![Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter celebrate 75 years of marriage](https://news.internationalpk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Jimmy-and-Rosalynn-Carter-celebrate-75-years-of-marriage-1024x576.jpg)
Both a former president and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Jimmy Carter has called marrying Rosalynn “a pinnacle of my life.”
“The best thing I ever did was marrying Rosalynn,” he once said.
Beginning before Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were even born, the longest presidential marriage in history didn’t begin with a simple “yes.”
When Jimmy, then a fresh-faced US Naval Academy student, first proposed, Rosalynn Smith — as she was known then — rejected him because of a promise she made at 13 to her dying father that she’d finish college before marrying.
As Rosalynn recounted in her memoir, “First Lady from Plains,” the pair grew up three years and three miles apart.
There were no girls in town who were her age. So Rosalynn became best friends with Jimmy’s younger sister. “I thought he was the most handsome young man I had ever seen,” she wrote.
At every stop along the way to the nation’s highest office, the Carters brought their unique blend of sincerity and conviction. After leaving active Navy duty in 1953, Jimmy spent time raising his children, running the family peanut farm and taking his first political steps, winning election to the Georgia state Senate in 1962.
By 1970, he had captured Georgia’s governorship. Just six years later, he was elected president. And while Jimmy was the one who sat at the Resolute Desk, Rosalynn was a towering figure in the White House who wielded enormous influence.
Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend of the Carters, told CNN that the former President trusted Rosalynn “above and beyond everybody else.”
“Rosalynn has always been that trusted adviser that is selfless. He knows for sure that she is looking out for others. And I don’t know if President Carter would have been president without Rosalynn,” Stuckey said.
Gerald Rafshoon, who served as White House communications director under Carter, recounted Rosalynn as the former President’s “best adviser” who “isn’t afraid to tell him when he’s wrong, and when he’s right she would fight to the end to help him.”
Sometimes, he told CNN, the pair would speak to each other in Spanish during meetings just so they could talk one-on-one without anyone else interfering.
“We would say, ‘Oh gosh, they’re talking in Spanish. We’ve lost this argument,'” Rafshoon said.
And though Jimmy failed to capture reelection after a term defined by inflation at home and conflict abroad, the couple channeled their energy for political service into a remarkable run of volunteer work and global democracy advocacy.
“There’s the feeling of wanting to redeem yourself,” author and journalist Kate Andersen Brower said of Jimmy Carter’s reelection loss. “And then I think there’s a bit of anger there too — and kind of feeling overlooked that has really kind of galvanized and spurred them into action in a way because they were one term. And I say ‘they’ because they’re really a unit and a team.”
“I think that their post-presidency is what’s going to define both of their legacies because it was so long,” Brower said.
Remarkably, the Carters’ tireless public service has endured multiple health issues over the years.
“They will never, ever give up once they set their mind to something, they put everything into it,” Stuckey said. “And every day they try to eat right, exercise because they know the value of their presence to a project and they want to live as long as they can, so they can help as many people as they can.”
“We try to be reconciled before we go to sleep at night, and try to find everything we can think of that we like to do together,” he said. “So we have a lot of good times.”
CNN’s Stephen Collinson contributed to this report.