Her decency and character should be our guiding star
She was a small-town girl from Georgia who, during her husband’s brief four years in the White House, became one of the most consequential first ladies in American history. She was, as well, a good and decent human being who, throughout her long life, was ever alert to opportunities for making the world a better place.
When Eleanor Rosalynn Smith Carter left this earth last Sunday at age 96, she left behind a nation facing a deeply consequential election, an election where issues of character, basic human decency and selfless commitment to public service are very much on the ballot. In the coming year, her exemplary life can serve as our touchstone as we assess candidates who offer themselves as decision-makers in our daily lives and in the life of the nation.
To be sure, it’s not all that easy to separate Rosalynn Carter from the political sphere. Beneath the soft-spoken Georgia drawl and the gentle demeanor evocative of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” character Melanie, she was ambitious, resolute and, as Jimmy Carter himself admitted, the more political of the two. Highminded and idealistic she may have been, but she also was a tireless campaigner and a deft tactician, alert to political advantage. There was a reason she was called the Steel Magnolia, a nickname she appreciated. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” the nation’s 39th president said in a statement. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”
Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter — at 99, the nation’s longest-living former president — knew each for 96 years. They first met when Jimmy’s mother, Lillian Carter, the nurse who delivered Rosalynn, brought her 3-year-old son over to see the new baby. The Carters were married for more than 77 years.
When her husband was elected president in 1976, she already had served as the first lady of Georgia — he had been elected governor in 1970 — so she had some notion of what the spouse of a chief executive could accomplish. With Eleanor Roosevelt as her role model, she resolved to focus her energy, attention and fame as first lady on public issues of consequence. Treatment of the mentally ill was foremost.
She recalled in her memoir that when she was traveling the state campaigning for her husband in his 1966 race for governor — a race he lost to ax handle-wielding segregationist Lester Maddox — she was struck by the numerous people she met who voiced their concerns about a family member dealing with mental illness. In her memoir, she recalled a distant cousin who was mentally ill; he would come down the street singing loudly and, as a child, she would run and hide. “He probably wanted nothing more than friendship and recognition, yet he was different, and when I heard him, my impulse was to flee,” she wrote.
With that early experience in mind, she worked to combat the stigma that relegated the mentally ill to the shadows. Labeling mental health care “a basic human right,” she became a fierce advocate for mental-health parity, calling for illnesses of the mind to be covered by insurance on par with illnesses of the body.
Her efforts came after a nationwide campaign in the 1960s to “deinstitutionalize” the mentally ill, with the goal of replacing mental hospitals, where patients were basically warehoused for years, with community mental health treatment. The effort had been only partially successful.
As she learned from desperate caregivers who came up to her on the campaign trail, those community facilities didn’t exist. Too often those suffering from mental illnesses went from the hospital to the streets. A weary cotton mill worker she met told her about how she and her husband worked opposite shifts so one of them would always be available to care for their mentally ill daughter.
“The image of the woman haunted me all day,” Rosalynn Carter wrote in her 2010 book, “Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis.” That night she slipped into a line of people waiting to meet her husband at a campaign rally.
“I came to see what you are going to do to help people with mental illness when you are governor,” she told the surprised candidate.
As governor, Jimmy Carter created a state commission to develop more effective mental illness care. Responding in large part to his wife’s fierce advocacy, President Carter signed the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, an ambitious investment in communitybased mental health clinics.
Her ally in the effort was U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, whose Democratic primary challenge to her husband seriously weakened his reelection effort. “She stayed with her cause, even though it gave Kennedy a ‘win,’” recalled James Fallows, President Carter’s speechwriter.
The first lady also established the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers as a way to support family members and other unpaid caregivers. According to the institute website, they number more than 53 million in the United States. She also wrote or co-wrote five books about caregiving and mental health.
During her White House years, Rosalynn Carter also took on elder care and equal rights for women as priorities. After her husband lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan in 1980, she acknowledged missing the spotlight directed toward those causes when she was first lady.
Neither Carter knew what they would be doing with the rest of their lives beyond remodeling the house in Plains, Ga., they had built 20 years earlier.
She was 53; he was 56. Probably neither could imagine that they were about to embark on what CNN described as “the longest and most ambitious post-presidency in American history.” They would spend decades making a profound difference in the lives of people around the world through the work of the Carter Center. Established in Atlanta in 1982, the goal of the center is to “wage peace, fight disease and build hope.”
When then-President Bill Clinton presented both Carters with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, he noted that they had “done more good things for more people in more places than any other couple on Earth.”
The work of the Carter Center continues. So, we would hope, does Rosalynn Carter’s example and influence. Her passing prompts us to acknowledge that character is not the sole preserve of one party or one political perspective (as friends and acquaintances of a former first lady with Houston ties can rightfully claim). But as both Rosalynn Carter and Barbara Bush would no doubt attest, character is foundational if a self-governing nation is to thrive.
An extraordinary American is gone. For the sake of the nation she loved, we can hope to see her like again.
Keep Carter’s exemplary life in mind during the 2024 elections.