E. Stanly Godbold, Jr.: Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: A Love Story

[E. Stanly Godbold, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of History at Mississippi State University. He served as off-camera consultant and on-camera commentator for the American Experience documentary on the life of Jimmy Carter. He is the author of Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter: The Georgia Years, 1924-1974. This article is a brief excerpt from that book.]

In the hot, dusty summer of 1945, people in Plains talked about the heat, the crops, and the war, unaware of an event on Main Street that three decades later would catapult their town onto the world stage. Jimmy Carter, the twenty-year-old eldest child of a prominent local family, was visiting his hometown before returning for his final year at the Naval Academy. As he drove down Main Street in a Ford car with a rumble seat, accompanied by his sister Ruth and her boyfriend, he glanced toward the Methodist church. There he spied a pretty young woman loitering on the steps. Petite Rosalynn Smith, with her large, warm, intelligent eyes, exuded a seductive shyness that captivated the Academy man. Graduated as valedictorian of her class at Plains High School, she had completed one year at a nearby junior college. Jimmy stopped the car, not knowing that Ruth and Rosalynn had conspired to set up the meeting. He invited Rosalynn to attend the movie at the Rylander Theater in nearby Americus that night. She accepted.

Rosalynn was seventeen and Jimmy twenty that night in 1945 when they had their first date. His white Navy uniform dazzled her, and he thought her ravishing in her blue dress that buttoned all the way down the front. Immediately after their first date, Jimmy told his mother that he had met the woman he intended to marry. Lillian disapproved. “Jimmy, she’s just a little girl! She’s Ruth’s friend,” she argued. Lillian thought that Jimmy was much more sophisticated than “naïve” Rosalynn Smith of Plains, Georgia.

Rosalynn’s father lacked the powerful personality and wealth of Earl Carter, and neither her mother nor any woman in Plains could equal Miss Lillian. Yet, connected by blood to the Wises, Murrays, Bells, and Smiths, her pedigree, ever so important in a small southern town, was superior to that of the Gordys or Carters. Because her father died when she was young and her mother remained imprisoned in shyness, Rosalynn had no influential, potent adults to push her into the world. What she had was a robust spirit, a vigorous will, an inquisitive intellect, an energetic mind, an unspoken ambition, a quiet faith, and a tough ability to succeed at whatever she undertook....