‘Jimmy and I always partners’

Press, 29 June 1983, Page 9

‘Jimmy and I always partners’

Rosalynn Carter, the former First Lady of the United States, is finishing her memoirs and emerging from her self-imposed Georgia exile. Yet she hasn’t made much peace with the past. During a recent visit to New York, she was blonder, lively, open, prettily dressed, and even philosophical. But she made it clear she still resents “misunderstandings” concerning her attendance at Cabinet meetings and her considerable influence in shaping her husband’s administration. The criticism to which both she and the former President, Jimmy Carter, were subjected still rankles. What such critics didn’t understand, she told 15 women who lunched with her, was that “Jimmy and I were always partners.” “After a few weeks in the peanut business,” she said, reaching back to the days when her husband left the Navy and they returned to Plains, “I knew as much about the business as he did. “I did the books. I talked over everything with him. “We campaigned as a team. We were a team in the White House. We sat in the rocking chairs on the Truman Balcony, just as we did at the Governor’s mansion at 4.30 every afternoon, and we talked.” She said she knew Presidents’ wives were always going to be criticised for something or other, herself

CHARLOTTE CURTIS, “Neu; York Times” - NZPA, meets an assured, lively Rosalynn Carter. included, and she saw no way around that. “But I always felt the press was easier on Gerry Ford than on my husband.” Now she feels it is less critical of President Reagan. “You reach a point where you don’t care,” she said. “For a long time, I didn’t read the papers or watch the nightly news.” Now she said of what she sees on television or reads, she believes “almost nothing.” Her attendance at Cabinet meetings was inevitable. During the 1976 campaign, she said, “Jimmy would go out and say something and I’d say, ‘How dare you say that you didn’t tell me.’ That’s when he said, ‘Come to the Cabinet meetings’.” She paused, then added, “I knew it was a man’s world, but I needed to know. I’d be damned if I’d leave.” According to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book, “Power and Principle,” on his years as President Carter’s National Security Adviser, Mrs Carter began to meet with the newly selected Cabinet in December, 1976, before Carter took office. Clearly, and one suspects wisely, Mr Brzezinski befriended her. He “was quite impressed,” he wrote, “by her clear involvement in

everything" that President Carter did. She said the return of the Panama Canal and the normalisation of China-Ameri-can relations were on a “list” of what “we” intended to do if he was elected. “Whenever anything new came up, Zbig would come and tell me about it. The same was true of the domestic side, and women’s issues.” Asked if she thought First Ladies should be paid, she said she wasn’t sure. “I was on the stage as much as Jimmy was,” she said. “The President was paid SUS2OO,OOO a year. I felt this was ours.” Mr and Mrs Carter were here for a private, black-tie dinner. She stayed on the next day for a lunch given by television interviewer Barbara Walters. Except for an anecdote or two, she said she was speaking on the record, and that much of what she was saying would be further explained in her as yet untitled book. “I loved being in the White House,” she said in her soft-spoken, straightforward way. “I felt as if I could do something for people.” Besides the criticism and the agonies of the Iranian hostage crisis, there were other tribulations. “We were short-handed,” she said. “We had seven calligraphers and that was too many. We let four of them go. Then we didn’t have enough and I had to write things myself.”

The calligraphers write invitations and address envelopes for the White House. When the matter of foreign gifts came up, Mrs Carter said she received all kinds of jewels, including a necklace from Jihan Sadat, when she was the First Lady of Egypt. And something special from Mrs Jose Lopez-Portillo, whose husband was Mexico’s President. Under American law, such gifts belong to the Government. The Carters’ gifts were stored in Atlanta, with some pieces now on display in the Federal Building where Mr Carter has his office. “I couldn’t give anything worth more than $25 in return,” she said. “That’s all the Government allowed. If I wanted to give something more expensive, I had to pay the difference.” Mrs Carter’s memoirs were to have been finished last northern summer, but it was slow going. Linda Bird Francke is helping her rewrite them.

“She’s even using my words,” Mrs Carter said. The book details the Carters’ carefully forged partnership, her distrust of the press, and the story of a small, Georgia girl who grew up to become First Lady. It is now expected late this year. After consulting with Lady Bird Johnson, she has decided to go on tour to promote its sale. Asked what, if anything, she missed about Washington, Mrs Carter burst out laughing. “The hairdresser,” she said. “He would come around any time of the day or night.” Kitty Carlisle Hart, one of the guests, said Mr Carter once told her that Rosalynn was the best hula dancer among the Navy wives, and Mrs Carter laughed again. “I was,” she said, “and it was fun. I’ve written about that. Sometimes, when I was working on the book, I would remember things and I just sat over the typewriter and cried.”