Global humanitarians Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter always had each other

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter couldn’t remember their first meeting. She was a newborn baby. He was soon out of diapers himself, a future US president looking down on the future first lady his mother had given birth to just days earlier.

What blossomed in the century that followed was a partnership that captured the office of Georgia’s governor, the White House, and then propelled the Carters as global humanitarians for four decades. At the heart of that path was a small-town love story that made them more than a power couple: they were lifemates and best friends.

Rosalynn Carter died on November 19 at the age of 96. The former president, now 99, was with her when they were at their home in Plains, where they lived all their lives, except for his college and 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 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.

The former first lady 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. They avoided dancing with others at White House dinners. After the presidency, they built The Carter Center in Atlanta together. They met with world leaders, oversaw elections and fought diseases in developing countries.

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 mastery of their second language. 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 The Associated Press in 2021.

Rosalynn said she first “fell in love with Jimmy’s picture” hanging on his sister’s bedroom wall. When he returned home from the US Naval Academy in the summer of 1945, Ruth Carter convinced her brother to go on a date with Rosalynn.

The next morning, Jimmy Carter told his mother that he was going to marry Rosalynn Smith.

“I’d never had a guy kiss me on a first date,” she recalls. Yet she saw the seeds of something deeper than teenage romance. Usually shy, she found she could “talk to him, really talk to him.”

They married on July 7, 1946 and left for his first Navy assignment.

When James Earl Carter Sr. died in 1953, his eponymous son moved his family back to Georgia – without asking his wife. He recalled sixty years later how “cool” she was with him for months over the move, with the rift only fully closed when she made herself his indispensable business partner in their peanut farming business.

Yet the future president did not consult his wife when he launched his first political campaign. In that case, however, Rosalynn Carter was on board and willingly stayed behind to run the Plains business when he went to Atlanta as a senator.

“I was more of a political partner than a political wife, and I never felt targeted,” she said. “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.”

Family and close friends remember a bond that thrived not only on mutual respect, but also on competitiveness.

They rushed to finish writing their next books or to beat the other in their later years at tennis, skiing or some other pursuit. As they fished, they kept score.

‘How many did she catch? How big were they?’” Ms. 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?’”

Eventually, that friendly competition gave way to two non-peers trying to care for each other.

Chip Carter, the couple’s son who spent much of the past few months with his parents, told The Washington Post that because his mother was rapidly deteriorating in her final days, the former president asked to be alone with her. First, Jimmy Carter sat at her bedside in his wheelchair. Later, assistants 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,” grandson Jason Carter said. “They always had each other.”

This story was reported by The Associated Press.