ATLANTA — The most vivid memories Amb. Andrew Young has of Rosalynn Carter are, he told 11Alive after her passing, the "everyday things" that characterized her as a first lady who took the role seriously as a political job.
How she would attend Jimmy Carter's Cabinet meetings, of which Young was part; how she would be by his side as his "soulmate"; and how she was both a sounding board for policies and a fountain of ideas and opinions for the president, his most trusted and forceful adviser.
"I don't know that he ever made a decision - whether he asked her or not, he heard her opinion," Young, the ambassador to the United Nations for the Carter administration, said Sunday.
One of Rosalynn Carter's most enduring legacies was her approach to life inside the White House as a spouse. It's standard now for a first lady to have policy platforms of her own, a staff and a portfolio that act as an extension of the administration's purview.
But that was not so much the case when Carter arrived in Washington. In many ways, she blazed the trail in becoming the first first lady to take up her own active office in the East Wing and even attending Cabinet meetings, an extraordinary level of involvement at that time for a first lady.
"Whenever you had a Cabinet meeting, she slipped in and sat down and started taking notes," Young recalled. "And I'm sure she discussed her opinions and her notes with her husband when the Cabinet meeting was over."
He said the back-and-forth between Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter was truly a partnership of equals.
"They were true friends. And if the president was gonna go build houses, Rosalynn went to build houses. When she got concerned about the state of children in the world, he gave her carte blanche to travel around the world, assess the problem and come back and tell him what she thought he should be doing," he said. "... I don't think he made decisions without checking with her on how they might impact a variety of people on the planet."
Amb. Young added that wherever she went, she treated people with equal concern and respect, never losing touch with her roots.
"She was as concerned about the people in Africa and the Middle East and Latin America as she was her friends and colleagues in Plains," he said. "She was really and truly a world citizen, and a wonderful representative of these United States."