PLAINS, Ga. — In the spring of 1955, Rosalynn Carter was doing what she had sworn to avoid when she married an ambitious Navy officer: keeping house and raising children in the same small town where they grew up.
Then Jimmy Carter enlisted the help of his family’s peanut farm warehouse. The future American president couldn’t make it on his own and they had no money to hire staff. So his wife gathered their sons and answered the company phone. Soon she was managing finances and dealing with customers.
Before long, “on paper I knew more about the company than he did, and he would take my advice on things,” Rosalynn Carter told The Associated Press ahead of their 75th anniversary in 2021.
Their marriage was almost a decade old when she went to the warehouse, but that was perhaps the real beginning of a partnership that won the governorship of Georgia in 1970, the White House in 1976 and then propelled the Carters for four decades as global humanists . At the heart of that path was a small-town love story that spanned 77 years of marriage and 20 years of family friendships before that.
Their journey together ended on November 19 with the death of Rosalynn Carter at the age of 96. The former president, now 99, was with her when she died at their home in Plains, where they lived all their lives, except for his college and university building. Navy years, one term as governor, and their White House years from 1977-81.
“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” Jimmy Carter said in a statement released after her death by The Carter Center, which they co-founded in 1982 after leaving Washington. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew someone loved and supported me.”
It is not known whether the 39th president, who is largely confined to a wheelchair and hospital bed during his 10th month in hospice care, will attend the tributes that begin Monday. Those close to the family say they expect him to make every effort, especially for the final services: an invitation-only funeral on Wednesday in Plains and a private burial in a plot the couple will eventually share.
“It’s hard to think of one without the other,” said Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend who saw the couple often during Rosalynn Carter’s final months.
Rosalynn Carter often campaigned separately from her husband to expand their reach: “If I go with Jimmy, I’ll just sit there,” she once said. “I can spend my time better.”
As president, Jimmy Carter sent her abroad as an official diplomat. She attended cabinet meetings and discussed what she heard with him at the residence. They avoided dancing with others at White House dinners and had late-night phone calls when traveling separately.
After the presidency, they built The Carter Center together. They met with world leaders, oversaw elections and fought diseases in developing countries. Sometimes she took notes, other times she spoke. There are remote villages in the more than 145 countries they visited where children, many of whom are now adults, were named Jimmy, Rosalynn or Carter.
They read the Bible together every night, even over the phone, a habit that continued as they grew older. Sometimes they read aloud in Spanish to maintain proficiency in their second language even after their international travel diminished. And they held hands often: at home, at church, as they walked down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day in 1977, and as she lay on her deathbed in the house they built before his first legislative election in 1962.
“We are not going to sleep with some remaining differences between us,” the former president told AP in 2021.
The couple’s parents were neighbors in the mid-1920s. Lillian Carter, a nurse, delivered Eleanor Rosalynn Smith and a few days later brought young Jimmy Carter back to the Smith home to meet the baby. The couple’s earliest memories came after the Carters moved to a farm outside the city and Rosalynn became a close friend of Ruth Carter, Jimmy’s younger sister.
By the time he was at the US Naval Academy, Ruth was working as a matchmaker. Rosalynn said she first “fell in love with Jimmy’s picture” hanging in Ruth’s bedroom. When he returned home from Annapolis in the summer of 1945, Jimmy agreed to a picnic with his sister and her friend, and then with Rosalynn. Jimmy kissed her after a movie and the next morning he told his mother he was marrying Rosalynn Smith.
“I’d never had a guy kiss me on a first date,” Rosalynn remembers.
Yet she saw the seeds of something deeper than teenage romance. Usually shy, she found she could “talk to him, really talk to him.” Teasing and flirting turned into letters to and from Annapolis, and then his proposal. She turned it down and told him that she had promised her father, who had died in 1940, that she would finish college.
After both graduated, they married on July 7, 1946.
Jimmy Carter was a newlywed in love and wrote in poetry that his wife’s beauty silenced songbirds. But he did not consider her a true equal, indeed decades later he attributed that attitude to the social and religious mores of the time.
Rosalynn Carter dreamed of becoming an architect, but saw her husband’s naval career as a way to escape country life. Neither planned to return to Plains, but when James Earl Carter Sr. died in 1953, his eponymous son resigned to move his family back to Georgia, where he took over the family farm. Jimmy Carter didn’t ask his wife. He remembered six decades later how “cool” she was to him for months. The dynamics only fully thawed when she emerged as an indispensable business partner.
The future president still did not consult his wife when he launched his first political campaign. In that case, however, she was on board and excited about his prospects. After he took his Senate seat in Atlanta, she recognized the nature of their combination.
“I was more of a political partner than a political wife, and I never felt squeezed,” she said of staying behind in Plains to run the business and care for their children. “I only had to call him home once, when one of our old brick warehouses collapsed, spilling hundreds of tons of peanuts onto the street.”
As her husband ran for governor, she reported to him what voters told her, beginning her half-century of advocacy for better mental health treatment in America.
On the presidential trail, she was able to guide him more effectively than his aides. “Jimmy, don’t go into so much detail or use such big words,” she told him. “Just explain it to them the way you explain it to me.”
White House adviser Stuart Eizenstat said the former first lady had “creepy political instincts.”
The high points of their political lives formed what family and close friends remember as a bond that thrived not only on mutual respect but also on competitiveness.
“My grandparents were notoriously competitive in everything,” says eldest grandson Jason Carter, now Carter Center board chairman.
They rushed to finish writing their next books or to beat the other in their later years at tennis, skiing or some other pursuit. Jason Carter laughed at the mountains of fish at the family’s mountain cabin as one showed off his superior catch only to be outdone by the other.
‘How many did she catch? How big were they?” Stuckey recalled the former president asking her one day as she bounced between the two at the edge of their pond in Plains. “I went back to Rosalynn and she said, ‘What did he say? How much does he have?’”
For the former first lady, it was all part of any healthy marriage.
“Jimmy and I are always looking for things to do together,” she told AP at age 93, but “each person needs some space. That’s really important.”
As their global footprint narrowed first to the US, then to the Carter Center campus in Atlanta, and finally to their home and the surrounding city, even that friendly competition gave way to two non-peers trying to care for each other .
“They could finish each other’s sentences,” Stuckey said of her many Saturday evening meals at the Carters’ table or with them at hers.
Chip Carter, the couple’s son who spent much of the past few months with his parents, told The Washington Post after his mother’s death that as she rapidly deteriorated in her final days, his father asked to be alone with his partner of almost eighty years. First, Jimmy Carter sat at her bedside in his wheelchair. Later, the hospice aides moved his bed to the foot of hers.
He stayed there until she was gone and then asked to be with his once shy bride again, just Jimmy and Rosalynn.
“They were never really alone during their time on this earth,” Jason Carter said. “They always had each other.”
