The Muse of Malaise

The Real Jimmy Carter
How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators, and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry
by Steven F. Hayward
Regnery, 272 pp., $27.95

DURING THE FUNERAL CEREMONIES for President Reagan, few people mentioned the fortieth president without paying tribute to the job he did in dispelling the national mood that he met at the start of his mission: the enervation and horror, the malaise and bad feeling, the gloom and despair. The person most representative of this mood was carefully not mentioned: James Earl Carter. What was also not mentioned was that Carter was key to the legend of Reagan, symbolizing the darkness in which Reagan shone brighter, the ashes from which he would rise.

Carter is surely one of the worst failures in the history of the American presidency, but he is a failure of a special sort: He did not overreach, as did Lyndon Johnson, or seek to deceive, as did Richard Nixon. Rather, like Herbert Hoover, he seems a well-meaning sort overcome by reality. But while Hoover was blindsided by the depression, Carter failed on a broad range of matters and faced few crises he didn't first bring on himself. Most presidents, even the good ones (sometimes especially even the good ones) leave behind a mixed record of big wins and big errors, but with Carter, the darkness seems everywhere: He is all Bay of Pigs and no Missile Crisis, all Iran-contra and no "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

PBS, whose American Experience series on the presidents has done some fascinating things with such novelistic lives as those of Reagan, Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, and both the Roosevelts, seemed (in a two-part series first aired two years ago and now reappearing) at a loss for how to handle this long dirge-like story, and, to its credit, the program did not flinch from portraying his actual presidency as the total disaster it was. In the end, however, it made a stab in the direction of uplift by portraying his post-presidency as a heart-warming success, the tale of a man who turned defeat in the cruel world of power into a lifetime of unselfish service.

This is the conceit ripped into shreds by Steven F. Hayward in his new book, The Real Jimmy Carter, which maintains that in his current carnation Carter is as wrongheaded and hapless as ever, that he has learned nothing at all from his-tory, and, in his new guise as a globe-trotting statesman, is reprising his role as a bringer of chaos, this time on the stage of the world.

Using a process of selective exclusion, PBS gives Carter credit for hammering away at Habitat for Humanity and raising money to fight diseases in Africa. Hayward concedes this, but then paints a less pleasant picture: Carter the ex-president has been more destructive than Carter the president, and, if possible, still more annoying, undermining later presidents with the ruthless ambition that marked his career.

Carter began, in the contentious post-civil-rights era in the deep South, by beating Carl Sanders in the 1970 race for governor of Georgia, by running as a segregationist, at least by implication: portraying himself as a "redneck" and cultivating the endorsement of Lester Maddox. Once elected, he used his inaugural speech to stun both the state and the nation by declaring that the time for segregation was over, and disowning, in effect, his prior campaign. It may have distressed his original voters (whom he no longer needed), but it was a huge hit with the national press, which may have been his target, and overnight it made him a red-hot political property. Time magazine, which had planned a general story on the new class of southern governors, suddenly came out instead with a story on Carter--with a cover that made him resemble John Kennedy.

Hayward credits Carter with transforming the way men now run for president (he was the man who gave us the Iowa caucus) and with perfecting the role of the outsider-insurgent which since then has dominated national politics. Before Carter was elected, presidential contenders had been creatures of Washington: Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson, Goldwater, McGovern, and Humphrey all had been senators, and Ford was a longtime House fixture. Three of Carter's successors--Reagan, Clinton, and the current Bush--were instead governors who ran against Washington (while, of course, longing to get there).

CARTER ALSO HAD THE SENSE to craft himself a profile as a religious, moral, culturally conservative moderate. He suggested that welfare should be connected to a work incentive, that power in some ways should be decentralized, and that people should take more responsibility for their own lives. "Reagan could hardly have put it differently," Hayward tells us, and sometimes he didn't. Both Carter and Reagan began their campaigns by quoting the same verse from the Bible.

If Carter had governed with the skill he campaigned, PBS might have had yet another inspiring story. Alas, he did not. Frequently, the ability to run a successful campaign presages some talents at governing, but Carter would prove a catastrophe. As party leader, he inspired both a challenge from the left by Ted Kennedy and a revolt from the right among Scoop Jackson Democrats, who in 1980 would find a soulmate in Reagan and a permanent home in the Republican party. "I never understood how Carter's political mind worked," his vice president remarked. "Everything [Carter] touches turns to ashes," the New Republic added.

As a domestic manager, his crowning achievement was to take the old liberal creed of big government and hitch it to the new liberal creed of "limits to growth" and create incoherence. "We have learned that 'more' is not necessarily 'better,' and that even our great nation has its recognized limits," he scolded, taking on two hundred years of the American temperament. Thus he tried to damp down the consumption machine that drives the economy, while balking at the tax cuts that might have spurred on investment. The result was stagflation, a condition economists had once thought impossible, of soaring inflation and no growth in jobs. Interest rates soared, and Carter's approval ratings sank into the thirties. For this he blamed the American people, for being too immature to realize the good times were over for good.

Carter the candidate owed at least some of his votes to his prior career as a career naval officer, where he was a disciple of Admiral Hyman Rickover, a notoriously hard-edged military martinet who made Donald Rumsfeld seem cuddly. Once in office, however, the ex-naval officer infused the office with liberal guilt. Gerald Ford may have lost the election in the one debate in which he insisted the Soviet Union no longer controlled Poland, but Carter behaved as if this were truly the case. In an address at Notre Dame on May 22, 1977, he denounced the "inordinate fear of communism" that had produced the containment theory that had kept the peace for three decades. In his first month in office he announced his intention to withdraw nuclear weapons and ground troops from South Korea, cut six billion dollars from the defense budget, cancel development of the Trident nuclear submarine, and defer construction of the neutron bomb.

All of these proposals were made unilaterally, with no effort to induce concessions by the other side. Cyrus Vance, Carter's first secretary of state, was described by Democrat Morris Abrams as the closest thing to a pure pacifist since William Jennings Bryan, and by Defense Secretary Harold Brown as a man who believed the use of force was always mistaken. Paul Warnke, Carter's chief arms-control negotiator, held views described by George Will as "engagingly childlike"--believing that if we disarmed, the Soviet Union would follow us. Early on, the centrist Committee for a Democratic Majority sent Carter a list of moderates, Jeane Kirkpatrick among them, for consideration for appointment for foreign policy posts. Of fifty-three names, just one was appointed, to a minor trade post.

EVEN CARTER'S MUCH VAUNTED human-rights effort, which gave some people hope he would use it as a moral weapon against the Soviet Union, quickly lost much of its power and luster when it became evident that he intended to use it less against Communists than against the more marginal despots in the non-Communist orbit. Thus he embraced Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the 1979 arms-control summit and assured an assemblage of East Europeans that "the old ideological labels have lost their meaning," even as they remained under the Soviet boot. In Carter's State Department, the Sandinistas were thought to be moderates and the Ayatollah Khomeini a saintlike figure surrounded by "moderate, progressive individuals" with a notable "concern for human rights."

Carter's meddling in Central America led to a civil war that killed 40,000 people, left 100,000 homeless, and installed a Soviet-supported totalitarian government that for ten years was a source of unrest in the region. On November 4, 1979, a group of Khomeini's progressive moderates stormed the embassy in Tehran and held Americans hostage for the next fourteen months. The regime that replaced the disposed shah became a major backer of the fundamentalist terrorist movement. As a reward for his efforts to wind down the arms race, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan--astounding the president, who nonetheless told a group of moderate Democrats that current events would do nothing to alter his policies. Carter had done more in three years to weaken the country and destabilize the world than all the other presidents since the Cold War had started. It was Senator Moynihan who gave him his epitaph: "Unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies, he has adopted our enemies' view of the world."

Carter kept breaking haplessness records, at the rate of one every two or three months. In April 1980, an attempt to rescue the hostages ended when three of eight helicopters developed mechanical problems, one killing eight soldiers when it crashed. An Israeli officer delivered the verdict: "the planning and execution were too incompetent to believe." In June, Carter's failures in the Middle East and in economic and energy policies coalesced in a gasoline shortage that caused long lines and panic at the pumps. There was a two-day riot at a Pennsylvania gas station; over the July 4 weekend, 90 percent of the stations in the New York City area were closed.

CARTER FLEW OFF to an energy summit where he found no relief and came back to the classic Carterian moment: the flight to Camp David, followed by the purge of the cabinet and the world-famous speech on "malaise." Among the millions who were less than impressed was Ronald Reagan, then running against him. Vice President Mondale, who was so enraged he considered resigning, warned Carter: "You can't castigate the American people, or they will turn you off once and for all." And so they did. No one was surprised when Carter was attacked by a "killer rabbit" in Georgia, or when Reagan finished him off in November in a landslide so sweeping that the networks announced it only minutes after the first polls had closed.

Herbert Hoover accepted the verdict of history when he lost in 1932 to Franklin Roosevelt, keeping a profile so low he was all but invisible. Carter instead reacted as if he had retired by choice with the thanks of the nation. He did some good work for general charities, and he was useful at least twice in his international forays: in Panama in 1986 when he faced Noreiga, and unexpectedly in 2002 in Cuba when he went against type to tell Castro off. He also acquired a lengthy record of criticizing, weakening, and undercutting a series of American presidents.

He publicly attacked Reagan's morals and competence. In 1990 and 1991, as George Bush was assembling the Gulf War coalition, Carter wrote secretly to Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterand, Mikhail Gorbachev, and a dozen others, asking the U.N. Security Council not to back Bush. (Bush only found out what had happened when a stunned Brian Mulroney called Dick Cheney up to complain.) Bill Clinton soured on the ex-president after Carter's trip in 1994 to North Korea, in which he publicly embraced the dictator Kim Il Sung and negotiated a wholly worthless treaty banning production of nuclear weapons, which that country proceeded to break.

Carter of course made the same vehement objections to George W. Bush's war on terror as he had made to his father's war in the Gulf ten years earlier, going so far as to happily accept an award from the Nobel Prize committee that was given to him solely for the purpose of giving a black eye to America. "It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken," the Nobel committee chairman said helpfully, "a kick in the leg to all those that follow the same line as the U.S." Carter's "Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason," Lance Morrow wrote in Time. As Hayward notes, Carter's successors have done far more than he did for human rights and for the nation's security. Iran and Nicaragua, the twin targets of his attention as president, turned on his watch into hell holes. And we can safely say that had he been reelected, or had his way afterward, the Soviet Union might still be in existence, and the oil fields of Kuwait and possibly Saudi Arabia might be in the hands of Iraq.

Nonetheless, Carter is a historic figure, one of the hinges on which history swings. No man has done more than he to create and empower the modern Republican party, which, when he became president, seemed down for the count. If he had been the man he seemed when he was running for president--an integrationist but a social conservative, a small businessman and ex-naval officer, a Rickover protégé with a keen sense of power--he might have recreated the party of Truman and Kennedy. As it was, his incompetence and his blundering, coming after McGovern's extremism and the implosions of Humphrey and Johnson, was the last straw for a great many Democrats, who decided the chances they were willing to give to their party had more or less run their course. Under his goading, millions who had never believed they could vote for a Republican president crossed over to vote for an ex-movie actor.

Some would later cross back, but they were never anchored quite so securely as they had been, and they remained available to a plausible Republican candidate as they had not been before. The end of the Democrats as the national majority begins with Carter--as does the end of liberalism as the national creed. A lot has been written about the maturation of the conservative movement from Goldwater to the present day, but this of course is only one half of the story. It was not enough for the Republicans to become more poised and accessible. The Democrats had to collapse, freeing millions of voters to look at an alternative. No one symbolized this collapse more than did Jimmy Carter, victim of rabbits and America's muse of malaise.

The REAL misery index hit record levels with the Peanut Man. It was the inflation rate, prime rate, and unemployment rate. It was between 40% and 45% towards the end of his term. I doubt the country could have withstood another 4 years of him.

Noeomie is an excellent writer. I'm always happy to see a thread with her articles! I lived through the miserable Carter era. I'd almost forgotten how AWFUL it was! This is an accurate, painful synopsis! BTTT

Carter is an embarassment to me as a son of the great state of Georgia. Why anyone still listens to him is a wonder. I still remember the old joke that said his mom, Rose (RIP), used to say that she wished she has stayed a virgin. I now also wish she had.

I was just a kid when he was in office, but I remember the daily count of days our people where held hostage. I also remember that the DAY Reagen (RIP) walked into the White House they suddenly where released. I don't know if it was '41 behinds the scenes or not, but I REALLY hope that something similar happens this time around. That our enemies and those who are pulled to their orbit will see a country that WILL NOT lay down. That this country will re-elect W and show the world we REALLY mean business! Just like we did when the country voted for Reagan (RIP).

It bothered me that former President Carter spoke at St. Olaf for the Nobel conference. He was smug, santimonious, and partisan. I never could stand that liberation theology nonsense.

This article explains some of the damage he has done, and continues to do. I had not heard the Mulroney or Mondale stories before.

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