We were living in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1974 when the outgoing governor announced he was a candidate for president. The headline in the Atlanta Constitution read JIMMY CARTER’S RUNNING FOR WHAT? A few months before, he had made an appearance as a mystery guest on “What’s My Line?” One of the panelists guessed he was a mystic and asked if he recruited nuns.
It was exciting to have a Georgian in the presidential race, but at the time I was more interested in who was going to replace Carter in the governor’s office. His immediate predecessor, and likely successor, was Lester Maddox, a florid, balding incarnation of Elmer Fudd. Maddox had made a name for himself in 1964 when he chased three black divinity students out of his chicken restaurant with an ax handle. Two years later he was governor of Georgia. “I never doubted I’d win,” he liked to boast. “All I had to do was beat the state Democratic party, every major labor leader, the state Republican party, all one hundred fifty-nine courthouses, about four hundred city halls, all the politicians of rank—every one of ’em—every major newspaper, the television and radio stations, the railroads, all the major banks, all the major industries, the utility companies. So that’s what I did. I beat everybody.” One of the people he beat was a little-known state senator and peanut farmer from Plains, who was in his first statewide race. Carter did not run well in that election, he was crushed, but he was a careful student of Maddox’s use of symbols and his antiestablishment, outsider appeal.
Maddox was easily the most recognizable man in Georgia, and after George Wallace the most famous politician in the South. He was on the Dick Cavett show twice. His record album, God, Family and Country, sold five thousand copies in the first week. There was an off-Broadway musical review entitled Red, White and Maddox. The secret of his celebrity was his own utter inability to be embarrassed by who he was, combined with a general amazement that such a person could be elected to any office anywhere, even on a whim. And yet Maddox was a surprisingly good governor, honest, and successful in certain populist ways. He called himself a segregationist, but he appointed more blacks to state jobs than any previous governor. He was a patron saint to the state’s huge prison population because of his penal reforms and large-scale reprieves. Under Georgia law Maddox could not succeed himself as governor, so he made a brief run for president (Georgia, the cradle of presidential candidates), then he prudently came home and got himself elected lieutenant governor. While he was in office he opened up a shop in Atlanta where he sold Lester Maddox memorabilia, such as autographed ax handles, Lester Maddox T-shirts, and the Lester Maddox Wake Up America alarm clock. For Christmas one year, my Georgia brother-in-law gave my parents a Lester Maddox toilet seat.
This was Jimmy Carter’s political mentor, although the two men would become famous enemies. By whipping Carter, Maddox had taught him how to win in Georgia. The next time Carter stumped for governor he was a born-again Christian in a flannel shirt, running against the “liberal” Atlanta establishment and enjoying the support of most of the leading segregationists in the state, including Lester Maddox.
That was an education no national politician had ever received, because for the last century winning in Georgia had been an absolute bar to higher office. The South extracted compromises that no candidate could live with beyond its borders. The quandary of Jimmy Carter was that he wanted to go beyond. On the day of his inauguration as governor, he made a statement that would set him free of the South. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over. Our people have already made this major and difficult decision.… No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.” That speech got him on the cover of Time magazine. He was now a national figure, of sorts, but he was curiously dead in Georgia.
I was covering the 1974 governor’s race—the race to succeed Carter—for The Progressive, a liberal northern monthly, which viewed Georgia politics as a racial horror show. In the contest for lieutenant governor, for instance, there was a Nazi who claimed that “Hitler was too moderate” and a conservative black doctor who went to jail in the middle of the campaign for contempt of court (he neglected to pay his child support). However, I was just learning that Georgia politics was far more subtle than it appeared to the rest of the country, which would shortly be overwhelmed by a man who learned his trade by courting votes among the small-town bigots and the Lions Club bourgeoisie and the snake-handling Christians of rural Georgia.
I caught up with Lester Maddox at a rally in Griffin. He marched into the crowd in the middle of a team of majorettes, wearing a Shriner’s fez and throwing candy to the children. He made a quick speech, pledging a war on crime, then he hopped on a bicycle and peddled backward. It was his favorite campaign stunt, and thrilling to witness. I was surprised to notice about a dozen black people in the crowd, some of them wearing Maddox buttons and carrying MADDOX WITHOUT A RUNOFF signs. Despite his assurance to voters that he was “still a segregationist,” Maddox was the only candidate to advertise in black newspapers, and a Blacks for Maddox office had just opened in Milledgeville.
He was in the contest with fifteen other men. One of them, a former state employee in the Department of Corrections, said he had been directed by God on two occasions, January 2 and 8, to enter the race. Less-divine contenders included Bert Lance, the North Georgia banker who was Carter’s designated successor, and George Busbee, the Georgia House majority leader. My favorite candidate was Ronnie “Machine Gun” Thompson, the mayor of Macon, who was entered in both the Republican and Democratic primaries. He was a political figure only Georgia could produce—that is, a white gospel singer who became mayor on a “shoot to kill” platform, and a segregationist who was a close friend of many black recording artists, including James Brown. Thompson got his nickname when he personally returned a sniper’s fire with a spray from a police machine gun. His campaign song was “If You Don’t Like Policemen, Call a Hippie.”
Both Maddox and Thompson made the runoffs, Maddox as a Democrat and Thompson as a Republican. Maddox’s opponent was the colorless moderate, George Busbee. Maddox opened the campaign by playing the racial gambit. He charged that Busbee was a tool of the black state representative, Julian Bond, who had become a national figure some years before when the Georgia House refused to seat him after his election. “The fellows I’ll be in a runoff with are the two B’s—Busbee and Bond,” Maddox declared. “In South Georgia they are calling Busbee ‘Julian Busbee.’ ” Bond did support Busbee, although not very significantly (like Carter, he was off running for president), but in Georgia it was a political sin for a white politician to appear to be courting the black vote. Once when a photograph of Lester Maddox and Julian Bond chatting in the capitol hallways was published in Georgia newspapers, Maddox had received a number of death threats, so the darker interpretation of the “Julian Busbee” ploy was that Maddox was trying to have his opponent murdered.
“I have made no special appeal to Julian Bond,” Busbee declared. “If the lieutenant governor would bother to check the vote of the House, he would find that George Busbee voted against seating Julian Bond in the House because of the activities and the statements made by him on the draft cards and other matters concerning the war in Vietnam.” That was Busbee’s attempt to dodge the racial tag. In the meantime, Maddox had his own problems with a Ku Klux Klan endorsement, which is the donkey’s tail for the pseudosegregationist. The candidate claimed that “Maddox-haters” had concocted the endorsement, and as a matter of fact Maddox “didn’t even believe we have such an organization as the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia.” That statement disgusted Grand Dragon James Lumpkin, who said that “every race Maddox has been in he’s had the support of the Klan.” Just when it began to look awkward for Maddox, the noisiest black activist in the state, the firebrand Hosea Williams, endorsed Busbee. Outraged, Busbee cried that he had never met or talked to Williams, and in fact he understood that Williams was secretly working for Maddox. Williams had to admit that he had twice referred to Maddox as “the best governor we’ve ever had” on Atlanta radio talk shows, but he claimed he was still endorsing Busbee, even if Busbee didn’t want his support. “White folks have risen above that,” Williams said when he was asked if this was a race-baiting tactic to bring down Busbee. “White folks ain’t that stupid.”
Busbee won the runoff and the general election, despite his unwanted black support. Maddox went on to join Bond and Carter in the presidential race, along with another Georgian, a black Republican who was running an antiprofanity campaign. It was still early in the presidential season, but already I had the feeling that Georgia politics had grown too sophisticated for the rest of the nation to withstand. Somebody from Georgia was bound to win.
Jimmy Carter was an enigma, and that is a frustrating quality in a politician. He was fortunate to be running for office at a time when people seemed to want qualities he seemed to have. He certainly didn’t look like a president. “His countenance, unsmiling, resembles that of an intelligent gun dog,” noticed the Sunday Times of London. His most attractive feature was his obscurity. Watergate had been such a tar baby that every politician in Washington was stuck to it, as was every lawyer. “I am not a professional politician,” Carter would remind us. “I am not a lawyer.” He did not live in Washington. He was not in any real sense a party man. In another year, what Carter was not would have been seen as liabilities, as they soon proved to be, but in 1976, our bicentennial year, we were longing for the lost innocence of our republic and looking for forgiveness. It was jokingly said that Jimmy Carter took his initials too seriously, but there was that religious air about him, and the unstated subtext of his campaign was that Carter was our political savior.
The first time I saw Jimmy Carter he was already a candidate for president. Roberta was an assistant book buyer at Rich’s department store, and helped to arrange an autograph party for Carter’s campaign book, Why Not the Best? Scarcely anyone came. Carter’s four years as governor had been acrimonious. He had not been careful in the way a politician would be who intends to hold on to local power. He had been curt and inflexible. He had cultivated tastes that his constituents considered eccentric, such as the music of Bob Dylan and the philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr. He had never been much of a hand-shaker or a baby kisser; he was not widely loved or even widely known. If Lester Maddox had held a book signing, the store would have been mobbed. Instead, there was Carter sitting alone on a small dais, grinning into space, cordoned off by gold ropes, and discreetly attended by Secret Service men. Given the department store setting, he reminded me of an unfrocked Santa waiting for kids to sit on his lap.
But there was also about him a peculiar radiance, which had partly to do with the lights shining on his orangish hair and partly to do with the glow of power and celebrity. Even a political dark horse like Carter acquires an aura when he announces for the presidency. One begins to read about the candidate in the papers, and soon grows acquainted with his family on television, and learns to recognize his voice and features—without really knowing him, one knows so much about him that it has a queer effect on nonpublic people like me. I wanted to go up to Carter, to talk to him and perhaps offer my support in his campaign, but his chances seemed so remote, and the radiance held me back.
The next time I saw Jimmy Carter was inauguration day. I was in Washington, perhaps the only journalist in town who was not writing about politics that week (I was working on water pollution). Sunday at noon on January 20, 1977, I was in Herman Talmadge’s senatorial office with about a hundred other Georgians watching Carter take the oath of office on TV. He was only a block away in person, but the crowds were so great and the day so cold I had retreated indoors. As we watched the icy breath float from the mouth of the first southern president since the Civil War, a procession began to form in Talmadge’s office; it was the Instamatic Line, an orderly queue of believers such as you might see at tent revivals and every Saturday night at “The Grand Ole Opry.” They shuffled toward the senator’s television set to kneel and flash a picture of Jimmy Carter on TV. It seemed to me a pledge of allegiance that the South had not been able to make to the rest of the nation since the reign of Andrew Jackson.
After the ceremony I walked outside into the brilliant, frigid day. The ground was covered with new snow, which squeaked when I stepped on it. I stood on Pennsylvania Avenue to watch the parade. At that point in my life I had seen only one American president, Dwight Eisenhower, who rode in a motorcade in the 1960 Boy Scout Jamboree. Eisenhower went by so quickly that I hardly got an impression of him, other than a smiling man standing in an open convertible, waving his arms over his head in that characteristic gesture of his as he raced past thousands of silent Boy Scouts. But the power of the presidency is such that I doubt there is a single one of those scouts who does not remember a quarter of a century later that he saw Eisenhower.
Now, however, the simple American action of watching a presidential parade drummed up old and complex fears in me, and an instinctive defensiveness. As we waited for Carter I prepared to make a quick mental snapshot of the passing limousine and to note the President’s face. The marching bands came, and then the train of black Lincolns—and then a murmur in the crowd, a rustle of astonishment that caused me instinctively to cringe. But it was not a fearful sound; it was joyous. “He’s walking!” people cried out. “He’s walking!” Before we could disbelieve it, there he was, right in front of me, holding his wife’s hand and walking down the center stripe of Pennsylvania Avenue. For many of us, it brought tears to our eyes. He was trusting us not to kill him.
The South was suddenly, briefly, chic. It had been discovered by the networks and the New York magazines. How wonderful, at last, to believe that I was in the center of life and not on its gray periphery. Everyone within the outer circle of the South was aware of it, this new sense of importance, and of acceptance, and of being in the spotlight.
The Deep South was emerging into the new world. You could see the skyscrapers sprouting in Charlotte and Atlanta, and the suburbs splashing across county lines. More than that, you could feel the juice surging through southern humanity, like an adrenal burst. To be in Georgia then was to be inside the inner circle. It reminded me of Texas a decade before, when Lyndon Johnson was president. Texas had become a real place then, an international dateline, and despite the moral complications of the assassination and the frequent embarrassment of watching Lyndon address his fell’ Ummurrukuns, I had come to see myself as having an authentic heritage, however flawed and wrongheaded. I was a real person. Now that same feeling of coming to life was spreading across the South, and there was a sense of marveling at oneself and a humorous and forgiving feeling of being who one was after all.
We were living now in the New South, that is, the postracist South that had been promised since Georgia Senator Benjamin Hill coined the term during Reconstruction. It was essentially an advertising term, as in New, Improved South, which was designed to beckon industry and the balm of federal money. Investment in the South was booming, and a great image-reversal was taking place. School buses were being bombed in Denver and Detroit, while desegregation was succeeding in many southern schools. The entire country had lost a war now, not just the old Confederacy. The South now appeared prosperous, dynamic, and racially harmonious, while the North was languishing, losing its grip on industry, tumbling into racial despair.
Georgia was always the avant-garde of the civil rights movement, the homeplace of so many of its leaders; a battleground, certainly, but the place where the ancient distress would finally resolve itself—through love. That was the electrifying message Carter delivered. No candidate or president I knew had ever said the word aloud, but Carter said it boldly and all the time. Love as a political doctrine was so raw it could only have sprung from the rural South, a region where sophistication was not worshiped but Jehovah was; where sudden death at the hands of passion was not an abstraction; where people’s daily lives were stultifying but whose spiritual lives were filled with crude and spectacular intensity. There was this particular irony that the rest of the country had not sorted out, which was that while the rural South had resisted the politics of the civil rights movement, it had been vulnerable to the spiritual message, which was unconditional love. This was a revelation ecstatically received in the churches of Calvary and Holiness and Pentecost and Nazarene, and in the charismatic, deep-water Baptist church that Jimmy Carter attended. “Blacks have always known that our best allies are those Southern whites,” said Andrew Young, “who have dared to live by their religious principles and who have been through the fire of persecution because of it.”
The epicenter of this great phenomenon, the reformation of the South, was Plains. It was here that the Peanut Brigade formed up and followed Carter through the primaries, paying their own expenses, knocking on doors of New Hampshire and Massachusetts and walking the black wards of the big northern cities. They came to spread the word about Carter and to disarm the old prejudices about the South. It was a task Carter could not have accomplished alone. Eventually, as Carter swept through the primaries behind that famous grin of his, which was like the Cutty Sark under full sail, reporters arrived to poke around Plains, to meet the other Carters and to get a fix on this new political force. Very soon the town of Plains, population 683, came to represent a vision of a lost America, almost a preindustrial America of porch swings and soft-ball games and Sunday school picnics. This was an America that remained spiritually intact, unrushed, bound by profound family ties and ruled by values deeply rooted in agrarian traditions that seemed precious and, until now, nearly irretrievable. If the other side of Plains—that is, the Klan and the White Citizens Council and the black tenant farmers on the Carter acreage—did occasionally lurch into view, it only added to the power of the metaphor Plains had become.
In its modest and frequently comical fashion, Jimmy Carter’s hometown assumed a mythical, sitcom status in the national consciousness. Everyone knew the cast of characters, who were all Carters—Miz Lillian, the formidable mother; Ruth Carter Stapleton, the faith-healing evangelist; the redneck brother, Billy, who became a wisecracking, beer-guzzling antidote to the parson’s manner of his elder brother—and so on, into the uncles and cousins twice removed, each of these characters being folksy and two-dimensional in exactly the ways that television characters would be, and each with his own constituency. I doubt, for instance, that Carter would have carried the Wallace voters without the image of the good ole boys sitting around Billy’s filling station, or the women’s vote without the forceful female figures of his mother and his wife. They reflected on Carter, as did his nanny and the black playmates of his youth. They were a part of him, and so we understood Carter’s psyche as being partly redneck, partly female, and partly black.
Even before the election, Plains had become a roadside shrine, a stop on the way to Florida for many tourists who were drawn there by curiosity and nostalgia. It was a simple farm town, made possible by the conjunction of U.S. Highway 290 with two farm-to-market roads and the Seaboard Coast Line railroad. It was like a million such anonymous crossings in the web of America—like Seward, Kansas, my father’s hometown, or Rutledge, Georgia, 120 miles north of Plains, my mother’s birthplace—and because it was no more than it was, Plains seemed a part of me, a part of my ancestral, small-town past.
When a reporter asked Billy Carter on election night what he thought was going to happen to Plains now that his brother was standing on the steps of the railroad depot, tears streaming down his face, declaring victory, Billy predicted the town was “going to go to hell in a handbasket.” That burst of candor was the only good laugh my father got in the entire election. We were watching the returns together in an Atlanta hotel room. He had voted for Ford, without much enthusiasm, and had watched Carter with increasing suspicion. “I will never lie to you,” “Trust me,” “If we could just have a government as good and as honest and as decent and as competent and as compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people—” my father heard these campaign statements from Carter with a cynicism I had not seen in him before. It was Nixon’s legacy to him, this distrust.
For the first time since 1960, my mother voted for a Democrat—as how could she not, she still had the South in her mouth. When she heard Carter speaking, he was ratifying her origins as well as her accent. All of her life she had paid in incidental ways for being a Georgian; people had made unfair assumptions about her intelligence or sophistication; she had been judged as being racially biased because of her background. Now there was a man who forced everyone to understand the complexity and nobility and beauty of the Deep South experience.
I was a Carter man much as my father had been a Nixon man. Here was a candidate who talked about human rights, ecology, tax reform, arms control, mass transit, equal opportunity—issues that had animated me for most of my political life—as well as such nonliberal concerns as civil service reform, fiscal restraint, governmental reorganization, and deregulation, which had become more important to me as my faith in government began to wane. Carter described himself as being liberal on social issues, but also as a fiscal conservative, which suggested that he believed in social programs without wanting to pay for them. I had come to the same position myself.
For me, however, the real appeal of Jimmy Carter was spiritual. He promised to make America work again, which all candidates do, but he also promised to make it good again. Carter was fond of quoting Niebuhr’s maxim that politics is the sad duty of establishing justice in a sinful world. In the anguish after Watergate, Carter’s political theology promised to redeem a political system that had been corrupted by the small-minded, self-interested Washington insiders. He would sweep through the temple and chase away the money changers. He would bring to government the same redemptive love that had transformed the civil rights movement. He would restore our moral standing among nations.
To my father, who was as religious as Carter, and who did not believe America needed to justify itself to depraved old Europe, or the Communist world, or the corrupt and ruthless governments of the Third World, Carter’s preachments were infuriating. But to me, who had come of age in a time of political murder and a bad war, and who had lost my own faith, Carter appeared to be the redeemer I sought. Perhaps the burden of my generation was to live in the reflected light of my father’s time, when America had been, in our minds, purer and worthier, before pride led it astray. Jimmy Carter, in all humility, promised to make America holy again.
As president, Jimmy Carter will probably be seen as a transition between the end of Roosevelt liberalism and the beginning of Reagan conservatism, a small figure in the shadows of Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan, a pothole in the minds of students searching for the name of the thirty-ninth president. He cut the federal deficit in half (under Ford, the deficit was higher than it had ever been, $66 billion); he increased defense spending; he slowed the growth of welfare programs; he deregulated the airlines, the banks, the railroads, and the trucking and communication industries. In the process he alienated the Democratic liberals in Congress, and lost the support of his own party. His presidency was a precursor of the new world conservatism that would triumph four years later, bringing in Ronald Reagan and sweeping away the liberal war-horses of the Senate—Bayh, Church, McGovern—who were the center of resistance to Carter’s legislative agenda.
Almost everyone agrees that Carter was a failure as President; he’s been thrown onto the same heap with Nixon and Johnson; and yet for me Carter still represents unsolved problems concerning what I think about the presidency, and America’s role in the world, and virtue as a goal of politics.
There was a conceit, when Carter came into office, that the presidency had grown too large, that it had thrown the powers of government out of balance. Johnson and Nixon had waged undeclared wars; Nixon had attempted to impose a police state on the country while corrupting the executive branch. And although both men had been brought down by popular reaction, it did not seem enough; the presidency itself must be bridled. There was significant talk about turning to a parliamentary democracy, or, failing that, adopting a single six-year term. The appurtenances of the presidency—the helicopter, the Marine Band, the Air Force jet, the color blue—were more appropriate for a European monarch of another era than a modern American head of state. The pomp of the presidential arrival, not only in Paris or Bonn but also in Cleveland or Fort Worth, was accompanied by an oxymoronic sensation when Air Force One touched down, the carpet unfurled, the band struck up “Hail to the Chief,” and out stepped—well, Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford. One felt fortunate that there was not a presidential costume, a robe and a crown. Only Kennedy had the natural elegance to be an American king.
Jimmy Carter campaigned as a common citizen, carrying his own luggage and sleeping in the homes of his supporters. Even his faith in God was common, one could say primitive, despite his interest in theology. He was “born again,” something educated and enlightened people didn’t say. Toward God, and toward the American populace, he lowered his head. He was no more than one of us, he said; he was no more decent and honest and sensible than are the American people. His humility was appropriate for the times. One believed that with Carter, at least, there would be no war, no scandals; one asked very little more from him than that. And indeed, he offered us little more than himself; his platform was clean living and repentance.
When Gerald Ford stumbled, or fell on the ski slope, or got shot at by women, he had seemed to diminish the presidency, because we saw the occasionally clumsy human occupying the symbolic office of America. Under Carter, the humanizing of the presidency was a matter of policy. It seemed to be a part of his mandate to make the presidency smaller, Carter-sized. One of his first actions was to sell the presidential yacht, a symbolic action that had exactly the opposite effect upon me than I might have supposed. He lounged about in blue jeans, he gave a fireside chat wearing a cardigan sweater. He liked to jog, and he entered a ten-kilometer race that he failed to finish. His humanity was always on display, disconcertingly so. He forced us to judge him as a person, not a symbol. Some of his qualities were remarkable. For instance, I never recall him saying “uh” in any of his numerous press conferences; he had such comprehensive, detailed responses to every question that he reminded you of the best student you ever knew. Like Kennedy, with whom he sought to be compared, he was a voracious reader, swallowing huge briefs one after another—he even found time to read the Bible in Spanish every night. But these qualities were features of his insecurity; he was overcompensating; he was mistaking omniscience for wisdom. During the first six months of his presidency, according to his former speechwriter, James Fallows, even such details as who would use the White House tennis court each week were referred to Carter for his approval. He wanted control, but he didn’t really want power.
Congress quickly sensed this and learned to ignore him. The rest of the world soon arrived at the same conclusion; attacks on America became hysterical at the very time when America was admitting its faults. Even our allies treated us with contempt. All across the globe antidemocratic forces discovered room to maneuver. No doubt the trauma of Vietnam had left America in a state of semi-paralysis, but by nature and religion Carter seemed disinclined to respond forcibly to the humiliations America suffered during his presidency.
At last, however, I believed that America was morally correct. Carter proved himself a peacemaker by personally extracting a Middle East settlement from Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin during an extraordinary thirteen-day arbitration at Camp David. It was a triumph of Carter’s best qualities: his persistence and his unfailing belief in the fundamental goodness of all people. Even though the agreement soon would cost Sadat his life, it was a great achievement and one that meant much to me, with my fond attachment to Egypt. Carter put a black civil rights preacher, Andrew Young, in the United Nations, which had become a forum for anti-American complaints, and he made human rights the centerpiece of his foreign policy. His commitment to human rights was not really “absolute,” as he had said in his inaugural address (the policy did not apply at all in the Philippines, for instance), but it was a criterion nonetheless: No longer would we prop up friendly dictators or military juntas that murdered their opponents in the name of anti-Communism. The point of the human rights policy was to look at the world as something other than a field of operations for American interests. Instead of saving the world for Coca-Cola, we would use our influence to aid the Soviet Jew or the Chilean dissident; in some respect every citizen in the world stood beneath the umbrella of Carter’s new doctrine. We became the guarantors of freedom everywhere. Because it really was important to Carter, the policy had an effect. The number of Jews permitted to emigrate from Russia rose from 14,000 in 1976 to more than 50,000 in 1979 (then fell sharply after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan). Political prisoners began to surface in Argentina, Indonesia, even in Cuba. Despite the ridicule Carter received from the practitioners of Realpolitik, he was saving lives.
The unanticipated result of the human rights policy was that America became a court of appeal for every dissident group in the world. Already regarded as being close to omnipotence, we added to our powers the moral judgment of other governments—and at a time when our strongest instincts were to pull back’ from adventure and to settle into the family of nations like a rich uncle. This seemed to me a perfectly proper arrangement. After Vietnam, I had no desire to force my beliefs on other countries; I was not an isolationist, but I didn’t believe we should be the world’s policeman, either. I was uncomfortable with our running a world we knew so little about. Once we reached some decent understanding with the Soviets, we could withdraw from the inevitable conflicts of developing countries and the entangling alliances George Washington warned us against. We could let our will be known by rewarding our friends and criticizing our enemies. We would become like Europe—that is, less powerful, and less blameful.
Until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter had similar views. “Our people have now learned the folly of our trying to inject our power into the internal affairs of other nations. It is time that our government learned that lesson too,” he said during his first campaign. In one of his early presidential addresses, he said “We are free now of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator in that fear.” Then on Christmas Day in 1979, the Russians initiated a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan, and Jimmy Carter became a convert to the extreme anti-Soviet views of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. “My opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last week than even the previous two and one half years before that,” Carter said. We heard no more about human rights and the need to scale back our military expenditures. Instead, Carter asked Congress to reinstitute compulsory registration for the draft and began a military buildup that was without precedent in peacetime. He banned grain sales to the Soviet Union and ordered a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. He also set about repairing relations with Pakistan’s military dictator, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who had overthrown and then put to death the democratically elected prime minister of that country, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Carter had discovered, in the last year of his office, that morality as a foreign policy is limited by the assumption that the rest of the world will be bound by the same standards.
And anyway, despite our best efforts to do good, most of the world seemed to regard America as evil—indeed, as the source of evil itself. It was within our unlimited power, everyone supposed, to remove tyrants, eliminate poverty, and dispense justice—although we were also regarded as being responsible for those conditions in the first place. The attacks on America in the seventies were founded on this double premise: We had caused the problems, and we could cure them. How far from true this was may be seen in the example of Iran.
Iran was not an entirely real country to me. There was Iran, our devoted ally, the greedy OPEC partner, a newly industrialized country on Russia’s southwestern border, and there was Persia, the land of flying carpets and veiled women and Omar Khayyám singing in the wilderness. Over both of these entities ruled the shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, upon his Peacock Throne. I was opposed to the shah because I despised royalty on principle, even in its vestigial forms, although Iran had been ruled by a monarchy for 2500 years, and the shah was a progressive leader. He had the reputation of being a ruthless modernizer, who had given away the royal lands to peasants, but who also bulldozed ancient villages to make way for new agricultural collectives. He had advanced the cause of women’s rights and dispatched teams of teachers and health workers to the countryside to improve the lives of the poor farmers. He had even invited humanitarian groups, including Amnesty International and the Red Cross, to tour his prisons and advise him on improving conditions there. Despite his liberal record, the shah was the world’s most eager customer in the arms market. During the Nixon administration, when he had carte blanche to purchase even the most advanced weaponry, he spent nearly $20 billion on American arms. Now, under Carter, who had pledged to cut back on the weapons merchandising of the past, the shah still accounted for one third of our foreign military sales.
On the day the shah arrived in Washington for a visit during Carter’s first year in office, four thousand anti-shah protesters (mostly students), armed with clubs and staves, attacked the fifteen hundred pro-shah supporters in Lafayette Park, opposite the White House. More than a hundred people were injured. Washington police dispersed the demonstrators with tear gas, which wafted across the White House fence and onto the south lawn, where President Carter was welcoming the shah and his wife. The newspapers the next day showed Carter wiping tears from his eyes as he listened to the shah’s remarks. To me that episode suggested something about the amiable chaos of American democracy. Carter seemed to feel the same way when he joked at the state dinner that evening, “There is one thing I can say about the shah—he knows how to draw a crowd.” However, when reports of the protests reached Tehran, opposition leaders interpreted them as a sign from Carter that he had backed away from the shah, and they immediately began to organize. They had been waiting for a signal to begin in earnest, and Carter’s tears had provided it. This would be the great puzzle for Americans, that the Iranian revolution was directed not at the shah, who was already fatally wounded with cancer and who would spend his last year wandering the globe seeking sanctuary and medical treatment; it was instead a revolution directed at us and was waged to some extent for our benefit.
The students in Lafayette Park held us responsible for keeping the shah on his throne. They were followers of the exiled religious leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who called the United States “the great Satan,” and who said Jimmy Carter was “the vilest man on Earth,” because of his continuing support for the shah. For his part, the shah blamed Jimmy Carter for the demonstrations against his regime, in both America and Iran, which he thought were prompted by Carter’s sermons on human rights. Later he suggested that his downfall was brought about by a conspiracy between American oil companies and the CIA in a scheme to raise oil prices. In the Iranian mind it was an article of faith that the CIA controlled everything. “Thus, long after Khomeini returned to Iran and U.S.-Iranian relations lay in ruins,” wrote Gary Sick, who was on Carter’s National Security Council, “it was common to meet sophisticated, well-educated Iranians whose inevitable question would be, ‘Why did the United States want to bring Khomeini to power?’ ”
There were certain parallels between Carter and Khomeini, which suggested that similar currents were moving in both countries. The Iranian revolution, led by holy men, was entirely novel and bizarre to us, and yet more than any president in our history, Carter was a religious leader. He had not lived in exile, as Khomeini had, but he had been so far on the fringe of national power that his election was at least the representation of an overthrow of the existing order. Both men came to power because of popular distress with the direction in which their countries were moving, and both represented a spiritual appeal to an earlier time, when values were firmer and easier to grasp.
To most Americans the rage directed at their country by the Iranians was simply wild, a form of religious hallucination. We were not a colonial power in Iran, but Khomeini spoke of us as an “oppressor,” a “plunderer,” the source of all Iranian problems. “This is not a struggle between the U.S. and Iran,” Khomeini contended. “It is a struggle between Islam and blasphemy.”
On November 4, 1979, a mob of as many as three thousand students scaled the walls of the American embassy in Tehran and held captive the seventy-six American employees trapped inside. It was at first merely a symbolic action, spurred by the anti-American speeches of the Ayatollah. The students who led the takeover of the embassy did it in the spirit of theater, not expecting that Khomeini would endorse their action or that for the next fourteen months the American hostages would become the central issue of the Iranian revolution.
I recall a scene on television of a young Iranian woman wearing a dark blue head scarf (some of the other female militants wore a full chador) piecing together the mutilated documents that the embassy staff had shredded during the siege. We would learn later that all the most sensitive documents had been captured intact, so that this painstaking assembly of the destroyed files was mostly a show of fanaticism. I had two quite vivid thoughts. One was that the students certainly had the goods on America now. I was predisposed to believe in America’s guilt; I expected a deluge of embarrassing revelations. The other thought was, what kind of revolution is this, that revolves backward in time, back into the age of religious oppression and veiled women? Iran was turning back into Persia.
Night after night we saw screaming mobs of Iranians pouring out their hatred for America, using our flag to carry out the trash, hanging Carter’s effigy, and occasionally producing some helpless blindfolded hostage. In part it was all a performance, done for the benefit of the television camera, which would turn a docile crowd into maniacs as soon as the lens was trained upon them. But there was also about these crowds an eager curiosity; despite their rage, they would often look into the camera as they might peer into a one-way mirror, looking for the Americans in their fabled living rooms on the other side.
After two weeks Khomeini released the black and female hostages who were not suspected of being spies. He assumed that American blacks would respond sympathetically. Indeed, the most profound misconception of the Iranian revolutionaries was that the American people would rally to their cause once their case against the U.S. government had been fully explained. “If the facts penetrate the Zionist-imperialist propaganda screen, if we succeed in explaining the truth to the American citizenry through the mass media, then the Americans will most probably have a change of heart about us,” Khomeini said in his Time magazine Man of the Year interview. Many of the students in the embassy and some top officials in the revolutionary government had attended American universities during the sixties and early seventies, when protests against the Vietnam War and the U.S. government were at a peak, and they had returned to Iran believing that, like them, Americans were just waiting for a signal to overthrow their own government.
In fact, their anti-American revolution had exactly the opposite effect, even on me, who was still willing to believe the worst about my country. The taking of American hostages was an international crime, widely condemned, but when Carter asked our allies to apply sanctions to Iran, they quietly refused. One came to feel, as an American, intensely alone. The Iranians seemed to be saying something about us that the rest of the world tacitly believed, which was that we controlled their lives, we were evil, whatever went wrong in the world was our fault.
America was, of course, modern, and the Iranian revolution loathed the modern world. Perhaps it is because Americans have so little past of our own that we rush toward the future, but in a country like Iran, with a past that reaches back to the birth of civilization, the homogenizing American future must look like cultural extinction.
America equals change. One can understand the resentment in a country where every new fashion, every new industry, every new idea, makes a person incrementally more American than he was before. To avoid becoming American, one must avoid newness; innovation must be despised. This is absurd, of course, it will not work; to live against modernity is to become a cult, not a culture. But this was the impossible posture Iran had chosen, to retreat two hundred years into itself, into a pre-American world. This was the sympathetic chord that kept our allies from punishing Iran; yes, they had economic reasons as well, but they too were nostalgic for a life that was once more French, more German, more Japanese, less American.
What makes America such a powerful agent for change is that, being a nation of immigrants, it is more international than any other country; it has roots in all nations. As a result, it has divided all other countries into two countries. There is, for instance, Italy, and there is the Italy that is inside America, in Brooklyn and Providence; there is Poland and there is the Poland of Chicago and Milwaukee; and so on. Iran exists similarly divided. Between these two countries, Iran and Iran-America, there is the natural antagonism of siblings. One does well at the other’s expense. This must be one cause of anti-Americanism everywhere, the resentment a person feels for his successful relative.
America not only divides countries, it divides personalities. One thinks of the 60,000 Iranian students in the United States, some of whom stayed here and continued to demonstrate for Khomeini, risking the fury of offended citizens. I noticed several of the militants in the embassy wearing American army field jackets, just as I had when I was a student. I identified with them that way, and I understood that they identified with me. Part of them was American. The revolution was going on inside them, between their American selves and their Iranian selves, and it made unconscious sense that this battle would be fought on the only patch of American soil in Iran.
I identified, as I say, with the American selves of these Iranian revolutionaries, but I also responded to that other resentful, anti-American side of them. What I understood about their Iranian selves was their sense of insignificance, the feeling of being less than a complete human being because one is not at the center of life. It was a similar resentment I felt growing up in Texas, believing that my life was unimportant because it was being lived offstage, and not in Paris, London, someplace central and vital. I now imagined what it must be like to live in a world in which there is America, and not to be an American.
I was still waiting for the revelations from the documents. Every night we attended lectures on television by the Iranian president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, or the foreign minister, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a highly self-assured man who had once flunked out of Georgetown University. They spoke to us about the crimes of America. In 1953 the CIA had staged a coup to keep the shah in power, and the Iranians had never forgiven us. It was a crime, no doubt, perhaps not so great a crime as the British invasion of Iran during the previous decade, or the Russian occupation, but it ended any claims of American innocence. According to Bani-Sadr, the American embassy was “the real center of power in Iran”; the shah was only an American puppet. But when the documents were finally published, eventually totaling forty volumes, there was scarcely any evidence that the United States had controlled or even strongly influenced Iranian affairs for the thirty-eight years the shah was on the throne. “The students who captured the embassy were convinced that the United States had secretly managed political events in Iran for years, that it had directed the shah’s campaign against the revolution, and that it was engaged in efforts to destabilize Iran and undermine Khomeini’s regime through nefarious contacts with dissident tribes and disaffected political elements,” wrote Sick. “In fact, the most striking feature about the many volumes of material published … was the absence of anything sensational.”
This was curious. Like a juror, I sensed a verdict arising from my soul, and it astonished me. America was not innocent, but it was also not guilty. It was not good but it was also not evil.
For me, the important result of the Iranian revolution was that it brought down Jimmy Carter. The morning after the 1980 presidential election a friend called and said, “There’s not a liberal left in town.” The country had renounced Carter because he appeared to be weak and because it could not bear the mortification it had endured in Iran. Carter had handled the crisis with patience and nobility; it was a true spiritual trial, and in some respects his finest achievement, but people had stopped believing in him. His rescue attempt came to an embarrassing, fatal end in the Iranian desert, when a helicopter crashed into one of the transport planes carrying American soldiers; and it was there, in a superheated fireball in a remote, Iranian desert, that Carter’s presidency was consumed.
He had been the one president I called mine. America had turned against him, and I felt that it had also turned against me. But I also felt a sense of relief, which I did not want to admit. One wants to believe in a president’s karma, and Carter, as his party chairman sadly observed, had used up all his luck getting elected. I knew that the experiment with morality was over. Even Carter, at the end, had learned about the compromises nations must make just to exist in the world, and the conflicting ideas different peoples have about how and why they want to live their lives. The world would be harder to fit into now. We had been led into Vietnam by pride, and perhaps into Iran by humility. Where could we turn next? We were confounded. And yet on the day the hostages finally came home, 444 days after their capture and moments after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, it seemed to me that America had broken loose from a guilty image of itself and had once again, in the miraculous American fashion, made itself new.