“Never in our history has a couple approached the White House so equally side by side as Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter,” Vogue noted in its January 1977 issue—and indeed, it echoed a statement made by Mr. Carter almost 50 years later, shortly after his wife’s death this month. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” he said. “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.”
Mr. and Mrs. Carter’s love story had the patina of historical significance—wed in 1946, they were the longest-married first couple ever, closely followed by George and Barbara Bush’s 73 years—but it began humbly, in their shared hometown of Plains, Georgia. Some 18 years before they went on their first date (to a movie in 1945, the summer before Mr. Carter’s final year at the United States Naval Academy), his mother—a nurse known throughout her life as Miss Lillian—actually delivered her future daughter-in-law in 1927. (Biographer Jonathan Alter claimed that a two-year-old Jimmy first met Rosalynn mere days after she was born.) “She was a wonderful person, and the whole community had great respect for her,” Mrs. Carter wrote of Miss Lillian in her 1984 memoir, First Lady From Plains. “My parents even named my sister, Lillian Allethea, after her.”
After their wedding at the Plains Methodist Church (when he proposed, Mr. Carter gifted his soon-to-be bride a compact engraved with the letters ILYTG, standing for “I love you the goodest”), the Carters’ life together would span 77 years and produce four children. In that time they weathered Mr. Carter’s seven years of active duty in the Navy; their return home to Plains, where he took over his family’s peanut-farming business (and Mrs. Carter learned to keep the books); two terms as a state senator; a term as Georgia’s governor; a somewhat turbulent term as president, from 1977 to 1981; and then some four decades of diplomatic and philanthropic service through their nonprofit organization, the Carter Foundation.
The Carters celebrating their victory at the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary in 1976.
Photo: Getty Images
The pair were model partners during the Carter presidency, with Mrs. Carter not only sitting in on cabinet meetings and National Security Council briefings, but also traveling abroad on her husband’s abroad. (So, too, did Mrs. Carter spearhead initiatives of her own, becoming honorary chairwoman of Mr. Carter’s mental health commission and leading the White House Conference on Aging.) In 1979, Robert Strauss, Mr. Carter’s ambassador-at-large for Middle East negotiations, described the Carters’ working relationship to the New York Times: “One time I called and told the president that we had this particularly touchy problem with this person who shall remain nameless. He said, I’ll get Rosalynn, and you come and we’ll talk about it.”
“Jimmy has never said that I have to do this or that. I decide how I can be helpful,” Mrs. Carter told the Times in the same story. “If there’s something he wants me to do, he will tell me. But he trusts my judgment. What I’m trying to say is that I think we complement each other.”
Funnily enough, years after the Carters departed the White House (where they were replaced by the Reagans, another famously close first couple), it was the task of co-authoring a book—1987’s Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life—that proved perhaps the greatest test in their marriage. “All of Rosalynn’s bad characteristics came out during the writing of this book, and I guess mine did, too,” Mr. Carter told the Los Angeles Times that year. “We were so frustrated with each other about it that we couldn’t even talk about it,” Mrs. Carter added.
The couple in 1987, promoting their book Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life.
Photo: Getty Images
But it wasn’t long before the ship was righted again: Always a Reckoning, a collection of poems released by Mr. Carter in 1995, included one—simply titled “Rosalynn”—that lovingly recalled their early courtship. (“She’d smile, and birds would feel that they no longer / had to sing, or it may be I failed / to hear their song.”)
Until the end of their life together, the Carters remained resolutely by each other’s side. When Mr. Carter, who is now 99, entered hospice care in February, it was primarily to spend his remaining time at home with Mrs. Carter. At their modest, ranch-style house in Plains—which they’d shared since 1961—the couple enjoyed regular visits from their sprawling extended family, and watching Braves games on television. “He’s together with his wife. They’re in love,” Jason Carter, one of the couple’s grandsons, said of Mr. Carter in September. “They’re at peace and you don’t get more from that.”