Opinion: The astonishing life of Rosalynn Carter

Editor’s note: Stuart E. Eizenstat was chief domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter and deputy secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

That Rosalynn Carter would become a transformative first lady, the first to be a full political and policy partner of a president, was as astonishing to those who knew her as I did, from Jimmy Carter’s early political years, as her husband’s remarkable rise from obscurity to the Oval Office.

I first met Rosalynn when I was working as the policy director of Jimmy Carter’s 1970 gubernatorial campaign in Georgia. She was painfully shy and retiring. During his unsuccessful first race for governor in 1966, she did not make a single speech. In this campaign, when she was unexpectedly asked to speak at a luncheon in Gainesville, Georgia, she stammered that her husband needed the help of the audience and sat down.

She later told me she was terrified that she would have to go through this again and again as a political wife. And yet she blossomed like a beautiful flower, becoming more and more confident — and coming into her own as a political actor.

Rosalynn ultimately came to enjoy campaigning. While Jimmy Carter traveled to Iowa on more than 100 visits before the 1976 caucuses, she too went there more than 70 times, and she campaigned vigorously in New Hampshire, the first primary, and in Florida, where she helped her husband defeat the arch-segregationist George Wallace.

During the Iran hostage crisis, when (over her objection) the president took a self-imposed hiatus from campaigning against Sen. Ted Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic nomination, she took on the burden of campaigning for several crucial months.

During the gubernatorial campaigns, she told me that the topic Georgians raised with her most often was the stigma attached to mental illness and the absence of mental health care for members of their family. The issue became her abiding interest.

In 1977, only a few weeks after her husband’s inauguration, Rosalynn was the driving force behind the establishment of the President’s Commission on Mental Health. She urged the president to name her its chair, but federal law precluded it, so she settled for honorary chair, although she was the commission’s guiding leader.

Even though I was the president’s chief domestic policy adviser and would normally have overseen any new policy initiative, Rosalynn and her staff took the lead in drafting, testifying before Congress and successfully lobbying for what became the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, tirelessly explaining that people with mental illness should be treated just as those with physical illness.

She was a champion for family and women’s issues. She recommended the establishment of the National Advisory Committee for Women and was significantly responsible for identifying qualified women for senior positions in the administration and in the federal courts. Jimmy Carter would appoint more women to federal judgeships than all 38 preceding presidents combined. After her White House years, she built on her work as first lady (and as first lady of Georgia), to help develop an ambitious children’s immunization program in all 50 states.

There were a series of other “firsts” as first lady. The press frequently asked about her husband’s positions on issues, and so she insisted on being fully briefed so she could respond correctly. After Cabinet meetings, she grilled the president about what had transpired, and he said, “Why don’t you sit in on Cabinet meetings, and then you’ll know what’s going on and why we made the decisions?” She became the only first lady to do so, sitting near me with the senior White House staff, taking copious notes.

Senior White House staff sometimes went to Rosalynn to try to convince her to weigh in with the president on sensitive issues, not always for the best. For example, White House pollster Pat Caddell first went to her to argue for a shakeup of his Cabinet and for what became the “crisis of confidence” speech, or as the press called it, the “malaise” speech.

The president recognized her capabilities from the start, giving her a challenging diplomatic assignment unlike any first lady before or since: a grueling two-week trip to seven Latin American countries, not to meet with her fellow first ladies as a goodwill gesture, but to bring a message to the region’s military dictators that the Carter administration was putting a new emphasis on human rights and democracy.

She worked hard to improve her Spanish by taking language lessons and immersing herself in the culture and history of the region, while absorbing briefings by scholars and administration experts. She brought home tangible achievements. Ecuador pledged to sign the American Convention on Human Rights; the military leader of Peru promised to give up power and establish a democracy. She got the president of Colombia to intercede with Panama’s leader, Gen. Omar Torrijos, to move forward on negotiations for the Panama Canal Treaty.

This was not her only challenging foreign diplomatic assignment. She was instrumental in helping Cambodian refugees who had fled the murderous Pol Pot regime. She took a 24-hour flight to Thailand, urging the king to provide more support for them and successfully prodded UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to appoint a special relief coordinator. She also played a key role in arranging an airlift of US food and emergency supplies.

And she had a hand in Carter’s most important foreign policy triumph, the Camp David Accords. Jimmy Carter told me it was Rosalynn’s idea to conduct the negotiations between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin at the rustic presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Park. And she was by the president’s side much of the time during those 13 arduous days, as he drafted more than 20 peace agreements before the final one was accepted.

In the White House, she displayed a keen sense of politics as she advised Jimmy Carter, and by their joint admission, she was more politically oriented than he was. She urged him to delay Senate ratification for the Panama Canal Treaty until a second term, because it was so politically controversial. But the president charged ahead, saying, “Suppose there isn’t a second term,” and won Senate ratification in one of the toughest congressional battles of his presidency. But it came with the political cost Rosalynn feared, as a number of Democratic senators who supported the treaty were defeated for reelection. She told him to avoid a traditional Russian kiss on the cheeks by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev when they signed the SALT II Treaty in Vienna, Austria, in 1979, but he did so anyway.

Rosalynn Carter was often referred to as the “Steel Magnolia,” a hard woman with a soft exterior, but I saw a different side of her. As busy as she was, she always tried to be home by 4 p.m. to greet her young daughter, Amy, after school. She worked hard to make life as normal as possible for Amy, allowing her to roller-skate down the White House hallways and play in the treehouse the president built for her.

She and Jimmy would often jog around the track of the South Lawn of the White House and play tennis together in the late afternoon. They would cool off on the Truman Balcony, in the Southern-style rocking chairs Jimmy designed. She saw to it that the family ate dinner at 6:30 p.m. when the president was not tied up with official business. And they ended the day reading the Bible together, often in Spanish.

I was the beneficiary of her personal kindness on many occasions. In 1974, she arranged for my late wife, Fran, and me to have a Sunday lunch at the Governor’s Mansion in Atlanta to thank me for my work with the governor in his role as chairman of the Democratic National Committee’s congressional campaign committee. She also invited my parents and Fran’s parents, who were visiting from Boston. She showed great aplomb when, on a tour of the greenhouse, my wonderful mother had the chutzpah to ask if she could take one plant home. Without blinking, Rosalynn readily agreed. And it was Rosalynn who urged the president to allow the senior White House staff to spend weekends with our families at Camp David, realizing the sacrifices our 24/7 jobs imposed on our family life.

Their partnership continued in the historic post-presidency of Jimmy Carter as they returned to their ranch house in Plains, Georgia. They co-founded the Carter Center, which has monitored more than 100 democratic elections, and they worked to eradicate two diseases (Guinea worm and river blindness) and promoted human rights. They both joked — though with some truth to it — that one of their most difficult jobs in the post-presidency was co-authoring a book, “Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life.”

With all these accomplishments, family came first. She was a loving wife of 77 years, a caring and kind mother to her four children, and grandmother of 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. Her 96 years on this earth was truly a life well-lived.

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