Who is Amy Carter? Everything You Need to Know

Quick Facts

Age: 56 Years, 56 Year Old Females

Family:

Spouse/Ex-: James Wentzel (m. 1996)

siblings: Donnel Carter, Jack Carter, James Carter

children: Hugo James Wentzel

American Women Libra Women

U.S. State: Georgia

More Facts

education: Brown University, Memphis College of Art, Tulane University

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Childhood & Early Life

Amy Carter was born in Georgia, USA, on October 19th 1967, to Jimmy Carter and his wife, Eleanor Rosalyn Smith. She is one of the four children of Jimmy Carter. Jimmy became the governor of Georgia while Amy was 3, which provided her with almost a celebrity status among the media. Her father was elected as the governor and Amy had to leave her hometown as the family moved into the Governor’s Mansion. Later in 1977, when her father was elected as the President of the United States, the family moved to Washington DC, to live in the White House.

However, she was just a kid by then and attended Stevens Elementary school in Washington DC, and everybody quickly knew that she was the daughter of Jimmy Carter, but the constant media coverage got her irritated. The school, in which many kids belonged to famous American families, had to set up some rules protect the celebrity kids. Eventually, even her bodyguards had to wait into the offices while she attended her classes. It became difficult for her to even make friends there.

Amy somehow managed to continue her studies without many difficulties, which usually arose due to her celebrity status among her classmates. She entered Rose Hardy Middle School, and studied there while getting looked after by her nanny, Mary Prince, who took care of Amy from the time she was 4 years old, until the time her father remained President.

Amy showed an inclination towards arts and attended Brown University, from where she was expelled due to her activism. She then went on to earn two arts degrees from Memphis College of Arts and Tulane University, New Orleans.

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At the White House

She was a popular kid around the White House. The insiders claimed that she used to skate around the entire establishment, unaware and unaffected about the fact that her father was the most important man in the entire country, and possibly, the world. She first entered the White House when she was 9 and media was constantly after her due to the fact that she was one of the first children to have lived in the White House since John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

Amy Carter owned a beautiful Siamese cat, which she named Misty Malarky Ying Yang and they both created sort of a ruckus into the White House. She was known to be a kind hearted little kid and loved animals with all her heart. She was also gifted a baby elephant by a foreign delegation, which she couldn’t keep with her in the house and thus, it was given away to the zoo. With the help of some of her friends, she had established a tree house in the backyard of the White House, the first ever kid to do so, reportedly.

She brought her friends over, which somehow didn’t go well with the security agencies inside the White House. They asked her father to ask her to stop playing in the tree house with her friends, but Jimmy Carter laughed off saying they were just kids. The security personnel then would guard them from the ground, while the kids enjoyed themselves in the massive tree house.

Her father made sure that she was away from the media as far as she could be and didn’t usually talk about her openly in the interviews. However, there was no denying the fact that she was indeed a very smart kid. Once Jimmy Carter used her reference during a debate he was involved in with Ronald Reagan and said that when he asked his daughter about the worst current world issue, she said ‘the control of nuclear arms’.

Even though she was a kid, she wasn’t away from unwanted controversies that she had to face many times. Once when she was asked whether she had a message for children of America, she replied with a simple ‘no’, which was reported as rude behaviour by the media. Another controversy arose when she was reading a book which offended a few of the foreign guests during a state dinner. Some photographs of her emerged from time to time highlighting her carefree life at the White House.

Activism

Without any general interest in politics, Amy stayed away from it, but there was nothing that kept her away from raising her voice to the wrongs happening in the American society. She got into activism during college and even got expelled once when she protested against the CIA recruitment at the Brown University. She was taken in along with 13 other students, including the famous activist Abbie Hoffman. She was a second year student by then and the board at the university had to expel the arrested students.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, Amy kept herself involved in several protests and sit-ins. She was a keen supporter of the race equality and protested against the changing US policies which didn’t concern itself anymore with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa along with Central America. She wanted the United States to keep working in the direction to make the world a better place to live.

Personal Life

Amy Carter always believed in a simple life and her dating life was also as simple as it could get. She met a computer consultant, James Gregory Wentzel, at Tulane University and immediately fell in love with him. The couple dated for a few years, and they got hitched in September 1996. The couple then made a move to Atlanta and gave birth to a son named Hugo in 1999.

Ever since she got married, Amy has maintained a very low profile and she is not generally seen during protests, interviews or anything that would identify her as a public figure. She respected her father and didn’t change her name after the marriage.

She continued her term as a board member of Carter Centre, a social group established by her father that indulges in advocating social reforms, human rights and diplomacy.

Amy also illustrated her father Jimmy Carter’s Children book named ‘The Little Baby Snoogie-Fleejer’ in 1996.

Amy Carter Biography