I was just blown away that President Carter, one of the greatest human beings in the world, would call me and ask me to be his pastor,” said the Rev. Tony Lowden.

Perhaps Carter’s most revealing poem, “I Wanted to Share My Father’s World,” concerns the man who never got to see his namesake son’s achievements. He wrote that he despised Earl’s discipline, and swallowed hunger for “just a word of praise.”

Members of Congress, the Supreme Court and other dignitaries will gather at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday for a lying-in-state ceremony for former President Jimmy Carter.

Michael Tropp has met seven presidents and visited all 39 presidential gravesites. This presidential history buff just paid his respects to Jimmy Carter.

Joe Biden is the consummate Washington insider. Jimmy Carter was anything but. Yet the 46th and 39th U.S. presidents had a decades-long friendship starting when Biden, as a young Delaware lawmaker, became the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s outsider White House bid in 1976.

Jimmy Carter wrote many of his books at a log cabin in the north Georgia mountains, where he fished, hiked and was known to the locals as 'a regular guy.'

It’s the world’s most exclusive fraternity and, on Thursday, all five members of the so-called presidents club will gather to honor one of their own.

Numerous ordinary Americans visited the casket of former President Carter early Wednesday as his remains lie in repose at the U.S. Capitol.

“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."

Grandchildren Jason Carter and James Carter IV have continued the family's legacy, with Jason serving as chairman of The Carter Center’s board and James gaining attention for a pivotal video in the 2012 presidential race.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to pay their respects to a president. They were not going to miss it, even if meant waking up in the middle of the night.