“Jimmy Carter was always an outsider ,” said biographer Jonathan Alter, explaining how Carter capitalized on the fallout of the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon. “The country was thirsting for moral renewal and for Carter, as this genuinely religious figure, to come in and clean things up."

Former President Jimmy Carter is being remembered in six days of state funeral events that began Saturday​ with a service at his boyhood home in Plains, Georgia.