result
Tribute to
Carter
In November 2023, The Carter Center lost one of its founders, former U.S. First Lady Rosalynn Carter. The outpouring of tributes from national leaders and the public showed the profound impact Mrs. Carter had in the United States and around
the world.
Just a few weeks earlier, on Oct. 1, 2023, the Center celebrated the 99th birthday of its other founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The Center received messages from people far and wide, praising his life of public service.
With this special section, we pay tribute to the incredible achievements of both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, as U.S. leaders and as founders of The Carter Center.
Jimmy Carter is known as a man of high principle, steadfast integrity, and deep religious faith who has dedicated his life to public service. As private citizen and public official he has pursued the causes of human rights, peace, and care for the least fortunate with passionate resolve and boundless energy.
Throughout his life, he repeatedly has placed what he believes to be right above personal and political considerations. Underneath his quiet voice and ready smile is a bulldog determination and an aversion to compromise on matters of principle.
In 1928, the Carter family moved to a 350-acre farm in the tiny community of Archery, Georgia. A young Jimmy Carter is pictured here atop his Shetland pony.
Humble Beginnings
Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.) was born Oct. 1, 1924, in the small farming town of Plains, Georgia, and grew up in the nearby community of Archery. His father, James Earl Carter, Sr., was a farmer and businessman; his mother, Lillian Gordy Carter, a registered nurse.
He was educated in the public school of Plains, attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, New York, where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine.
At Jimmy Carter’s graduation from the Naval Academy on June 5, 1946, his mother, Miss Lillian, and his fiancée, Rosalynn Smith, pin epaulets on Ensign Carter, with his father, Earl Carter, in the background.
On July 7, 1946, he married Rosalynn Smith of Plains. When his father died in 1953, he resigned his naval commission and returned with his family to Georgia. He took over the Carter farms, and he and Rosalynn operated Carter’s Warehouse, a general-purpose seed and farm supply company in Plains. He quickly became a leader of the community, serving on county boards supervising education, the hospital authority, and the library. In 1962 he won election to the Georgia Senate. He lost his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966, but won the next election, becoming Georgia’s 76th governor on Jan. 12, 1971. He was the Democratic National Committee campaign chairman for the 1974 congressional and gubernatorial elections.
Jimmy Carter became Georgia’s 76th governor on Jan. 12, 1971, tackling disorganization and waste in state government, improving race relations, opening state jobs to African Americans, achieving tax reform, and reforming the state prison system.
Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s marriage to Jimmy Carter took her from a rural farming community to the White House. Showing the world a new vision of the First Lady, Mrs. Carter was a working partner and trusted advisor to the president, a participant in foreign and domestic affairs, and an astute political strategist. Widely recognized as the nation’s foremost advocate for mental health, she was actively devoted to building a more caring society.
The Early Years
She was born Eleanor Rosalynn Smith on August 18, 1927, in Plains, Georgia, daughter of Wilburn Edgar Smith, a farmer who also owned and operated the first auto shop in the county, and Frances Allethea Murray, a college graduate and homemaker. As a child, she was shaped by strong religious and family values and an early acceptance of hard work and responsibility.
In 1946, she married Jimmy Carter, who had just graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. Mrs. Carter described her years as a Navy wife as a coming of age in which she developed the self-confidence to manage a household with three babies on her own while her husband worked and was often aboard ship.
This photo was taken on July 7, 1946, when Rosalynn Smith and Jimmy Carter were married in Plains, Georgia.
After Carter left the Navy and returned home to run the family business, Rosalynn began working alongside her husband, keeping the books for the farms and the farm supply business. During Carter’s contentious 1962 race for the state Senate, she received her first taste of politics.
Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter had four children. Jack, Chip, and Jeff Carter were born while the Carters were stationed in different Navy ports. Amy was born in 1967, after the family had moved back to Plains, Georgia. This photo of Mrs. Carter with Amy is circa 1970.
Though shy about public speaking, she became fully engaged in subsequent campaigns for his re-election and his bids for governor in 1966 and 1970. She campaigned full time on a separate schedule in the 1976 and 1980 presidential races.
Many said Rosalynn Carter was Jimmy Carter’s best campaign asset in races for state senate, governor of Georgia, and the U.S. presidency. Here they celebrate his 1970 election win to become Georgia’s 76th governor.
As Georgia’s First Lady, Mrs. Carter led a passionate fight against the stigma of mental illnesses and worked to overhaul the state’s mental health care system. Her obligations in the governor’s mansion also called for entertaining visiting officials and diplomats, serving as liaison to civic groups, and using her influence as a public figure to advance immunizations of children and other charitable causes.
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
While assuming the traditional demands of presidential wife and official White House hostess, Mrs. Carter worked tirelessly to create what she described as “a more caring society.” As a result of her singular tenacity and southern gentleness, she was dubbed the “steel magnolia.”
Rosalynn Carter testifies on behalf of the President’s Commission on Mental Health before the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources on Feb. 7, 1979. She was the second first lady to appear before Congress.
Early in 1977, she became the honorary chair of the President’s Commission on Mental Health, holding hearings across the country testifying before and in Congress, and spearheading passage of the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980.
She traveled extensively overseas, promoting both her own projects and the president’s policies. In a history-making trip to Latin America in 1977, she represented the U.S. government and visited with heads of state from seven Latin American countries. In Geneva, Switzerland, she became the first First Lady to address the World Health Organization.
Rosalynn Carter was a strong proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. On the right is former First Lady Betty Ford at the National Women’s Conference in support of the ERA in November 1977.
On to the White House
On Dec. 12, 1974, Jimmy Carter announced his candidacy for president of the United States. He won his party’s nomination on the first ballot at the 1976 Democratic National Convention and was elected president on Nov. 2, 1976.
Jimmy Carter was sworn in as President of the United States on Jan. 20, 1977, by Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger.
Jimmy Carter served as president from Jan. 20, 1977, to Jan. 20, 1981. Significant foreign policy accomplishments of his administration included the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David Accords, the treaty of peace between Egypt and Israel, the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union, and the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. He championed human rights throughout the world.
In September 1978, Jimmy Carter negotiated the Camp David accords, which created a framework for a peace agreement in the Middle East. Pictured are Egypt President Anwar Sadat, President Carter, and Israel Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the March 26, 1979, White House signing of the resulting Israel-Egypt peace treaty that began an era of lasting peace between the two nations.
On the domestic side, the administration’s achievements included a comprehensive energy program conducted by a new Department of Energy; deregulation in energy, transportation, communications, and finance; major educational programs under a new Department of Education; and major environmental protection legislation, including the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which doubled the size of the national park system and tripled the wilderness areas.
The Carter Center and Beyond
In 1982, Jimmy Carter became University Distinguished Professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and with Rosalynn Carter founded The Carter Center. The nonpartisan and nonprofit Center addresses national and international issues of public policy. Carter Center staff and associates have joined with President Carter in efforts to resolve conflict, promote democracy, protect human rights, and prevent disease and other afflictions. The Center has spearheaded the international effort to eradicate Guinea worm disease, which is poised to be the second human disease in history to be eradicated.
Jimmy Carter consoles a young patient having a worm removed from her body in Savelugu, Ghana, in February 2007. The Carter Center leads the international campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease.
The Carter Presidential Center was dedicated in October 1986, and includes the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, administered by the National Archives. Also open to visitors is the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Plains, administered by the National Park Service.
For many years, President Carter taught Sunday school in the Maranatha Baptist Church of Plains. The Carters have three sons, one daughter, and 12 grandchildren (one deceased).
Jimmy Carter and then-North Korea President Kim Il-Sung met in Pyongyang in 1994 for talks resulting in an eight-year freeze of the country’s nuclear weapons program.
On Dec. 10, 2002, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2002 to Jimmy Carter “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
In 2002, Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance remarks in Oslo, Norway, President Carter said: “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.”
An Enduring Legacy
After what Rosalynn Carter called “involuntary retirement” to Plains in 1981, her working relationship with her husband expanded. In 1982, they together founded The Carter Center in Atlanta, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for people at home and in the developing world through programs to alleviate suffering and advance human rights.
Mrs. Carter observes voting at an Indonesian polling station in June 1999 during the nation’s first genuinely democratic legislative elections, which were monitored by The Carter Center.
As emissaries for the Center, the Carters circled the globe many times on nonpolitical campaigns to eradicate Guinea worm disease and other neglected tropical diseases, increase agricultural production in Africa, monitor elections in nascent democracies, urge greater compliance with international human rights standards, and resolve conflicts.
She established the Carter Center’s Mental Health Program to continue her work to combat stigma and discrimination against people with mental illnesses and promote improved mental health care in the United States and abroad.
Mrs. Carter addresses participants in the 2006 Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy at The Carter Center in Atlanta.
In 1987, Mrs. Carter founded the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers at Georgia Southwestern State University to support those who selflessly care for others and build on her belief that “there are only four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.”
President and Mrs. Carter receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton at a ceremony at The Carter Center on Aug. 9, 1999.
Mrs. Carter died at home in Plains, Ga., on Nov. 19, 2023. Asked once how she would like to be remembered, she said, “I would like for people to think that I took advantage of the opportunities I had and did the best I could.”
One Powerful Pair
As equal partners, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter achieved more than either could have done alone. Each achieved great things individually, but the dynamic combination of their talents, skills, and passions was a force multiplier.
Here is just a sample of their many accomplishments:
- In the White House, they worked to find solutions for the nation’s challenges. Mrs. Carter attended Cabinet meetings and advised President Carter on important policy issues. Both as governor of Georgia and as president, he named her to lead mental health reform efforts.
- They elevated the role of First Lady to a position of consequence. Mrs. Carter was the first presidential spouse to have an office in the White House, where she managed a staff and engaged in substantive matters.
- They fought for women’s rights. Mrs. Carter was a champion of the Equal Rights Amendment, and President Carter named a record number of women to Cabinet positions and federal judgeships.
- They engaged in diplomacy that promoted human rights, peace, and justice. President Carter deputized Mrs. Carter in 1977 to represent the United States on an unprecedented tour of Central and South American countries.
- In their post-presidency, they created The Carter Center and developed it into the effective organization it is today. For decades, both Carters were deeply involved in the overall direction and daily operation of the Center, which continues to carry out their vision for a better, healthier, more just world.
- They traveled to dozens of countries to observe elections and campaign against neglected tropical diseases. Both President and Mrs. Carter could be seen side by side watching voters exercise their rights, pressing heads of state to do right by their citizens, and visiting with marginalized people around the globe.
Together, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter made a formidable team.
President and Mrs. Carter travel by train to Alexandria, Egypt, during a trip to the Middle East in March 1979.