Loving, Hating, and Understanding Jimmy Carter
A Review of His Very Best by Jonathan Alter
As President Carter’s former intern, I am embarrassed to admit that I knew so little of the Jimmy Carter story. Even all those tours of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Museum did not really help that much in mastering all the splendidly consequential details in this man’s life. To be sure, part of the reason for my blind spot is that I had been too eager to interpret Carter himself and his past statements at face value without accounting for the fact that Carter is prone to boasting about his accomplishments. In the biography, His Very Best, Alter is correct to question some of these boasts, including glorifying his years as a “teenage slumlord” and the white lie that he was a nuclear physicist—synonymous with genius—when running for political office. This tendency to embellish his achievements was matched only by stubborn micromanagement of staff. They often felt betrayed by the promise he expressed on the campaign trail when bogged down in a series of mundane policy details without sustained reflection on what was the point of that policy program, as outgoing lead speechwriter, James Fallows, documented for history in a widely discussed Atlantic column, The Passionless Presidency. In spite of being granted significant public approval looking for a leader to lift them out of the “malaise” of Watergate and Vietnam and start afresh, this uncharacteristic lack of vision and personal limitations1 derailed the President’s domestic agenda.
But when the careful historian examines the most puzzling aspect of President Carter’s approach, an underlying principle emerges. President Carter, an outsider from Georgia, did not understand Washington politics or even the inefficiencies involved in the ways political systems process information, but he intuitively understood that America in the 1970’s faced a series of interlocking crises—environmental degradation, energy dependence, gender inequality, inflation, and America losing its moral standing the world as a beacon for peace and human rights. He did not have the good fortune to come around in one of those momentous eras where everything appears to change at once without much effort. Instead, he reluctantly, and sometimes brilliantly (as his encounters with Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens over Alaskan refuge lands and former linguistics professor, Senator S.I. Hayakawa, over the passage of the Panama canal treaty underscore), engaged in the Sisyphean undertaking of manipulating the American political system for marginal, but no less consequential, ends. After all, if you are a descendant of Cambodian, Laotian, or Vietnamese refugees, or have taken advantage of low-cost airline travel, or enjoyed the dizzying selection of IPA’s from Portland to Atlanta, it makes little sense to call Carter administration initiatives “marginal”. Whether in the grocery aisle or on Wall St., the world that we currently inhabit is, to a large extent, the work of the Carter administration’s making. Alter is correct to emphasize that some histories do not appreciate the extent to which this is true when they mistakenly stamp Reagan’s name on initiatives that started in the Carter administration.
Yet Carter’s meticulous, painstaking attention to the issues of the day did not engender a big bang change in social attitudes so as to make America more aware of the moral challenges and tragedies it would soon confront in the decades to follow. In fact, Carter’s limited ability to make a sustained connection with the American people, in spite of his best attempts with the Mr. Rogers persona and fireside chats, may have had the opposite effect, ushering in a dark turn of Reagan neoliberalism which is still being elevated to new heights. The Reagan rebellion was in part a reaction to a presidency whose approval reached the nadir of modern presidential polling, and reflected a dogged commitment to principle over politics that had not been seen since Truman and perhaps Lincoln. Like these other presidents whom Carter idoled, he bottomed out due to neither accident nor incompetence but willfully.
Much to Rosalyn’s consternation, Carter rarely listened to political advice2, instead pursuing the course that Carter had the foresight to know would be in the long-term best interests of the nation. Rosalyn would later appreciate in a 2015 address that Carter’s political antipathy and uncanny insight were a packaged deal, “A leader can lead people where they want to go…A great leader leads people where they ought to go.” A Newsweek profile of Jimmy Carter in his Presidential campaign identified the practical effect of consistently assigning moral leadership above all political considerations, “After 15 minutes, you love Jimmy Carter. After six months, you hate him. But after 10 years, you understand him.”
As it turns out, the Newsweek columnist was a bit optimistic. Jimmy Carter is still not well understood. But that does not reflect poorly on the American people. The arc of Carter’s life from his time at Annapolis and in the Navy to his first failed bid for Governor to President to unofficial Secretary of State to Sunday school teacher can be interpreted as a long meandering journey memorialized in the poem Invictus he memorized at Annapolis to become “master of my fate, captain of my soul”. Carter readily admits that only in the final Sunday school teacher phase did he master the intricacies of that fate, tied up to his advocacy across the globe, and the complexity of his soul. In other words, Jimmy Carter could only reach these insights about himself later in life with the benefit of distance. We may only be able to reach similar insights about our common fate with the requisite distance, and Carter’s trailblazing professional example and intellectual influences are key to dissecting the nature of that fate.
I make this claim with some doubt as I cannot be sure as to whether Americans possess either the time or forbearance for others to cultivate that distance. The first issue of time is related to scale of the human quandary in the Age of the Anthropocene. Carter’s White House was the first official source to recognize human activity as the source of this problem, and it is possible that the current tendency toward perfect tragedy may have been greatly alleviated if only humanity had been further guided by Carter’s moral leadership. But we did not go along that course because President Carter’s moral leadership in other areas—namely, the efforts to ratify the Panama Canal treaty, dubbed a “handover” by conservative adversaries—incited the Right to devalue forbearance. Their message seemed to be that moral leadership constituted such a threat to the conservative meta-view of the world as inherently dangerous and therefore only amenable to force that it must be opposed politically as the “moral equivalent of war”. President Carter would presciently pioneer that phrase in a speech on energy, stating simply that curbing energy consumption and development of renewables would be like war, “except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy”.
Consistent with the pattern of rhetorical and tactical emulation identified by Corey Robin’s history of the right, the President’s conservative adversaries in the Senate and their popular supporters were especially animated by the President’s international diplomacy to the point that they opposed it as if it were an act of war. Jesse Helms fabricated a scare story involving the brother of a Panamanian general as a cocaine trafficker in a last-ditch effort to block the treaties. Helms, along with the other Senator President Carter identified as a right-wing “nut” in his diary, Strom Thurmond, refused Carter’s request to refrain from commenting on the treaties as the details were being negotiated so as to not derail the process in ways that embarrassed the U.S. Their refusal would foreshadow the GOP’s complete abandonment of even the pretense of forbearance. The general temptation to activate partisan identities wholly without or prior to the attempt of rational back-and-forth on the merits of an issue between parties, would accelerate as the media became balkanized along partisan lines, then information itself became democratized with the advent of social media. All of the echoes from this period rhyme quite loudly. During the Iranian hostage negotiations, Reagan attempted to spread the rumor that Carter was paying off the Iranians in exchange for American hostages. Much as Republicans would do 35 years later in the Iranian nuclear negotiations, Reagan conflated unfreezing Iranian assets with payoffs. And to the extent that Reagan collaborated with Chase Manhattan bankers with assets tied to the Shah, the politicization of the issue may have had precisely the opposite effect of prolonging the duration in which Americans were held hostage.
The fact that Carter’s moral leadership engendered such a violent reaction from the segregationist right is a clue to the power hidden within the advice given to a young Jimmy Carter by his high school principal, Ms. Coleman, “We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.” Ironically, the commitment to unchanging principles is what makes Carter more malleable to challenges because there is no preoccupation with a unidirectional tendency toward perfection. Like some intellectually-minded future presidents, Carter’s philosophy is primarily concerned with the art of living together, as indicated by his signature foreign policy accomplishments normalizing relations with mainland China, the Panama canal, and Camp David Accords, as well as his furious activity waging peace, fighting disease and building hope with The Carter Center during his post-presidency. This was all inspired by the “unchanging principles” that Ms. Coleman encouraged Carter to ponder for the rest of his life.
Carter settled on an elegant reconciliation between the way changing times often undermine the commitment to unchanging principles by making living together in modern society with all its complexities and divisions devilishly difficult. He simply refused to acknowledge a basic concept that all modern cultures take as self-evident—the inexorable tendency toward perfection. The theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, was another formative influence, “Soft utopianism (i.e. liberalism) is the creed of those who claim to embody perfection, but expect perfection to emerge out of the ongoing process of history…but…they do not understand that history makes the problems of man’s togetherness more, rather than less, complex.” Niebuhr is remarkably prescient, writing that Last Men demagogues will thrive under this intellectual project if it is not corrected with self-doubt which paradoxically comes from faith, “The logic of the decay of modern culture from universalistic humanism to nationalistic anarchy may be expressed as follows: Men seek a universal standard for human good…To their sorrow, some of their fellow men refuse to accept that standard. Since they know the standard to be universal the recalcitrance of their fellows is a proof, in their minds, of some defect in the humanity of the non-conformists. Thus, a rationalist age creates a new fanaticism.” Carter was familiar with this fanaticism, and his ideological restraint embracing his faith and “inner engineer” while in office, commonly seen as weaknesses, can viewed as a deft political strategy of denying these emerging elements from feeding off the hubris of liberal “soft Utopian” dreams of perfection and escape.
If Niebuhr were alive today, he may very well say that the populist uprising in American politics is a reaction to the dominant interpretation of Obamaism as out-sized faith in progress. Humanity must embrace with humility that progress is not an escape, “Human existence is precarious and will remain so to the end of history. Human achievement contains a tragic element of frustration…There is an ultimate answer to these tragic elements of the human existence but that answer can be known only to those who have stopped looking for some easy escape from tragedy.” We can live together on this planet for the foreseeable future, but if humanity is expected to adjust to times that are not merely changing but disorienting, we must dispel the notion the art of living together can only be perfected when human societies have progressed to the point that ethically tolerable societies are made possible. No, Carter’s example tells us that ethically tolerable societies where all individuals and groups are living in peace must be the first principle. It cannot be negotiated in the event that material scarcity or other limits to the endurance of the human spirit become more severe. A creed that allows for negotiation of first principles will set us up for catastrophic moral failures in the 21st century.
I cannot be sure how Carter would mount the challenge to the “nuts” who oppose the universal values that set us on an almost certain path to self-destruction, but I like to think he would be guided by the simple boast he and Vice President Mondale regularly repeated of their administration: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace. And we championed human rights.” So long as future leaders promote each one of these virtues with a degree of humility so as to not smack of condescending universalism, these ought to be the first principles on which American democracy is constituted. Americans also ought to promote a discussion of how to better realize these first principles, while recognizing that retreat, which occurs merely from the absence of engagement, would result in nationalized anarchy that offers political advantage for some but at the expense of collective destruction for all. President Carter charted this path forward to rediscover the civic virtues of America, but that rediscovery may be made impossible unless the respect for forbearance is regained so as to not construe politics as war by other means. I also eagerly hope that future American presidents will confidently project the moral authority contained in Carter’s basic assertion that “not a drop of blood of a single of a single citizen was shed by the sword of war” and extend that authority to encompass the slow violence likely in the 21st century as people attempt to avert the ominous tendency toward perfect tragedy.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes might contrast Carter’s “second-class temperament” with the more successful FDR.
With the notable exception of his successful 1970 dog whistle campaign for governor of Georgia.