Get Carter – a decent man and a decent president
It’s coming rather late in the day, but there is growing recognition that Jimmy Carter played a poor hand about as well as could have been hoped
By the time you read this, James Earl Carter Jr may well have gone to his eternal reward. If he hasn’t, it’s likely the 98-year-old, who is currently receiving hospice care, won’t be around for much longer.
As would be expected, this has prompted a rash of articles – pre-obituaries, I guess you’d call them – reviewing Carter’s one-term stint as US President. I certainly haven’t read all the pre-obituaries. However, I’ve been pleased to note some of the ones I’ve seen have taken a revisionist angle, arguing that Carter was a better president than most people realise and deserves credit for many achievements typically attributed to his much more feted successor Ronald Reagan.
Myth and reality
To the extent anyone under 60 thinks of Jimmy Carter nowadays, they probably have a vague conception of him as the political equivalent of The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders – a well-meaning but vaguely ridiculous born-again Christian.
As it was in many first-world nations, the latter half of the 1970s was a shit show in the US. Inevitably, Carter gets blamed for this. To this day, the conventional wisdom is that Carter somehow wasn’t really up to the job of being president. Just like a lot of other 1970s political leaders – Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser in Australia, for example – Carter is seen to have lacked one or more of the attributes – perspicacity, courage, ruthlessness, reforming zeal, the common touch, luck – required to be an effective political leader.
Carter isn’t beyond criticism, but I’d argue that he’s a much more substantial and admirable figure than commonly believed. And I suspect history will judge him somewhat more kindly than the American public has in recent decades.
Myth #1 – Carter was a gormless peanut farmer
Carter was born in 1924, two years before Queen Elizabeth. He was the son of a businessman and got involved in several entrepreneurial ventures in his teenage years before enrolling to study engineering, ultimately graduating 60th out of his class of 821 at the US Naval Academy.
Despite not being a natural fit with what we’d today term the ‘bro culture’ of the pre-woke US navy, Carter rose up the ranks quickly. He could have ended up an admiral if he hadn’t felt duty bound to cut his military career short to take over the family business when his father died. The family business was a mess and Carter ultimately inherited relatively little of worth. But, showing his characteristic single-mindedness, he worked and studied extremely hard to turn himself into a successful agribusiness owner.
In the early 1960s, when it took real balls for a white Southern businessman to champion tolerance and racial integration, Carter was a strong supporter of the Civil Rights movement. He sometimes had to shamefully pander to his Dixiecrat colleagues and Southern voters keen on maintaining the “ethnic purity of their neighbourhoods”. But like LBJ, Carter showed remarkable bravery in advocating for the interests of African-Americans during an era when politicians paid a heavy electoral price for doing so.
It was his involvement in the burgeoning civil rights struggle that saw Carter get involved in mainstream politics. First as a state senator, then as a governor and finally as president (from 1976-1981.)
Myth #2 – Carter didn’t manage the economy well
Carter’s wife and advisers, as well as Democrats more broadly, were frequently frustrated by Carter’s insistence on doing what he believed to be right, rather than what was popular. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his approach to managing the economy.
Regular readers will know I’m no fan of neoliberalism. But by the time Carter took over the Keynesian economic settings that had produced such widespread prosperity in the three decades after WWII had stopped working. Much to the confusion of economists, the US economy was suffering from both high inflation and high unemployment – or stagflation, as it came to be known.
There’s a common misapprehension that Ronald Reagan appointed the pitiless inflation-fighter Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve then backed him in as he pushed interest rates sky high, triggering a deep recession.
This is, at best, half true.
It was Carter who appointed Volcker chairman of the Fed and then supported him as he doubled interest rates to almost 20 per cent, leading to a severe economic downturn that started in early 1980, the year Carter was campaigning for re-election. As electoral defeats and victories usually are, Carter’s defeat later that year was overdetermined. But his crazy-brave decision to allow Volcker to unrelentingly smash the hip-pocket nerve of voters for the longer-term good of the US economy undoubtedly played a crucial role. (To give Reagan his due, he did keep Volcker on and allowed him to keep wringing the inflation out of the US economy. Though he did put pressure on Volcker not to raise interest rates, which at that point were much lower than 20 per cent, when he was campaigning for re-election in 1984.)
Also, as Noah Smith argues in this excellent article, it was actually Carter who was the ‘Great Deregulator’. It was Carter who deregulated the oil, trucking, railroads, airline and beer industries in the US, resulting – most of the time, at least – in lower prices and much more consumer choice. We should all be saying a silent prayer of thanks to Carter every time we get on a budget airline and fly to another country for $300, rather than the $3000 or $30,000 it would have cost back in the pre-deregulation, cosy oligopoly days when regular air travel was indulgence only the upper-middle class could partake of.
In stark contrast, Reagan only deregulated the buses and part of the finance industry (i.e. savings and loans associations, a kind of American building society). Younger readers will no doubt be shocked to learn that deregulating (part of) the finance industry didn’t result in greater competition, lower prices and better customer service but rather a handful of spivs making out like bandits while many everyday Americans got comprehensively screwed over.
Myth #3 – Carter didn’t achieve much in the foreign policy arena
The thing most Americans, and probably most non-Americans, think of when the Carter Administration is mentioned is the Iran hostage crisis. To make a long and convoluted story short, 52 Americans were taken hostage in late 1979 by what we’d now call Islamofascists in Iran. Carter failed to get them released and then signed off on an ill-fated rescue mission.
Then – allegedly – president-elect Reagan brokered a hostages-for-weapons deal that saw the American hostages released on the day he was inaugurated. The message was clear and is widely believed to this day – Carter was an ineffectual idealist while Reagan was a canny pragmatist who got things done. And with Reagan in charge, the Americans would no longer have to endure being humiliated on the world stage by a bunch of jumped-up camel-jockey terrorists.
Even if Carter did fumble the Iran hostage crisis, the notion he was some guileless buffoon while Reagan was a Bismarckian headkicker doesn’t bear close scrutiny. It was Carter who had the impressive military background, not Reagan. The Gipper got a BA with a major in sociology, then worked in showbiz, becoming a minor Hollywood star in the early 1940s when many of his colleagues were off fighting the Japanese and Germans. (To be fair, Reagan did enlist in the Army Reserve in 1937 and made over 400 training films for the armed services during WWII.)
Smith argues, and I’m inclined to agree, that Carter deserves plenty of credit for the US winning the Cold War. Once again, there’s a common but mistaken belief that Reagan bankrupted the USSR by ramping up defence spending and forcing the Soviets into an arms race they couldn’t win.
As a percentage of GDP, Reagan didn’t much increase US defence spending. In any event, by the time he assumed office, the Russians had pretty much given up trying to compete on military expenditures. In regards to the fall of the USSR, Smith quotes former Soviet official and Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, who argues the USSR was a sclerotic petrostate by the 1980s and what finished it off was the collapse in oil prices that started in 1985.
The humiliation of Soviet forces in Afghanistan certainly didn’t do anything to further the continued existence of the USSR. Russian tanks rolled into Kabul in mid-1979 and it was Carter who decided to arm the anti-Soviet Mujahideen. As Smith puts it, “In terms of ending the Cold War, Reagan mainly held a course that Carter had initiated — arm the USSR’s opponents, boost oil production, and issue moral condemnations of the USSR while engaging in arms limitation talks with it at the same time.”
The quiet dignity of stoically eating the shit sandwich Fate has handed you
As I experienced firsthand while working as a magazine journalist at a time when the print media was imploding, sometimes, no matter what you do, you’re screwed. There are a variety of ways you can react to that. I’ve always believed there was something noble about just continuing to show up every day, doing the best you can do in challenging circumstances, and keeping your own counsel as those sitting comfortably on the sidelines hold forth on how much better a job they could do if they were in your position.
Carter was before my time – I was only three when he was elected – and I have little in common with him. But I’ve always found his stolid sense of duty admirable. Like his contemporary, Queen Elizabeth, Carter was remarkably selfless. Unlike some prominent centre-left leaders I could name (OK then, I’ll name them – Hawke, Clinton, Blair), he didn’t set about massively enriching himself after he left office, instead choosing to start the Carter Center. It has been “Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. [And] Building Hope”, with no little success, since 1982.
As far as I’m aware, Carter has largely maintained a dignified silence for four decades, resisting the temptation to criticise his successors or justify his record. As Kai Bird writes in this (paywalled) New York Times article, titled ‘Jimmy Carter Presidency Was Not What You Think’, “Jimmy Carter was probably the most intelligent, hard-working and decent man to have occupied the Oval Office in the 20th century.”
I fear we will not see his like again.
Enlightening article.