By Philip Klein
Sunday, December 29, 2024
A popular narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy
Carter is that as president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him
politically but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The
reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former president.
Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home
and embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest
position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in
landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling
in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in
a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of
Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him
to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.
A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and
national name recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended
up in the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest, moderate,
and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an antidote to the
corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from the vulnerabilities of
the sitting president, Gerald Ford.
Once in office as an unlikely president, Carter spent his
one and only term showing the American people, and the rest of the world, that
he was not up to the job.
When he took the presidential oath in January 1977, the
unemployment rate was a high 7.5 percent; when he left office in January 1981,
it was just as high. Meanwhile, inflation, which was already elevated at 5.7 percent in
1976, the year he was elected, went up in each of his years in office — and
reached a staggering 13.5 percent in 1980, the year he was booted out. The only
year in the post–World War II period in which inflation was higher was 1947,
when the economy was booming and unemployment was minuscule. Put another way,
to maintain the buying power that $100 had on the month Carter was sworn into
office, you’d need $150 by the time he left the White House just four years later.
Under Carter, gas prices doubled, and the supply became so scarce that Americans had
to endure long lines at stations to fill up their tanks.
On the international stage, Carter showed weakness, and
America’s enemies took notice. Rather than recognize the true nature of the
Soviet threat, he preached the defeatist ideology of “peaceful coexistence,”
and the USSR steamrolled into Afghanistan. Also under his watch, radical
Islamic revolutionaries took over Iran, holding Americans hostage for the last
444 days of his presidency.
It is telling that the defining speech of his presidency
was known as the “malaise speech,” in which he spoke not as a leader but as an
essayist writing on the “crisis of confidence” in America. He observed: “For the first time in the history of our country
a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than
the past five years.” As he built a legacy of scarcity, he criticized Americans
for wanting plenty, lamenting that “too many of us now tend to worship
self-indulgence and consumption.”
It should be no surprise that Ronald Reagan’s message of
strength and optimism turned 1980 into a complete rout. Carter not only lost
489 electoral votes to 49, but he got trounced by ten points in the popular
vote — even though an independent candidate, John Anderson, drew 7 percent.
Carter, who performatively carried his own luggage as
president, tried to present himself as humble. But somebody actually humble
would have taken the hint by the magnitude of his defeat. The real Jimmy Carter
was stubborn and arrogant. He had plans for a second term, and he wanted to see
them through despite the overwhelming rejection by the American people. So
instead of stepping away, he spent the rest of his life simply pretending that
he was still president and pursuing foreign policy goals even when it meant
undermining the actual president.
The two most egregious examples of this came in his
efforts to stop the first Iraq War and his freelance nuclear diplomacy with
North Korea.
In his mostly sycophantic 1998 book on Carter’s
post–White House career, The Unfinished Presidency, Douglas Brinkley
gave a startling account of Carter’s behavior in the run-up to the 1990–91
Persian Gulf conflict.
Concerned by the looming threat of war after Saddam
Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Carter pulled out all the stops — and then some —
to try to thwart the president, George H. W. Bush. Carter’s efforts started off
within the realm of acceptable opposition for a former president. He wrote
op-eds, hosted conferences, gave speeches — all urging peace talks as an
alternative to repelling Saddam with the use of military force.
But when that failed, he took things to an extraordinary
level. Carter wrote a letter to the leaders of every country on the U.N.
Security Council, as well as a dozen other world leaders, Brinkley recounted,
making “a direct appeal to hold ‘good faith’ negotiations with Saddam Hussein
before entering upon a war. Carter implied that mature nations should not act
like lemmings, blindly following George Bush’s inflammatory ‘line in the sand
rhetoric.’”
As if this weren’t enough, on January 10, 1991 — just
five days before a deadline that had been set for Saddam to withdraw — Carter
wrote to key Arab leaders urging them to abandon their support for the U.S.,
undermining months of careful diplomacy by the Bush administration. “You may
have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the French,
Soviets and others fully supportive,” Carter advised them.
It is one thing for a former president to express
opposition to a policy of the sitting president, but by actively working to get
foreign leaders to withdraw support for the U.S. days before troops were to be
in the cross fire, Carter was taking actions that were closer to treason than
they were to legitimate peace activism.
Carter’s meddling was not limited to the first Iraq War
or to Republican administrations. In 1994, there was a standoff between the
U.S., its allies, and North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program.
The U.S. was floating the idea of sanctions at the United Nations. Over the
years, Carter had received multiple invitations to visit North Korea from Kim
Il-sung and was eager to fly over and defuse the situation with an ultimate
goal of convening a North–South peace summit and unifying the peninsula.
Begrudgingly, the Clinton administration agreed to let Carter meet with Kim as
long as Carter made clear that he was a private citizen and that he was merely
gathering information on the North Korean perspective, which he would then
report back to the Clinton administration.
Without telling the Clinton administration, however,
Carter flew to North Korea with a CNN film crew and proceeded to negotiate the
framework of an agreement. He then informed the Clinton team after the fact,
with little warning, that he was about to go on CNN to announce the deal. This
infuriated the Clinton administration, and according to Brinkley’s account, one
cabinet member called the former president a “treasonous prick.” To make
matters worse, Carter then accepted a dinner invitation from Kim, at which
point Carter claimed on camera that the U.S. had stopped pursuing sanctions at
the U.N., which was untrue. Nevertheless, once Carter went on television to
announce all this, Clinton felt completely boxed in, and he was forced to
accept the deal and abandon sanction efforts.
Over time, it became clear that Kim had just used Carter
to take the heat off, get economic relief, and buy time while still continuing
to enrich uranium in violation of the agreement, which it withdrew from in 2002
after being called out for cheating. Within a few years, North Korea had built
a nuclear arsenal. Carter’s effort at freelance diplomacy, in addition to
advancing a foreign policy at odds with the administration, squandered a
crucial window to stop North Korea from going nuclear.
When it came to unrealized ambitions, nothing frustrated
Carter more than the Middle East. He was convinced that, had he been reelected,
he would have been able to build on the peace agreement between Israel and
Egypt and resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians — even though
there were significant differences between the two conflicts. In 2003, he boasted to the New York Times, “Had I been elected
to a second term, with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation
I had in the region, we could have moved to a final solution.” It was quite a
choice of words.
During the pro-Israel Reagan administration, Carter saw
little opportunity to advance his agenda, but he perceived an opening when Bush
took over. In 1990, he befriended PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, and,
Brinkley writes, “Carter began coaching Arafat on how to not frighten
democracies by using inflammatory rhetoric: it was a strategy that would
eventually lead to the Oslo Agreements of September 1993.”
Throughout the 1990s, Arafat pursued a strategy of
talking peace to the world at large while working behind the scenes to continue
terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. He was infamous for appearing
moderate when speaking in English while fuming radically and inciting violence
in Arabic. Throughout this time, he was being mentored by Carter, who not only
advised him but even personally wrote a sample speech for him suggesting
language to use that would allow him to more effectively gain sympathy from
Western audiences. At one point, he went on a Saudi fundraising mission for the
PLO at Arafat’s behest. Of course, Arafat had no interest in peace, which
became crystal clear in 2000 when he rejected an offer of Palestinian statehood
and launched a campaign of terror known as the Second Intifada instead.
Carter’s friendship with Arafat was part of a pattern in
which he would chastise Israel in the most extreme terms while ignoring or
minimizing the actions of terrorists and dictators whose enemies happened to be
Israel. On a Middle East trip in 1990, he visited Syria to meet with Hafez
al-Assad and had nothing to say about the brutal dictator’s violations of human
rights, but then he went to Israel and blasted its human rights record as it
was trying to form a government. Carter met with and embraced Hamas and, in 2015, the year after thousands of
rockets were fired indiscriminately at Israel civilians, claimed that the group, which in its charter calls for the
extermination of Israel, was the party actually committed to peace and that
Israel was not.
In 2007, Carter published Palestine: Peace Not
Apartheid, which was not only one-sided in its attacks on Israel but was
filled with inaccuracies and distortions. At one point in the book, he invoked
the story of Jesus to liken Israeli authorities to the Pharisees. In the first
edition, he included a line in which he asserted that terrorist attacks
on Israeli civilians were justified until Israel submits to demands: “It is
imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian
groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of
terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for
Peace are accepted by Israel.” While he claimed this line was a mistake, he defended the rest of his work and dismissed
legitimate criticism as merely coming from Jews.
“Most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish
American organizations,” Carter said in an interview with Al Jazeera, in which
he also claimed that Palestinian rocket attacks on Israelis were
not acts of terrorism. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, he further advanced
old tropes of nefarious Jewish control. He complained that the pro-Israel lobby made it “almost
politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position
between Israel and Palestine” and lamented that “book reviews in the mainstream
media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations.”
This wasn’t true, and, further, it means that he described all Jewish writers
(such as Jeffrey Goldberg, who reviewed the book for the Washington Post) as
representing “Jewish organizations.”
In a speech
at George Washington University on the same book tour, he argued that the
obstacle to peace was “a minority of the more conservative [Israeli] leaders
who have intruded into Palestine and who are unfortunately supported by AIPAC
and most of the vocal American Jewish communities.”
At the event, one student asked about the fact that 14
members of the Carter Center’s advisory board had resigned over the book, and
Carter had a familiar response: “They all happen to be Jewish Americans; I
understand the tremendous pressures on them.”
One of the members to resign was a close associate, Ken
Stein, an Emory University professor who had spent decades at the center — as
its first permanent director, and then as the Middle East fellow, during which
time he traveled with Carter and took notes on their meetings with foreign
leaders. In a blistering review for the Middle East Quarterly,
Stein wrote, “While Carter says that he wrote the book to educate and provoke
debate, the narrative aims its attack toward Israel, Israeli politicians, and
Israel’s supporters. It contains egregious errors of both commission and
omission. To suit his desired ends, he manipulates information, redefines
facts, and exaggerates conclusions.”
Among the examples he gives is an account of a meeting
Carter had with Hafez al-Assad, in which Stein was the notetaker. Even though
Stein shared his notes from the meeting, Carter’s account of the same meeting
in the book was manipulated to make Assad seem more flexible than he actually
was.
Stein also included the revelation that “Carter’s
distrust of the U.S. Jewish community and other supporters of Israel runs
deep.” Stein recalled an interview he once conducted for his 1991 book in which
Carter bitterly told him:
[Vice president] Fritz Mondale was
much more deeply immersed in the Jewish organization leadership than I was.
That was an alien world to me. They [American Jews] didn’t support me during
the presidential campaign [that] had been predicated greatly upon Jewish money.
. . . Almost all of them were supportive of Scoop Jackson — Scoop Jackson was
their spokesman . . . their hero. So I was looked upon as an alien challenger
to their own candidate. You know, I don’t mean unanimously but . . .
overwhelmingly. So I didn’t feel obligated to them or to labor unions and so
forth. Fritz . . . was committed to Israel. . . . It was an act just like
breathing to him — it wasn’t like breathing to me. So I was willing to break
the shell more than he was.
It probably didn’t help Carter’s mood that, in 1980, he
received a lower share of the Jewish vote than any Democratic candidate since
1920.
In the coming days and weeks, there will be an effort to
rewrite history and claim that the 39th president was underappreciated and that
people have been too harsh on him. But the truth is that historians have not
been harsh enough. One of the few silver linings that can be offered about
Jimmy Carter is that, thankfully, he was too politically inept to be given the
opportunity do even more damage.
