Presidents club convening to honor Jimmy Carter at contentious moment for the exclusive group

By Betsy Klein and Jeff Zeleny, CNN

Washington (CNN) — It’s the world’s most exclusive fraternity and, on Thursday, all five members of the so-called presidents club will gather to honor one of their own.

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are expected to attend the state funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, who died December 29.

It’s an exceedingly rare convening, and it will mark the first time all of the club’s living members will come face to face since the funeral of George H.W. Bush in December 2018.

Six years later, the group has a sharply fractured dynamic that will be closely watched at the Washington National Cathedral service. The former presidents have directly, and indirectly, spoken forcefully against Trump, who mounted a successful political comeback after his defeat four years ago and who in less than two weeks will return to the White House.

“Definitely in modern history — from Kennedy on — there hasn’t been a more contentious moment between these men,” said Kate Andersen Brower, the author of “Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump.”

Linked by the shared experience of having served in what one of their predecessors — William Howard Taft — once described as “the loneliest place in the world,” the five living American presidents will gather “at a funeral for a man who always stood a bit, figuratively, apart from them,” said Brower.

The presidents club, by nature, is complicated by past rivalries and future legacies. Those complications have only intensified as Trump, who has railed against all of his fellow presidents, is returning to the White House. Yet regardless of party, the members — so far, all men — are bound by the singular experience of serving in the Oval Office.

The long life of Jimmy Carter spanned 17 American presidents, an extraordinary stretch from Calvin Coolidge to Biden. At 100, he was the oldest living president — and longest-serving member of the presidents club, though he charted his own course during his 43 years after leaving the White House.

Fraught relationships

In death, Democrats and Republicans alike rushed to pay tribute to Carter’s legacy and the post-presidency example he set for decades.

But in life, Carter’s relationships with presidents were often more fraught, with Democrats like Clinton and Obama rarely seeking his guidance or publicly turning to him for fear of being too closely associated with a presidency that ended in defeat after one term.

In a tribute to Carter’s life last week, Obama highlighted a line from Carter’s 2002 Nobel Peace Prize speech: “God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace.”

Yet when Obama won his Nobel prize in 2009, which came as a surprise during his first year in office, he made no mention of Carter. He did, however, single out John F. Kennedy.

In 2014, Carter candidly said that Obama did not reach out to him during his presidency. Asked by NBC News whether Obama seeks his counsel, Carter said, “Unfortunately, the answer is no. President Obama doesn’t.”

He cited the Carter Center’s “strong and public position of equal treatment between the Palestinians and the Israelis” as a reason for his distance from Obama: “I think this was a sensitive area in which the president didn’t want to be involved.”

Some presidents leaned on Carter’s experience and advice, as well as his diplomatic abilities. But Carter didn’t shy away from using his platform to speak out against his successors when he felt it was warranted, sometimes causing them difficulties.

A reversal for Bush

Carter was critical of the George W. Bush administration, publicly lambasting the president and his handling of the Iraq War in a 2007 interview.

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, slamming Bush’s “overt reversal of America’s basic values.”

But Carter later offered Bush praise; at the 2013 opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, Carter extended his “admiration” to the 43rd president, heralding Bush for keeping his word and acting to end a 20-year civil war in Sudan.

The Clinton era

As president, Clinton took Carter up on an offer to help de-escalate tensions with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

“The use of President Carter to resolve this conflict proved complicated, when he announced an unofficial agreement with North Korea to bring an end to the stalemate on CNN before allowing the Clinton Administration officials to review the agreement,” the Clinton Library said in a brief history of their relationship.

Carter later joined a diplomatic team along with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia to help “avoid an armed conflict with the military leaders of Haiti,” the Clinton Library said.

But the two reportedly sparred when Carter “went on CNN before meeting Mr. Clinton for breakfast and a planned joint news conference,” according to The New York Times.

Clinton presented Carter with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 1999. Yet fresh tensions arose when Carter chose Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential race.

The Trump years

Carter was in touch with Trump and his administration multiple times during the president-elect’s first term.

In 2018, Carter said that he received a briefing on North Korea following Trump’s announcement of new sanctions on the country and that he’d be willing to travel to North Korea on the administration’s behalf, an offer Trump never took him up on. In 2019, Carter wrote Trump a letter on US-China trade relations and spoke with him by phone.

But the relationship deteriorated later that year when Carter called for a full investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and suggested it “would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election.” Carter later issued stark warnings about Trump’s decision to withhold funding from the World Health Organization amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump, for his part, called Carter a “nice man” and a “terrible president” during a G20 Summit news conference in June 2019.

In the days before and after Carter’s death, Trump railed against a pair of treaties Carter negotiated during his term regarding the Panama Canal.

In a news conference Tuesday, Trump went on an unprompted tangent criticizing Carter: “Giving the Panama Canal is why Jimmy Carter lost the election, in my opinion — more so, maybe, than the hostages,” he said, referring to the Iran hostage crisis.

Conceding that it’s “inappropriate” to discuss the Panama Canal in light of Carter’s death, Trump added, “It’s a bad part of the Carter legacy. He was a good man. Look, he was a good man. I knew him a little bit and he was a very fine person, but that was a big mistake.”

Trump extended warm condolences following Carter’s death in a formal statement describing the former president as “a truly good man” and “very consequential.” Days later, however, he took to social media to complain that flags on federal buildings would be at half-staff during his inauguration, a standard, monthlong procedure commemorating the death of an American president.

Biden’s loyalty

Carter, a child of the Great Depression, was the last president to routinely ask his fellow Americans to sacrifice. Whether turning down the heat and donning a sweater to limiting driving and gas consumption, Carter’s requests fell flat politically and created a caricature of a president from which his predecessors were eager to distance themselves.

In the height of the Great Recession, as the George W. Bush presidency ended and the Obama era began, Democrats in the West Wing were loath to seek Carter’s guidance or even mention his name. He was far more likely to be invoked by Republicans in a more disparaging and mocking tone.

But for Biden, there were no such reservations. He has long worn his love and loyalty to Carter on his sleeve, paying an early visit to the former president’s home in Plains, Georgia, and proudly reminiscing about how he was the first senator to endorse Carter’s improbable presidential candidacy.

“We believe being ‘right’ on the issues is not enough in 1976. Our nation and our party need a president who is not only right, but who has demonstrated ability to accomplish our common goals,” Biden and then-Sen. Birch Bayh wrote in a joint letter at the time, adding, “We believe that person is Jimmy Carter.”

Four years ago, Biden’s inauguration was the first one Carter had missed since his own swearing-in in 1977. His health was failing, but the relationship Carter had with Biden was the strongest he forged with any of his successors.

Biden is poised to make remarks Thursday during the state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral. In the waning days of his presidency, after decades of delivering tributes and send-offs, Biden will do something for the first time: eulogize a fellow member of the presidents club.

Carter’s legacy

With his successors and his predecessors, Carter marched to his own beat. He created relationships with some presidents — notably extending an olive branch early and often to Gerald Ford, whom he defeated in 1976 — while never forging a true connection with Ronald Reagan, to whom he lost in 1980.

Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, were slow to get over slights from official Washington — perceived or real — after they left the White House. Carter was the last to follow the Harry Truman model of not profiting from a post-presidency through paid speeches or other endeavors.

Chip Carter, the late president’s son, made a passing reference to the lingering sentiment of his parents as they returned home to Georgia and took control of forging their own legacy.

“Dad’s legacy from Georgia, the governor’s office, and from the presidency, was a little bit rough at the end of it because of our opposition and the way they framed us,” Chip Carter said Saturday in Atlanta, “which was probably somewhat true and somewhat not.”

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