Biden: Carter asked him to deliver eulogy

Former president entered hospice care last month.

In what might have been a slip of the tongue, President Joe Biden said Monday night that former President Jimmy Carter asked him to deliver his eulogy.

“He asked me to do his eulogy,” Biden said, at a fund- raiser in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. Biden then stopped him- self, adding: “Excuse me, I shouldn’t say that.” The Carter Center, Car- ter’s Atlanta-based nonprofit, declined to comment early Tuesday on Biden’s remarks.

The center announced last month that Carter, 98, had entered home hospice care in Plains.

Biden didn’t say Monday how long ago Carter asked him to deliver his eulogy.

Carter and Biden have enjoyed a relationship dating to when Biden was a first- term senator from Delaware in 1976. Biden endorsed Carter, then Georgia’s governor, as the Democratic presidential candidate, becoming one of the first elected officials outside the Peach State to back Carter.

Returning the favor in 2020, Carter endorsed Biden for president.

In 2021, Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter in Plains, a rural town of barely more than 500 residents.

In his speech Monday, which was covered by a White House press pool, Biden talked about his 25-year plan to cut the cancer death rate in half.

“I spent time with Jimmy Carter, and it’s finally caught up with him,” Biden said.

In the fall of 2015, Car- ter announced that he had several cancer spots that had spread to his brain. By December of that year, and after therapy, Carter announced in church that the spots were gone.