📢 As Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter both prepared for the end, the couple has had plenty of support from their four children, 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.
"They are at peace and – as always – their home is full of love," the couple's grandson, Jason Carter, who chairs The Carter Center governing board, wrote in a Twitter post in February after his grandfather announced he was going into hospice care.
1945-1962: Courtship, marriage and early life together
A one-time commanding officer of a Navy submarine, Jimmy Carter – who began courting Rosalynn Smith while he was a cadet at the United States Naval Academy – has often referred to his wife as his "secret weapon," both on the campaign trail and in their private life.
"When I first had a date with her, the next morning I told my mother, that was the girl I wanted to marry," Jimmy Carter told ABC News in July 2021, as he and his wife emerged from COVID-19 isolation to celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary.
In the same interview, Rosalynn Carter said she turned him down the first time he proposed, saying she had promised her father on his deathbed that she would finish college before she wed.
He was the president of the United States and the governor of Georgia, but Jimmy Carter always said the "pinnacle" of his life was getting Eleanor Rosalynn Smith to marry him.
In the 2020 book "What Makes a Marriage Last" by Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas, Rosalynn Carter said she fell in love with a photograph of Jimmy Carter that Ruth Carter had on her bedroom wall.
"I didn't know a single boy I thought I'd want to spend my life with until Jimmy Carter came calling," she said in the book. But at the time, Jimmy Carter had left Plains for Annapolis, Maryland, to enroll in the Naval Academy.
As fate would have it, while back home on a break from the Naval Academy, Jimmy Carter found himself without a date because his then-girlfriend was at a family reunion, he recalled in "What Makes a Marriage Last."
I was cruising around with my sister, Ruth, and her boyfriend, just looking for a date, and I picked up Rosalynn in front of the Methodist church," he recalled. "I just felt compatible with her. She was beautiful and innocent, and there was a resonance. We rode in the rumble seat of a Ford pickup – Ruth and her boyfriend in the front – and I kissed her on that first date. I remember that vividly."
The couple married on July 7, 1946, and traveled the world while he was deployed to different bases, including Pearl Harbor, as a submarine officer.
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