Look at their faces — formal, etched with experience, laden with the weight of momentous decisions. Add up their years: 379 to be exact, enough time to take you back into the mid-1600s, when the notion of the American nation was still more than a century away.
Consider why they were there: to bid farewell to a member of their fraternity who was the last of his generation and whose own life began just a few years after World War I's ashes stopped smoldering.
Bill Clinton. George W. Bush. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. Joe Biden.
Inside Washington National Cathedral on Thursday, the five men who have occupied the Oval Office since 1993 convened for a rare moment together at Jimmy Carter's state funeral. In that one act, they created a momentary timeline of American history, a strand that connects them to the Roosevelts, to Lincoln and to Washington, the first of them. Visible right next to the five, too, were four people who were a heartbeat away from the same position — Dan Quayle,Al Gore, Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, the current vice president.
The three coequal branches of the American government were designed to transcend just one person. Yet somehow, with our love of big personalities and our elevation of the individual, the president of the United States became a different breed entirely — an amalgam of person and office that now occupies a space in the culture like no other.
The American presidency is draped in ritual. ''Hail to the Chief'' is played when a president enters an official event. People stand when a president comes into the room. A protective cocoon envelopes a president's every move. Speeches are given behind a presidential seal. The office confers an aura that continues up until the moment of an elaborate, dayslong memorial.
That aura — and the fact that many have hardly been ideological kindred spirits — is what makes images like those at Carter's service so extraordinary.
Yet it's not merely that these are the fellow citizens who led Americans through the Kosovo war, through the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq War, through the rise of the internet and economic calamities, climate change and pandemic. It's not that, adore them or despise them, they rose to the lead the nation and did consequential things — positive and negative — in Americans' name.
