Asked about the 1980 election, Amy Carter named nuclear arms control
At nine, Amy Carter moved into the White House, roller-skated across the East Room and hosted sleepovers in a South Lawn treehouse while Secret Service agents kept watch below. Her father even quoted her in a 1980 debate with Ronald Reagan: she had told him the big issue was controlling nuclear weapons.
Plains, Georgia, was the family home when Amy Lynn Carter arrived on October 19, 1967, the fourth child and only daughter of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. According to one of her brothers, the family had voted a year earlier on whether their parents should try for a girl, and chose her name in advance from a Webster's dictionary. She moved to the Georgia Governor's Mansion in Atlanta when her father won the governorship in 1970, then to Washington after the 1976 presidential election.
She arrived at the White House in January 1977, the first young child to live there since the Kennedy years, and she went to ordinary public schools in the capital. Her household included a Siamese cat, Misty Malarky Ying Yang, and she accepted an elephant from Sri Lanka, which went to the National Zoo. Her nanny, Mary Prince, had started the job through a Georgia prison release programme; Prince had been wrongly convicted of murder and was later exonerated and pardoned. At a state dinner for Pierre Trudeau on February 21, 1977, the nine-year-old was spotted reading books while the toasts went on.
Unlike later presidential children, she got little protection from press scrutiny. At Brown University she became known for campaigning against apartheid and the CIA, and in 1986 she was arrested with Abbie Hoffman and 13 others at a protest against CIA recruiting at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their lawyer, Leonard Weinglass, used a necessity defence, likening the blockade to trespassing in a burning building, and she was acquitted in Northampton. Brown dismissed her academically in 1987.
Art became her field: the Memphis College of Art awarded her a fine arts degree in 1991, and Tulane University gave her a master's in art history five years later, in 1996. She drew the pictures for her father's 1995 children's book, The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, and sits on the board of counselors of the Carter Center.
Source: Amy Carter
