MINNEAPOLIS — Former president Jimmy Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, died in 2021 but left behind a eulogy that his son Ted read at Carter’s memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington Thursday morning.
The eulogy — which Walter Mondale was believed to have written in 2015 after Carter, who was 90 years old at the time, announced he had brain cancer — touched on how some issues Carter and his Vice President faced were ahead of their time.
“The most was climate change. Yeah, I mean Carter staked his presidency on environmental regulation, on deregulation of industries, on conservation,” Ted Mondale said.
The eulogy also alluded to the relationship Carter and Walter Mondale shared post-presidency. Walter Mondale wrote that, “unlike a lot of vice presidents and their presidents, our relationship did not blow up.”
Read the full transcript of Walter Mondale’s eulogy below:
“Today we join in sadness to honor our dear friend, President Carter, for his extraordinary years of principled and decent leadership, his courageous commitment to civil rights and human rights. I think we all remember that day when then-Governor Carter made his famous inaugural address and for the first time a Georgia Governor called for a commitment to the traditions of Martin Luther King and for the decency that his leadership stood for over Dr. King’s lifetime.
“I was surprised when then-candidate Gov. Carter asked me to join him as his running mate in 1976. He amazed me then as he has every year since and following his presidency. He, of course, was brilliant, as we all know. He had a great sense of humor. While we had only 4 years in the White House, he achieved so much in that time. It stood as a marker for Americans dedicated to justice and decency. Today we come to say goodbye to our friend and to deeply thank his partner, Rosalynn, who is with us today. God bless you Rosalynn.
“Carter was a man of his word. I remember when we talked about his concept of the vice presidency. I told him that I would like to do it and I had only two requests. I wanted to make a real contribution and didn’t want to be embarrassed or humiliated as many of my predecessors had been in that office. He agreed, welcomed my full participation, directed his staff to treat me as they would him and, during our 4 years in the White House, he was very careful to protect me from the frustration and too often humiliation that had cursed the lives of many vice presidents. These were good years for Joan and me. Because of that, I want to thank the President for the good choices he made of his key personnel, key advisors and political leaders. We don’t have time to mention many of them but Stu Eizenstat comes as close as humanly possible to rivaling President Carter’s formidable work ethic. Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell were blessings every day during my time in the White House.
“One of the things that dawned on me during the course of our time together in the White House is how well we seemed to work together and how we seemed to understand each other and how, unlike a lot of vice presidents and their presidents, our relationship did not blow up. I think one ofthe realities was that Carter was a devout Christian who grew up, as we know, in a small town and was active in his faith for almost every moment of his life. I was also a small-town kid and I grew up in our small Methodist church where my Dad was the preacher and our faith was very basic to me as Carter’s faith was to him. That created a bond between us that allowed us to understand each other and to find ways to work together because ofour common commitment to our faith.
“Joan loved her time as the second lady and we have Jimmy and Rosalynn to thank for helping her champion the public arts while we were together and for being so kind to her. With his leadership, we created the model vice presidency, a real partnership between the President and the Vice President. Working together, we did change how my office acted to provide new levels of support to his presidency. We became very close friends. We often spent hours together throughout the day. We were working on real problems, not wasting time. That model vice presidency that Carter helped create has been followed in one way or another by later administrations of both parties. Our personal relationship we established while we were in office continued throughout our lives. He allowed me to take a leadership role on issues that never would have been allowed before. I worked in a central role in trying to bring decency to the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian boat people who were fleeing their countries. With President Carter’s orders, the boat people were picked up by our great Navy from their flimsy boats which were capsizing and took them to safety. Most became good American citizens working for a healthy and prosperous nation. Compare this to how we are tragically dealing with the crisis of immigrants today.
“Carter was farsighted. He put aside his short-term political interests to tackle challenges that demanded sacrifice to protect our kids and grandkids from harm one or two decades out. Very few people in the 1970’s had heard the term “climate change”. Yet Carter put his presidency on the line to pass laws to conserve energy, deregulate new oil and gas prices and invest in clean, renewable solar, wind and geothermal alternatives to fossil fuels. It wasn’t a perfect program but, thanks to Carter, U.S. energy consumption declined 10% between 1979 and 1983. In many ways, he laid the foundation for future presidents to come to grips with climate change. Some thought he was crazy to fight so hard to pass these bills, but he was dead right.
“All of us know President Carter elevated human rights to the top of his agenda but sometimes we forget how seriously he pushed to advance the rights of women. He proposed and signed the law extending the period for states to approve the Equal Rights Amendment, which now, finally, has been ratified by three quarters of the states. He appointed women to head the Departments of Commerce, Education, HEW and HUD. Women on his White House staff played crucial roles in developing his highest priority energy and environmental proposals and laws deregulating our oil and gas, trucking and airline industries. And he dramatically increased the ranks of female circuit and district court judges, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In all he appointed five times as many women to the federal bench as all of his predecessors combined.
“Two decades ago, President Carter said he believed income inequality was the biggest global issue. Two years ago, in a speech in Lynchburg, he said “I think now… it is the discrimination against women and girls in the world,” including the brutal killing of female infants, sexual abuse, human trafficking, honor killings and the rest. He concluded that, until the stubborn attitudes that foster discrimination against women change, the world cannot advance and poverty and income inequality cannot be solved.
“Amen!
“Toward the end of our time in the White House, the President and I were talking about how we might describe what we tried to do. We came up with this sentence which to me remains an important summary of what we were trying to do. “We told the truth, we obeyed the law and we kept the peace.” That we did, Mr. President. I will always be proud and grateful to have had the chance to work with you toward these noble ends. It was then and always will be the most rewarding experience of my public career.”
Walter Mondale’s wasn’t the only posthumous eulogy delivered at Carter’s state funeral. President Gerald Ford also wrote a eulogy for Carter before he died in 2006, which was read by his son Steven.