At the time, though, Mrs. Carter’s achievements were largely dismissed. Late ’70s press coverage mocked her as “Rosé Rosalynn,” a dour Southern Baptist who canceled hard liquor, dancing and French cooking at White House dinners — all seen as not elegant or remnants of Kennedy-era decadence — and allowed her staff members to shuffle around in clogs. Feminists like Gloria Steinem faulted Mrs. Carter for not being sufficiently outré in her activism. “I am disappointed in her altogether,” complained Ms. Steinem in 1978. Even female reporters like United Press International’s Helen Thomas, an old White House hand who had witnessed far lazier and media-hostile first ladies, were unimpressed. “There’s no ferment, no mystique,” she wrote. “She creates neither love nor hate.”
Neither America nor Washington was quite ready for Mrs. Carter at the time. A careless classism and Georgetown-set pettiness ran through much of the D.C.-focused society gossip and political reporting about her. (Nancy Reagan was careful to cultivate the Katharine Graham-led Washington social elite to pre-empt the same fate.)
While Mrs. Carter was less contemptuous of politics than her husband and strategic enough to know that lofty goals required politicking, she, too, came from a small town in Georgia and had a slightly defensive air of humble superiority. It kept her from doing the image crafting and social brokering that first ladyhood requires. It was only a political outsider like Andy Warhol, who visited the Carters in Plains, Ga., to do a portrait of Mr. Carter after he won the Democratic nomination, who could appreciate her steel. “She’s the tough one, Rosalynn,” he told a colleague after the trip. “She wears the pantsuit. Polyester.”
Less Washington-centric press accounts from Mrs. Carter’s time in office acknowledged what she had managed to achieve but with an undercurrent of ambivalence. A Newsweek columnist referred to her as “Mrs. President”; on the occasion of one speech, a piece in The Atlantic described her as having “the air of a child at her first piano recital.” It was only years later that mental health would emerge as a national health crisis, and by that time Mrs. Carter’s early efforts to both forge a care agenda and combat stigma were largely forgotten. The legacy of the Carter administration itself was neglected for decades and only recently has generated renewed interest.
My own interest in Rosalynn Carter was piqued in childhood, when in Iranian émigré circles her husband was blamed for haranguing the shah of Iran on his human rights record, emboldening the anti-shah Iranian student movement in the United States and thus shepherding that great disaster, the Iranian revolution of 1979. In my mind, the name Jimmy Carter, pronounced in a Persian accent, still sounds like a curse word.