Five living presidents gathered at the service in Washington. They were a reminder of how much has changed in US politics

Heavy with honours, attended by all living US presidents, and swathed in public affection, Jimmy Carter received a solemn state funeral on Thursday on the kind of cold and crystalline January day at which Washington DC’s climate can excel. Within hours, though, the 39th US president’s remains were interred in a private ceremony alongside his wife Rosalynn, in the shadow of the modest house they built in 1961 in Plains, Georgia, where Mr Carter was born more than a century ago, and where he died at the end of December.

This sharp juxtapositions of Mr Carter’s final day in the world’s eye were somehow appropriate. He made his home in Washington for the four years of his presidency, but his roots and heart were always in Georgia. His manifest personal decency and lack of Beltway experience made him the “not-Nixon” that the US needed after Watergate. Yet after a presidency marked by spiralling oil prices and the Iran hostage debacle, America quickly turned to a “not-Carter” candidate in the shape of Ronald Reagan.

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