Rosalynn Carter, wife of Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth president of the United States, was First Lady of the United States from 1976 to 1980. With President Carter, she founded The Carter Center, a non-profit organisation that prevents and resolves conflicts, enhances freedom and democracy, and improves health around the world.
"What makes Rosalynn Carter so interesting and her memoir so
compelling is her awareness that she is part of a long and
distinguished historical tradition: the southern lady in politics .
. . What ought to be a continuing legacy is Rosalynn's success in
breaking new ground as a First Lady, without uprooting the
traditions of the past."
--Minneapolis Tribune
"First Lady From Plains is a readable, lively and revealing account
of the Carters and their remarkable journey from rural Georgia to
the White House in a span of 10 years. After her husband lost the
1980 election, Mrs. Carter admitted being "bitter enough for both
of us," but fortunately she does not allow her spleen to overwhelm
her book. She simply avoids some of the more painful personal
moments of the Carter Presidency - the Bert Lance affair and Billy
Carter's embarrassing fling with the Libyans. Privately, she has
said their friends and family have suffered enough, and she is not
about to reopen their cases.Mrs. Carter, who describes herself as
her husband's "political partner," does not accept defeat easily.
Never has, never will. After he narrowly lost his first
gubernatorial campaign to Lester Maddox in 1966, the Carters drove
to the Georgia coast for a vacation. "When we went through the town
of Waycross," she writes, "where I had campaigned especially hard,
once standing all night at a gospel singing, only to have the town
vote solidly for Maddox, I put my head in my arms and refused to
look out the window." But Mrs. Carter no longer reacts that way
when passing through politically hostile territory, and it's a good
thing, considering the number of states Jimmy Carter lost in
1980.Mrs. Carter is tough, emotional, ambitious, strong- willed and
fiercely dedicated to her husband. Her childhood, she says, ended
on the day her father, a farmer and auto mechanic, died of
leukemia. At 13, she had to help her mother support the family by
taking in sewing and selling eggs and butter. She lived through the
kind of hard times that Jimmy Carter, son of one of Plains's
better-off families, wanted voters to believe he had experienced.
After her father's death, Mrs. Carter had two goals - to live up to
her father's high expectations and to escape from Plains. In a way,
her marriage to Jimmy Carter was a twofer; it allowed her to
accomplish both."--The New York Times on the original edition,
April 1984
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