“Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.”
—Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter was the first president born in a hospital
Carter is the only president who ever filed a UFO sighting report with the U.S. Air Force
He also directed the government to consult a psychic to help locate a missing airplane
Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, nearly resigned because he had lost confidence in President Carter’s leadership ability
Nathan Miller, author of a book about America’s ten worst presidents, wrote, “Electing Jimmy Carter president was as close as the American people have ever come to picking a name out of the phone book and giving him the job.” This is not quite correct. Although he had a thin record as an undistinguished one-term governor of Georgia, Carter’s successful drive to the presidency in 1976 was a work of political genius and determination—though his campaign is responsible for lengthening the presidential election cycle to the endless and expensive process we have today. It was Carter who transformed the Iowa caucuses, until then a minor, sleepy affair that most candidates ignored, into the high-profile, first-in-the-nation contest it is now.
Carter skillfully exploited the nation’s post-Watergate mood of disenchantment with Washington. His one shrewd political insight: after the disappointment of Vietnam, the failure of the Great Society, and the scandal of Watergate, what Americans most wanted in a president was someone who taught Sunday school, which Carter did at his Baptist church in Plains, Georgia. He promised never to lie to the American people. But he concealed his soft liberal ideology and projected a persona that concealed the nasty and hypocritical side of his character. He was a high-minded practitioner of low blows.
“I see nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained. I would not force a racial integration of a neighborhood by government action.”
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Jimmy Carter in Pennsylvania, during the 1976 campaign
Both as president and in his long, self-aggrandizing career as a former president, Carter has represented himself as a racial healer. But his political career in Georgia, and even some of his appeals in the 1976 campaign, reveal him to have been a typical Southern race-baiter. Sociologist Kenneth Morris, whose study Jimmy Carter, American Moralist, is generally favorable to Carter, observes that the “not-so-subtle racism” of Carter’s 1970 campaign was “blatant . . . the chicanery had been more than accidental; it had been systematic.”
Longtime NBC and ABC broadcaster David Brinkley observed of Carter, “Despite his intelligence, he had a vindictive streak, a mean streak, that surfaced frequently and antagonized people.” Eleanor Randolph of the Chicago Tribune wrote, “Carter likes to carve up an opponent, make his friends laugh at him and then call it a joke. . . . [He] stretched the truth to the point where it becomes dishonest to call it exaggeration.” And Gary Fink, author of a generally favorable study of Carter’s governorship, notes that “Carter usually claimed the moral and ethical high ground” but “practiced a style of politics based on exaggeration, disingenuousness, and at times outright deception.”
The man with the legendary smile could be unfriendly and cold. “There were no private smiles,” said one disgruntled campaign aide in 1976. His personal White House secretary, Susan Clough, recalled that Carter rarely said hello to her as he walked by her desk. Not a “Happy Thanksgiving,” or a “Merry Christmas.” Nothing, she said. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. judged Carter to be a “narcissistic loner.” “Carter was never a regular guy,” his speechwriter Patrick Anderson observed. “The sum of his parts never quite added up to that. . . . Carter talked his way into the presidency, yet in some profound way he never learned the language of men.”
“I’ve looked upon a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it. But that doesn’t mean I condemn someone who not only looks at women with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock. Christ says, ‘Don’t consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife.’”
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Jimmy Carter to Playboy magazine, 1976
Was Carter a liberal? A Southern conservative? A moderate? He presented himself as all of the above. One poll before the election found that Carter “comes across as more conservative to conservative voters, more middle-of-the-road to middle-of-the-roaders, and more liberal to liberals.” And Carter’s own pollster Pat Caddell found that on election day in 1976, “fifty percent of the public still does not know where Carter stands on the issues.” It may have been a winning formula for the election, but it was a disaster for Carter once he took office.
Carter began his presidency with an attitude of fiscal conservatism, rebuffing many proposals from the liberal Democratic Congress to expand spending. Liberals were certain that Carter would acquiesce in new activist government programs once in office, and were shocked to discover that Carter had really meant it when he pledged to balance the budget. Carter relished the discomfort he caused liberals on fiscal matters. “I wish you could have seen the stricken expressions on the faces of those Democratic leaders when I was talking about balancing the budget,” Carter told biographer Peter Bourne. It wasn’t just members of Congress that Carter upset. Carter charged his secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph Califano, with the task of coming up with a welfare reform plan. Califano didn’t take Carter’s condition that any reform plan had to be accomplished at current funding levels seriously. When Califano presented Carter a set of options that all cost billions more, Carter exploded: “Are you telling me that there is no way to improve upon the present system except by spending billions of dollars? In that case, to hell with it! We’re wasting our time.”
When Carter, clenching his fist for dramatic effect, called his energy policy the “moral equivalent of war,” people noticed that the phrase yielded the acronym “MEOW.”
But what most upset liberals, especially Senator Ted Kennedy, was Carter’s refusal to back a comprehensive national health insurance plan that would have cost upwards of $100 billion a year. During the campaign Carter had endorsed national health insurance, but in office he proposed a slow, piecemeal approach to the issue. The government “cannot afford to do everything,” Carter said, postponing even the introduction of a bill until 1979. What Carter eventually proposed in 1979 was a hospital cost-containment measure that went nowhere.
Energy policy was Carter’s most frivolous misadventure. At a time when government regulation and price controls were wreaking havoc in the energy market and causing soaring prices for consumers, Carter proposed more government regulation of energy, subsidies for “alternative” sources that never work very well, and higher taxes.
While Carter had a measure of fiscal conservatism, his general handling of the economy—especially of the most serious problem of the time, inflation—was disastrous. True to form, Carter tried to explain inflation as a moral problem afflicting the American people: “It is a myth that the government itself can stop inflation.” Rather, inflation was a reflection of “unpleasant facts about ourselves,” of “a preoccupation with self” that retards the willingness of Americans “to sacrifice for the common good.” At no time did Carter mention the money supply, or the government’s role in running the Treasury printing press. The Carter administration proceeded to fight inflation through “jawboning,” which meant giving an official scowl to businesses and labor unions who sought price and wage increases. In 1979, inflation soared further, to more than 12 percent. With the prime rate nearing 20 percent and signs that inflation might begin spiraling to Latin American levels, Carter finally reversed course and appointed Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve. But by then the pain necessarily involved in fighting the inflation was considerably more acute than if Carter had governed more sensibly when he took office. Volcker immediately jacked up interest rates to curb monetary growth.
“I think it’s inevitable that there will be a lower standard of living than what everybody had always anticipated, constant growth . . . . I think there’s going to have to be a reorientation of what people value in their own lives. I believe that there has to be a more equitable sharing of what we have . . . . The only trend is downward.”
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Carter to visitors to Camp David before the 1979 “Malaise” speech
The economic problems of the nation reached their nadir in the summer of 1979, providing the occasion for the worst presidential speech ever given: Carter’s famous “malaise” speech. The president never actually used the term “malaise” in his speech, but he said the nation suffered from a “crisis of confidence,” and in his own notes he used the term “malaise” to describe the nation’s condition.
There were credible rumors that Carter had suffered a nervous breakdown in the days before the speech, as he fled to the presidential retreat at Camp David for ten days to figure out what to do. At one point before the speech, Vice President Walter Mondale bluntly told Carter that a speech based on the “malaise” idea would be “political suicide,” and that he doubted he would be able to defend it. “You can’t castigate the American people,” Mondale told Carter, “or they will turn you off once and for all.” Mondale almost resigned in protest over the speech.
“I don’t laugh at people any more when they say they have seen a UFO because I’ve seen one myself.”
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Jimmy Carter, 1975
Carter had built up great expectations for a redemptive presidency during his 1976 campaign. Having run for office on the promise of “a government as good as the people,” Carter was now saying, in effect, that the people were no good.
The net results of Carter’s erratic economic policies were high inflation, slow productivity growth, stagnant personal incomes, and persistent unemployment. But those were the least of Carter’s troubles as his term progressed. Carter oversaw a ruin in foreign policy to match the ruin of the domestic economy. By 1980, Americans’ anxiety about the prospect of war would reach its highest level since the Cuban missile crisis.
Henry Kissinger observed that by 1980 Carter had achieved a rare trifecta: “The Carter administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.”
Carter had campaigned for the presidency as a critic of détente and a champion of human rights, but he ended up embracing a détente even more appeasing than under Nixon and Ford, and undermining the cause of democracy and human rights around the world. According to the annual Freedom House survey of democracy and liberty around the globe, there was almost no increase in freedom during Carter’s presidency. Meanwhile, both Iran and Nicaragua, principal targets of Carter’s human rights policy, became human rights disasters when revolutions replaced pro-American rulers with despotic anti-American rulers (Communists in the case of Nicaragua). And the fall of the Shah in Iran was a powerful impetus to the explosion of terrorism that is still convulsing the world today. America’s allies in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, were alarmed at the outcome of the Iranian revolution and appalled by the ineffective American response. The lesson drawn was that it was not necessarily advantageous to be too close to the United States.
Carter’s foreign policy was sentimental rather than hardheaded or principled—a heavy dose of liberal guilt combined with the fashionable view that the “bipolar” world of the Cold War should give way to a “multi-polar” world. Four months into his administration, Carter made explicit his departure from the post-war foreign policy consensus. In a May 22, 1977, commencement address at Notre Dame University, Carter declared, “Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. . . . The unifying threat of conflict with the Soviet Union has become less intensive. . .” [emphasis added].
Two years later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan—the first time the Soviets had invaded a nation outside their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe—and threatened the Middle East. Carter said the invasion had opened his eyes to the Soviet menace, and he announced a new policy—the “Carter doctrine”—that any attack on a Middle Eastern nation constituted an attack on American interests, and would draw a U.S. military response. Then he sent unarmed airplanes to the Middle East to show his new “toughness.” Robert Tucker of Johns Hopkins University wrote in Foreign Affairs’ annual survey of the world, “After almost three years, it is reasonably clear that the Carter Administration’s foreign policy has been a failure.”
By the beginning of 1980, the bottom had fallen out of Carter’s presidency. Khomeini’s triumph in Iran turned out to be not the end but the beginning of America’s agony in the Middle East. In November 1979, Iran seized the American embassy in Tehran, holding fifty-two Americans hostage, in violation of every diplomatic tradition and international law. The hostage-taking plunged America into a war-like crisis, except that the United States never credibly threatened Iran with war. Some of the Iranians who participated in the hostage-taking said subsequently that they expected the affair to last only as long as it took the U.S. to make credible threats of military action against Iran, and they were startled that Carter quickly and publicly disavowed the use of force (though Carter did send a private warning to Iran threatening severe but unspecified consequences if the hostages were harmed). Within days it was evident that the crisis would drag on for months. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), looking for a way to ingratiate themselves with the U.S., offered to intervene—Arafat had been one of the first foreign visitors to Iran after Khomeini’s return in February—but Khomeini bluntly told Arafat to stay out of the matter. Carter later turned to Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi for help, asking his brother Billy Carter, who had accepted a $200,000 dollar “loan” from Libya that would become an embarrassment to Carter in the summer of 1980, to intercede with the anti-American tyrant of Tripoli. Khomeini was not impressed. Carter inexplicably decided to send former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, than whom there was no finer example of an accuser of America before the world—Clark had already written to an Iranian official offering advice about how to seek damages for the “criminal and wrongful acts committed by the Shah”—as an envoy to Iran, but Clark received the same treatment as the PLO. All U.S. attempts to make any kind of productive diplomatic contact with Iran hit a stone wall. Even freezing billions of dollars of Iranian assets in the U.S. and packing the Shah off to Panama did nothing to alter the deadlock.
Jimmy Carter is the only president of the twentieth century who did not appoint a single justice to the Supreme Court, so he doesn’t have a legacy in the third branch of government comparable to those of other presidents. He deserves an F grade for his respect and defense of the Constitution, nonetheless, for an unusual reason: his unprecedented and outrageous behavior as an ex-president. Carter does not seem to understand that the nation has only one president at a time. He has consistently undermined his successors in ways both direct and indirect.
The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators, and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry by Steven F. Hayward (Regnery, 2004).
On the surface it is astonishing that someone whose four years in the presidency are widely judged to have been a disastrous failure continues to attract front-page headlines and exert influence on the world stage more than thirty years later. Carter, Time magazine’s essayist Lance Morrow once observed, has established himself as “America’s anti-President: a psalm-singing global circuit rider and moral interventionist who behaved, in a surreal and often effective way, as if the election of 1980 had been only some kind of ghastly mistake, a technicality of democratic punctilio.” Carter has assembled a record of egregious behavior that is invariably forgiven and forgotten. The most notable instance came in late 1990 and early 1991, as the United States was assembling the coalition to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In the U.S., Carter opposed the prospective Gulf War, saying it would be “a massive, self-destructive, almost suicidal war.” But he didn’t stop there. In November 1990 Carter wrote to several heads of state represented in the UN Security Council, including Francois Mitterrand, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, and more than a dozen others, appealing for “negotiations” and deploring President George H. W. Bush’s “line in the sand” rhetoric. The UN Security Council, Carter said directly, could stop the United States from launching a military campaign. The Arab League, not the U.S., should be the agent to work out a diplomatic solution. Carter sent out his irenic missives without the knowledge of the Bush administration, which didn’t learn of Carter’s activities until Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney telephoned Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to ask him what Carter was up to. Cheney was shocked, later telling Carter biographer Douglas Brinkley that Carter’s actions were “reprehensible, totally inappropriate for a former president.”
In the day preceding the UN’s January 15 ultimatum for Hussein to leave Kuwait, Carter continued his behind-the scenes meddling. Carter wrote on January 10 to Saudi’s King Fahd, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, and Syria’s Hafez Assad urging them to break from Bush’s painstakingly assembled coalition. “I urge you,” Carter wrote, “to call publicly for a delay in the use of force while Arab leaders seek a peaceful solution to the crisis. You have to forgo approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets, and others fully supportive” [emphasis added]. While Carter had belatedly informed the Bush administration of his November communiqués, he kept his January missives secret from Bush, who did not find out about them until several years later. Carter never apologized to Bush for his interference. Carter also opposed President George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, at one point going as far as to question President Bush’s own Christian faith. It is episodes of this kind that prompted Lance Morrow to comment that “some of his Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason.”
Any lingering doubts about Carter’s political failings were removed once and for all when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, explicitly as an anti-American gesture on the part of the Nobel committee.