THE late President Jimmy Carter’s daughter is attending the National Cathedral in Washington for her father’s funeral.
Amy Carter, who is now 57 years old, gained notoriety among the American public at the young age of 9 when her father was elected president and inaugurated into office.
Amy was pictured with relatives outside Washington DC’s National Cathedral for the funeral of President Carter.
America’s longest-living president, Carter died last month at age 100 after nearly two years in hospice care.
Dressed in black and wearing dark sunglasses, Amy arrived at the funeral alongside other members of the Carter family.
Earlier this week, she was spotted in attendance at a ceremony where the flag-draped casket of her father lay in state in the Capitol.
Amy has largely kept her life private following a rebellious youth and young adulthood.
As the youngest of four, with three brothers, she spent the ages of 9 to 13 at the White House making a name for herself from a young age.
While she did engage in official activities such as co-hosting a 50th birthday celebration for Mickey Mouse with her mother Rosalynn Carter when she was just 11, most of her fame stemmed from perceived rebellious actions.
The first daughter was often seen rollerskating in the halls, commonly accompanied by friends she had visiting her.
During a later interview on the David Letterman show, she shared that one of the things she missed about living in the White House was its spaciousness, allowing her to have people over without her parents being aware.
Apart from her skating notoriety, Amy is also credited as bringing a tree house to the White House.
Reporters at the time wrote about Amy and her father strolling the grounds to pick out the right spot for her arborous hang out.
The President’s only daughter hosted a “tree house-warming party” in March 1977, inviting two friends for a sleepover where they “gossiped and giggled,” before moving inside.
Despite accusations of the tree house being a political ploy, Amy and friends consistently used it until the family vacated the White House at the end of the Carter administration.
Amy also caused upset in the press when she was seen reading at various state dinners, which was seen as disrespectful; the young girl later told reporters that reading was her favorite activity.
It is no surprise that she went on to meet her first husband, Jim Wentzel, while working over the summer at a bookstore where he was a manager, marrying him the next fall.
Roslynn Carter, Amy’s mother, once said that Amy liked to lay on a window sill in the White House with the window open, worrying her a great deal.
Amy later divulged that she and some of her companions, potentially her brothers, carved their initials into one of the White House’s window sills.
Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and daughter of President Carter’s national security adviser recalled her and Amy almost costing the nation an “international disaster.”
“With Amy Carter, it was at Camp David during the peace accord and we were trying to ride a golf cart,” shared Brzezinski with People Magazine.
As Amy sat in the passenger seat, she, “hit the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin with the golf cart.”
The Israeli prime minister had been at Camp David in secret to negotiate peace agreements with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, led by President Carter.
After the Carter Administration vacated the White House, Amy went on to attend high school in Washington, DC, paging for the US Senate at 14 years old, before finishing her senior year in an Atlanta high school.
The first daughter enjoyed some media quiet in her later high school years until she was arrested at three political protests while attending Brown University.
Amy started at Brown in 1985, taking courses like Native American literature, feminist frameworks, plant biology, and linguistics, quickly becoming involved in politics on campus.
In her freshman year, she presented an 18-foot-long, 400-pound foot to the House Select Committee on Hunger to symbolically “stamp out hunger,” on behalf of the university’s National Student Campaign Against Hunger.
Hours after this presentation, she went on to participate in the preliminary ceremony for Hands Across America.
Only a month prior to her ceremonial appearance, Amy had been arrested on the steps of the South African Embassy in DC while protesting racial segregation in the country known as apartheid.
Then in March 1986, she was arrested again alongside 13 other Brown students while protesting IBM’s business in South Africa.
In November 1986, she was arrested for a third time while protesting against recruiting on campus by the Central Intelligence Agency at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
She described the police’s show of force at the time as excessive, causing her to take action.
“There were, I would say, 60 or 80 cops in riot gear, billy clubs, mace, with four or five police dogs – it was really terrible,” Amy described.
”That was the final decision, of not wanting to leave those people there by themselves,” she explained.
Later, when her case was taken to trial, the young activist asked to have a jury, ”so we can spotlight the C.I.A.”
When asked about the potential for prison she seemed unconcerned.
”I haven’t really been thinking about the jail part,” she claimed.
”I’ve just been thinking about the trial itself. Whatever happens, I’m sure I can handle it.”
Amy finished her sophomore year at Brown but was then asked to leave the school due to incomplete coursework.
Some disagreed with the claim that she left due to academics, like her friend and classmate Alison Buckser.
“She’s very perceptive,” Buckser said.
“I’ve taken three or four classes with her and I find it very difficult to believe that she would be dismissed for academic reasons.”
Walter Feldman, a professor of art in whose print-making class Amy took explained that Amy was just different from other students.
”I don’t think that she can ever be a typical student.
”She wanted to let me know in the worst way that she couldn’t help herself,” he explained of her absences due to political engagements.
She went on to study fine arts at Memphis College of Arts and obtained a master’s in art history from Tulane University in New Orleans.
Since her media-filled younger years, the first and only daughter of Jimmy Carter and the late Roslynn has enjoyed privacy and separation from public attention.
She and her father later went on to write a children’s book together.
