close.”
Jeff Carter, son
Donnel Jeffrey is his youngest son. He worked as a computing consultant and was a founder of a company, Computer Mapping Consultants. Josh Carter shared publicly last year that Jeff Carter had been diagnosed several years ago with Parkinson’s disease. One of his sons, Jeremy, died in 2015 of a heart attack.
Amy Carter, daughter
She is the couple’s youngest child and the most widely known from her childhood spent in the White House. She attracted attention after her father left the White House for her political activism, which included an arrest at the South African embassy while protesting apartheid. But for more than 30 years, she has been almost entirely withdrawn from the public stage. She did collaborate with her father on two books, which she illustrated: “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer,” a children’s book, and “Christmas in Plains.”
The post Jimmy Carter’s Large Family Honors the Former President appeared first on New York Times.
