WASHINGTON − Former President Jimmy Carter’s youngest child and only daughter was among those gathered in Washington Tuesday to honor her father on the highest national stage.
Amy Carter, 57, sat with her older brothers − Jack, Chip and Jeff − and other members of the Carter family inside the Capitol rotunda, as members of Congress and other leaders paid their respects to the late 39th president.
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Carter’s casket was brought to the ornate hall on Capitol Hill via a horse-drawn caisson. The funeral procession down Washington streets was meant to mirror his inaugural parade in 1977 when Carter and his wife Rosalynn walked on foot from the Capitol to the White House. Amy Carter, then 9, joined her parents for a portion of the journey.
Amy Carter quickly became an object of public fascination during her father’s presidency. From dining with movie stars to roller skating with friends on the south lawn, her life as a child in the White House − the first since John F. Kennedy’s Camelot more than a decade earlier − was well documented.
She was also a political symbol before the age of 10. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter snubbed the capital’s elite private schools to enroll Amy, whose elder brothers were already grown, at a public elementary school. Carter was only the second president after Theodore Roosevelt to enroll his child in public school.
Later, as a teenager and young adult, Amy Carter made her own waves, with multiple arrests related to protesting South African apartheid as well as the U.S. involvement in Nicaragua.
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But since her youth, the youngest child of the first family has largely withdrawn from the public eye in favor of a quiet life in her home state of Georgia. She was at one point, a part-time art teacher at a private school in Atlanta, the New York Times reported.
Amy Carter has always preferred her privacy, those who knew her told the Times. Her return to Washington this week marks one of only a few moments in the spotlight in recent years.
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After Rosalynn Carter’s death in November 2023, Amy Carter spoke at a memorial service in Atlanta and read an emotional love letter from her father to her mother, dated 75 years earlier.
“My darling, every time I have ever been away from you, I have been thrilled when I returned to discover just how wonderful you are,” she read from her father’s words. “…Goodbye, darling. Until tomorrow, Jimmy.”
