Kati Marton (37 page)

NOT SINCE EDITH AND WOODROW WILSON HAD THERE BEEN A COUPLE THIS
close in the White House. As with the Wilsons, the remarkable rapport between Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter did not necessarily enhance his presidency. The very qualities that made Jimmy a devoted husband mitigated against his political success. He did not need a bracing dip into a crowd to confirm who he was. Carter did not even like large crowds. He was not possessed of that giant hole of neediness that drove men like Johnson or
Clinton, time after time, to “press the flesh.” He did not really enjoy people, other than Rosalynn. Beyond his wife, and to a lesser extent his children, Carter felt an abstract connection to others. He loved her and really needed only her approval. Their airtight bond, the fact that they were self-sufficient and self-contained, sometimes shielded them from reality.

They were an exemplary pair: close, loving, supportive and open. From the beginning they were everything to each other: friend, lover, confidant, business, and later, political partners. Eminently suited, they were raised in the same corner of rural Georgia and had known of each other all their lives. From the day he first kissed the shy seventeen-year-old, Jimmy was determined to make Rosalynn “an extension of myself.” It was more than the sweetness that radiated from Rosalynn’s perfect apple-shaped face and upturned wide eyes that drew him to her. She shared his seriousness and fierce determination to improve herself, a trait neither of them has ever lost. Three decades of marriage had not cooled Jimmy and Rosalynn’s need, or their ardor, for each other. They shared the same goals for their marriage: unlimited mutual support and a closeness that made them function like an autonomous republic. Neither liked being without the other even for a day. But it was not a relationship of equals, and never would be.

One presence was more dominant than Rosalynn’s in Jimmy’s life: God. A born-again Christian, Jimmy felt that God’s hand had chosen him, that he was accountable only to Him. By living an exemplary life, Carter believed he could reconcile his deep commitment to God with a career in politics. His belief that he was a messenger of God had fueled the political novice’s extravagant dream: to run for president. Armed with a moral certainty that bordered on the messianic, Carter was a singular presence on the American political landscape.

He had run a brilliant race in 1976 and had then become the anti-politician, beyond the reach of advisers, including even his wife. His vice president, Walter Mondale, remarked that Carter had the coldest nose of any politician he’d ever encountered. Carter seemed proud of that fact. Once he made up his mind, there was no one, not even Rosalynn, who could change it. For ultimately Rosalynn was the beloved instrument of his will. It had always been so between them. It was so in the White House.

The Roosevelts, the Kennedys and the Reagans were master manipulators of the trappings of the presidency. Jimmy and Rosalynn were not. The most remarkable thing about Jimmy Carter is that he was ever elected president in the first place. But the American people like their leaders to radiate confidence and strength, to reassure them that they are in charge. As president, Carter often seemed smaller than life.

Rosalynn had no agenda other than her husband. Her marriage came ahead of everything else in her life, though she had other interests. “If you ask me which were his ideas or hers,” Mondale concluded, “I couldn’t tell you. They worked together.” The Carters, however, are an object lesson of the truism that no matter how good the partnership, how successful the first lady, it is still the president’s performance that determines their legacy.

BY NOVEMBER 1979,
the third year of her husband’s presidency, Rosalynn Carter had grasped the power of her office. A journey to Thailand demonstrated her strength as first lady. She was not prepared for what she now saw: thousands of wasted humans—babies, small children and the very old—lying very still on the ground or on dirty mats as the sun beat down and flies buzzed around them. The smell of human waste and disease hung over the Sakeo refugee camp at the Thai/Cambodian border, as did a chilling silence. Among the human wrecks suffering from cholera and malaria walked healthy young men wearing red-checkered bandannas, members of the Khmer Rouge, the organization responsible for the killing fields that brought the refugees to this camp. Their leader, Pol Pot, had already exterminated more than one million Cambodians in an effort to create a “new society.” The first lady had come to call attention to the growing refugee crisis, but there had been no advance work done for this visit. Instinctively, she touched the elderly and whispered hello to people who could no longer hear her, as she moved with solemn dignity through the camp. She cradled a dying infant in her arms. Although tears sometimes filled her eyes, she retained her composure through the visit.

This was Rosalynn at her best, fulfilling her country’s expectations of a first lady without overstepping the invisible boundaries that tripped
her up earlier (when, for example, she attended Cabinet meetings). On the flight home from Bangkok to Washington, she pulled the State Department veterans traveling aboard her military aircraft to her side and talked about the urgent need to organize a large-scale, coordinated relief program for the refugees. The diplomats were moved by the intensity in her soft, modulated voice. She said she would summon to the White House all the various refugee organizations for a meeting. They needed to appoint a strong, high-profile leader for the effort. There should be no duplication, none of the usual bureaucratic paralysis. She would make maximum use of her platform.

Physically and emotionally exhausted when the plane touched down at Andrews Air Force Base late at night, Rosalynn was surprised when her husband bounded up the ramp. With a characteristic cool greeting to her entourage, he swept her up in a warm embrace. It was obvious to those present that the president had badly missed his wife. Rosalynn switched seamlessly from her official role back to the one she had filled for nearly her whole life, Jimmy Carter’s essential partner.

One of those who helped choreograph Carter’s stunning victory, Pat Caddell, learned fast about this couple. During the 1976 Michigan primary, two of Carter’s closest aides, Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon—famous pranksters—egged on the young Caddell to call the candidate with new poll numbers. Call him in Plains at midday, they urged him, he’ll just be getting home from a week on the stump, he’ll want to know right away. Rafshoon and Jordan knew what Caddell did not, that calling candidate Carter before he had his “Rosalynn fix” was dangerous. But Caddell, the new kid on the team, foiled the practical joke by not calling until later in the afternoon, much to Rafshoon and Jordan’s disappointment.

Luck, politicians will say, is more important than skill in politics. They also say that politicians make their own luck. By the time Rosalynn returned from her transforming trip to the Thai refugee camp, President Carter’s legacy was sealed. That same week, on November 2, 1979, several thousand Iranian youths seized the American embassy in Teheran and took fifty-two members of the staff hostage. It was the beginning of the end of a singularly unlucky presidency.

LIKE MOST COUPLES
, the Carters established the rules governing their marriage early on. She adored him and felt privileged to have been chosen by Plains’ most desirable, most glamorous son. In their tiny universe, he was at the top of the social pecking order, she much further down. Neither one had ever loved, or would ever love, anyone else. Rosalynn lost her father, an auto mechanic, when she was thirteen, so Jimmy was literally the only man in her life. Though only twenty-one himself, Jimmy was self-assured enough when they met to play the role of both father and suitor, and soon husband.

To stroll down Plains, a “town” of a single row of stores whose chief businesses are peanuts and worms, is to realize the enormity of Jimmy’s ambition and achievement. Carter was different from all the other youths Rosalynn Smith had ever met. Most of them finished twelfth grade and either went off to the service or returned to their farms. But Jimmy, a restless youth with big dreams, was not going to stay under his authoritarian father’s thumb for long.

Jimmy began planning his future before adolescence. He wrote letters to people who might recommend him as a candidate for the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the school his father wanted him to attend. As the scion of the tiny community’s best-known tribe, Jimmy already had an air of infallibility. His parents had ambitions for their brilliant son. Rosalynn was not part of their scheme.

Rosalynn’s pleasure, like Jimmy’s, came from hard work and self-improvement. Shortly before her father died, Rosalynn had promised him she would go to college, and so she did, the only one in her high school class to do so. Responsibility had been thrust on her early. As a teenager, she became a parent to her three younger siblings while her mother worked. Rosalynn fell in love with the twenty-year-old naval academy cadet when she was seventeen and still living at home. “I thought [Jimmy] was the most handsome young man I had ever seen.”

Carter used the Bible as his manual for living. He imparted to Rosalynn a biblical sense that a wife’s role was to serve the husband. Even then there was an air of piety, a gravity, about Jimmy. At Annapolis, his
classmates would not tell off-color stories in his presence. On his days off in the navy, while others went carousing, Jimmy conducted Bible classes. Rosalynn learned to fulfill his expectations. She strived for the qualities Carter prized: tenacity, self-sufficiency and spirituality.

He whisked her from dusty southern Georgia to San Diego; New London, Connecticut; and Hawaii, glittering ports of call for a girl from Plains. As far as Jimmy was concerned, there was nothing she could not do. She rarely disappointed him. In his early years in the navy he was gone much of the time. Three babies were born in rapid succession. “I felt I became independent that way,” said Rosalynn. “When you’re away from home and your husband’s gone, you just have to take care of everything. And it was a good feeling for me. I liked it.”

But Jimmy cut short her independence. After seven years of the freewheeling navy life, he decided it was time for the Carters to return to Plains. His father had passed away, and Jimmy wanted to take over the family peanut business. “I argued, I cried. I screamed at him. I loved our life in the navy,” Rosalynn wrote, but tears, she added, “instead of being persuasive or eliciting sympathy, had quite the opposite effect on Jimmy.”

They were setting the pattern for their life. When they disagreed, even though they were intensely connected, he prevailed. “I’m not going to argue about this, Rosie,” he would say, and that was that. “He had, and still has, no patience with tears, thinking instead that one makes the best of whatever situation—and with a smile,” Rosalynn said. Sullen, she was driven back to the small town she thought she had left behind. Rosalynn thought the best part of her life was over. “I became more and more dejected the closer we got. I didn’t want to live in Plains. I had left there, moved on, and changed. But Jimmy was determined—and happy ….” Approaching the dusty street of her childhood, seemingly oblivious to her despair, Jimmy turned to her with the brilliant smile that would one day be familiar to the whole country, and said, “We’re home.”

There was something almost ruthless in Carter’s disregard of his wife’s feelings, and a chilling aspect to his dead certainty that he was doing the right thing for both of them. She was his wife and he expected her to be just as competent, just as stoic, just as determined as he was. Happiness for him came from a job well done, not from a “good time.”
Jimmy once said that if he could come back in another life, it would be as a Mennonite, a member of the austere religion that holds the Bible as its sole rule of faith.