Former President Jimmy Carter is gone. All Americans on the right and left should mourn. He was an oak of a man.
Funerals are the time for the living to honor the dead, and there is much in Carter’s life that merits tribute. Honoring politicians in a democracy, however, is tricky. They can and often do make the wrong decisions. This fact is hardly surprising. Few people can bat 1.000. These mistakes are usually a function of judgment rather than character.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Carter won the White House in 1976 for a reason. He offered a vision for America that resonated with a public aching after the humiliation of Vietnam and the betrayal of Watergate. He did so with the added liability of being from Georgia, making him the first Southerner to win the White House on his own since the Civil War. (Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson were from former Confederate states, but both had inherited the office and had the advantage of incumbency when they won election in their own right.) He was an “outsider” to the ways of Washington after three of the biggest “insiders” of all time — Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford — had brought the United States to the sorry state it found itself in during the mid-1970s.
Saying that his electoral victory was the most important presidential achievement — as one historian argued years ago — is more than a little harsh. The Panama Canal treaty and the Camp David peace settlement were foreign policy achievements of the first order.
I spent seven years living — in a figurative way — with Carter as I wrote a book on the 1980 Olympic boycott. (One reviewer, intending this comment as a compliment, called it the most negative book ever written on Carter.) With that said, I was surprised at what I found. The Carter who emerged from the memos, letters and transcripts of meetings was a man of vision and resolution. Running counter to popular perceptions of his administration as indecisive, I found that once he made a decision, he had the conviction of his beliefs to push what he wanted. He was also open-minded; willing and determined to hear from people with different ideas. But once a decision was made, it was made. Many of his domestic critics saw his emphasis on human rights in foreign policy as naive and idealistic. Perhaps, but the Soviets saw him as a dangerous man, because his emphasis on the rights of all peoples was to them as an attack on the very foundations of the Soviet Union. Historians have offered many reasons for the end of the Cold War, but an emphasize on the power of human rights in the wake of the Helsinki Accords deserves a great deal of respect. At the same time, Carter was hardly naive. The military buildup that former President Ronald Reagan gets so much credit for actually started while the Georgia politician was in office.
Still, one-term presidents are one termers for a reason. In Carter’s case, despite having majorities in both houses of Congress, his relationship with the legislature was poor. Many established powers on Capitol Hill saw him as an interloper. He had trailed them in vote counts in their districts and states. They believed he owed them, not the other way around. Ignoring Congress, which the Carter administration did a lot, was not a move designed to make things better. His determination and resolution in decision-making turned into a rigid inflexibility, which is sometimes the worst thing a politician can do when they need to win votes. Interests rates when he ran for reelection were bouncing around 20%; inflation, 12%. He also had a tendency to focus on details rather than on setting policy priorities. He failed to offer the nation a vision for the future. In short, the American people had good reason not to give him a second term in office.
Power, though, was more than a list of achievements for Carter. Reflecting a realist view of human nature, Carter believed that those who had political power had the responsibility to use their resources to establish a system of justice that benefited all. Carter, reflecting his education at the U.S. Naval Academy, believed in leadership by example. In the White House, he showed the people that a fairly honest man could be a politician and president. We could do far worse.
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is a professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College and the author of “Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott and the Cold War.” The views stated here are his and his alone and do not reflect the policy of the U.S. Navy or Department of Defense.
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