Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were making coffee in their suite at the Westin in Annapolis while, downstairs, a few hundred donors, friends, and Carter Administration veterans (Walter Mondale, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jerry Rafshoon) had gathered for the annual Carter Center Weekend. The night before, the Carters had danced to “Georgia on My Mind” at a party celebrating their forthcoming seventieth wedding anniversary and Jimmy’s graduation from the Naval Academy, also seventy years ago. Their third son, Jeff, toasted them for “saving more lives than possibly any couple in the history of the world.”
When Carter was told that only one tenth of one per cent of American couples have been married for seventy years (George and Barbara Bush clock in at seventy-one), he smiled. “I hope we make it,” he said. “We still got a couple of weeks to go.”
The caution was understandable. “At first, I thought he had about two weeks to live,” Rosalynn, who is eighty-eight, recalled of her husband’s diagnosis, last year, of Stage IV melanoma. Now he is in remission. The Carters still live in Plains, Georgia, when they aren’t on the road or in their apartment at the Carter Center, in Atlanta, where they sleep on a Murphy bed that Jimmy pulls down without the help of the Secret Service.
The Carters first saw each other when they were babies in Plains. Jimmy’s mother, a nurse, helped deliver Rosalynn, and a few days later brought her toddler over to see the newborn next door. Rosalynn became a friend of Jimmy’s younger sister, Ruth, and remembers gazing fondly at a photograph of Jimmy in his Naval Academy uniform. Although she turned down his first proposal, she said yes when she was eighteen. (She was the second-to-last girl in her class at Plains High School to marry.) When Jimmy decided, over her objections, to quit the Navy, in 1953, he remembers her not speaking to him for the entire drive home from the base in Schenectady. She recalls being resentful, but says that there was no silent treatment. Jimmy has no memory of her throwing a lamp at him when he put a sewer line in their back yard without telling her. The lamp, she recalls, missed.
These days, “ninety per cent of our arguments are about hearing,” Jimmy said. “When I tell her, ‘Please speak more loudly,’ she absolutely refuses to speak more loudly or to look at me when she talks. So almost everything she says to me in the car has to be said at least twice.”
“Which drives me up the wall,” Rosalynn interjected. “I was telling the Secret Service everything I wanted Jimmy to know. I thought he was just not listening to me. So we went to the doctor, and I found out it was me! I was the one who was deaf.”
The Carters attribute their long and happy marriage in part to taking up new activities together: jogging, fly-fishing, biking, bird-watching. They learned to ski when she was fifty-nine and he was sixty-two. Rosalynn said, “The main thing is space. It took us a while to develop that—for Jimmy to approve of my own things that I want to do.” Rosalynn runs a mental-health program at the Carter Center, whose mission includes “waging peace.” A few days earlier, Jimmy had talked to John Kerry about the faltering ceasefire in Syria, which is being monitored by the U.N. with the help of a social-media mapping tool developed by the Carter Center. Jimmy visited Vladimir Putin last year, and later sent the Russian President an e-mail discussing peace proposals for Syria and offering him the mapping tool, which lets the world know exactly where his country’s bombs are falling and whether they are hitting only isis targets, as Putin claims.
The Carter Center has monitored more than a hundred elections around the world, and Jimmy is worried about the impact of voter suppression on this year’s American contest. He was the first major political figure to call the Trump campaign racist.
With minutes to go before a lecture on fighting river blindness in Latin America, Jimmy hustled out the door. “Rosalynn, come on if you’re going in the elevator with me!” he shouted.
“I’m coming by myself,” she said. ♦