The formidable Rosalynn Carter
I only saw Rosalynn Carter angry twice. Both occasions involved Ronald Reagan, who had crushed Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, and both reflected her passion and decency.
The first concerned a free public swimming pool in the Carters’ hometown, Plains, Georgia, that they built in the 1950s for the Lions Club. She recounted to me during an interview that when Reagan was president, local conservatives turned it into a whites-only private club. Reagan made people “comfortable with their prejudices,” she snapped.
The second related to the landmark Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, a major investment in community mental health centers that Mrs. Carter spearheaded with the help of her husband’s other archrival, Senator Edward Kennedy. Sitting in her office at the Carter Center in 2015, she grew upset as she described how Reagan defunded the ambitious program, leaving tens of thousands of people untreated. It took 30 years – until Obamacare – before federal funding for community mental health treatment centers was fully resurrected with her help.
Perhaps in death Mrs. Carter’s role as this country’s premier champion of mental health will finally be properly appreciated. It’s only one of the many unheralded accomplishments of a formidable and gracious woman who belongs in the first rank of influential first ladies.
Over nearly 80 years, the Carters forged the longest, closest and arguably most productive high-level political partnership in American history – more seamless than those between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt or Bill and Hillary Clinton because it lacked the personal drama of those marriages.
Although each agreed that the secret to a long, happy marriage was to spend some time apart, they did almost everything together – from learning to read the Bible in Spanish before bed to dodging gunfire in Africa after the presidency and fly fishing in Siberia when he was 90 and she was 88.
The Carters were married for 77 years, a distinction enjoyed by an estimated 1,000 or so American couples. But they knew each other for an astonishing 96 years, first meeting a few days after Rosalynn Smith was born in 1927 when Jimmy’s mother, the nurse who delivered Rosalynn, brought her toddler over to see the new baby.
On their first date in 1945, when Jimmy was a midshipman at the US Naval Academy, they went to a movie neither remembered. Nearly half a century later, Jimmy wrote a poem entitled “Rosalynn:”
I’d pay to sit behind her, blind to what was on the screen, and watch the image flicker upon her hair.
I’d glow when her diminished voice would clear my muddled thoughts, like lightning flashing in a gloomy sky.
Inside the White House, Mrs. Carter was the first presidential spouse with her own professional policy staff. In 1977, she assumed an unprecedented role as her husband’s personal envoy and forcefully confronted authoritarian heads of state in Latin America on their human rights abuses. She took action to combat age discrimination by working closely with the congressman Claude Pepper to loosen rules on mandatory retirement, which affected the careers of millions. And touched by the plight of the Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing communist Vietnam, among others, she persuaded her husband to more than double the number of refugees admitted from Southeast Asia.
Mr. Carter described their relationship as “like one person acting in concert.” Asked about his decision-making on foreign policy, he said that he confirmed his judgment with “Rosalynn, Cy” – Cyrus Vance, his secretary of state – “Zbig” – Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser – “and Ham” – Hamilton Jordan, his chief of staff. As the Time correspondent Hugh Sidey wrote in 1979, “Note the order.” On the domestic side, Mrs. Carter pushed her husband hard to appoint more women to important positions, and he did, naming five times as many women to the federal bench as all of his predecessors combined.