When Axar Nesmith received a call offering her the job of writing a presidential speech for Jimmy Carter, she turned it down. The mother of two young children explained to Chief of Staff Carter that she simply didn’t have the time.
But Nesmith quickly changed her mind and, with encouragement from her husband, a fellow journalist, who told her he could raise two babies, called her back to accept. She arrived at the White House shortly after President Carter’s inauguration in 1977, becoming one of the first women to work as a speechwriter for an American president.
“She wasn’t one to tout her accomplishments,” Susannah Nesmith said of her mother. “She was always careful to point out that Betty Ford had a speechwriter who wrote for President Ford, and that John Adams’ wife wrote many, if not all, of his speeches. I wrote the section.”
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Nesmith, who lived in Alexandria, Virginia, died on March 5 at the age of 84 after a short illness. She took pride in crafting speeches that sounded like Mr. Carter, eliminating political double-speak and clichés, her daughter said.
“She was one of his favorite speechwriters. She just had his voice,” said Nesmith, who worked with Nesmith in the newsroom of the Atlanta Constitution before working at the Justice Department in the Carter administration, and later with Carter’s said Terry Adamson, who served as his personal attorney.
Mr. Carter, 99, entered hospice care a year ago at his home in Plains, Georgia, making him the longest-living U.S. president.
In this April 2016 photo provided by Terry Adamson, Axar Nesmith (second from left) and her husband Jeff pose for a photo with former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter in Plains, Georgia. Mr. Nesmith (right) is pictured. She served as a speechwriter during President Carter’s term and died on March 5, 2025, in Alexandria, Virginia. (Terry Adamson, via Associated Press)
When he met Nesmith, Carter was a little-known peanut farmer running for Georgia governor in 1966 and running his first campaign. She was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution and covered the campaign that Carter lost.
“He was traveling all over the state, and she was the only reporter who accompanied him to cover his campaign,” Susannah Nesmith said in a phone interview. “So she got to know him very well. I think they had similar ideas about justice and about a new South that could dispel the legacy of racism.”
Nesmith started working as an intern at an Atlanta newspaper, continued to work after the internship officially ended, and was hired full-time, according to her daughter. She was tasked with deciding important civil rights cases in federal court in Atlanta. And she wrote articles about some of the leading figures of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.
On April 5, 1968, the day after Dr. King was assassinated in Tennessee, an obituary written by Nesmith appeared on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution. He was commemorated as the grandson of a slave who became one of the people who died in 1993. world. “
Nesmith’s daughter said she wrote it while crying.
Nesmith’s relationship with Carter soon bore fruit after Carter was elected president in 1976, when his chief of staff, Jody Powell, hired her as a speechwriter. It took some adjustment for Carter, who was used to preparing her public remarks as Georgia’s governor and writing her own inaugural address.
Nesmith later said that their shared Georgia roots gave him an advantage in writing for Carter, noting that he was the only Southerner on Carter’s speechwriting staff.
“He was, to some extent, outside of the Washington mindset,” Nesmith said in a 1992 C-SPAN interview. “He was more inclined not to argue so much as to explain and expect people to understand and act on it.”
Among the newspaper clippings Nesmith kept was a full-page article in the Washington Star about Carter’s October 1978 speech on Dr. Family members of the rights movement leaders also attended. On that page was a handwritten note from the president. “Axar, that was a great speech.”
Nesmith remained on Carter’s staff until the end of his presidential term. The day after losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, Mr. Nesmith coped with defeat by planting hundreds of daffodil bulbs in the garden of his home in Virginia.
“She felt like it was the only thing she could do to make something good,” her daughter said.
After the couple left the White House, Nesmith co-authored the former president and his wife Rosalynn Carter’s 1987 book “All You Can Get: Making the Most of the Remaining Life You Have,” Susannah Nesmith said. He said that he helped him and continued to work there. Carter at the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.
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In the mid-1980s, Mr. Nesmith went to work for Sen. Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat known for his efforts to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
“Axa was a quiet and caring man with a very strong voice and deep knowledge across many fields,” Nunn said in a statement. “She has been a wonderful and talented partner for all of us in the public service field. I am extremely proud to have had the benefit of Axar’s great personality, wisdom, and sound judgment. She could read the room at every turn.”
Nesmith’s husband of 57 years, Jeff Nesmith, passed away last year. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his investigative series on medical malpractice in the military, published by the Dayton Daily News in Ohio. In addition to her daughter, Nesmith is survived by her son, Hollis Jefferson Nesmith III, her two grandchildren, and one niece.
