Amy Lynn Carter (born October 19, 1967) is the only daughter and fourth child of the 39th U.S. president Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn Carter. Carter first entered the public spotlight as a child when she lived in the White House during her father's presidency.
In January 1977, at the age of nine, Carter entered the White House, where she lived for four years. She was the subject of much media attention during this period. Young children had not lived in the White House since the early 1960s presidency of John F. Kennedy (and would not again do so after the Carter presidency until the inauguration of Bill Clinton, in January 1993, when Chelsea moved in.)
While Carter was in the White House, she had a Siamese cat named Misty Malarky Ying Yang, which was the last cat to occupy the White House until Socks, owned by Clinton. Carter also accepted an elephant from Sri Lanka; the animal was given to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.[11]
Carter pictured in the White House with her cat and dollhouse, 1978
Carter roller-skated through the White House's East Room and had a treehouse on the South Lawn.[12] When she invited friends over for slumber parties in her tree house, Secret Service agents monitored the event from the ground.[13]
Mary Prince (an African American woman wrongly convicted of murder, and later exonerated and pardoned) acted as her nanny for most of the period from 1971 until Jimmy Carter's presidency ended, having begun in that position through a prison release program in Georgia.[14][15]
Carter did not receive the "hands off" treatment that most of the media later afforded to Chelsea Clinton.[13] President Carter mentioned his daughter during a 1980 debate with Ronald Reagan, when he said he had asked her what the most important issue in that election was and she said, "the control of nuclear arms".
Carter playing in a tree at the White House in 1977
Amy Carter later became known for her political activism. She participated in sit-ins and protests during the 1980s and early 1990s that were aimed at changing U.S. foreign policy towards South African apartheid and Central America.[13] Along with activist Abbie Hoffman and 13 others, she was arrested, while still a Brown student, during a 1986 demonstration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for protesting CIA recruitment there. She was acquitted of all charges in a well-publicized trial in Northampton, Massachusetts. Attorney Leonard Weinglass, who defended Hoffman in the Chicago Seven trial in the 1960s, utilized the necessity defense, successfully arguing that because the CIA was involved in criminal activity in Central America and other hotspots, preventing it from recruiting on campus was equivalent to trespassing in a burning building.[17]
In September 1996, Carter married computer consultant James Gregory Wentzel, whom she met while attending Tulane. Wentzel was a manager at Chapter Eleven, an Atlanta bookstore, where Carter worked part time.[19][20] They have a son, Hugo James Wentzel (who in 2023 was featured on the second season of reality TV competition show Claim to Fame). The couple divorced in 2005. In 2007, Carter married John Joseph "Jay" Kelly. They have a son, Errol Carter Kelly.[21]
Since the late 1990s, Carter has maintained a low profile, not participating in public protests and rarely granting interviews.[13]
^Jimmy Carter (2005). Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis. Simon and Schuster. pp. 84–. ISBN978-0-7432-8457-8. My last book, Sharing Good Times, is dedicated "to Mary Prince, whom we love and cherish." Mary is a wonderful black woman who, as a teenager visiting a small town, was falsely accused of murder and defended by an assigned lawyer whom she first met on the day of the trial, when he advised her to plead guilty, promising a light sentence. She got life imprisonment instead ... A reexamination of the evidence and trial proceedings by the original judge revealed that she was completely innocent, and she was granted a pardon.
^Chabbott, Sophia (March 19, 2015). "The Residence: Meet the Women Behind Presidential Families Kennedy, Johnson, Carter". Glamour.com. Retrieved May 2, 2015. Rosalynn Carter, who believed Prince was wrongly convicted, secured a reprieve so Prince could join them in Washington. Prince was later granted a full pardon; to this day she occasionally babysits the Carters' grandkids.
^Anthony, Carl (March 24, 2016). "Presidential Daughters Attending State Dinners, Part 3". firstladies.org. National First Ladies' Library. Retrieved November 29, 2020. Art Buchwald said that people are overreacting to Amy sticking her nose in a book between courses and that sometimes he wished he could read during such dinners.
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