Asked once if his 12-year-old daughter, Amy, ever brags about her father being president, Jimmy Carter said she didn’t. If anything, he added, “she probably apologizes.”
It was the summer of 1979, and the election in which Carter would lose in 44 of 50 states was more than a year away, but he already knew that he disappointed millions.
Now, as America eulogizes its 39th president, the verdict on Carter is dialectic, a mixture of economic failure, idealistic achievement, and reckless naiveté.
The failure happened in America, the achievement happened here, and the recklessness affected the entire world.
HAVING UNSEATED Richard Nixon’s tainted establishment and pale successor, the unassuming peanut grower and Georgia Tech graduate contrasted the Republican elite’s snobs, and fed hopes for happier times after the traumas of Watergate and Vietnam.
The happier times never came. The departing era’s challenges were quickly replaced by economic woes, underscored by 7% unemployment, 13% inflation, and a free-falling dollar that lost one-third of its value in German marks and nearly half of its value in Japanese yens.
With the benefit of hindsight, many would blame Carter for having failed to deliver the economic surgery that Ronald Reagan later performed. That claim is unfair.
The Carter-era’s inflation was a global disease sparked by the Arab-led oil embargo, and its economic solutions took time to conceive. Yes, Reagan understood the utility of deregulation and tax cuts but the basis of his treatment was the Federal Reserve’s shift to monetarism, the realization that inflation was driven by excessive money supply, which the central bank thus set out to drastically shrink.
The man who delivered this potion was not Reagan, but Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, and the man who appointed Volcker was not Reagan, but Carter. Unfortunately for Carter, that happened at his presidency’s twilight.
Volcker’s war took time to bear fruit, but it was launched in October 1979, more than a year before Reagan arrived.
Today everyone knows that the antidote to what Carter faced was low taxes, high interest rates, and deregulation, but Carter didn’t know that, and neither did Gerald Ford nor Richard Nixon, because most economists also didn’t yet know that. In this regard, then, Carter, was more unlucky than unwise. That cannot be said of his record on foreign affairs.
The greatest achievement
CARTTER’S GREATEST achievement, the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, was much more than a political feat. It was one of the biggest accomplishments ever struck by any American president.
Diplomatically, it broke the Arab taboo on recognizing Israel; militarily, it pacified Israel’s largest enemy; and geopolitically it dealt a major blow to the Soviet Union’s global sway. And Carter’s role in making it happen was pivotal.
True, Carter did not cook Anwar Sadat’s historic arrival in Israel; that was done by Sadat himself, in tandem with Menachem Begin and his foreign minister, Moshe Dayan.
However, the talks that the visit ignited in November 1977 soon stalled, and by the summer of 1978 seemed ready to collapse.
That’s when Carter, in a stroke of brilliance, invited both leaders, secretly and separately, for a summit at Camp David. The American president then cleared his schedule and spent 11 days with the Israeli and Egyptian delegations, personally mediating where necessary and helping reconcile differences, phrase contentious clauses, and clear snags until a peace agreement’s draft was finally produced and signed. For this, Israel will forever be indebted to Jimmy Carter.
Moreover, Carter’s involvement and dedication throughout that process epitomized all that was admirable and charming about the man whose sense of religious mission and moral humility were the inversion of the Nixon era’s atmosphere of political brutality, cynicism, and deceit.
Carter the peacemaker was the same Carter whose post-presidential decades were a celebration of charity and compassion joining, for instance, efforts to fight disease in Africa and helping build, with his own hands, homes for America’s poor.
However, the same innocence that on a personal level was harmless and constructive, proved politically harmful, and historically destructive.
CARTER’S MORAL innocence produced political naiveté, vividly reflected in his politically damning, and intellectually absurd book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (2006).
The diatribe that squarely blamed Israel for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict ignored apartheid’s real definition, which is a system of social discrimination based on race laws, and instead imposed this loaded term on a conflict that isn’t social, but national, and has no race laws.
This was besides refusing to acknowledge the Palestinian cause’s hijacking by the Islamists who transformed a national conflict into a religious war.
The post-presidential Carter’s denial of the Islamist scourge was a natural continuation, and fitting aftermath, of Carter-the-president’s handling of the Iranian Revolution, which uncorked Islamist violence worldwide, and has yet to abate.
Carter’s Iranian debacle came in two phases: first, the failure to prevent the Khomeini Revolution, and then the failure to confront it.
Carter's failures
The first failure stemmed directly from Carter’s naiveté. His demand that shah Reza Pahlavi adopt Western human-rights standards reflected an utter misunderstanding of history in general, and the Middle East in particular. Such was also Carter’s gullible reading of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a benign priest.
That was before Khomeini unseated the shah. Then came the kidnapping of 53 Americans by Khomeini’s henchmen, who held them hostage for more than a year. Carter’s response to that aggression was a protracted negotiation and a failed rescue operation.
It was a display of weakness for which mankind suffers to this day. It was also the chief cause of Carter’s electoral defeat. Margaret Thatcher went to war with Argentina for a much less brazen provocation.
That’s why she is remembered as the great leader that Jimmy Carter was not.
www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.