Rosalynn Carter, 96-year-old former first lady, is in hospice care at home, Carter Center says
Former first lady Rosalynn Carter is staying in a hospice home in Plains, Georgia, with former President Jimmy Carter, who has been receiving end-of-life care since February, their family announced Friday.
The Carter family said they are “grateful for the outpouring of love and support” but asked for privacy. The Carters have been married for 77 years and are the longest married presidential couple in the US
The family announced earlier this year that the 96-year-old former first lady is suffering from dementia. The former president, now 99, was admitted to a hospice at home in February but remains alert, his loved ones say.
They were together during Jimmy Carter’s rise from their Georgia farm to his election as president in 1976. After his defeat in 1980, the couple founded The Carter Center in Atlanta as a global center to advocate human rights, democracy and public health .
“I loved politics,” Rosalynn Carter told The Associated Press in 2021. She said she had “the best time” campaigning on behalf of her husband in what they both described as “a complete partnership.”
Long after leaving the White House, Jimmy Carter said, “The best thing I ever experienced in my life was when she said she was going to marry me.”
The family’s announcement Friday brought a new round of tributes.
Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia called the former first lady “a remarkable woman of great faith” and said that “her service to Georgia and our country is part of an incredible legacy.”
The couple’s grandson, Jason Carter, said in a recent interview that his grandparents enjoyed spending their “last chapter” together at home, celebrating their long lives, family and love in the same small Georgia town where they both were born.
“That word love is really the word that certainly defines their personal relationship, but also the way they approach this world,” says Jason Carter, who is now chairman of the board of directors of The Carter Center.
In addition to her role as a top advisor to the president, Rosalynn Carter became one of the world’s leading advocates for mental health care and expanding the role of health care providers in American life. She helped the Carter administration pass major health care legislation during her husband’s term, and she continued her work after their years in the White House by founding a fellowship where journalists could focus on more effective ways to discuss mental health issues .
For years, she emphasized the need to reduce the stigma attached to people struggling with mental illness. Decades after leaving the White House, she testified on Capitol Hill urging Congress to put treatment and insurance for mental illness on par with other conditions in the U.S. health care system. She traveled the world to help developing countries address their lack of mental health resources.
“I want people to know what I know – that today, thanks to research and our knowledge of the brain, mental illnesses can be diagnosed and treated effectively, and that the majority of those with these illnesses can recover and live fulfilling lives…go to school , work, raise a family and be productive citizens in their communities,” she said.
At the height of the Carters’ political power, the Washington press corps in the late 1970s dubbed Rosalynn Carter “the Steel Magnolia,” a reflection of the quiet grace stereotypical of the era’s Southern political women and a hard core that made her made a strength of her husband’s power. on behalf of and in its own right.
“She knew what she wanted to accomplish,” said Kathy Cade, Rosalynn Carter’s White House adviser.
To expand the role of first lady, she worked in her own office in the East Wing with her own staff and on her own initiative. She also huddled with the president’s advisers and attended top-level meetings, raising eyebrows in Washington power circles.
“She didn’t say anything at Cabinet meetings, but she wanted to be fully informed so she could give her husband good advice,” says Carter biographer Jonathan Alter.
Alter considers Rosalynn Carter’s only colleagues to be influential first ladies: Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton, although he said the Carters’ partnership was more seamless because it lacked the infidelities and personal drama of the Roosevelts and Clintons.
The band also brought friendly rivalry and humor: “I never knew I’d marry someone so old,” Jimmy Carter joked when his wife was 91.
They often rushed to finish writing their next books or tried to beat the other in tennis, skiing, or some other pursuit.
Rosalynn Carter was central to her husband’s political campaigns, beginning with his first Senate race in 1962.
“In the beginning I wrote letters to people. He would go out and I would write letters to them,” she told The Associated Press. “But then it developed into a full-time job for me, working to help him get elected.”
She first campaigned solo during Jimmy Carter’s 1966 bid for governor. She was nervous at first, but warmed to the role and ultimately demonstrated what White House adviser Stuart Eizenstat called “uncanny political instinct.”
At the White House, it was Rosalynn Carter who urged her husband to think more about the 1980 election as he set priorities, and to discuss how decisions could play out in the media. When Jimmy Carter stayed in Washington to do everything he could to free the American hostages in Iran, the first lady found himself on the trail of his re-election campaign.
“The last time we ran, I campaigned hard every day,” she told the AP.
Her emphasis on mental health and reducing stigma traced back to her husband’s campaigns in Georgia.
Voters were “patiently waiting” to talk about their family problems, she once wrote. After hearing a factory worker’s story about caring for her stricken child, Rosalynn Carter decided to bring the issue to the candidate. She showed up unannounced at her husband’s meeting that day and stood in line to shake his hand, just like everyone else.