Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, were married for 77 years, longer than any other couple who lived in the White House.
Among presidential marriages, reaching more than three-quarters of a century is a singular distinction. Gerald Ford, John Adams, Harry S. Truman, Richard M. Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and John Quincy Adams had marriages that eclipsed 50 years.
President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, were the only other first couple to reach seven decades.
The Carters were a constant in each other’s lives virtually from the beginning. When Mr. Carter was 3, his mother took him to see the neighbor’s new baby, Rosalynn.
When she was older, Rosalynn Carter later said, she would visit her future husband’s sister, Ruth Carter, who kept a photograph of Mr. Carter on her bedroom wall. “I fell in love with that picture,” she said.
Their partnership withstood the glare of political campaigns and the strains of raising a family, triumphs that catapulted them to international prominence and a defeat that sent them home to Georgia as political outcasts with a faltering family business. As their world inevitably narrowed in the dusk of life, the couple came to rely on their bond even more.
“We’ve just grown closer and closer together,” Mr. Carter said in 2021 ahead of the couple’s 75th wedding anniversary.
Mrs. Carter died on Nov. 19, 2023, at age 96, two days after the Carter Center in Atlanta said she had entered hospice care at home in Plains, Ga. Mr. Carter survived for more than a year after her death.
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