Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s 77-year marriage has become part of the couple’s political lore.
“Yours is a love like everyone would wish that they would have,” US broadcasting star Oprah Winfrey told the former president in 2015.
But their partnership was not only a romantic union – it was a political alliance as well, one that propelled the couple to the White House and afterward, to a life of public service around the world.
“I’ve been very happy,” Jimmy Carter told the New York Times in 2021.
“And I love her more now than I did to begin with – which is saying a lot, because I loved her a lot.”
President Carter died on Sunday at the age of 100 after spending several months in hospice.
Rosalynn Carter died at age 96 in November 2023, after being diagnosed with dementia.
A fateful encounter
Jimmy Carter has told the story of how he met his wife many times, over many interviews.
The way he recounted it, he was supposed to go on a date with a Georgia pageant queen the night he met his future wife.
But his date had a family obligation and – like so many dates throughout human history – she bailed.
So Carter, who was on a break from the US Naval Academy at the time, drove around his hometown of Plains, Georgia, instead.
That was how he spotted the woman who would change the course of his life.
He saw Rosalynn Smith on the steps of a local Methodist church that evening and asked her out to see a movie, he told Winfrey.
The next day, his mother asked him how the evening had gone
“I said: ‘She’s the one I’m going to marry,'” Carter said.
“There was just something about her,” he told Winfrey – who then interrupted the interview to tell the elderly Carter that he was blushing.
Carter had actually caught Rosalynn’s eye years earlier, when she visited his sister Ruth and saw a photo of a young Jimmy.
“I fell in love with that picture,” she told the New York Times in 2021, in an interview timed to their 75th wedding anniversary.
But, as he recounted, Rosalynn took a little longer to conclude they should wed. She initially said no when he proposed over Christmas break.
They eventually did marry in 1946, when Jimmy was 21 and Rosalynn was 18. They were not to be separated until her death last year.
The Carters at work on the presidential campaign trail
Rosalynn Carter played an active role in her husband’s political and public service career.
When asked by the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper to name their biggest accomplishment as a couple, the former president replied: “Having been elected president with Rosa’s good help.”
“In the campaign we worked closely together, and in the White House we worked closely together.”
Rosalynn Carter expanded and formalised the role of the First Lady, establishing the Office of the First Lady in the White House.
The couple would hold policy lunches together in the White House, and the First Lady sat in on Cabinet meetings and briefings.
In 1977, she went on a tour of Central and South America to discuss major policy initiatives.
She took on significant diplomatic responsibilities and was at her husband’s side as he negotiated the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, and she advised her husband through the most turbulent moments of his one-term presidency.
Rosalynn Carter became an advocate for mental health, and worked to push funding for mental healthcare through Congress.
She also spoke up for those caring for people who are aging, ill, or disabled.
“There are only four kinds of people in the world – those that have been caregivers, those that are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers,” she once famously declared.
Like everything else, the Carters embarked hand-in-hand in their post-White House era.
They co-founded the Carter Center, a non-profit organisation that champions human rights.
The couple helped build homes around the world with Habitat for Humanity – a non-profit that builds affordable housing – and were often photographed together in coordinating work attire on building sites.
The pair also volunteered to observe elections in developing nations as part of their commitment to human rights and democracy.
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in 1986, posing in front of a photo from their wedding day
Modern US presidents often find wealth after leaving office, signing multi-million dollar book contracts or commanding five- or six-figure speaking fees. Sometimes, they sell branded merchandise.
Not the Carters.
They returned to the the small Georgia home where they resided before Carter went to the White House – assessed at just $167,000 (£133,000), according to a Washington Post report from 2018.
The decision to return to Plains, Georgia, where they were born and fell in love, became part of the couple’s post-presidential story.
In their elder years they eschewed private jets for commercial air travel, and the former president was known to greet fellow passengers and take selfies with them, according to the Post.
Jimmy Carter also cost the government the least of any former living president in terms of pensions, office staff, and related expenses.
In fiscal year 2023, Carter’s budget request was $426,000, according to the General Services Administration. By comparison, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Donald Trump all requested more than one million dollars.
Their modest approach to life continued until their deaths.
President Carter will lie in state at the US Capitol and receive a state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral on 9 January.
But according to his wishes, he will be buried next to Rosalynn on a hill looking over a willow-shaded pond in Plains.