Ninety-three-year-old Jimmy Carter has now been a former president longer than anybody else and, as his admirers like to say, in the four decades since he left office has “redefined” what it means to be an ex-president. This may well be true, bearing in mind that people tend to live longer than they used to and Carter was comparatively young (52) when he defeated Gerald Ford in 1976. Most living ex-presidents have concentrated on organizing their legacies and steering clear of politics. Carter, by contrast, has been a faithful partisan warrior since Ronald Reagan forced his retirement and has transformed his own presidential library, the Carter Center in Atlanta, into a combination museum-NGO. His indefatigable globetrotting won him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
All this is very admirable in its way. Yet presidents are judged not by their retirement projects but by their tenure in office—and while Carter’s energetic ex-presidency is no doubt an expression of his deepest convictions, it is also a self-evident gesture toward redemption. Like the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, or Theodore Roosevelt’s expedition up the Amazon, Jimmy Carter’s ex-presidency is likely to be regarded by posterity as an interesting footnote to a stint in the White House.
Enter Stuart Eizenstat, an earnest and capable Atlanta lawyer who first encountered Carter when the future president was serving as governor of Georgia and was recruited by Carter in 1974 to join his insurgent presidential campaign. A Jewish graduate of Harvard Law School, Eizenstat felt himself to be something of an outlier in Carter’s “Georgia Mafia” inner circle. But he admired the governor, in particular his early commitment to civil rights, and Carter valued Eizenstat’s judgment and acumen.
In the White House, the thirtysomething Eizenstat served as the president’s chief domestic policy adviser—and inevitably, political counselor. Accordingly, President Carter: The White House Years is not a biography of his old boss but an exhaustive refutation of Carter’s current status as (in Eizenstat’s words) “a weak and hapless president.” Carter’s one-term presidency, he insists, “was one of the most consequential in modern history,” and Carter left the White House not with a legacy of failure but “concrete reforms and long-lasting benefits to the people of the United States as well as the international order.”
It’s no reflection on Eizenstat—or on Carter, for that matter—to suggest that, in staking such a claim, the author is defending his own legacy as well as burnishing Carter’s. And how could it be otherwise? The judgment of posterity can be arbitrary, capricious, and, of course, retroactive. Presidents are neither elected nor defeated unanimously, and in 1980, 35 million Americans cast their ballots for Carter and against Reagan. Indeed, you could argue (and Eizenstat does) that with a slight adjustment in circumstances, Carter might have won reelection. He had, after all, decisively fought off Edward Kennedy’s churlish primary challenge, and it is often forgotten that for many months, the issue that is now regarded as ultimately fatal to Carter’s prospects—the Iran hostage crisis—had worked to his advantage in public opinion polls.
President Carter is a useful, even interesting, brief for the defense. All presidents enjoy some measure of success, and most exert influence one way or another. Jimmy Carter is no exception. His initiatives included a Wilsonian recommitment to human rights in diplomacy, which became and remains bipartisan policy; and while the blessings of the Camp David Accords have been mixed, they constitute an undeniable and enduring achievement. The long process of economic deregulation, lately accelerated by Donald Trump, was initiated not by Ronald Reagan but Jimmy Carter. Even Reagan’s refreshment of the American defense posture in the 1980s began with Carter’s commitment to deploy the new medium-range Pershing II ballistic missiles in Western Europe.
Put another way, if you tend to agree with what we might call the Carter-Eizenstat view of contemporary history—and you have lots of company—you will find much here to buttress the author’s argument that Carter was not only “consequential” but right on the issues. The problem, however, is that Carter’s reputation is not quite the mystery that Eizenstat believes it to be, and as his book reveals, its causes and origins are easily perceptible. That is to say, as candidate and president, Jimmy Carter had many qualities and virtues—all of which were regularly celebrated in the press—but his weaknesses and defects, above all his equivocal political talents, conspired with events to undermine and ultimately shorten his tenure.
For one thing, the qualities that first attracted Eizenstat—Carter’s acute intelligence, personal piety, deep sense of rectitude, and commitment to principle—proved, in the long run, to be political liabilities. Trained as a nuclear engineer, Carter’s close analysis of problems and issues, impressive in depth and attention to detail, tended to convince him that his conclusions were self-evident. This is a president, after all, whose campaign autobiography was entitled Why Not the Best? Having settled on a course of action, Carter was naturally impatient with both the demands of politics and the natural obstacles of democratic government.
Like more than a few “outsider” aspirants to the presidency, Carter arrived in Washington determined not to achieve harmony but to change the culture of an entrenched political class and govern not by consensus or political maneuver but proclamation. A moralist in his personal and public life, he was quick to cast issues in righteous terms—his solution to the energy crisis was “the moral equivalent of war,” the federal tax code was “a disgrace to the human race”—and was often angered by the countervailing forces in political life. At a time when his own party enjoyed prohibitive majorities on Capitol Hill, Carter not only deliberately failed to cultivate Congress but alienated natural allies in both parties.
Even in the symbolic gestures of his presidency, Carter fell victim to his rectitude and amateur status. Having enchanted the press with the folksy gesture of his Inauguration Day walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, the cardigan sweater he pulled on two weeks later for his televised energy-crisis address appeared to be the awkward prop it obviously was. Even his commitment to fiscal integrity and budgetary restraint—a conviction at odds with his Democratic base but appealing to independents—manifested itself in well-publicized but hopelessly trivial savings in White House expenditures. Television sets were removed from offices; magazine and newspaper subscriptions were canceled; retiring cabinet members’ oil portraits were replaced with photographs.
In the end, however, what was most damaging to Carter was not the slow disaffection of his party’s left wing or his startling complaint about Americans’ “inordinate fear of communism” but a gathering perception that the president, while capable of action and enjoying consistent support in the media, was slowly and inexorably overwhelmed by events. The headlines of the day surely undermined confidence: The Carter years were marked by persistent economic stagnation and high inflation; the Iranian revolution caused a shortage of oil and long lines at gas stations; the Soviet Union advanced on innumerable fronts; even the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island seemed to capture the sense, in the 1970s, that the long upward trends in American life were pointing downward.
The consensus view that the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81 was the calamity that turned American voters against Carter may well be right. The prolonged standoff between the United States and the revolutionary regime in Tehran certainly featured all the elements that could transform Carter’s ostensible strengths into shortcomings: his public insistence on moderation and restraint, which in due course resembled paralysis; his desperate attempt at a rescue mission ending in failure and death. For me, however, events of the previous summer seem more decisive. In July 1979, as the country was plunged into its second energy crisis in less than a decade, and long lines at gas pumps painfully suggested the erosion of American power, Carter retreated to Camp David, summoning dozens of friends and associates, sages and confidants alike, for prolonged consultations on what he described as a national “crisis of confidence.” At the end of the process, Carter returned to Washington and delivered a televised address—the famous “malaise” speech, although Carter did not use that term—designed to rally Americans toward energy independence and demanding “a rebirth of the American spirit.”
Eizenstat had at the time been skeptical about the message, with its implied rebuke of unhappy consumers. In retrospect, however, he marvels that its purpose was so quickly realized by a dramatic boost in the polls. And then, almost as quickly as Carter’s prospects had been enhanced, in one swift, maladroit gesture he managed to nullify all the effects of his speech. Seeking to project strength as well as resiliency, he reorganized his White House staff to grant unprecedented power to a new chief of staff and, accusing his assembled cabinet of “disloyalty,” demanded their resignations, firing half of them.
It is both astonishing and instructive to read Eizenstat’s anguished account of this curious episode. The nation was manifestly in crisis, perhaps even a “crisis of confidence,” yet the president’s instinct was not to lead but reproach. Carter found himself assailed by the various factions within his own administration, veering indecisively from one to the other. The message in his speech—the message in his hasty cabinet execution—was the product not of Carter’s convictions but a panicked distillation of competing ideas.
Whatever Americans expect in a president, at that moment they ceased to find it in Jimmy Carter. The man who had moved from virtual obscurity to the White House seemed visibly to shrink into irrelevance, even pathos—and the key to his legacy of failure was revealed.
