Former President Jimmy Carter on October 1 became the oldest American president, having lived through the presidencies of 17 other men, beginning with Calvin Coolidge, who served from 1923 until Herbert Hoover assumed office in 1929.
I met Carter as a student at UNC in the spring of 1975 when he was a nationally unknown former governor of Georgia and peanut farmer, an improbable candidate for president the following year. He gave a speech on energy policy and the environment and mingled with a small group afterwards in the student union. I most remember his intense, steely, determined blue eyes and what smart and detailed answers he gave. The central question we Poli Sci and Journalism students asked him was how he could possibly think he would win the presidency since he then had a national name recognition of one percent. He told us about the new Iowa Caucuses that he was focusing on winning by meeting and shaking hands with nearly every potential caucus-goer. Being a smart aleck who frequently embraced conventional media wisdom, I was skeptical. Of his plans to bring peace between Israel and Egypt, I thought “that’s unlikely to happen.” (That peace still holds today.)
With the nation reeling from what President Gerald Ford called “our long national nightmare” — Richard Nixon’s “shameful” Watergate scandal and resignation, and the quagmire of Vietnam, resulting in a humiliating loss for the U.S — Carter captured the national zeitgeist due to his devout beliefs, promise of national redemption and to “never lie to the American people.”
James Fallows, a speechwriter for Carter during the first two years of his presidency, has a nice tribute on Substack. Fallows first came to my attention in 1979 when he wrote an article for The Atlantic that was widely viewed as a put-down of his former boss. He called Carter’s presidency “passionless,” with Carter mired down by paying too much attention to too many details, like managing the schedule of the White House tennis court. The article was certainly good for Fallows’ journalism career — he established himself as an independent analyst, not as an apologist or propagandist for Carter’s presidency. But didn’t Carter need more defenders in the media? He seemed to have very few. Only in recent years have journalists and historians such as Jonathan Alter, author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, in 2020, given Carter his due.
In a 2023 postscript, republished on his Substack, Fallows wrote:
“Intelligent, disciplined, self-contained, spiritual. President Carter made some of his own luck, good and bad—as I described in this magazine 45 years ago. There is little I would change in that assessment, highly controversial at the time, except to say that in 1979 Carter still had nearly half of his time in office ahead of him, and most of his adult life. I argued then that his was a “passionless” presidency. He revealed his passions—his ideals, his commitments—in the long years to come.”
But that 1979 article indirectly made the case for a more passionate Democrat, Ted Kennedy, to challenge Carter, as if the liberalism of the 1960s could be rekindled, and only Jimmy Carter stood in its way. I, a newspaper reporter and columnist in my twenties, without much historical perspective or knowledge of economics, was persuaded by articles like that and to some extend fell for the Kennedy mythology. Teddy’s 1980 campaign in retrospect proved to be a chimera. If progressives had their feet firmly planted in solid ground and their ears attuned to what real people were thinking and feeling, Kennedy’s campaign would not have happened. It seriously damaged Carter’s chances for re-election. We should have paid more attention to Carter’s address at the JFK Library in October 1979 contrasting his era and the very different era of John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s.
Even without Kennedy’s challenge, however, Carter’s chances for re-election weren’t good. As Fallows points out, by 1979 his luck had run out. The prime interest rate for the nation’s best borrowers was at 20 percent, and stagflation — double-digit interest rates, double-digit inflation, and double-digit unemployment — was hurting a lot of people. An economically unsophisticated public is not likely to be patient with presidents who may have the right policies but cannot eliminate the “misery index” in two years or less.
Carter planted the seeds for breaking the back of stagflation by appointing a proponent of tight money, economist Paul Volcker, to head the Federal Reserve in 1979. Unfortunately for Carter’s political career, Volcker and the FED were not fully successful until 1983. That allowed President Reagan to fully take credit for it, and to win a landslide re-election in 1984.
Some commentators, especially hyper-partisan ones, have drawn the wrong lessons from Jimmy Carter’s example. Frank Hill, in a column for the North State Journal of NC called Character Vs. Policy: What Is More Important In A Candidate, portrays him as an unusually good man who was a terrible president, as if he personally was responsible for double-digit stagflation, the Iranian hostage crisis and a “weak” foreign policy that caused catastrophes like the Iranian Revolution and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. This America-centric approach falls into the gauzy mythology that presidents should be able to fully control the economy as well as domestic and foreign events, without of course explaining how that would be possible without resorting to international dictatorship. “Only I can fix it,” Donald Trump says. But in a democracy, we all have a say. Jimmy Carter understand that.
He did not bomb Iran back to the stone age for violating international law and holding American hostages but they did all come home safely.
Carter during his presidency did seem to lack vision and charisma compared to Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. I don’t remember Carter talking in 1980 about his specific plans for a second term, except he said he would over time eliminate the national debt rather than give tax cuts to the wealthiest as Reagan proposed.
(George H.W. Bush declared in debates that year that Reagan’s plan was “voodoo economics.” It certainly led to an explosion of the deficit, with successive presidents acting as if “deficits don’t matter.” Carter believed they did matter, but that was not a popular position on the right or the left.)
What If Jimmy Carter Won Re-election?
In 2015, after Carter’s diagnosis of brain cancer (since cured), several specialists on the Jimmy Carter administration participated in a panel discussion on “what life would be like if Jimmy Carter won a second term,” including historian Douglas Brinkley, conservative political analyst Michael Barone, longtime Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, and Randy Lewis, a Carter press aide.
Robert Duvall, a former hostage from Haiti, said he owes his life to Carter. If re-elected, Carter would have saved many more victims of human rights abuses, Duvall asserted.
Gary Sick, a National Security Council aide to Carter, suggested the Middle East would have been very different if Carter was re-elected. The Reagan administration backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, and supplied him with chemical weapons, which he later used on his own people; Carter would not have backed Iraq, Sick said.
Podcast: What Life Would Be Like If Jimmy Carter Won a Second Term?
Progressive economists contend that a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 10 percent has occurred since Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts were implemented in 1981. A working paper by two Rand Corporation economists calculated that the aggregate annual incomes of middle class and poor Americans could have been far higher if more progressive tax policies were enacted.
But Carter did not make a strong economically populist appeal in his 1980 re-election campaign.
Smaller Than Life?
The modest and humble image Carter cultivated in his first campaign, which was so refreshing after the arrogance and venality of the Nixon years, seemed by 1980 to make him, at least to a critical segment of fickle voters, smaller than life.
Now he again seems, if not larger than life, to offer evidence that persistent dedication to public service, enduring principles, and good causes, will lead the world to offer great tributes.
His story is also evidence that a president’s true nature will ultimately be revealed and acknowledged by even those who did not vote for or support him, as well as to those who did.
Once a president has left office, it is easier to see his presidency in more objective terms, not just as an individual but as a product of his times and as a reflection of the collective psychology of the nation.
Share your thoughts about Jimmy Carter by replying to this email or posting in the comments section of Substack.
HILL: Character vs. policy: What is more important in a candidate? | The North State Journal (nsjonline.com)
The Google News aggregator informs us of lots of observances of Jimmy Carter’s birthday, and retrospectives.
Anyone can write a birthday card to Carter here. The notes can be read by everyone. http://www.centuryofcarter.com
This site was featured on public radio’s https://the1a.org/segments/100-years-of-president-jimmy-carter/ and as a podcast, with lots of public memories and tributes.
Carter at 85
How Much of Carter’s Perceived Failure As President Was Simply A Result of Media Framing? This documentary explored that question, I offered my observations and interacted with the filmmaker (now deceased).