2025-01-08
10 分钟It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to pay their respects to a president. They were not going to miss it, even if meant waking up in the middle of the night.
Hi, my name is Rick Rojas.
I'm the Atlanta bureau chief for the New York Times.
A few weeks ago, at the end of December, Jimmy Carter,
our nation's oldest former president, died at the age of 100 at his home in Plains, Georgia.
The moment he died, plans that had been worked on for decades went into motion.
A Carter center official told me
that the earliest planning document that they could find actually came from 1986.
Once you become a president, a part of you always belongs to the people.
There is this expectation when a president dies that the people that voted for him,
the people that supported him,
the people that were represented by him,
feel like they have a chance to be a part of this national moment of mourning.
That act of being able to come and publicly mourn is known as lying in repose.
There is a long tradition of public mourning in this country, particularly in Atlanta.
There were the funerals for Martin Luther King after his assassination in 1968.
Most recently, you had John Lewis, who died in 2020,
and he lied and stayed at the state Capitol here.
So for me, as the Atlanta bureau chief covering President Carter and his legacy,
being prepared for this moment has been something I've worked on for the past five years.
For this story I'm about to read for you, I spent the night at the Carter Presidential Library,