VIEWPOINT Six Lessons I Learned From Rosalynn Carter

By Linda Bird Francke

1. Rosalynn Carter and I and her Secret Service detail are in an elevator descending from our first meeting at Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of her future memoir. At the suggestion of our shared literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, I have signed on to help her with the project, having just finished my own book about children and divorce.

“You’ll have to walk quickly,” Rosalynn says to me as the elevator doors open and the agents rush us across the lobby inside a V formation. People look on in puzzlement at the racing entourage, which, to me, attracts attention rather than deflects it. But I’m new to this.

Her car is waiting at the curb, and I step aside to let her enter first. But — no. I am hurried into the back seat and told to quickly move across. “You ride next to the window for protection,” says Rosalynn, who is quickly beside me.

I get it. If someone shoots from the street, I take the bullet.

And so begins an illuminating year or so working with the former first lady.

2. Speak Softly

My first trip to Plains, Georgia, in 1981: One building selling Carter memorabilia. Another, a worm factory.

“What do I call your husband?” I ask Rosalynn.

“Mr. President,” she responds firmly. “Once a president, always a president.”

Mr. President greets me and says, “I hope you are not one of those Bella Abzug feminists,” referring to the in-your-face chair of his National Advisory Committee for Women, whom he’d fired three years before.

“Yes, I am, Mr. President,” I reply. “I am a great fan of Bella.”

“I’m very disappointed to hear that,” Mr. President says with a grin, and Rosalynn pipes up, “but she’s so LOUD” (pronounced “LA-oud,” in Southern).

“Sometimes women have to be loud to be heard,” I say in as quiet a voice as I can muster.

But I’m not worried. Both Carters are firm advocates for women’s rights. It was the strident voice and take-no-prisoners attitude of the Bronx-born Bella that did her in with the Carter administration. I am from more polite and manipulative Manhattan.

3. Don’t Believe Stereotypes

The three of us are about to eat dinner in the kitchen at the Carters’ vacation home in Ellijay, Georgia.

“Would you like a drink?” Mr. President asks me.

I am stunned. A drink? A real drink? Not Mountain Dew? He had been deemed a hick teetotaler who refused to serve liquor at White House events.

I take a breath. “Do you have any rum?” I say.

“I’m sure we do,” he says, opening a cupboard to find its shelves empty. “Those kids cleaned me out again!” he says in exasperation, presumably at his three sons.

Seeing the amazement on my face, Rosalynn explains, “We have nothing against alcohol. We just always looked for ways to save the taxpayers’ money, and substituting wine for liquor in the White House saved a lot over the four years.”

I kick myself for swallowing the condescending and widespread stereotype of the Carters as unsophisticated country bumpkins.

My memory brings up an image of a tray bearing an assortment of ice-diluted drinks being passed by a butler at the elder Bush White House. Hardly appetizing, expensive and destined for throw-out.

4. Jimmy, the Charmer

Mr. President asks if I’d like to take a walk with him after dinner in Ellijay. He leads me to the rocky edge of a stream and proceeds to describe the life cycle of the mayfly. As they swarm around us, he explains that they only live a few days as adults and die after breeding. A sad brief story, but he is upbeat.

We go out to dinner the next night along with Bert Lance, his former budget director, and daughter Amy, a young teenager. “Anyone want a roadie?” he asks before we get into the car.

Amy’s image in the press has been of a shy, bland girl, but in reality she turns out to be cool. She has brought along her Barbie doll, which she calls “Scarbie,” and which sports a ripped off-the-shoulder dress and a long scar across her chest. She’s also brought a book with her to dinner, and not just any book.

“What are you reading?” her father asks.

“‘Music for Chameleons’ by Truman Capote,” she replies.

“That pre-vert?” her father teases and gets the inevitable rise.

“He’s a great writer!” Amy says loudly. “You should read him!”

As dinner ends, I confess to Mr. President that my son, Andrew, has recently (and, thankfully, briefly) registered as a Republican. Mr. P shares my dismay. “Andrew, how could you be a Republican, when you have such a fine, Democratic mama?” he writes in a big, looping script on a restaurant placemat.

5. Listen and Learn

Rosalynn is never late to our work sessions. She sits, straight-backed and composed, while I ask her questions and tape her responses. Her longtime assistant, who types up the transcripts, thinks it is a waste of time. I don’t. I will use this technique on the many memoirs I help write that follow this first one; it enables me to catch the cadence of her southern speech, specific words and expressions.

“How did you feel?” I ask time and again, leading her to ask if I am a psychiatrist.

She is a very private person, and though she answers all my questions, she doesn’t love the result. “I like what I write, not what I say,” she tells me.

Nan Talese, the book’s editor, steps in when we’ve finished “First Lady from Plains,” and edits it with Rosalynn until she is content.

I learn lessons I will use from Rosalynn. When I run for the New York State Assembly in 1990, I follow her campaign technique for her husband: Look for a radio tower wherever you find yourself and stop in at the station, unannounced. “The host will be thrilled to have a live interview just appear,” she says.

She’s right. I will haunt WLNG’s mobile van.

I earn a scolding on one trip to Plains when an ice storm closes the Atlanta airport but leaves a small local airport open. I fly home out of there and get a phone call from Rosalynn. “Your rental car cost more because you were supposed to return it to Atlanta,” she chides me. No expense eludes her, in or out of the White House.

She tells me a secret. Her bitterness over losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan is well-known, but its personification came down to the White House arrival of the Reagans’ headboard.

“Their headboard was white, tufted leather, and ours was antique, spooled pine,” she says quietly. “And they say they have class, and we don’t?”

The “they” is the Washington establishment and the condescending press that echoed it in what has come to be called “unconscious bias.”

And there, I believe, the Carters made a mistake. Instead of reaching out to the power-centric establishment, personified at the time by Kay Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, the Carters stuck to their own Southern cabal and were punished as “hicks.” One dinner party could have changed that.

Rosalynn and I have a victory lunch in Sagaponack when “First Lady from Plains” enters The New York Times bestseller list at No. 1. Her arrival is complicated by the East Hampton Airport having been declared inadequate and too far from a hospital by the Secret Service, so she comes by motorcade from Westhampton.

Our house had been cleared by the agents that morning, who “swept” our adjoining potato field for explosives, much to the amusement of the local farmer. She and I have celebratory tuna fish sandwiches, a ladylike hug, and off she goes.

6. Keep on Keeping On

The last time I see Rosalynn is in Israel in 2008, when we meet unexpectedly in the Ramallah office of Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, on the occupied West Bank. I am there to interview Fayyad for a piece I am doing on the Palestinians for Newsweek; the Carters are there on a Middle East peace-finding mission between Hamas and Israel and reconciliation between Fayyad’s party, Fatah and Hamas.

“Linda, what on earth are you doing here?” says Rosalynn, understandably incredulous in Fayyad’s office. I explain and praise the former president’s efforts for peace, including his controversial meeting with Hamas leaders. “Well, it’s not going over very well back home,” the ever-political Rosalynn notes. “He’s a brave man,” I say. “He is trying to do what is right and no one else is.”

I go downstairs while the Carters meet with Fayyad and am told by Palestinian security that I can’t go back upstairs until the meeting has concluded and the Carters are out of the building. And, suddenly, there they are, walking quickly side by side, flanked by the Secret Service in the familiar V formation.

Eyes forward, posture erect, Rosalynn and Mr. President sweep by me and out the door. I never see either of them again.

The death of former first lady Rosalynn Carter on November 19 brought back personal memories for journalist and author Linda Bird Francke.

A resident of Sagaponack and formerly of Manhattan, Francke was for decades celebrated for her literary collaborations with a cast of famously fierce women, including Geraldine Ferraro, Jehan Sadat, Benazir Bhutto, Diane von Furstenberg, Betty Friedan, Queen Noor and Barbara Walters.

The first of those collaborations was with the quietly fierce Carter in 1981, soon after her husband, Jimmy, had lost his bid for a second term in a landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan. The book, “First Lady from Plains,” an autobiography, appeared in 1984.

Carter’s death at age 96 in her hometown in November moved Francke to write down these recollections of her experiences working with the former first lady.