Rosalynn Carter

First Lady

• Born: August 18, 1927
• Place of Birth: Plains, Georgia
• Died: November 19, 2023
• Place of Death: Plains, Georgia

First Lady Rosalynn Carter faced many challenges in her life. As the eldest of four children, she supported her mother emotionally after her father’s death. After marriage, Rosalynn helped her husband, Jimmy Carter, run his family’s peanut warehouse business. In 1976, before Carter was elected to the presidency, she campaigned with him. As First Lady (1977–81), she campaigned in his stead because fulfilling his presidential duties was more important to the president than stumping for a second term in office. Following their White House years, the Carters returned home to Plains, Georgia, where they were active in their community and church as well as in various charitable endeavors.

Early Life

Rosalynn Carter was the first of four children born to Allethea Murray Smith and Wilburn Edgar Smith. She was born Eleanor Rosalynn Smith in Plains, a small town in central Georgia. Her father owned and operated a small auto repair shop and also drove the school bus. Her mother had gone to college and held a teaching credential but, after her marriage, had stayed home and cared for her growing family. The family lost their savings when the Plains bank failed in 1926.

As a child, Carter loved reading books, played games with her brothers and their friends, and sometimes hiked to Magnolia Springs and swam in the spring-fed pool. Her chores included making beds, churning their cow’s milk into butter, sweeping the porch, and washing and drying the dishes. She also participated enthusiastically in church services, Sunday school, Bible school, and Methodist Youth League, and excelled in school.

In the summer of 1939, her father, Wilburn, became very ill. Neighbors and friends helped the family during her father’s illness. Lillian Carter, a local visiting nurse, came each day to give shots to Wilburn. After a long illness, he died of leukemia at the age of forty-four. Her mother, Allethea, was thirty-four, and Rosalynn, the oldest child, was just thirteen. Less than a year later, her maternal grandmother died, and her grandfather moved into town to live with them. The family only had her father’s insurance of $18.25 a month on which to live, so she helped her mother sew for people in the community. Her mother also found jobs working in the school lunchroom, as a clerk in the grocery store, and later as a clerk in the post office. She won a place on the girls’ basketball team and worked part-time at a local beauty shop.

Carter was valedictorian of her senior class and, fulfilling her father's dream, enrolled at Georgia Southwestern College in the nearby town of Americus. She would have liked to attend a school farther from home, but family finances dictated her decision.

Marriage and Family

In the years after her father died, Rosalynn also became close friends with Lillian Carter's daughter Ruth. Her son Jimmy was then away at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Ruth, seeing that Rosalynn was enamored of a picture of Jimmy on her bedroom wall, contrived to bring the two together. Soon Rosalynn and Jimmy were dating and corresponding regularly while Jimmy was away at Annapolis. When he asked her to marry him that December, however, she turned him down. She had promised her father that she would get a college education. She was just in her first year at Georgia Southwestern and planned to transfer to Georgia State College for Women, where her mother had studied, after two years. At seventeen, Rosalynn felt too young and naïve for marriage, and they agreed to wait. In February, however, she visited Annapolis with his parents on a holiday weekend, and when he proposed again, she accepted. They were married on July 7, 1946.

The Carters' first home together was in Norfolk, Virginia. Her husband was assigned duty testing new navigation radar communications and gunnery equipment. He was gone most weekdays and then had duty aboard ship one other night when it was docked. Carter consequently learned how to handle finances, deal with contractors, and cook. She soon became pregnant and gave birth to John "Jack" William Carter on July 3, 1947.

When her husband was selected for submarine school, they moved to New London, Connecticut. While living there in the students’ quarters, Carter enjoyed the fellowship of the navy wives and also studied Spanish with a young Peruvian couple. Next, the Carters went to Hawaii for one and one-half years. Their second son, James Earl Carter III, was born in Hawaii. When war began in Korea, her husband’s submarine was assigned to San Diego, California. Carter and their two young sons flew to San Diego, where they stayed in a rented apartment in a rundown section of town. Another move took them back to New London, where her husband was assigned to a small new submarine. He later applied for entrance into the nuclear submarine program headed by Admiral Hyman Rickover. He was accepted, and the family moved to Schenectady, New York, where the nuclear submarine’s reactor was being built.

At that time, Carter's father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer, and her husband returned to Plains. While there, he listened to people tell of the help his father had given them. He also learned that his father was counting on him to look after his younger brother, his mother, and the family peanut warehouse business. He decided that he should leave the navy and return to Plains permanently. Carter, who liked being a navy wife, did not want to return. However, her husband was determined, and his will prevailed.

Carter was very unhappy at first. Because they had so little money, they moved into a government housing project. She refused to join the other wives and children in the courtyard of the housing project; she did not want to fit in. Her mother remonstrated, telling her that the neighbors worried about her because she stayed in so much. After a while, Carter began to make an effort to talk with the other women. She and her husband began to attend church again and renewed old friendships. In 1954, the couple faced financial hardship, as the farmers’ crops failed due to drought, and they could not repay credit that had been extended to them.

In the spring of 1955, Carter began working in the peanut warehouse answering the telephone, invoicing customers, working on the accounts, and paying the bills. That year the Carters had a good harvest, and the family worked hard from August to October weighing, grading, and storing peanuts before loading them onto trucks to be transported out of Plains. They rented an old, unheated house and barns on the edge of Plains.

Carter joined the Baptist Church, where her husband became a deacon, and taught Sunday school. She joined the PTA, the Garden Club, and the board of a small theater group. She was the den mother for a Cub Scout pack. She attended their sons’ basketball games and sent them off to swimming lessons, continued helping out at the warehouse, and studied accounting on her own so that she could keep their books. She and her husband also enjoyed golf and dancing, took the family camping, and vacationed in Cuba, New Orleans, Florida, and Mexico.

When the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that public schools should be desegregated, the Carters supported integration in their hometown, but they found that their stance was not particularly popular. Their views were shaped by their experiences in the navy, where they had seen that integration worked, and they felt that their neighbors and friends were being unrealistic in opposing its extension to the schools of Plains. Jimmy Carter was pressured to join the White Citizens Council, but he refused. The Carters were then told that if they did not join, their business would be boycotted, but except for a few individuals, the threatened boycotts did not develop.

Supporting Political Ambition

Carter's husband decided to run for the state senate. She managed the warehouse while he went from county to county campaigning, and also worked the phones with friends and relatives, urging people to vote for her husband. After her husband found and gathered evidence of voting fraud in the neighboring county on primary day, a new election was called, which he won. When her husband went to Atlanta for the legislative session, Carter received threats from the political boss of the neighboring county where the fraud had occurred. She feared that their home or business might be destroyed.

When Carter's husband decided to run for governor in 1966, the family again pulled together to campaign. Carter traveled across the state of Georgia, campaigning for her husband and giving interviews to the local press. That year, however, her husband was defeated. Although he did not officially announce his candidacy, he immediately began preparing for his next bid. The Carters recorded the names and addresses of possible supporters, wrote out standard letters to send, and began working on speeches.

Carter kept the files and clipped news items she thought he should read. During the two years before the election, he was out speaking somewhere almost every night. Carter resumed campaigning the year before the election. Carter would get up before dawn to meet with policemen, firemen, maintenance crews, or garbage collectors as they gathered before work. She searched for crowds at football and basketball games, livestock sales, tobacco barns, rodeos, and horse shows. She stood in front of stores, handing out brochures and asking people to support her husband. After one humiliating episode, she also learned how to give speeches. She wrote out a small speech, memorized it, and gave that speech at small coffees and receptions.

Carter's husband won the election. The Carters visited the governor’s mansion in Atlanta and attended a conference for newly elected governors in North Carolina. Both of these trips helped prepare Carter for her role as the governor’s wife. According to a family story, though, her mother-in-law believed that she could not perform the duties of a First Lady. When they moved into the governor’s mansion, her mother-in-law went along too and announced that she would act as First Lady since Carter lacked the sophistication to do it. Carter told her mother-in-law that she was welcome to visit but that she wanted to run her own household. She even suggested that it might be better if her mother-in-law returned home and came back later when things were more settled. After that, her mother-in-law came occasionally for visits, and Carter became known as a gracious and capable host and as someone who was concerned and active in a number of statewide issues.

Carter hired competent staff, a housekeeper, and a personal assistant, and trained prisoners to cook and wait on tables. She convinced the state police to maintain a less obvious presence at the mansion and to wear plain clothes when they accompanied the Carter family away from home. The governor’s mansion was open to tourists four days a week and was also used as a place for special receptions for a number of groups, such as seniors, students, children with intellectual disabilities, and garden clubs.

Carter became an active member of the Governor’s Commission to Improve Services to the Mentally and Emotionally Handicapped. She worked one day a week at the Georgia Regional Hospital, visited the other state hospitals, and reported her findings to the commission. She also worked with the Women’s Prison Committee of the Commission on the Status of Women.

Presidential Campaign

When Carter's husband decided to run for the presidency, Carter began campaigning for him nearly a year before the primaries. She began in Florida, then visited Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the remaining New England states. By November 1976, Carter had campaigned in forty-two states. She attended coffees, teas, receptions, luncheons, and dinners. She answered questions about mental health, education, prison reform, and reorganization of government. She also worked at raising money to finance the campaign, calling potential donors.

The Carters also received assistance from the Peanut Brigade, a group of volunteers, mostly from Georgia, who paid their own way and traveled all over the country, telling voters about Jimmy Carter. For example, they came to New Hampshire a month before the primary election to knock on doors and hand out campaign brochures. Jimmy Carter won the Democratic primary there. He lost the Massachusetts primary but won in Florida.

The Carters gained enough votes from the primaries to be certain they could win the Democratic presidential nomination at that year's convention in New York City. A number of earlier contenders said they would release their delegates to cast their votes for Jimmy Carter. The Democratic National Convention was followed by three months of intense campaigning. Carter campaigned all over the United States, accompanied by her assistant and usually flying in a chartered airplane. Again, her husband won the election.

Ahead of the inauguration, her husband invited Democratic senators and representatives, potential cabinet members, and others to meet with him in Plains. Carter, her mother, her assistant, and two daughters-in-law provided meals and refreshments to their distinguished visitors.

Presidency and First Ladyship

On the day of Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, he rode in a limousine beside President Gerald R. Ford to the ceremony at the Capitol; Rosalynn and Betty Ford followed in the second car. Following the inauguration and lunch at the Capitol, Jimmy, Rosalynn, and their children broke with tradition and, instead of riding back to the White House in cars, they walked along the route. Holding hands, with their youngest child between them, the Carters walked, waving and smiling at the cheering crowds. Their walk was broadcast nationally and marked the beginning of a new administration.

As they settled in at the White House, Carter found that she had many things to discuss with her husband, such as decisions about White House guests, invitations, and answers to letters. He suggested that she arrange to lunch with him one day a week so that he would not be faced with matters at the end of a long working day, when he had to deal with weightier problems. The Carters continued to discuss matters of varied importance. She found that it was easier for her to learn about people’s problems than it was for him. He was always surrounded by officials, while she could still meet and talk with individuals about their concerns, whether they were the special problems of the elderly, high fuel costs in the North, or raising children in the inner cities. In her own words, she gave her husband a “firsthand report of the attitudes and needs of people in our country.” Carter and their sons also acted as sounding boards when he was trying to think through a particular issue.

The Carters did argue about political timing. There were a number of instances when she wanted him to postpone addressing controversial issues until a second term, such as the Panama Canal treaties, Middle East policies, or energy policy. He would say that it was more important to do what needed to be done than to win a second term as president.

Carter had a staff of twenty-one people to plan and carry out all official and social White House functions. They were responsible for arranging the details of teas, receptions, luncheons, state dinners, ceremonies on the White House lawn, lectures, and briefings by the president, vice president, and cabinet members, and for coverage by the press at these events. They were also in charge of sending out information on the White House and its history.

In addition, Carter and her staff worked on her special projects, such as setting up the President’s Commission on Mental Health, putting together a task force to inventory federal programs for the elderly, and making a list of qualified women for federal appointments. Finally, they were responsible for handling the mail addressed to the family. They received nearly eleven thousand letters each month. Carter spent endless hours autographing photographs and always had a stack of photos waiting for her signature at her desk.

Carter also attended cabinet meetings. Her husband had suggested that she attend so that she would know what was going on as well as the reasons behind the decisions that were being made. She took notes occasionally if there was something she wanted to ask him about, but she usually sat quietly in the background and never participated in the discussions.

In June 1977, Carter visited seven countries in Latin America. She spent two months preparing for the trip, attending briefing sessions, practicing her Spanish, and reviewing materials on Latin America. Although some members of Congress opposed her going, saying that Latin Americans would not appreciate a female envoy, she was well received. She was accompanied by State Department representatives, secretaries, and Secret Service agents. Also along were twenty-seven members of the press. Carter spent a number of hours with government leaders at each stop. She presented her husband’s policies on issues such as trade, human rights, and arms sales. She took notes on the concerns expressed by those she spoke with and carried those concerns back to her husband and the State Department.

Among the many who visited the White House during the Jimmy Carter administration, a few guests stand out. When the planned visit of Pope John Paul II to the United States was announced, thousands of people wrote to ask if they could be invited to the reception for him, which ultimately expanded across both lawns of the White House.

In September 1978, other important visitors arrived: Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. They had been invited to attend a meeting at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, in the hope that they might be able to reach an accord between their two nations. President Carter hoped that these talks might lead to peace in the Middle East. Carter had become friendly with the two men’s wives, who were also invited; it was hoped that including the wives at the meeting would lead to a more relaxed atmosphere. Living accommodations were arranged to facilitate discussions. The Sadats were assigned to one cabin, the Begins to another, and the Carters stayed in a third, all within one hundred yards of one another. Each leader brought his own advisers and secretaries, who stayed in buildings a little farther away.

Carter worked on an international call to prayer, along with her husband's prayer group and press secretary Jody Powell. was at Camp David during most of the deliberations and was one of the few people with whom her husband could discuss the problems of the meetings. She also represented her husband at a number of scheduled events at the White House, as he was so deeply involved in the Camp David negotiations. When the negotiations successfully arrived at a peace treaty that the Israeli and Egyptian leaders both agreed to sign, Carter and her staff invited the cabinet members and the Egyptian and Israeli embassies’ personnel to the White House for the formal signing of the treaty, ending thirty-one years of hostility between the two nations.

The year after this foreign policy triumph brought international crises. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and President Carter led the United States in withdrawing from the coming 1980 Moscow Olympics. He also declared an embargo on shipments of grain to the Soviets.

Also in 1979, Iranian militants invaded the American Embassy in Tehran and captured sixty-five Americans, holding them hostage and demanding the return of deposed Iranian leader Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi for trial. After the Iranian Revolution, the shah had left Iran to come to the United States for medical treatment. President Carter refused the terrorists’ demands and imposed sanctions against Iran, which initially won him widespread support in the United States. At that time, he announced his intention to run for reelection in 1980.

Because her husband said that he was needed in Washington, DC, to deal with these crises, Carter tried to fill his place on the campaign trail. She campaigned around the country for two or three days each week. It was she who had to face angry farmers in Iowa who feared that the Soviet grain embargo would hurt them. As she campaigned around the United States, she was asked many times about the hostages in Iran. She and her husband were both frustrated by the situation; diplomatic measures had not secured the hostages’ release. She met with the families of the hostages, one of whom suggested that people tie yellow ribbons around trees to symbolize their longed-for return. Carter tied one around a tree on the White House lawn. People around the United States also tied ribbons on trees.

Popular opinion was shifting, though: People began to ask why the president was not taking stronger action. When US intelligence information indicated that no release of hostages was in sight, his administration attempted a military rescue operation to free them. The operation failed tragically, with the deaths of eight volunteer rescue team members in a helicopter crash. The hostages did come home; ironically, they were released on January 20, 1981, the day Jimmy’s successor, Ronald Reagan, was sworn in as president.

Legacy

Rosalynn Carter opened new paths for future presidents’ wives by assuming a major role as First Lady. She was used to acting as her husband’s partner, and she frequently substituted for him at ceremonial occasions and advised him on policy matters and political strategy. She served as hostess at the White House, a traditional role, but also as hostess at Camp David during the negotiations between leaders of Israel and Egypt. She was also a major campaigner in all of Jimmy’s electoral contests.

Jimmy Carter’s defeat in the election of 1980 was very difficult for her to accept, but in subsequent years, she and her husband engaged in a variety of activities. They moved back to Plains and remained active in their town and church as well as in Habitat for Humanity housing projects. In 1982, the Carters founded the Carter Center in Atlanta, a nonprofit public policy center dedicated to fighting disease and poverty, promoting human rights, and educating people worldwide. Both Carters served on the center’s board of trustees until 2005.

The Carters both wrote accounts of their lives. Rosalynn Carter’s book, First Lady from Plains (1984), was well received. More books followed, some written with her husband and others by herself. A long-time advocate for promoting positive changes in mental health care, she published Helping Someone with Mental Illness: A Compassionate Guide for Family, Friends, and Caregivers (with Susan K. Golant, 1999), and Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis (with Susan K. Golant and Kathryn E. Cade, 2010). For the latter, she went on a national book tour to promote her book and spread its key messages about mental health, such as the fact that prisons are often the sole institutional source of mental health care.

Carter won several honors and awards for her volunteer work and advocacy. Both she and her husband were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton in August 1999. In 2001 she was presented with an honorary doctorate from Georgia Southwestern State University for work she did with the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Human Development on campus. For her work in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, among other achievements, Carter was named to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2001 and inducted in 2002. In 2003 the University of California, San Francisco, presented her with the UCSF Medal, for her many years of prominent work advocating for mental health reform. In December 2020, the US House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution to honor her dedication towards improving the treatment of mental illnesses in US health care for several decades.

Staunch advocates for affordable housing, the Carters continued to participate in Habitat for Humanity housing projects across the US and Canada throughout the 2010s. In October 2014, the Carters announced that the Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter Habitat Work Project would work with thousands of volunteers to build shelters for 100,000 Nepali families by 2016. In 2019, the Carters attended one of their last Carter Work Projects and helped build twenty-one homes in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 1984 and 2019, the Carters visited fourteen countries and worked with over 104,000 volunteers to help build and repair over four thousand houses.

Carter also spent several decades working at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she continued her advocacy for mental health services, among other principal issues of interest. As part of her efforts toward advancing mental health services and awareness in the US, from 1985 until 2016, she hosted the annual Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy, an annual conference between national leaders centered around various mental health topics. She conducted several conferences at Emory University's campus before she later brought the annual Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy to the Carter Center. She also served as a distinguished fellow in Emory University’s women's studies department for nearly thirty years until her departure in 2018. During her time at Emory University, she helped advocate for butterfly conservation and cofounded the Rosalynn Carter Butterfly Trail and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Pollinator Garden to foster pollinator-friendly habitats; as of 2023, the Rosalynn Carter Butterfly Trail helped create over three thousand gardens for butterflies and other key pollinators.

In August 2015 Jimmy Carter announced that he had been diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, which had been found in his liver and brain. When asked which of his achievements made him most proud, he said that it was marrying Rosalynn. “That’s the pinnacle of my life.” In 2019, the Carters became the longest-married presidential couple in US history. They celebrated seventy-seven years of marriage in 2023.

On May 30, 2023, the Carter Center announced Mrs. Carter's dementia diagnosis. She died on November 19, 2023, two days after it had been announced that she had entered hospice care. At age ninety-six, Rosalynn Carter became one of the longest-lived first ladies in US history at the time of her death, second to Bess Truman, who died at age ninety-seven in 1982.

Bibliography

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Carter, Jimmy, and Rosalynn Carter. Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life. U of Arkansas P, 1995.

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Carter, Rosalynn, and Susan K. Golant. Helping Someone with Mental Illness: A Compassionate Guide for Family, Friends, and Caregivers. Times Books, 1998.

“Rosalynn Carter Biography.” National First Ladies’ Library, archive.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=40. Accessed 6 Aug. 2024.

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Westfall, Sandra Sobieraj. “Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter: A Love Story.” People, 20 Oct. 2014, pp. 70–75.