Rosalynn Carter: Jimmy's sister Ruth was my best friend and she had a picture of him on the wall in her bedroom. I just thought he was the most handsome young man I'd ever seen. One day I confessed to her that I wished she let me take that photograph home because I just thought I had fallen in love with Jimmy Carter.

Narrator: Rosalynn Smith was shy, a dedicated student, read The Bible daily and went to church on Sundays. Her mother once described her as a girl who could wear a white dress all day and keep it clean.

E. Stanly Godbold, Historian: She was very bright. She was a reader. She liked to look at maps. She was always interested in seeing the world. And she always wanted to get away.

Rosalynn Carter: I went to a meeting at the church and I was standing outside, and Jimmy drove up with Ruth and her boyfriend, got out of the car and came up and asked me to go to the movie. He kissed me goodbye. I was thrilled to death. And then we started corresponding. And by the time Christmas came, I was swept off my feet.

Narrator: One month after his graduation from Annapolis, Jimmy and Rosalynn were married. She was 18, he was 21. The Carters began married life in Norfolk, Virginia where the Navy lieutenant first reported for duty. The children arrived in quick succession. Jack one year after their wedding, James Earl or Chip less than three years later in Hawaii, and a third, Jeff, born in New London, Connecticut. With her husband away at sea Rosalynn found herself alone and in charge of all the affairs of the Carter household. "I felt inadequate and very lonely," she later said. "Sometimes I cried though I didn't let Jimmy know. He has no patience with tears, thinking instead that one makes the best of whatever situation and with a smile."

Rosalynn Carter: I learned to be very independent. I could take care of myself and the baby and do things that I never dreamed I would be able to do alone.

Narrator: Two years after joining the Navy, Ensign Carter was accepted into the submarine service. It was a way to advance rapidly in a highly competitive environment.

Doug Brinkley: The military was everything for Jimmy Carter. It's his training. He's never a minute late for anything. Punctuality means everything. His sense of order -- there's no sense of a mess around Jimmy Carter. It's a certain kind of person that works in a submarine. It takes a kind of mental discipline.

Narrator: While the rest of the officers lingered after dinner or settled in for a long game of bridge or poker, his shipmates remembered, Carter would read a book, solve a sonar problem, always something constructive. "I mastered the assignments that I had," Carter would say of his Navy career, "got the best fitness reports, and I never put in for anything that I did not get."

Archive Voiceover: She's coming up out of the deep. The Seawolf...

Narrator: After six years in the service, Lieutenant Carter earned one of the most coveted posts in the Navy: senior officer of the USS Seawolf, on the vanguard of America's nuclear defense program.

Rosalynn Carter: He always had one of the best positions in the Navy. And I think it gave him a lot of confidence that he could do whatever he wanted to do.

Narrator: In 1953, less than a year after he began duty on the Seawolf, Carter received a message from home. His father had cancer and was not expected to live long.