For a Mainer, meeting future First Lady Rosalynn Carter was like “a Yankee landing in the middle of King Arthur’s Court,” recalled Jane Fenderson Cabot of Harpswell. But Plains, Georgia wasn’t quite as glamorous as the mythical Camelot.

Cabot had driven to Plains on the second day of her new job as director of scheduling for Jimmy Carter’s wife during the 1976 presidential campaign. “She met me at the door beautifully coifed and made up.”  But she also was barefoot and wearing jeans because “she was having her official campaign portrait taken only from the waist up,” Cabot said with a laugh.

Later appointed White House Director of Scheduling for the First Lady, the Saco native was in charge of Rosalynn Carter’s appointments calendar and arranged all of her domestic and international travel during the four years Jimmy Carter was in office. Hardly a newcomer to national politics, Cabot had worked for 11 years as a legislative aide to Maine U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie.

In 2015 Cabot and her husband, Edward, retired full time to Harpswell where they had summered for years on property that her parents had owned. Her jet-setting days now mostly behind her, Jane Cabot recently was elected president of the nonprofit, non-partisan Maine Women’s Giving Tree, a charitable organization serving women, children and families in the Midcoast area.

MWGT has donated nearly $350,000 to local organizations since 2012. Its 75 women members pool their philanthropic dollars to support initiatives in Bath, Brunswick, Freeport, Harpswell, Phippsburg, Topsham, Woolwich and Wiscasset. By pooling their funds, members believe they can make a greater impact in the Midcoast area than they would as individual donors.

“We’re eager for more women to join us and encourage anyone interested to learn more at www.mainewomensgivingtree.org,” Cabot said.

Earlier this year, MWGT awarded $50,000 in grants to 10 nonprofits, including Elder Abuse Institute of Maine, Midcoast Community Alliance, Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program, Midcoast Literacy, Oasis Free Clinic, Sweetser, Telford Housing, The Emergency Action Network, The Gathering Place, and Wayfinder Schools.

“Especially during this pandemic year, the resources of so many local groups are stretched to the limit,” Cabot said, “and it’s vital that organizations like the Giving Tree respond to the crisis as generously and as swiftly as possible.      

“We take our responsibilities as local philanthropists very seriously, and we have a rigorous and objective process to review all applications for funding,” she said. “But this year we have decided to accelerate our timetable so that we can award our annual grants in April 2021, nearly two months earlier than originally planned.”

Cabot heads a slate of all-volunteer officers including Sue Loebs and Karen Bragaw, co-vice presidents; Barbara Achter, secretary; and Diane Field, treasurer.

While MWGT work is “very gratifying” for Cabot, it’s not quite as heady as having her own office in the White House, traveling abroad with Rosalynn Carter or running into former boss Sen. Muskie and Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the Rose Garden.

Cabot started working for Maine’s Sen. Muskie during summers when she was a student at Mount Holyoke College and joined his staff full time after graduation. In the 1968 vice presidential election she was on Muskie’s campaign plane fact checking for the candidate. “It was a memorable experience,” she said.

But when Rosalynn Carter called, Cabot was ready for a change.

Mrs. Carter was one of the first in her role to make official trips abroad representing the president in substantive talks with foreign leaders, she said.  “Her first trip was to seven Caribbean and Latin American nations. Before leaving Washington the First Lady met with dozens of experts and was so well briefed she won over even the most macho leaders.  By then, they understood she was their direct line to the president.”

On one trip, Cabot met an official at an experimental farm in Peru where new strains of potatoes were being developed. “When he started to talk,” I said, ‘Where in Maine are you from?” He laughed and told me he was from Aroostook County. Hearing him made me a bit homesick.”

Cabot retained her strong ties to Sen. Muskie and today serves on the Board of Visitors of the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine. One of her most vivid White House memories is an encounter with Muskie and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the pair walked through the White House Rose Garden and saw Jane Cabot.

“Hello, Jane,” Muskie said, stopping and turning to Humphrey. “You remember, Jane, Hubert.” Of course he did, the other Senator said, although Cabot is sure Humphrey had no idea who she was. But that memory remains “such a wonderful picture” of the former presidential and vice presidential running mates.  “It was shortly before Humphrey died,” she said.

After President Carter lost his re-election bid, Jane married Edward Cabot, an attorney, and moved to New York. Ned Cabot, who died in 2018, had once been a liberal Republican and had run Sen. Jacob Javits’s New York office. He later succeeded Archibald Cox as national chairman of Common Cause and taught law and public policy at Yale, New York University and Trinity College.

She convinced him to retire in Harpswell where they tore down her parents’ old cottage and built a new house. “Ned loved this place as much as I do,” she said.

While in New York, Jane Cabot ran the public issues division of M Booth and Associates, a public relations firm, and worked with some of the nation’s largest philanthropies, colleges and non-profit institutions. 

“Good on-the-job training for the Maine Women’s Giving Tree,” she said.