“How many Carters are there, for heaven’s sake?” asked a bewildered Florida Democrat, who in one hard-breathing campaign week had been buttonholed by Jimmy, had his hand squeezed by Son Jack and received the “sweetest phone call you ever heard” from Wife Rosalynn. Like the Spanish moss that flourishes in the South, the Carters are conspicuous, tenacious and at times overwhelming. Most of them will be at the convention. If the pater familias is elected President, a Carter Administration will be a family affair.
WIFE ROSALYNN (pronounced Rose-lun) is politically, as well as personally, closer to Jimmy than anyone else. As she puts it: “We’ve always been kind of like partners. If Jimmy went out and did great things and I was left at home, I would have resented it.”
A comely woman with soft, almost feline movements and hazel eyes to match, she is 48 but looks at least ten years younger. In 14 months of campaigning, she covered 34 states and made almost as many speeches as Carter (she also still washes and irons Jimmy’s shirts on weekends back home). Says a Carter aide: “Charming, persuasive, ambitious—put them all together and you have Rosalynn. She is, in fact, an extension of Jimmy.”
Though now described as a “magnolia made of steel,” she once seemed to be all petals. The daughter of a Plains garage mechanic, she was a shy and quiet girl with a winning smile and virtually no sense of humor. Says her mother, Allie Smith, “I am surprised she can now get up in front of all those people and make speeches.”
But when Jimmy made his successful run for Georgia Governor in 1970, she joined the rough-and-tumble and became an overnight hit on the campaign trail. As the first lady of Georgia, her performance was nearly flawless. She was especially skilled at promoting her husband’s mental health program in skeptical rural Georgia.
Whenever Jimmy makes an important decision, he talks it over with Rosalynn. She often plays the part of devil’s advocate. As she says self-deprecatingly: “He needs to know what people who are not as smart as he is think about things.” Jimmy especially values her perception of people. If she approves of someone, he is in; if not, he is out. She clearly had a say in the vice-presidential decision.
Jimmy and Rosalynn go their separate ways on the campaign trail in order to reach as many people as possible. “I never worry about what I should have said, or if I don’t look just right, or what I’ve got to do,” she says. “I just give it my best and move on.”
The other influential woman in Carter’s life is his mother, “MISS LILLIAN” (pronounced Lee-yun), a redoubtable personality who would have fascinated William Faulkner and Bertolt Brecht. Says she: “Everything I started, I finished. Jimmy got that from me.” Indeed, she bequeathed him his pearly teeth, his smile, his inquisitiveness, his endurance —and, fans say, his compassion.
Her lifetime calling has been healing. She trained as a registered nurse, and even after she married James Earl Carter, a farmer-businessman, she continued as a kind of community physician —and not just for whites. She sat up through the night with sick black children as well. In an era of strict segregation, she would greet black friends at the front door or in her parlor, while her husband went out the back door to avoid witnessing such a breach of local mores.
When she was 68, Widow Carter joined the Peace Corps and requested a challenging post. She was sent to a small town in India, where she had the frustrating task of encouraging birth control. She encountered every imaginable disease. Stifling her revulsion, she nursed one young leper back to health. When she returned home after two years, she was exhausted and had lost 26 pounds. But, as Jimmy remarks, “a major portion of her heart is still in India.”
As she tools around Plains in her blue Chevy, she stops now and then to enlist somebody’s help in one cause or another. She is not reluctant to criticize Jimmy. The family, she insists, was never so impoverished during the Depression as he suggests in campaign oratory. She also thinks he talks too much about his religion, about never telling a lie, about loving Rosalynn more now than when he married her. “There was really nothing outstanding about Jimmy as a boy,” she reflects. “He was a farm child like all other farm children. I never thought of him in politics.”
The three Carter sons are wrapped up in the campaign. Each of them—and their wives—visited many states since early in 1975. JOHN (JACK), 29, a University of Georgia Law School graduate who lives in Calhoun, Ga., has yet to try any cases because he is too busy working for Dad. He sees it as his mission to convert all doubters.
JAMES EARL III (“CHIP”), 26, is the best politician among the sons. “He is smart, has good instincts and works harder than the rest,” says a Carter aide. He also introduced his father to Bob Dylan, who supplies some of the candidate’s favorite lines. (“It [the world] looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.”) Chip lives with his wife Caron in a $8,100 mobile home near the Plains railroad station. A member of the Plains city council, he plans to go into the family peanut business. Some day he may run for higher office.
DONNEL (“JEFF”), 23, is working on a degree in government at Georgia State and wants to become an urban planner. The shiest of the sons, he lives in an apartment in Atlanta with his wife Annette, when he is not helping his father.
AMY CARTER, 8, is not quite campaigning, but she is a distinct political asset. A frisky, freckled, strawberry blonde who looks like Huck Finn’s kid sister with the inevitable Carter smile, she basks in all the attention without letting it turn her head. She has, however, learned to turn a profit by selling lemonade and sandwiches at her already famous stand in Plains. In one day’s brisk entrepreneurship, she and her pint-size partners earned $23 from tourists and newsmen who were thirsty for anything that the Carter family provided.
RUTH STAPLETON, 46, Jimmy’s second sister, is an evangelical therapist, usually called a faith healer, who led her brother to his Christian rebirth after he was defeated in the 1966 gubernatorial election (TIME, April 25). Says she: “Jimmy has a deep spiritual side, and I am the only one allowed in.” A onetime high school beauty queen who has by no means lost her looks, she discovered the healing powers of Christ during a period of bleak despair in the early years of her marriage. She now travels round the world sharing her experience with others. When not on the road, she stays at home in Fayetteville, N.C., with her husband Robert, a veterinarian, and their four children.
GLORIA SPANN, 49, Jimmy’s older sister, is the clan cutup. For 17 years “GoGo” was an accountant in Georgia, until she decided to give it up to have some fun. That includes teaching art, decorating jeans with paint and decals and roaring around on one of her two Honda motorcycles. Her husband Walter, a farmer, drives a Harley Davidson 1200. They have cycled around much of the Southeast, but she does not plan to spend too much time in Washington. “I might visit the White House some time to look at the kitchen,” she allows. But she prefers Plains: “I’m prone to be sittin’ on a bank fishin’.”
BILLY CARTER, 39, Jimmy’s brother, is also content right where he is in Plains; he knows he would not fit in at, say, the Sans Souci restaurant in Washington. But whenever a visiting reporter wants to see a genuine “good ole boy” in the flesh, Billy proudly presents himself. He acknowledges: “I’m a redneck.” By his own reckoning, he has given 300 interviews. In the evening Billy holds court at the gas station he owns, and friends and strangers join him in downing beers —or whatever else is available. His T shirt bears the inscription CAST IRON, and Billy says there is very little liquid refreshment he cannot stomach.
He is politically more conservative than Jimmy, and like their father, a smart businessman. Under him, sales of the family enterprise have risen from $800,000 in the past to $2.5 million today. Says he with a smile as wide as Plains: “I’m the only sane one in the family.”
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