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.

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

SPAN, former President Jimmy Carter gave a moment of levity on the future of The Carter Center upon his passing.

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.

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.”

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.

“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."

Hundreds of mourners gathered at the Carter Presidential Center on Monday night before President Jimmy Carter’s body is taken to Washington D.C.

Former President Jimmy Carter will lie here in repose under ceremonial guard 24 hours a day until 6 a.m. on Tuesday, so you can come at any time on Monday, day or night.

The state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter begins Saturday in his home state. Follow for updates on the motorcade from Plains to Atlanta

A florist, a musician and a reverend are among the people working behind the scenes at Washington National Cathedral to prepare for Jimmy Carter’s service.