Forbidden pistachios and a very long project: Jimmy Carter aides share tales
Beth Davis and Lauren Gay were two of former President Jimmy Carter’s closest aides for almost two decades. They had never given an interview to a reporter before. Now, almost a year after his death, they were ready to show and tell.
They sat in the president’s old office at the Carter Center, surrounded by artifacts of their departed boss. His light blue armchair. His compact disc of Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.” His jar of water from the North Pole, a gift to Carter from the crew of the USS Jimmy Carter submarine. As the afternoon light slanted in through the windows, the stories poured out.
There was the chair-caning story.
The logic-puzzle story.
The picture-printing story.
There was a longer story, too, a more consequential one, the historic tale of a project that took more than 40 years to finish. It was the thing that led Davis to buy an Apple Watch, wear it almost everywhere, and finally let it go, in dramatic fashion, once her greatest task was complete.
But that could wait. It was time for the pistachio story.
A fresh tin of pistachios from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation sat on the president’s old desk. It had just arrived that week, reminding them of a power struggle between Carter and his wife, Rosalynn.
“Which — we started crackin’ up laughing,” said Gay, who is now corporate secretary to the Carter Center’s board.
Davis, the center’s chief operating officer, said Rosalynn Carter was “very militant about what they ate.” Several of Jimmy Carter’s relatives had died of pancreatic cancer, and he hoped to avoid a similar fate. Thus, the Carters kept a strict diet.
Usually.
It was about 2015 when another round of Arthur Blank pistachios arrived at the Atlanta office, touching off a very civil war. President Carter took the pistachios home to Plains.
“Well,” Davis said, “the next month, when they come up, Mrs. Carter walks in with the pistachios, you know, eaten down to here —”
Davis made a gesture indicating how far the pistachio level had fallen.
“ — she’s like, ‘Put these on the kitchen table and give them to staff. These are salted. I don’t want Jimmy to eat them.’”
“And he’s like, ‘Don’t you dare. Make sure these come home with me.’ So then we have to sneak them into the car so he can take them back home. Lo and behold, the next month, she brings them back. They’re now like, down to here, and she’s like, ‘Absolutely not. Give these to the staff. They’re salted nuts. I don’t want him to have that much salt.’ He then sneaks them back home again.”
Rosalynn Carter lost that battle, but she won the war. Or maybe they both won. Seizing the pistachios, she put them in a colander, rinsed off the salt, dried them in her food dehydrator, and served them to the low-sodium husband who would become the longest-living president in American history.
Carter died Dec. 29, 2024, at age 100. His post-presidency lasted almost 44 years, longer than that of any other president. He dedicated much of that time to the Carter Center, the Atlanta nonprofit he founded with Rosalynn in 1982 to fight global diseases and promote human rights and democracy.
It was roughly halfway through that sustained whirlwind of diplomatic and charitable activity when Lauren Gay was hired as his special assistant. She was 22 years old. Her mother, Judy Comer, had worked for Carter when he was governor of Georgia. Her father, Ronnie Gay, was a Georgia State Patrol officer who worked on Carter’s security detail. Carter introduced them. Decades later, referring to their daughter, he said something like, “Well, she wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for me.”
Carter was 76 when Gay took the job in 2001. Old enough to be her grandfather. Part of her job was drafting memos or letters that would go out under his name. This was a challenge, given that Carter was a prolific author and a stickler for grammar who regularly communicated with the time-pressed leaders of the world. No flowery language, he told her. Cut it by a quarter, then by a quarter again. Soon she found herself writing in his voice. There was one commonly misused word he wanted her to use correctly. He gave her a sticky note that said, “Comprise means to include or contain.” She looked for chances to work it in.
Eventually, their team also comprised Beth Davis. She joined in 2006 as a scheduling assistant and worked her way up to director of scheduling. Gay and Davis clicked. They had to, because Gay took part in Carter’s phone calls and often told Davis about them so when Carter talked with Davis she would know what she needed to know. There was no time to waste. Davis had inherited a daunting project, already decades in the making, and she took it on as her own.
There was much more to tell about that project. They would get to it soon. But first, the picture-printing story.
“So I was tech support,” Gay said, launching into a story about how Carter took a boat out on a pond and then had a picture he wanted to print. She told him to email it to himself so he could print it from his computer. Try as he might, the man born in 1924 had trouble keeping pace with technology.
“And I said, ‘OK, it should be working.’ He said, ‘Yes, it should, but it isn’t. And by the way, while we’re talking about it, why does it have this weird triangle in the middle?’ And I said, ‘I’m gonna need you to go ahead and push that little triangle for me.’ And he was like, ‘Oh. Video.’ And I was like, ‘You can’t print a video because you can’t print a video.’”
When Davis and Gay made mistakes, they confessed and proposed solutions. That was sufficient. When Carter was wrong, and finally realized it, he’d say something like, “I’m not going to argue with you about this.” And then he’d call back a while later and say, “Hi, sweetheart.”
Carter didn’t routinely praise his aides for doing their jobs. But he offered timely compliments, in front of other people, when things went well. “She’s the boss of me,” he might say, or, “That one’s mine.” Davis accompanied him to Haiti around 2012, nervous about her new role, hoping to get everything right. She recalled a quiet moment near the end of the trip. He told her she’d done a good job, told her he loved her and kissed her on the cheek.
Carter had served in the U.S. Navy and helped develop technology for nuclear submarines. Later, he received a top-secret briefing about the advanced submarine that bore his name. Carter worked to keep his mind sharp as he aged. On Feb. 23, 2017, he sent Davis an email. The subject line was “Einstein.” The message said:
“When you finish 73 hard, please send me a photo. J”
Davis knew what that meant. They’d been on a long flight together, and she’d seen Carter playing a game on his iPad. A puzzle game called Einstein’s Riddle, or something like that. He gave her his iPad and told her to play while he took a nap. Later she downloaded it to her phone. Carter took it seriously, writing notes in a notebook on combinations he’d tried. But his son Jeff could apparently finish the puzzles faster than his father could. When Davis read the email, she surmised that Carter wanted to see her score so he could feel like he’d beaten someone.
“So I was just like, ‘You know, I can’t even do the first hard one.’ It’s way too hard for me. I am not a nuclear engineer that went to Georgia Tech.”
At the Carter Center this December, the show-and-tell moved from Carter’s office to a place rarely seen by outsiders: the efficiency apartment where the Carters slept on a Murphy bed when they stayed in Atlanta. Here was a small wooden chair the former president asked Gay and Davis to fix for him. Carter, a skilled carpenter, had made it himself. It needed recaning.
“He could have done it himself very easily,” Davis said.
“He said, ‘I want you guys to learn something together.’”
“As if we hadn’t —” Gay said.
“ — learned so much from him,” Davis said.
So they watched some YouTube videos, got some beeswax and a boning tool, soaked the canes in a bathtub, and recaned the chair in a herringbone pattern.
Gay said she would never know why Carter selected them for this task. Davis had a theory: Their jobs with Carter were not just jobs. The relationship was not just professional. They loved him, and he loved them. He was passing something important to the next generation.
In 2015, Carter called them into his apartment. They already knew what was happening, because Gay was on his phone calls and Davis scheduled his doctor appointments, but they didn’t know from him, so it wasn’t official. Davis remembered the moment.
“He’s like, ‘I’ve been diagnosed with melanoma. It’s in my liver and in my brain. … But I want you to know that I’m at peace with it. But we are going to fight it. So I’ve asked you to bring the calendar in. Here’s the plan, here’s what I want you to keep, here’s what I want you to cancel.’”
And with that, the long project took on new urgency.
All along, Davis had been planning his funeral.
She was not the first to make these plans. Davis had seen meeting notes from 1983, about two years after Carter left the White House, relating to the logistics of a state funeral in Washington. The lead coordinator was Nancy Konigsmark, Carter’s previous director of scheduling, who worked on the project for close to three decades. She was younger than Carter, only 67, when she died in 2012 after her own fight with cancer. Now it was up to Davis.
The funeral of a former president is a monumental undertaking. There are thousands of people involved, including foreign heads of state. There are multiple locations, security protocols, speakers with complicated schedules, relatives to transport, food allergies, invitations, songs. Davis kept the plans in a document that grew to more than 400 pages.
“I lived and breathed his funeral for almost 20 years,” she said. “And the last five years of his life, I really lived and breathed it. I didn’t go more than four hours from Plains. Like, my life was his life. I used to wear an Apple Watch so that no matter where I was, if my phone died, if I was in the shower, I would always, you know, be reachable, because I was waiting for that call for so long. And to me, it was the last gift I ever gave him, right? Like I spent all those years running his schedules, and this was the last schedule I would ever run for him. And I wanted it to be perfect.”
It changes a person, always being on call. Davis and Gay lived their lives on high alert. The phone could ring at any time, at any place, and they’d have to drop everything and go. Davis said she didn’t sleep well. She kept a suitcase in Plains, packed with the right clothes and toiletries for the funeral, and changed it twice a year as the temperature rose and fell.
Here’s the trouble with longevity. You live to see a lot of other people die. Carter was 69 when he attended Richard Nixon’s funeral. He was 79 at Ronald Reagan’s funeral. He was 82 when he spoke at Gerald Ford’s funeral. He was 94 when he outlived George H.W. Bush. And he was 99 in 2023 when he lost Rosalynn, his beloved wife of 77 years.
By then Carter had entered home hospice care. The end was near. One day in 2024, Gay and Davis went to see him. It was an emotional conversation. They thanked him for the life he’d given them, the many adventures. And, Davis said, “We thanked him for the greatest gift he ever gave us, which was each other.”
It was not a surprise when he finally departed. Davis had heard it might happen soon, and when the call came in she was already in the car on the way to Plains. She hung up and started making other calls. To the military, to the White House, to the Carter family. It was Dec. 29, 2024. Her hour had arrived.
Gay stayed in Atlanta, working out travel plans for the family. They were coming in from Virginia, Nevada, Oregon, California. Those 12 days from his death to his burial were a blur, Gay recalled. Or, as Davis put it, a fever dream. Late nights, early mornings, logistical nightmares. The president had been flexible about his funeral plans, but he stood firm on one point: He wanted to be buried in Plains on the same day as his state funeral in Washington.
On Jan. 9, 2025, Gay and Davis woke up early at hotels in Washington. The day had been planned down to the minute. At the Washington National Cathedral, Gerald Ford’s son Steven read a eulogy his late father had prepared for the occasion before he died. They were political rivals who became friends. And now, in effect, one former president was eulogizing another after both of them had died.
“May God bless and watch over this good man,” Ford wrote. “May He grant peace to the Carter family as they say goodbye to a man whose life was lived to the fullest with a faith demonstrated in countless good works, with a mission richly fulfilled, and a soul rewarded with life everlasting. And as for myself, Jimmy, I’m looking forward to our reunion. We have much to catch up on.”
Then it was back to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, to Lawson Army Airfield in Georgia, and on to Plains. After the private funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church, the president was laid to rest next to his wife in a garden outside their southwest Georgia home.
At Carter’s graveside, Gay broke down crying. Davis came over, put an arm around her, and kissed her on the head.
“Thank you,” Gay said.
“You’re welcome,” Davis said, misunderstanding the situation.
“A--hole,” Gay said to Davis, “I was talking to him.”
And both of them burst out laughing.
It was after 11 p.m. when Gay headed out for Atlanta. She fortified herself with a large coffee from Waffle House. Anyone would be tired in that situation, especially since she would later find out she had the coronavirus. But in the solitary quiet on the dark road, what she felt most was gratitude. What a profound thing to have been a part of. This thought applied to the day behind her, and to the 23 years she’d spent working for the president. Gay kept driving. That morning in Atlanta, snow began to fall.
Davis stayed behind in Plains, crashing with some friends of the Carters after a workday that lasted more than 20 hours. She canceled her Apple Watch subscription and drained the battery. She carried the watch to Carter’s grave site.
She thanked him again, told him he was the only person for whom she would ever be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Davis walked down the hill to the pond.
She tossed the watch in the water.
And she watched it sink out of sight.
About the Author
Thomas Lake is a senior reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated and The Guardian. He's a co-founder of The Lake Family Band. Please email thomas.lake@ajc.com if you'd like to share a story idea.
