WASHINGTON — The moment lingers in the national memory: a 9-year-old girl, golden haired and slightly awkward, traipsing off to public school in the nation’s capital with the Secret Service in tow.
For Americans of a certain age, that image and others of Amy Carter — the youngest child of former President Jimmy Carter and the first young child to live in the White House since the days of President John F. Kennedy — defined for the public a new and very different president. Carter, a Baptist Sunday school teacher and onetime peanut farmer, was determined to live simply and modestly after the wrenching scandal and national upheaval of Watergate.
During Carter’s time in office, Amy roller-skated on the driveway near the White House South Lawn; had dinner with one of her favorite actors, John Travolta; and sat behind the historic Resolute desk, which had been returned to the Oval Office at her father’s request. Her cat, a Siamese named Misty Malarky Ying Yang, became famous.
Now, after decades of quiet living in the Atlanta area, Amy Carter, 57, will once again be in the spotlight as her family prepares to lay her father to rest in a funeral that will draw dignitaries from around the world.
It is unclear how much of a public role she will take. When her mother, Rosalynn Carter, died in November 2023, a tearful Amy Carter read a love letter her father had written to his wife 75 years earlier, when he was serving in the Navy and they were apart.
“My mom spent most of her life in love with my dad,” she said. “Their partnership and love story was a defining feature of her life. Because he isn’t able to speak to you today, I’m going to share some of his words about loving and missing her.”
Those who know Amy Carter say she is reticent to the point of being shy. She has taught art, part time, at the Paideia School, a private school in Atlanta that her two sons have attended. Her name is not on the school’s website, and the school did not respond to email messages.
“She is a private person and likes to live a private life,” said Jan Williams, who taught Carter in 1976, when she was in the fourth grade in Plains, Georgia, while Jimmy Carter was running for president.
Shortly after he won the presidency, Carter announced that his daughter would attend the Thaddeus Stevens School, a public elementary school in Washington with a majority Black student body.
Only one other sitting president, Theodore Roosevelt, had sent a child to public school. But Carter had accepted the Democratic presidential nomination by condemning the “political and economic elite” who were out of touch with working-class Americans.
“When the public schools are inferior or torn by strife, their children go to exclusive private schools,” he said then.
In Washington and around the country, Americans debated whether the president and first lady were making decisions about their daughter’s education to score a political point. Amy has three older brothers — Jack, Chip and Jeff, all now in their 70s. Chip and Jeff Carter and their wives also lived in the White House for a time.
But the public’s fixation was with Amy, so much younger than her brothers that some people assumed she was an only child.
“She didn’t like all the limelight that was put on her,” Williams said. “She preferred to just do young child things — walk up and down the railroad tracks, climb a tree, ride a bike.”
Amy Carter cut a bookish, innocent figure as a child. She played in a treehouse designed by her father on the White House South Lawn. At Jimmy Carter’s first state dinner in 1977, which honored the president of Mexico, she touched off a debate about etiquette after reading a book called “The Mystery of the Screaming Clock” at the dinner table.
The next week, at a state dinner for the prime minister of Canada, she brought two books: “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator” and “The Story of the Gettysburg Address.”
It was, by any account, an extraordinary childhood. In a 1995 interview on the NPR program “Fresh Air,” Amy Carter recalled being especially drawn to Anwar el-Sadat, the president of Egypt. “He was so kind and would come and say good night to me before he left,” she said.
And she “was completely overwhelmed” by meeting Travolta and the singer Cher, whose long fingernails were etched in her memory. “I feel like she spoke to me about an hour alone — made me feel adult,” she said.
Carter’s views appeared to carry weight with her father. During a 1980 presidential debate against Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter told the audience that he had asked his daughter what she thought the “most important issue” was.
“She said she thought nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms,” Carter said.
Amy Carter did have a brief stint as a newsmaker in her own right — as a teenage activist. In 1985, she was arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington while protesting that country’s racial policy of apartheid. The next year, as a freshman at Brown University, she was arrested at an anti-apartheid protest in Rhode Island. And later that year, she was arrested in Massachusetts along with 1960s anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman and others in a demonstration against the CIA’s involvement in Nicaragua under her father’s successor, Reagan.
Carter was accused of disorderly conduct, while some other protesters were charged with trespassing. She and 14 others were tried and acquitted. She said in a 1986 interview that her parents were “neither excited nor upset” at her activities.
“Amy is a very shy girl, contrary to the image you see projected in the news media,” Jimmy Carter said at the time, adding that he agreed with her stance. “But she believes very strongly in what she’s doing.”
In 1987, Amy Carter severed her ties with Brown after being asked to leave for neglecting her studies in favor of political activism. She said she had not been expelled but chose not to go back. Years later, in the NPR interview, she said the experience made her “consider what kind of environment I really felt comfortable in” and prompted her return to the South, to study at the Memphis College of Art in Tennessee.
The last time Carter was in the public eye in any significant way was when she partnered with her father on a children’s book, “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer,” which was published in 1995. The story, about a boy who befriends a sea monster, was based on a fairy tale that Jimmy Carter made up to tell his own children.
Amy Carter, then a graduate student in art history at Tulane University, did the illustrations. Jimmy Carter said at the time that he wanted to write the book because it gave him the chance to work with his daughter.
Dr. William Foege, who served as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Carter administration and later was executive director of the Carter Center, said the experience drew the father and daughter closer.
“The two of them bonded over that book,” Foege said.