Jimmy Carter, R.I.P.

National Review Online

Sunday, December 29, 2024

 

Jimmy Carter’s best line was the opener of his speech accepting the nomination of the 1976 Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden. He had been running the first of the modern all-time campaigns, taking himself as an obscure southern governor to every hamlet and crossroads in early caucus and primary states, always beginning his pitches with the same simple introduction. At the convention, after his intraparty triumph and with the prospect of a blue election year ahead of him, he repeated it: “I’m Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president.”

 

He won the nomination, and the election, in great part because of who he was not. He was not a lefty freak à la George McGovern or a race-monger like George Wallace. He did not belong to the party of Richard Nixon. He was a mildly liberalish white southerner who would exorcise memories of Vietnam and Watergate simply by being himself.

 

His tenure turned out to be far more fraught than that. With an effort, one can recall a number of good things he did. He put missiles in Europe to defy Soviet buildups and bolster the NATO alliance. He brokered peace between Israel and Egypt. He installed Paul Volcker, the man who finally broke inflation, as chairman of the Fed. He approved an audacious plan for rescuing American diplomats held hostage in Tehran.

 

It needs an effort to recall these because so much else went wrong. The Soviet Union and its clients had been on a roll worldwide throughout the Seventies, from Africa to Indochina; during his administration, Afghanistan would fall too. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat paid for his peace with his life. Inflation, pre-Volcker, raged simultaneously with recession, something liberal economists said could not happen. The shah of Iran fell to a despotic anti-American zealot, and the helicopters sent to rescue our kidnapped diplomats crashed in the Iranian desert.

 

Carter had a personality that leaned into his travails. He was nagging, almost canting — his Southern Baptist faith could sour him as much as it sustained him — yet at the same time he seemed feeble. A submarine commander, an agribusinessman, and an ex-governor, he could not lead. Ronald Reagan, the man who unseated him after one term, had actor’s chops but was also a man with plans. Supply-side economics seemed new, bold, and easy to explain; his view of the Cold War was even simpler: As he outlined it to adviser Richard Allen, “We win, they lose.”

 

Carter’s post-presidency, widely praised, was overpraised. He raised money and talent to eradicate scourges such as the Guinea worm. But he also fancied himself an emeritus freelance diplomat, meddling in Haitian and Korean affairs, and becoming, via his ongoing interest in the Middle East, an anti-Israel shill. There was something performative about his well-photographed house-building with Habitat for Humanity: Your left hand should not know what your right hand is hammering.

 

He published poetry. John Quincy Adams’s imitation of Horace’s Ode 1.22 is not worried.

 

Yet we must take the sweet with the bitter. He was honest, he was earnest. He was married to Rosalynn Carter, née Smith, a fellow product of Plains, Ga., from 1946 until her death in 2023. He followed what he believed to be the right path according to his lights. Dead at 100, the longest-lived man to have held the presidency. R.I.P.