Rosalynn Carter spotted a photo on her best friend’s wall and thought the man in it was the most handsome she had ever seen. She asked Ruth Carter if she could take it home. The man was Ruth’s older brother, Jimmy.
“And she asked Ruth if she could take his photo home,” said Kate Anderson Brower, author of the book First Women. The pair went on their first date in 1945, when she was a student at Georgia Southwestern College and he was at the U.S. Naval Academy. They married the next year.
Rosalynn Carter died on Sunday, November 19, 2023, at home in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by family, the Carter Center said. She was 96. The center had announced two days earlier that she was in hospice care, and her family had said earlier in the year that she had dementia. Jimmy Carter, 99, has been in hospice care since February.
“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” the former president said in a statement. “As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”
A small town in the Depression
Born Eleanor Rosalynn Smith in 1927, she grew up in Plains, a rural town of fewer than a thousand people where church and school anchored daily life. She often said she never realized her family was poor, since few around her were well off. Her father was a farmer who also owned the county’s first auto shop. He died of cancer when she was 13, and as the oldest of four siblings she took on a caregiving role.
“She came from humble roots,” said Kathy Cade, a senior Carter Center official who worked beside her in the White House.
While Jimmy was in the Navy, she ran the household and raised their three young sons. A daughter, Amy, came later. After his father died in 1953 the couple went home to Plains and took over the family peanut farm in Sumter County. That partnership turned political when he ran for the Georgia state Senate in 1962, and he became governor in 1970.
She felt overwhelmed in the governor’s mansion at first. “In the beginning it was very stressful, but she quickly adapted,” Cade said.
Campaign trail and the White House
When her husband ran for president, Carter campaigned across the country for almost two years. She was shy and nervous speaking in public, but according to Brower she worked “tirelessly” to introduce a man few outside Georgia knew. Her trick was to find the tallest antenna in any town. “That was the TV or radio station,” Brower said, “and she would go there with a list of questions she wanted them to ask her.”
As first lady from 1977 to 1981, she sat in on Cabinet meetings and was only the second first lady to testify before Congress. She was the first presidential spouse to carry a briefcase to the office every day. The press nicknamed her the “Steel Magnolia.” Her husband’s closest political adviser, she pushed the role well past hostess duties.
Her top priority was mental health. It grew out of her campaigning across Georgia, where she heard from families with relatives in trouble and few community services to turn to, especially for children. State hospitals and institutions had a reputation for mistreating patients. As Georgia’s first lady she urged her husband to set up a governor’s commission on mental health, which drew up an influential plan to move treatment out of large institutions and into community centers.
She framed care as “a basic human right.” In 1980 President Carter signed the Mental Health Systems Act, which provided grants to community clinics. “She really began the effort in this country to modernize mental health care,” Cade said.
After the White House
The 1980 election loss sent the Carters home to what they called an “involuntary retirement.” Cade said Rosalynn believed her husband was the best person for the job and “that there was still work to be done.” Fixing up the house in Plains kept her busy. “We’d been gone 10 years from home,” she told NPR in 1987.
The couple founded the Carter Center, which worked to nearly eradicate Guinea worm disease in parts of Africa and Asia and monitored elections worldwide. In 1999 President Bill Clinton gave them the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying they had done “more good things for more people in more places than any other couple on the face of the Earth.” In 2019 they became the longest-married presidential couple, and they marked 75 years together two years later.
President Joe Biden and Jill Biden remembered the “hope, warmth and optimism” of the former first lady. George W. and Laura Bush called her “a woman of dignity and strength.”
The Carters had four children, 12 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. Asked once how she wanted to be remembered, Rosalynn Carter said: “I would like for people to think I took advantage of the opportunities I had and did the best I could.”
