First Ladies (56 page)

That background did not stop her, however, from compiling a remarkable list of accomplishments in just four years, and she did it as the most traditional of wives. “Jimmy and I were always partners,” she would announce, and then proceed to act in such a way that historians would describe her as “surrogate, confidante, and joint policymaker.”
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Abigail McCarthy, the perceptive observer of political wives, attributed Rosalynn Carter's special combination of supportive wifeliness and independent strength to her southern roots, and she had much in common, McCarthy pointed out, with the heroine of Ellen Glasgow's novel,
The Vein of Iron
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Rosalynn was fifty years old at the time of Jimmy's inauguration in January 1977. Her life up to that point had been divided roughly into thirds, with the initial segment ending at age thirteen when her father died. Like most of her immediate predecessors, she experienced the
death of a parent before she had reached adulthood, and for her the loss was traumatic. “He thought I could do anything,” she later recalled;
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and since she was the oldest of his four children, she took his deathbed request to “look after Mother for me” more to heart than did the others.
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Her mother added to Rosalynn's sense of responsibility by relying on her almost as another adult. “I was devastated,” Rosalynn wrote. “My childhood really ended at that moment.”
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Her education, however, was just beginning. A seventh grade teacher who was “young” and “beautiful” and “[who] I thought knew more than anyone I had ever met … was extremely interested in current events and prodded us to read the newspapers and listen to the radio, to stretch our minds about our country and the world … . I began … to discover a world of interesting people and faraway places.”
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High school graduation came first—with Rosalynn delivering the valedictory for her class of eleven—and then two years at a nearby junior college. Her real education began, however, when at eighteen, she married the local boy who had already distinguished himself by being nominated to the U.S. Naval Academy. Jimmy Carter, ready for his first naval assignment, was her ticket out of Georgia.

For a curious and energetic young wife, having a husband whose assignments took them to Norfolk, Virginia, then Hawaii, and finally Connecticut offered opportunities that she could only have dreamed of in tiny Plains, Georgia. While Jimmy was frequently on duty at sea for days or even weeks at a time, Rosalynn managed a household that eventually included three sons born within five years. When her husband came home, she worked with him through courses in the “Great Books” and in classical music. She learned the hula in Hawaii and memorized Shakespeare in Virginia, but most importantly she developed confidence that she could do things for herself. “[Jimmy] assumed that I could manage well and always made me feel he was proud of me. So I was forced to discover that I could do the things that had to be done.”
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The absence of close friends increased Rosalynn's emotional dependence on her husband. Plains had “literally no other girls … my age,” she told an interviewer,
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and the naval assignments, each lasting only a few years, gave little opportunity to forge strong friendships. Her days were filled with housekeeping. “I was the total wife and mother,” she later wrote, washing, ironing, cooking and mopping floors, but she was doing it all on her own, without the supervision of either mother or mother-in-law. The new independence suited her, and she recalled, “I was more content than I had been in years.”
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The third (but first political) segment of Rosalynn Carter's life began inauspiciously when she reluctantly returned to live in Georgia. In 1953, her father-in-law died, and Jimmy decided that his younger brother Billy, still in high school, needed help running the family businesses. Rosalynn disliked relinquishing the independence that she had gained but in “the only major disagreement” of their marriage, she lost. Or in the short run, it seemed that she had. She returned to Plains with Jimmy and their three sons. Very quickly she realized that the town had not changed but she had. With the confidence she had acquired away from home, she set out to explore the opportunities she had not recognized before. She played golf, took dancing lessons, and went off with friends on a trip to New Orleans. Even she had to admit she was “enjoying this life.”
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More significantly, she became involved in some of the issues that affected the small town—issues that often had direct and personal implications but on the local level seemed solvable. Jimmy's appointment to the school board put the Carters in the middle of the integration struggle, or, as Rosalynn described their position, off to a minority side of it. “Though we were both raised in the South and had accepted segregation as children,” she wrote, “Jimmy and I had traveled enough to see a different way of life … [and] I could count … on two hands, [the people] with whom Jimmy and I could talk openly about the issue.”
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The Carters' work in their church and other local organizations led them into politics, but it was Jimmy who took the lead. On his thirty-eighth birthday, he announced his candidacy for the state Senate.
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Rosalynn had already taken over the bookkeeping at the family's peanut warehouse, and she could evaluate, just by checking the accounts, which sections of the business made money and which lost. While Jimmy spent more time at legislative sessions in the state capital, she had to make more business decisions. Her own public service was very limited—the idea of delivering speeches made her physically ill, and when Jimmy first ran for governor in 1966, she and her sons did nothing more than pass out brochures and smile for photographs in front of a vehicle marked “Carter Family.”

Jimmy Carter lost that election, but in his next try in 1970, the entire family resolved to work harder. For Rosalynn, that meant conquering her fear of public speaking. Jimmy encouraged her to stop memorizing her script so she could speak extemporaneously from notecards, and the results surprised even her: “It was easy. [People] were listening attentively, and when I got through they wanted to hear more…. It was a wonderful feeling and quite a breakthrough for me.”
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Successful in that second gubernatorial race, the Carters moved into the spotlight of the state capital. It was a larger transition, she frequently said, than that she later made from Georgia to the White House.
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Other presidents' wives (including Edith Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt in Albany and Ellen Wilson in Trenton) had pointed to their husbands' governorship years as times of growth, and Rosalynn also reported that she used those years to gain confidence in her social and administrative abilities. Travels around the state exposed her to problems in mental health, education, and care for the aged, and she developed a new appreciation of what government could do to make individuals' lives better. By the time Jimmy prepared to run for president in 1976, she showed almost none of her old reticence about taking a public role for herself. By January 20, 1977, when she strode down Pennsylvania Avenue toward Number 1600, little remained of the tentative teenager who had left Plains, Georgia, thirty years earlier.

Much of the confidence developed during her fourteen months on the road before Jimmy won the 1976 nomination. It was a campaign unequaled among politicians' wives. Victory must have seemed an impossible dream at the beginning when few Americans outside Georgia had heard of Jimmy Carter. Even Jimmy's mother, the indefatigable Lillian Carter, was rumored to have responded to her son's announcement that he was running for president with the question “President of what?” Rosalynn became accustomed to similar replies when she first went out to speak for Jimmy.

The Carters had reasoned that in this difficult, uphill campaign, they could cover more ground if they traveled separately, and when she set out on her first out-of-state appearance to nearby Florida, she was accompanied only by one good friend. Guided by a Florida road map and a slightly outdated list of Democratic party officials, the two women stopped wherever they spotted a radio transmitter or found somebody willing to gather a few friends together. Rosalynn would make her speech about why Jimmy should be president, answer any questions, and then prepare to speed on to the next town.
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Rosalynn later graduated to commercial airlines and then to her own private plane but her schedule never lightened. She described campaigning as “a job, a very demanding job, with pressures and deadlines … constant studying and cramming … being able to stay cool under fire.”
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From Monday to Friday, she was on the road, and then on the weekend she returned to Plains to rest up, eat “a square meal,” confer with her husband and see the rest of the family, including their daughter, Amy, who was not yet ten years old. “It was
not a vocation I would want to pursue for a life,” Rosalynn wrote when it was all over, “but it was essential.”
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Like all successful campaigners, Rosalynn Carter had to decide what to do with victory, and no woman ever entered the White House with a clearer agenda for herself. Nor a longer one. She ticked off her causes in order of importance: she would continue to be active in mental health, because that was what she knew best, and she would work for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment which still needed the approval of three states. She also expected to help the aging and to encourage volunteerism on the local level. To assist her, she appointed a staff of eighteen, headed by Press Secretary and East Wing coordinator, Mary Finch Hoyt, a veteran of the Muskie and McGovern races. Eventually Rosalynn had a staff of twenty-one, not so large as she would have liked but larger than any East Wing staff in history.
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Even before the inauguration, Rosalynn Carter was off and running on her new job. In December 1976, she attended (although not in an official capacity) the inauguration of Mexico's new President, and then she returned to preside over a mental health conference in Philadelphia. After Jimmy took office, she increased momentum and within months had announced a precedent-breaking trip to Central and South America.

While other presidential wives had typically represented their husbands on ceremonial and fact-finding international missions, none had claimed to work out policy. Eleanor Roosevelt's trips across both the Atlantic and the Pacific during the war and Lady Bird Johnson's attendance at the funeral of Greece's king had underlined the surrogate role some First Ladies took, but neither had claimed to make decisions. Rosalynn Carter's trip to seven Central and South American countries in the spring of 1977 was billed by the president's office as “substantive,”
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and she encouraged that interpretation by revealing that she had prepared by studying Spanish and by briefings with members of the State Department and the National Security Council.
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She planned to deliver in each country a “summary of the administration's foreign policy approach,” and then go on to discuss more specific problems of local interest.

In Costa Rica she listened to complaints that the United States was restricting that country's trade, in Ecuador to objections that her husband should not have vetoed the sale of Israeli jets, and in Peru to an explanation for that country's arms buildup. When she returned to Washington, she reported to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on what she had seen and heard.
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The trip brought mixed returns. Heads of state who met with the American First Lady appeared uncertain as to how they should react, and while some Latins applauded her enthusiasm for learning their language, others expressed discomfort about receiving a United States representative who had been neither elected nor appointed. Reporters in Jamaica questioned whether she had the right to speak for her husband, and when she got home, the discussion continued. Meg Greenfield, in an article entitled, “Mrs. President,” explored the implications of the First Lady's trip and concluded that if Rosalynn wanted a role in diplomacy, she should find a way to make herself accountable for her actions.
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A State Department official attempted to blunt some of the criticism by describing Rosalynn's trip as “mainly questioning.”
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The fact that all her later international travel fell within the older, more traditional bounds for presidents' wives indicates that the Carters may have judged the South American venture not entirely successful, although Rosalynn explained the lack of additional trips by saying that Jimmy was “able to go himself.”
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She continued to signal her significant role in her husband's administration but in other ways—in announcements that she met regularly with him for “working” lunches and that she attended meetings of his closest advisers, including the cabinet.

Most of her energies were concentrated on the projects she had named early in the administration, especially mental health. Because she could not legally serve as actual chair of the President's Council on Mental Health, she took an honorary (but working) title and then accepted invitations to speak on the subject in Canada and in Europe.
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On February 7, 1979, she went before the Senate Resource subcommittee to testify in favor of increased federal spending for mental health programs, and there she tangled with Chairman Edward Kennedy over what constituted a satisfactory federal health budget.

As Rosalynn continued to follow her Mental Health Systems Act through the various committees, she made history of two kinds.
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Not only was she the first presidential wife to testify before a congressional committee since Eleanor Roosevelt appeared in the 1940s, but in this case the chairman of the Senate committee was a strong contender for her husband's job.
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“I had to swallow some pride—for the cause,” she later wrote, because during the early stages of the 1980 campaign when it was not yet clear who would win the Democratic nomination, “Senator Kennedy one day would be on the stump making one of his statements, such as ‘President Carter is making the poor eat cat food'
and the next day would be saying to me, ‘Mrs. Carter, the committee is completing work on the Mental Health Systems Act.' “
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