“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."

The body of Jimmy Carter is being taken from his home state of Georgia to Washington DC, where the former US president will lie in state before a large state funeral. Carter died on 29 December, aged 100, in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.