Watch The death of Rosalynn Carter, wife of American President Jimmy Carter and very political first lady – Belgium Trending News

Rosalynn Smith Carter died Sunday, November 19, at age 96 at her home in Plains, Georgia. Her relationship with former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, aged 99, lasted seventy-seven years, the longest American presidential marriage.

“Rosalynn has been my full partner in everything I have accomplished”, the former president said in a statement released on Sunday. Rosalynn Carter, who gained the status of first lady when her husband moved to the White House for a single mandate from 1977 to 1981, follows in the tradition of women who had a massive influence on their husband’s presidency . It was before Hillary Clinton and after figures like Edith Wilson, wife of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), who suffered a stroke, or Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945).

It was she who helped propel Jimmy Carter, Democrat and peanut planter, from his rural Georgia to the White House, in an America traumatized by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The Carter presidency did not resist the Iranian revolution, which led to the hostage crisis and the oil shock. Jimmy Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan, and accepted his fate, obviously more than Rosalynn Carter: “I was quite bitter for both of us, she declared. I hate losing. »

“Do-it-yourself Magnolia”

Rosalynn Carter was born in 1927 in Plains, a small remote village in Georgia, 220 kilometers south of Atlanta. It is Jimmy Carter’s mother, a nurse, who performs the delivery but she does not meet Jimmy until he becomes a student at the Navy school in 1945. He kisses her when returning from an outing to the movie theater. “I had never let any boy kiss me on the first date”, she wrote. They will never leave each other again.

They married in 1946 and the couple moved throughout Jimmy Carter’s assignments, until one day in 1953: Jimmy’s father died, and he announced to his wife that he was going to take over the family farm. “I contested. I cried. I even yelled at him.”, recounted Rosalynn Carter in her Memoirs. Return to this rural South from which she had escaped. The couple, who had four children, developed the peanut plantation and Jimmy entered politics at a time of the battle for civil rights. He was elected senator from Georgia in 1962 and then wanted to become governor. He failed in the Democratic primary in 1966 against a segregationist but finally managed to get elected in 1970.

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