I voted for Jimmy Carter when he ran for office. Unlike most presidents, he is remembered now for what he did after he left the presidency. Instead of retiring to a life of leisure and celebrity, he devoted himself to serving others. I think of him building houses for Habitat for Humanity. He also remained involved in political life through the work of the Carter Center, which monitored elections around the world and reported on fairness and transparency. I had the pleasure of serving on a federal commission that studied electoral reform in 2001 after the debacle of the Bush v. Gore election; the co-chairs of the commission were President Carter and President Gerald Ford. Those were the days when Republicans and Democrats agreed that everyone should vote and every vote should be counted. How things change in only 20 years.
I read this beautiful tribute by James “Chip” Carter to his mother and wanted to share it with you. It appeared in The Daily Yonder.
Chip Carter said at his mother’s funeral:
I want to welcome all of you here and thank you for coming to help my family and to mourn with my family and, mostly, to celebrate a life well lived.
My mother was the glue that held our family together through the ups and the downs and thicks and thins of our family’s politics. As individuals, she believed in us and took care of us.
When I was 14, I supported President Johnson for president. And every day I wore a Johnson sticker on my shirt. And periodically I would get beat up, and my shirt torn, and the button pulled off and my sticker always destroyed. And I would walk the block during lunch from school down to Carter’s Warehouse and my mother would have a shirt in the drawer already mended, button sewn on and the LBJ sticker still applied.
Years later she was influential in getting me into rehab for my drug and alcohol addiction. She saved my life.
When I started making speeches for dad in his political career, I was so nervous I often vomited in the waiting room before we went on stage. And one day after debating seven other children or offspring of candidates for president, I called my mother and told her how nervous I got and she told me something that I have used a thousand times since: She said Chip, you can do anything for 20 minutes except hold your breath.
When I was in the second grade, at Plains High School they had a donkey basketball game in the school building there to raise money for the school, and my mother rode her donkey as fast as it would slowly go, right under the goal, spun around so she was facing its tail, caught the pass and made the winning two points.
She was my hero that night. And she’s been my hero ever since.
A couple years ago mom and I were talking when she said that when Dad asked her to marry her for the second time, she said yes. But she expected him to provide for her a life of adventure. He told her that it would happen. She told me that she had lived on both coasts and Hawaii in the Navy and began their family. Mom said when it was decided they would leave the Navy and return to Plains, she was upset. And the family story is they rode in a car from Connecticut to Plains, Georgia, and when Mom had something to say to Dad she would say, “Jack, would you tell your father …” [Jack is the Carters’ eldest son.]
When Dad ran for office the first time my mother ended up running Carter’s Warehouse. She loved it. Every time he would go on a campaign trip or during the legislative session, she was really pleased to be in the office and be the boss. She told me that when Dad started running for president that the thing that she enjoyed the most were the people that she met across the country. And from working in Carter’s Warehouse, she said I was able to speak the language [of] prices and yields and relate to everyday issues and farm families — especially in Iowa. She said because of that, she’s the one that helped win that election there.
Then as first lady of the United States, always trying to follow the teaching of Jesus and to do what he taught her to do as a guideline, she said, “You will always get criticized by somebody for everything you do, so you might as well do what’s right.” That she and Dad were able to make a positive difference in peoples’ lives and that of so many families too.
My parents’ 77-year partnership is often talked about. Mom was always well-informed on the issues of the day. In the White House, Mom asked Dad so many questions that he finally said that she should attend Cabinet meetings, so she did. And caught a lot of flak for that. But she was then able to speak with authority on issues across our country and the world.
She would often try, and often fail, to get Dad to do what was right politically, and when she couldn’t change Dad’s mind she would repeat to herself: A leader takes people where they want to go, a great leader takes people where they need to go.
Losing the election in 1980 was devastating to us all. My parents were still young, my mother only 53, and they knew they still had more to contribute. They decided they would become missionaries and spent months trying to decide how to accomplish their goal. Finally, they decided as partners to start the Carter Center, which would allow my mother to continue to fight the stigma of mental illness and allow them both to help the poorest of the poor on this earth, as Jesus had taught them.
Mom started the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers at Georgia Southwestern University to train and support those who help others. At the same time Mom and Dad continued to support Habitat for Humanity, and Mom continued to support the Friendship Force.
She told me that her adventures had led her to more than 120 countries. She had been fly-fishing all over the world. She had met kings and queens, presidents, others in authority, powerful corporate leaders, and celebrities. She said the people that she felt the most comfortable with and the people she enjoyed being with the most were those that lived in absolute, abject poverty, the ones without adequate housing, without a proper diet and without access.
She had probably more adventures than anybody else on earth. Mom was always fun to be with. The Halloween before the pandemic, Mom showed up at Amy’s house. Amy lives on a street which closes down on Halloween, and every house is decorated. Mom was beautifully dressed as a monarch butterfly. The Secret Service were dressed casually, but perfectly, as Secret Service agents.
She proceeded to go up and down the street with her great-grandchildren and grandchildren and go trick or treating up and down and talk to people all over the street. She got back to Amy’s, and she was so excited because she’d been out so much and nobody had recognized her.
After Dad was put in hospice, my mother was racked with dementia, my siblings, my wife and I would stay with them so that there would always be a family member around. One day my mother was sitting with my wife, Becky, and she was reminiscing on what it was like to go and live in Hawaii. And she was talking about learning all of the native dances. And she got up from the sofa, pushed her walker away — which she couldn’t take a step without — and proceeded to do the hula for two or three minutes. She grabbed her walker, turned around, sat back on the sofa, turned to my wife and said, “That’s how you do it.”
I will always love my mother, I will cherish how she and dad raised their children. They’ve given us such a great example of how a couple should relate.
Let me finish by saying that my mother, Rosalynn Carter, was the most beautiful woman I have ever met, and pretty to look at, too. Thank you.
Diane Ravitch's blog 