Former President Jimmy Carter’s marriage to first lady Rosalynn Carter played a defining role in his life, spanning 77 years and making it the longest presidential marriage in U.S. history. Jimmy Carter died on Sunday, according to the Carter Center.
Throughout his four-year presidency, the pair presented themselves as a team, with Rosalynn serving as one of his closest advisers and even being a presence in Cabinet meetings.
And while the couple’s time in the White House was brief, they became a fixture in U.S. politics by championing various causes at home and abroad.
“Usually they say that first ladies are sometimes behind where society is in terms of what women can do, but I would say for Rosalynn Carter, she was out in front,” said Barbara Perry, the director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
“She and her husband had worked as a team from the beginning and certainly as they went through life,” she added.
Rosalynn Carter died Nov. 19, 2023, just days after she entered into hospice care. The former president made a rare public appearance at a tribute service for her on Nov. 28, 2023.
Jimmy Carter started dating then-Rosalynn Smith while he was home from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., according to the White House Historical Association. Smith had just wrapped up her freshman year at Georgia Southwestern College. The couple married in 1946 before following Carter’s naval career, which took them to Virginia, Hawaii and Connecticut.
However, this period of their life ended when Carter’s father died and the couple returned home to run his family’s peanut farm outside of Plains, Ga. The future first lady helped her husband with the business by working as a bookkeeper for the farm.
“We developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business, and it continued when Jimmy got involved in politics,” the former first lady said during a joint interview with her husband with The Associated Press ahead of the couple’s 75th wedding anniversary in 2021. “I knew more on paper about the business than he did. He would take my advice about things,” she added, drawing a laugh and affirmation from her husband.
Rosalynn Carter continued to support her husband by playing an integral role in his campaigns for state Senate, governor and later president.
During the Carter administration, Rosalynn Carter notably represented her husband during trips abroad including Brazil, Poland, Costa Rica, Rome and Thailand.
“There are pictures of her meeting with the secretary of State and the head of the National Security Council, so Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski,” Perry said. “Major, big figures in the president’s Cabinet that she was meeting with separately from the larger Cabinet meetings.”
She played a major role domestically, too, becoming the first spouse of the president since Eleanor Roosevelt to testify on Capitol Hill. Carter, who served as an active honorary chairwoman on the President’s Commission on Mental Health, was testifying about mental health, one of her chief issue areas as first lady.
“She, despite her activism, was not attempting to show herself to be a full partner with her husband even if she had wanted to be,” Perry said, referring to Roosevelt. “But Rosalynn Carter, I think, was the first to do that in the modern era.”
President Carter, whose administration was grappling with soaring inflation and energy costs, lost reelection in 1980 to then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan (R). But historians argue that the couple’s four years in the White House set them up for success down the road.
“What I say to the Gilbert and Sullivan’s lyric ‘he is the very model of a modern major general,’ in the case of Jimmy Carter, he’s the very model of a modern post president, and she’s the very model of a post or former first lady,” Perry said.
After the presidency, the pair went on to establish the Carter Center, a nonprofit humanitarian organization seeking to “prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health.”
The opening line to the center’s mission statement reads: “The Carter Center is guided by the principles of our Founders, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.”
“I always admire Jimmy Carter because he never downplayed the role of Rosalynn,” Perry said. “He always up-played the fact that they were a partnership and he believed in her and trusted in her.”
Jimmy Carter underscored the mutual respect he and his wife shared for each other during the couple’s interview with the AP in 2021, calling his marriage “a full partnership.”
“My biggest secret is to marry the right person if you want to have a long-lasting marriage,” he said.
