ATLANTA (AP) — Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter are celebrating their 77th wedding anniversary with a quiet Friday at their South Georgia home, extending their record as the first longest-married couple as the two 90-year-olds face challenges. major health issues.
The 39th president is 98 years old and has been in palliative care at home since February. The former first lady is 95 and suffers from dementia. The Carter family did not provide details on Jimmy or Rosalynn Carter’s medical condition, but said they both spent time together and with a stream of family members, as well as visits. occasional visits from close friends in recent months.
“As we look back on their legacy, it has been truly wonderful to see the outpouring of support, respect and love,” her grandson Jason Carter said recently. “That word love is really the one that certainly defines their personal relationship, but also the way they approach this world.”
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have been together on the American and international stage for half a century. What they described as a “comprehensive partnership” began years earlier in the Carter family farming business before his political career and their decades of global humanitarian work since leaving the White House in 1981 and founding the Center Carter the following year.
Across the center, Jimmy Carter led several diplomatic missions, working with the blessing of his successors in the Oval Office, even if he sometimes thwarted them. The former president and center staff have monitored at least 114 elections in Asia, Africa and the Americas since 1989. They recently turned their efforts to US elections.
Among their public health awareness activities, the center’s Guinea worm eradication program has nearly defeated the waterborne parasite once prevalent in developing countries. Known cases number in the millions in the mid-1980s when Jimmy Carter set out to eradicate Guinea worm disease. There were fewer than two dozen cases in 2022, and as of early spring the center had yet to document a case in 2023.
Rosalynn Carter, meanwhile, has taken her flagship policy issue – mental health treatment and advocacy – beyond the White House and created an annual fellowship allowing journalists to focus on mental health reporting. . She has also widely advocated for better services for caregivers, a goal the Carter family highlighted earlier this year when they announced the former first lady suffered from dementia.
Beyond The Carter Center, the couple have become the most famous volunteers for Habitat for Humanity, the international organization that builds, repairs and renovates homes for low-income people. The Carters first volunteered for Habitat in 1984, taking a bus from Georgia to the New York construction site with other volunteers. They would soon begin to hold annual builds named after the former president, donning helmets with volunteers through the late 80s and early 90s.
“Everything they’ve done is really just an extension of what they started and who they were in the White House,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic Party chairwoman who got her start. in politics during Carter’s presidential campaigns. “Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter are just good, decent people.”
The Carters married on July 7, 1946 in their hometown of Plains. But their relationship extends to the cradle.
Jimmy Carter’s parents were friends of Rosalynn’s parents. The future president’s mother was the nurse who gave birth to Eleanor Rosalynn Smith at the Smith family home in 1927. “Miss Lillian” returned to the Smiths’ home a few days later with her eldest son, Jimmy, to meet the new baby. The Carters moved to a farm in nearby Archery, just outside Plains, shortly thereafter, although the Carter children and the Smith children continued to see each other at the Plains school.
Rosalynn would become close friends with Jimmy’s sister Ruth, who acted as matchmaker during one of her older brother’s visits home from the US Naval Academy. Jimmy and Rosalynn got married shortly after graduating. They left Plains with no intention of returning other than as visitors. But in 1953, James Earl Carter Sr. died, leaving the family’s farming and warehouse business behind. Without consulting Rosalynn, the young lieutenant decided to leave the navy and bring his young family back to Georgia.
The future president, who became an advocate for women’s rights and appointed more women and non-white people to federal posts than any of his predecessors, later called it inconceivable that he hadn’t not consulted his wife. Yet in the years that followed, Rosalynn Carter became a key partner in the family business.
“I knew more about the paper than he did about the company. He would take my advice on things,” she told The Associated Press in a joint interview with her husband ahead of their 75th birthday in 2021.
This continued in politics, as Rosalynn Carter proved herself a shrewd activist and energetic political advocate in her own right, overcoming her youthful shyness that the former president portrayed in her writings and paintings.
“My wife is much more political,” he said in the interview.
Beyond their longevity, both Carters attribute their long marriage to open communication and their shared Christian faith.
“Every day there has to be reconciliation,” the former president said in 2021. “We don’t fall asleep with a few differences left between us.”
The couple also had hobbies together for years — sometimes even competitively. Before becoming frail, they enjoyed playing tennis, hiking and biking together. Both prolific writers, they sometimes rushed to finish drafts of books. Fishing also often involved competition, and they continued to fish until they were 90 on their property in Plains. They added birding in the last few decades as they physically slowed down.
For all their joint joys, Rosalynn Carter added another element of a successful marriage. “Everyone should have some space,” she said. “It’s really important.”