Jimmy Carter made a baby cry after kissing the child during his 1976 presidential campaign, outside his Baptist church in Plains, Georgia.

It would prove impossible to determine just which presidential candidate holds the record for kissing babies, that old campaign gesture dating back more than a century.

During a March 1979 visit to Elk City, Oklahoma, the President performed the proverbial political baby kiss, despite it not being a campaign year. (Corbis)

But one can certainly award President Jimmy Carter as the U.S. President who kissed more First Ladies other than his own wife.

This past three-day holiday weekend just ended, with both Valentine’s Day and President’s Day having been marked, offers as good a time as any, a glimpse back at the man who is surely the Kissingest President.

Carter kissing actress Liz Taylor at a June 30, 1976 fundraiser for his presidential campaign, held in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Who could resist the chance to kiss the larger-than-life movie star Elizabeth Taylor? Not Jimmy Carter.

In one of his earliest known kissing incidents, at the time of his nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate in the summer of 1976, he welcomed the actress at a convention fundraising event with a very long and affectionate public kiss.

A year later, she married a Republican.

President Jimmy Carter greets legendary actress Bette Davis at the White House. He kissed her at the event, a moment seemingly missed by photographers, but provoking her eyes to pop open in shock. (Corbis)

Among even the most steadfast of Democratic movie stars, a Carter kiss could cause consternation.

When Bette Davis got bussed in 1980, she bit her tongue but her large eyes popped into exclamation points and rolled disapprovingly towards the leader of the free world.

World leaders were also not off his target for a kiss. In fact, one such kiss became highly controversial and soon after used as an incident with political consequence shortly thereafter.

Not because the American President kissed another man – but because of who the man was and why they were together.

The famous photograph of Brezhnev kissing of Carter, June 1979. (Corbis)

On June 18, 1979, President Carter was in Vienna, Austria with the communist president of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev when he was the one surprised with a kiss.

The two exhausted world leaders had just completed two days of intensive negotiating on nuclear arms reduction. It cultivated with the signing signed the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty [SALT] II.  After the ink had dried, Brezhnev clasped the document and rose with Carter – and then turned to give him a big fat kiss.

Brezhnev practically put his lips on Nixon’s ear once they were out before photographers. (Corbis)

Brezhnev may well have been the world leader who came closest to out kissing Carter, and not just of movie stars and babies, but other Presidents.

The gruff Soviet leader was notorious for invading the personal space of American Commanders-in-Chief, having waited to whisper unnecessarily close into President Nixon’s ear until they were out before the press photographers, a gesture of intimidation. Disliking such encounters, Nixon nevertheless did not flinch, robbing Brezhnev of the full impact of his intent.

It became the first of two Carter kissing photographs that would be seen around the world.

Carter’s kissing a communist became a Reagan campaign chide.

A year later, the Communist-Kissing-Carter photo, however, would be used as propaganda fodder against Carter during his re-election campaign, by his opponent Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Building his reputation as a communist antagonist, Reagan gleefully bandied an enlarged copy of the image at a fundraising event.

Carter & Queen Mum, pre-kiss.

During a visit to Buckingham Palace, Carter’s kissing caused a diplomatic kerfuffle when he bused the royal face of the Queen Mother Elizabeth. She was not amused.

But when it came to the wives of other men who had held the presidency before or after him, Jimmy Carter holds the world record for pubic display of affection, kissing them on the cheek, the lips, or even their ear.

Bess Truman, at 94, exiting a Sugar Creek, Missouri restaurant a year before she met Jimmy Carter.

During his presidency, from January 20, 1977 to January 20, 1980, Carter had the opportunity to interact with five former First Ladies, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lady Bird Johnson and Betty Ford.

Carter’s meeting with Bess Truman was unremarkable. While in her hometown of Independence, Missouri to make a campaign appearance at a town hall meeting, he had staff arrange for him to visit her.

He recalled her as being physically strong, but she was 95 years old and either unable or unwilling to make a public appearance with the President, then fighting an uphill battle to win reelection.

While it is unlikely that he kissed this Victorian-raised woman who was famously undemonstrative, he also emerged from the house without anything like an endorsement.

Earlier in his presidency, Carter had managed to kiss the first of several First Ladies. Of these, there was one especially notable, the second Carter kiss seen ’round the world.

Moments before Carter’s kissing of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, she was smiling – and after the shocking incident, she was smiling again, at her son.

When he ascended the ceremony stage of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum dedication in 1979, it was not his speech but his kiss that made the news. It was planted on the cool cheek of the woman who’d worked to create the institution for fifteen years, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

As the photo capturing the moment makes clear, she did not wince or pull away, as some reports had it. Nor was she stone cold as he approached her or angry after the kiss, as photos prove.

Jackie and Teddy. She joined him a week later as he declared his run against Carter.

At the instant of her Carter kiss, however, Jackie was stunned still by such presumption of intimacy.

The fact that her brother-in-law, U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy would announce one week later, with Jackie’s skeptical presence, his candidacy against the incumbent President for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination was a likely contributing factor to her reaction.

Nevertheless, in classic Jackie style, she turned it around with a witty bit of obscure French history and self-deprecation.

As she told her friend Arthur Schlesinger, “Isn’t that strange the way we hardly know each other and the president kissed me? I suppose, he thought, it was droit du seigneur, the old feudal right of the lord of the manor to have his way with the serfs’ wives!”

President Jimmy Carter kisses former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower during a visit to her Gettysburg, Pennsylvania home in the summer of 1978. It quite shocked her that the President would be, as she said, “the first man outside of family to kiss me since Ike died.” Still, she rolled with the busses, flattered that he had called with Rosalynn Carter, and helped her by buying a “brick” that was part of a local civic renewal fundraising effort she was leading.

The second Carter kiss seen ’round the world: Jimmy Carter’s famous kiss on the face of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, October 20, 1979.

A series of screenshots from a tape show President Carter kissing Lady Bird Johnson at a March 12, 1980 White House event commemorating her sponsorship of the Head Start program.

Jimmy Carter kissing Betty Ford at her White House portrait unveiling ceremony in 1978.

After his presidency ended in 1981 after being defeated by Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter’s lips seemed to get a break for some years.

At the 1991 Reagan Library dedication, Jimmy Carter, second from left, and Pat Nixon, seventh from left, join (left to right) Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalynn Carter, the Fords, Nixon, the Reagans and Bushes.

At the presidential library dedications of his own and those of Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, the funerals of Nixon, Ford and Reagan, the inaugurations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and other of the rare gatherings of former Presidents and First Ladies, Jimmy Carter was in the presence of Pat Nixon, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and Laura Bush.

At the 2001 inauguration of her son George W., Barbara Bush made her way through the crowds on the podium to warmly greet Jimmy Carter.

No photos show him, however, kissing any of those four Republican presidential spouses.  Which is not to say that he didn’t greet them with a soft buss on the cheek in private waiting rooms and hallways, out of the range of the media.

Certainly one can imagine that he planted a dry one on the cheek of former First Lady Barbara Bush who, despite their political differences, always seemed to welcome him at gatherings with particular warmth and at the very least, good strong hugs.

Ronald and Nancy Reagan exchange kisses with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his wife Mila in the 1980s.

And he may well have kissed Nancy Reagan, when he called on her privately at Blair House before Ronald Reagan’s 2004 funeral, nearly a quarter of a century of mutual experiences in public life having softened the bitterness that emerged following Reagan’s defeat of Carter’s second term bid in 1980.

French President Jacques Chirac kissing the hand of Laura Bush.

Similarly, Laura Bush has evidenced that especial connection that former Presidents and First Ladies can’t help but form within their elite fraternity and sorority.

Having all served in an era when more openly affectionate greetings other than a handshake or nod have become the norm, First Ladies Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Bush were not averse, or at least not as unaccustomed to being kissed in public by male world leaders other than their own husbands than would have been First Ladies Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson.

Pat Nixon kissed her friend and successor Betty Ford before leaving the White House the day her husband resigned.

The one First Lady he seems unlikely to have kissed would have been Pat Nixon. He met her only on two known occasions. Following his inauguration as Governor of Georgia in 1971, Carter attended the 1973 annual January gathering of the governors of the states in Washington, D.C., events which included a reception hosted by the President and First Lady in the White House.

There is no record of their interactions at the time. It was another twenty years before they again briefly met, while both were in attendance at the 1991 Reagan Library & Museum dedication. At the time, Pat Nixon was in extremely frail health and had a degree of limited mobility due to emphysema. Other than posing together with the other Presidents and their wives for a group photograph of the historical gathering in the recreated Reagan Oval Office, they had no other known interaction.

When it came to Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter made headlines during the 2008 presidential election by breaking the unwritten code of former Presidents and making a public endorsement of a candidate – which was her opponent Barack Obama.

While Rosalynn Carter has always maintained friendly relations with both Bill and Hillary Clinton, there has been friction and resentment between the former President and the couple. Still, when they gathered together at the January 20, 2013 Obama inauguration, Carter gave the outgoing Secretary of State a very public kiss, making her Verified-Carter-Kissed-First-Lady Number Five.

At the 2013 second Inaugural ceremony of Barack Obama, Carter kissed Hillary Clinton.

As for the times he has been in the presence of Michelle Obama, it seems that Jimmy Carter hasn’t raised his lips to her face, but he certainly greeted her with an affectionate touch around the waist at the 2008 National Democratic Convention  and he did go in for the kiss with her mother Marian Robinson after first being introduced to her at the same event.

Carter meeting Michelle Obama at the 2008 National Democratic Convention, which nominated her husband – who the former president had publicly endorsed during the primary elections.

Carter goes to apparently kiss Marian Robinson, the First Lady’s mother.

So who was the sixth First Lady that Jimmy Carter kissed?

Among presidential spouses there is one who holds the record for kissing Jimmy Carter more than any other, for what is likely to total hundreds of thousands of times. And she is the one he has loved the most, before, during and after the time she was First Lady. And he still makes clear in public, just how much he loves kissing her.

That woman is, of course, his wife Rosalynn Carter.

Jimmy Carter’s first public kiss of his wife Rosalynn was at his 197TK inauguration as Governor of Georgia.

Following his official nomination as the 1976 Democratic presidential candidate at the convention in New York that summer, a goal towards which Rosalynn Carter had worked perhaps even harder than her husband to attain for him, the couple seemed lost in their own private moment amid such a public event.

The Carters kissing at the presidential podium after both making remarks during the Carter Administration.

**ADVANCE FOR MONDAY, DEC. 28** FILE – This Oct. 1, 2009 file photo shows former President Jimmy Carter getting a kiss from his wife Rosalynn as she introduces him during a reopening ceremony for the newly redesigned Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta. Carter was also celebrating his 85th birthday. Since leaving the White House, he’s logged millions of miles and visited dozens of countries on missions to wipe out diseases, mediate conflicts, advocate for human rights and monitor elections. He’s built a legacy that few, if any, American ex-presidents can match. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)

The former President kisses the former First Lady during a baseball game between their home team, the Atlanta Braves, and the Toronto Blue Jays, on September 17, 2015. (AP)

Categories: First Families, First Ladies, Presidents, The Carters

Tags: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Jimmy Carter, Rosalynn Carter