JIMMY CARTER: Post-War American Presidents (7)

[This series describes the 12 Post-War American Presidents from a British perspective]

Jimmy Carter was one of the few recent US Presidents whose term is reckoned an overall failure. A dark horse from the start, he failed to enthuse his nation and his programmes were ill-considered. His Deep South background was little understood or admired by the outside world. He had some foreign affairs successes but his downfall after one term was not much regretted. His post-Presidential career as a reconciler has been more productive and, now 90, he has morphed into some kind of venerable national treasure, despite being a perfect nuisance to mainstream policy makers. A very American figure, Carter represents a folksy, religious, if well-informed type - unfamiliar certainly and more-or-less unknown to Europeans. 

Jimmy Carter as President

James Earl (Jimmy) Carter was born in 1924 in rural Plains, Georgia where his father Earl ran the general store and later farmed peanuts. His mother was a nurse ministering to both blacks and whites in the segregated society of the time. The Carters were poor and young Jimmy had childhood friends among the local black families. His father subscribed to the established beliefs of the white South; Jimmy learnt much later that to win an election in Georgia, at least up to the mid-1960s, required no overt challenge to segregationist sentiment and this dilemma made him look hypocritical in the eyes of Eastern liberals.

Jimmy was studious and his great ambition was to get to Annapolis Naval College, which he did in 1943 graduating in 1946, when he also married Rosalynn Smith. His slight build and introspective nature made him an untypical cadet in the macho naval ambiance.

Carter the naval cadet

He served on various capital ships in the Pacific and on diesel submarines. He joined the elite engineering group developing US nuclear submarines under (later Admiral) Hyman Rickover, a famously demanding taskmaster. Future advancement and a glittering naval career beckoned. However, a secondment to Canada to help make safe a damaged nuclear reactor in 1952 made him very conscious of the danger of nuclear arms and when his father died in 1953, Carter decided to leave the Navy and run the family peanut business, much to his wife’s Rosalynn’s dismay who thought the return to Plains a highly regressive step.

Indeed the peanut farm almost failed after a poor harvest and the Carters initially lived in rented public housing for a period. Gradually Carter’s fortunes recovered and he became a community leader, a school governor and a local Baptist Church spokesman. He entered politics formally by becoming a busy 2-term state senator in Georgia in 1960 on an integrationist platform.  He ran for the Georgia governorship in 1966 but lost: trying again on a Populist ticket facing in several directions, he won and was sworn in as Governor in 1971. He not only soft-pedalled his integrationist beliefs but smeared his opponents for being too friendly towards blacks!  Yet he did a U-turn on taking office and advanced the black cause by rapidly integrating schools and promoting blacks to state jobs, while placating whites by opposing school bussing and endorsing the state death penalty. He took credit for stream-lining the state bureaucracy and attracting investment.

Carter was still an obscure, backwoods figure and his attempt to get the Democratic Vice-presidential nomination as a conservative counter-balance to McGovern failed in 1972. He resolved to make a bid for the Democratic nomination in 1976. The Republicans were at a low ebb after Nixon’s disastrous imbroglio over Watergate and limited Jerry Ford was not popular after pardoning Nixon. Moreover the US economy was in recession.

Carter had a number of rivals, notably Governor Jerry Brown of California, but he became the front-runner and built up momentum by winning many primaries. He was duly nominated with Walter Mondale as his Vice-President. Carter was seen as a breath of fresh air after a period of dirty politics in Washington; he even campaigned on the nebulous concepts of Faith and Love – the US wanted something completely new. As a foretaste of Carter’s oddity he even admitted in an interview with Playboy six weeks before the election that "I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times."  In Europe such an admission would be seen as embarrassing and inappropriate and would lose votes but Carter’s religiosity played well with the US electorate and in the event he narrowly beat Ford with less states but more Electoral College votes and 51% of the popular vote.

Jimmy and Rosalynn walk from the 1977 Inauguration

In a gesture of openness and informality Carter took the traditional inaugural limousine ride to the Capitol with the retiring President but after taking the Oath walked with Rosalynn through crowds to the White House. Jimmy Carter however needed more than moral uplift to tackle the substantive problems facing his Administration, notably inflation and recession. 

Carter had to contend with sharp OPEC oil price rises, inflationary to the US, and he responded by establishing a federal Energy Department, not before time. The need to reduce consumption, plan energy investment and stockpile reserves was recognised. The economy stuttered and suffered from “stagflation” which was difficult to dislodge while the US’s trading partners were in poor shape. Deregulation was introduced in the airline and brewing industries to foster competition. Carter had promised to overhaul the tax system but tinkered to no great effect, merely reducing the highest rates. He tried to tackle what he called “waste”, pork-barrel state infrastructure schemes which he thought squandered government money, but this put him on collision course with Congress for whose members such political favours were the stuff of politics. Relations between the White House and Congress were never smooth: Carter’s Savanarola clashing with the expansive Renaissance Princes on Capitol Hill. 

Carter was not a back-slapping politician and his approach was unemotional and principled. He lacked the easy confidence of a Reagan and would get bogged down in detail. He was hesitant and indecisive, withdrawing many initiatives on encountering opposition. His often rather anguished TV addresses to the nation did little to raise morale.

He had mixed success in foreign affairs. He idealistically surrendered US sovereignty over the Panama Canal to the notoriously corrupt government of Panama. He pursued SALT II talks with the USSR to reduce nuclear arsenals. His most memorable achievement was his mediation between charismatic Sadat of Egypt and intransigent Begin of Israel to sign the Camp David Accords of 1978; the part dealing with Palestine was rejected by the rest of the Arab world and became a dead letter but the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai and the normalisation of diplomatic relations endured.

Sadat, Carter and Begin after Camp David

Then events moved against Carter. In 1979 a pro-Soviet government took over in Afghanistan causing widespread unrest. Soviet troops were deployed in Afghanistan and the US supported the insurrection of the Fundamentalist Mujahidin with training, arms and money. The SALT talks were suspended and the unpopular decision was taken that sports-mad US would boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Worse, in 1979, the Shah of Iran, a long-term ally of the US, was overthrown by the fanatical Shia Ayatollah Khomeini and an anti-US frenzy was stoked up. “Students” invaded the US embassy in September 1979 and took 52 staff hostage mistreating and humiliating them. All diplomatic efforts to free them were fruitless and in April 1980 a military rescue mission also failed, leaving a hapless Carter with few options. He took the heavy political blame and Iran only released the hostages, 444 days after seizure, on the day of Reagan’s inauguration.

Carter faced a rather weak challenge from Ted Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic nomination and ran against Ronald Reagan but was comprehensively beaten. He was the first single-term elected President since Herbert Hoover lost to FDR in 1932.

Normally ex-Presidents fade away in decent obscurity but Carter became hyper-active and probably better-known than in his days in office. He set up the Carter Centre in 1982, led by him in Atlanta, dedicated to conflict resolution, human rights, disease eradication and election monitoring. As a born-again evangelical Baptist, he believed he had a mission by his good works to reform the world and he had an overweening confidence in the correctness of his own solutions. 

Carter with his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize

He was certainly busy; he persuaded Kim Il Sung of North Korea in 1994 to cut back on nuclear research, although that agreement collapsed in 2002; he mediated in conflict-torn Central Africa: he gave a clean bill of health to an election for Chavez in Venezuela; Cuba was visited and praised: he was highly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and he suggested talks with Hamas. He opposed US intervention in Iraq, trying to discourage allies from joining the US Coalition. As an independent person he was entitled to his opinions but his interventions annoyed the more hard-boiled members of the State Department and the CIA.

He became the darling of the tender-hearted and the utopian and assumed the mantle of past gurus like Bertrand Russell. Inevitably he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He joined Mandela in forming The Elders, a grey-bearded group of old politicos pronouncing on global conflicts. No doubt Carter means well and his work on health and affordable housing is admirable; the eradication of Guinea Worm disease is to his credit. Yet, in my view, he is puffed up by his own importance and trades blatantly on the prestige of his old office. His moral rectitude made him too rigid a President and has made him too credulous as a self-appointed Angel of Peace.

SMD

11.10.14

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014