Partner

First Lady from Plains.
by Rosalynn Carter.
Houghton Mifflin. 370 pp. $17.95.

The Carter White House seems to have spawned more memoirs more quickly than any other, a phenomenon that may owe something to the advent of the word processor. Jimmy Carter, Hamilton Jordan, and Jody Powell have offered their stories to the public, and now, with First Lady from Plains, we have the tale told from the perspective of the former President’s better half and “political partner.”

While Mrs. Carter’s narrative proper begins in Plains, Georgia, long before the presidential election that made the Carters international figures, the book opens with a prologue devoted to Inauguration Day, 1977. With her sharp eye for detail, Mrs. Carter vividly recreates the day, recalling the dawn blackness, the sound of jackhammers blasting ice off Pennsylvania Avenue—and her own worries about her new permanent. Describing the day’s events in the present tense, Mrs. Carter lends to them a dreamy, cinematic quality:

And we keep walking and waving, smiling and laughing, warm as we go through the snow and ice. . . . I suddenly think about all the obligations and responsibilities we have assumed. I am now in the White House as First Lady. . . .

In light of the four years that followed, “reruns” of the cheers and promises of that day strike an oddly disconcerting note.

Turning from the shining hour of the Inauguration, Mrs. Carter looks to her early days in Plains. There, as everyone knows, she and Jimmy Carter grew up, “three years and three miles apart.” And there she experienced a childhood that seems a cross between The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and an Andy Hardy movie. She read, she sewed, she fell in love with her best friend Ruth Carter’s brother. Married to Jimmy at eighteen, she left Plains armed with a guidebook called The Navy Wife. When Jimmy later decided to quit the Navy and return to Plains, Rosalynn Carter thought her life was over; she characterizes the bitter, painful fight that ensued as “the most serious argument of our marriage.” She lost, he won—which may account for the monumental significance of the quarrel. Her description of the car ride home, occurring long enough before the two of them had intruded on history so that it stands as something merely personal, is one of the few sympathetic moments of the book:

I had a long time to think about it as we packed the children into the car and began to drive South. And I became more and more dejected the closer we got. I didn’t want to live in Plains. I had left there, moved on, changed. But Jimmy was determined—and happy. I stared straight ahead in sullen silence as we drove into town. He was grinning from ear to ear. Never had we been at such cross-purposes. I thought the best part of my life had ended. But Jimmy turned to me with a smile and said cheerfully, “We’re home!”

It was in Plains, of course, that Jimmy Carter became involved in activities that ultimately launched him, and her, on his cosmic political career.

Throughout her book, Rosalynn Carter is candid about differences between her husband and herself, particularly differences of temperament. When Jimmy decided to run for the Georgia State Senate, she was astonished that he would even try: “But that is one of the fundamental differences between Jimmy and me. I don’t like to take a chance on losing. I always want to win!” It becomes evident on reading First Lady from Plains that Mrs. Carter accepts defeat with greater difficulty than does her husband. Over the years, her desire to win developed into an overwhelming drive, and the young woman who “felt so afraid [she] usually didn’t try” grew into the woman who says, “I would be out there campaigning right now if Jimmy would run again. . . . [W]hen all is said and done, for me, our loss at the polls is the biggest single reason I’d like to be back in the White House. I don’t like to lose.”

To put it mildly, the lady takes her husband’s victories and defeats personally, responding to election results as if the votes were tallied for her—and, as the public would discover, in many ways they were. As a matter of course she writes, “I am much more political than Jimmy.” In the months before the 1980 election, her husband was “not nearly as concerned about the campaign as I.” Later, as the results of the election became evident, an aide remarked on the President’s lack of bitterness. Mrs. Carter writes, “‘I’m bitter enough for both of us,’ I said. I meant it.”

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With such insights, we may better understand what Rosalynn Carter means when, describing her tenure as First Lady of Georgia, she says, “I was more a political partner than a political wife.” According to both her own and her husband’s memoirs, nothing changed after the couple became ensconced in Washington. Jimmy Carter writes in Keeping Faith:

Rosalynn’s attitude toward her White House duties was shaped by her experience as my business and political partner and her life as First Lady of Georgia. On the campaign trail, she had been as familiar with domestic and foreign issues as anyone around me, and had assumed the same basic responsibilities as I had. . . . Both my staff members and news reporters knew that she could speak for me with authority. All of us turned to her for sound advice on issues, and political strategy.

It was only natural that when we arrived in Washington she would pursue these kinds of activities. . . . It was most helpful for me to be able to discuss questions of importance with her as I formed my opinions.

Mrs. Carter tells us, “Though I could seldom sway him when his mind was made up, he always listened.” The reader is left to wonder what happened when the President’s opinions were still unformed.

Mrs. Carter has a habit of speaking of her husband in the first person plural, which may at first seem endearing but soon becomes alarming. Of the Inauguration Day crowd she observes, “All those people. And we are responsible to them and for them.” Of the area which, as First Lady, she made her special interest: “Fortunately, we were now in a position to make mental health a top national priority.” Of the 1980 Democratic convention: “We had won the nomination.” Apropos Ronald Reagan: “His politics were so bad . . . that I thought we could beat him with no trouble.”

But if she refers to her husband as “we,” she speaks of herself, emphatically, as “I” and “me.” Of her trip to Latin America in 1977: “The whole field of foreign relations was new and exciting for me.” It may be nice to know that international affairs kept the President’s wife entertained, but, in view of their touted partnership, what does this say about the Carter administration’s conduct of foreign affairs? At one point during her tour of Latin America, an American reporter confronted the First Lady with a question that nags at the reader throughout:

“You have neither been elected by the American people nor confirmed by the Senate to discuss foreign policy with foreign heads of state,” he said. “Do you consider this trip an appropriate exercise of your position?”

The one foreign-policy triumph of the Carter administration, Camp David, is recorded in great detail. The episode is obscured, however, by Mrs. Carter’s account of the crippling fiasco which spanned the final 444 days of the Carter Presidency. It is painful to be reminded of the morass in which the United State foundered under Jimmy Carter in those days, and astonishing that the events should be related with such an air of righteous pride. There are enough yellow ribbons and candlelight vigils here to make any reader cringe. What is nowhere to be found, however, is even the subtlest hint of the role President Carter played in letting the Shah fall as precipitously as he did.

Just as she sees the revolution in Iran erupting as if in a vacuum, Rosalynn Carter views the rise of Ronald Reagan as occurring independently of the mandate of the American people. In her eyes what defeated her husband was “the philosophy of a new President,” a philosophy that bore no relation to the public will. It is as though Ronald Reagan usurped presidential power in 1980, playing wicked Prince John to Jimmy Carter’s Richard the Lionhearted. This assessment, like many others in the book, is as naive as it is brazen, a combination all too characteristic of Rosalynn Carter herself. “I never forgot I was there because my husband held his high office,” she writes. Neither, one hopes, will anyone else.

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