Plains Truth

"I don't like to lose"

During her husband's term in the White House, Rosalynn Carter was often characterized as a "steel magnolia." In her autobiography, First Lady from Plains (Houghton Mifflin; $17.95), to be published early next month, she does little to defrost that decidedly cool image. By her own account, she is a tireless campaigner and a more cunning strategist than the 39th President. "I am much more political than Jimmy and was more concerned about popularity and winning re-election," she says. "Our most common argument centered on political timing."

The former First Lady says she urged her husband to postpone the Panama Canal treaties and some of the Middle East decisions until his second term. And she argued that he should delay announcing federal budget cuts that would affect New York City until after the 1980 New York primary. "My pleas always fell on deaf ears," she recalls. But through dogged persistence, she occasionally managed to get her way. "I wanted Jimmy to fire [Health, Education and Welfare Secretary] Joe Califano long before he ever did," she writes. "I felt Jimmy could find someone who would do the job just as well and keep a lower profile." Carter fired Califano in July 1979.

When Rosalynn was twelve years old, a Plains merchant offered a $5 prize for the seventh-grade student with the highest yearly average. "I could not let up on myself," she remembers. "I had to win it." And she did. In 1980, when a campaign aide praised her husband for not seeming bitter about his loss to Reagan, she retorted: "I'm bitter enough for the both of us."

The former First Lady's comments on her relationship with her husband are revealing. She was 17 when she caught the eye of the earnest home-town boy who attended the U.S. Naval Academy. "I knew this was the person I would fall in love with, the person I wanted to have fall in love with me," she recalls. As a Navy wife, she lived in locations from Connecticut to Hawaii, far from the strictures of small-town life. When her husband decided, after the death of his father, that the family must return to Plains, she was devastated. "I cried. I even screamed at him," she remembers. "It was the most serious argument of our marriage... I thought the best part of my life had ended."

In fact, the best part--politics--was only starting. In the book's final passage, she describes the inner engine that helped propel her and her husband from a sleepy town in Georgia to the White House: "Nothing is more thrilling than the urgency of a campaign... I don't like to lose."