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More than a quarter-century after completing his term of office, James Earl Carter is still to be found in the thick of debates about national policies on a range of issues: nuclear arms, Iraq, North Korea, and, especially, the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. A steady stream of books and articles continues to issue forth from his pen, and he travels the world on self-selected diplomatic missions. No other former President has chosen to play a similar role. But then, Carter’s whole political career has been out of the ordinary. In order to understand the man today, it is necessary to see him in the light of his past.
In 1976, when Carter tossed his hat into the ring for the presidential nomination, the Democratic party was still deeply riven by the long, bitter debate over the war in Vietnam. Carter’s response was to soar above these divisions, downplaying both ideology and issues. Instead, he put himself forward as a man of piety and character who would restore a high tone to government in the aftermath of Watergate and related scandals. Before the rise of politically-oriented televangelists, Jimmy Carter made his personal experience as a “born again” Christian into a key tenet of his platform. “I can give you a government that’s honest and that’s filled with love, competence, and compassion,” he pledged.
When the scramble for the Democratic nomination began, Carter was widely seen as a long shot. But by the time the primary season was half over, he had left the other, better-known Democratic contenders in the dust. That he was able to compete with them at all—that is, to raise money and enlist volunteers—owed to the national exposure he had received for his inaugural address as governor of Georgia in 1971. At that time, with much of the South still clinging to Jim Crow and resisting the nation’s new civil-rights laws, Carter had boldly declared that “the time for segregation is over.”
Yet the path that led him to that dramatic moment was a tortuous one, known to few outside of Georgia, and it shed light on the man who five years later would be promising voters across the country: “I will never lie to you.”
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Carter ran for governor of Georgia against Carl Sanders, who had served in the post previously, earning a reputation as one of the early “Southern moderates.” (Georgia law prohibited serving two terms consecutively.) In the campaign, Carter presented himself as, in his words, “a local Georgia conservative Democrat . . . basically a redneck.” This formulation was calculated to convey a message about his stand on racial issues: a message of resistance to racial integration, if not of out-and-out racism. He reinforced the same message by making a campaign stop at a whites-only private school, and by promising to invite Alabama Governor George Wallace, the champion of segregation, to address the state legislature.
Topping it off was Carter’s reaction when, as a result of the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Lester Maddox emerged as his running mate. Maddox, a restaurateur and Sanders’s successor as governor, had gained notoriety by distributing to the customers of his whites-only establishment ax handles with which to batter any blacks who might seek to be served there. Carter took the pairing in stride, characterizing Maddox as “the essence of the Democratic party.”
But no sooner had he won office than he executed his remarkable shift on race, a move that landed him on the cover of Time as the apotheosis of the “new South” and made him a nationally recognized figure. The cause of this about-face is still a matter of conjecture. Since he was barred from running for re-election, it is possible that he was already weighing a presidential run and thinking in terms of a national audience. Or he may have long harbored liberal views that he had deliberately concealed. In any event, one of his associates later explained that it was Carter’s way to “run conservative and govern liberal.” He was soon to put that formula to use again.
In pursuing his party’s 1976 presidential nomination, Carter not only kept his ideological profile low, he also made it blurry. On Vietnam, for instance: as governor, he had had no need to say much about the war, but what he did say seemed none too dovish, especially his ardent defense of Lieutenant William Calley, a Georgian convicted of the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. In the 1976 primary campaign, Carter distanced himself from the passel of doves—Congressman Morris Udall, Senator Frank Church, former New York Mayor John Lindsay, among others—competing for the mantle of George McGovern, leader of the antiwar Democrats. Instead, he stressed his background as a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and, because he had served on a nuclear submarine, as a disciple of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father of the nuclear navy.”
At the same time, though, he took pains to position himself somewhat to the dovish side of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the hero of the Democratic hawks. In particular, he denounced the Jackson-Vanik amendment that linked trade privileges for the Soviet Union to freedom of emigration. In a 1975 speech blaming Jackson for a Soviet crackdown against emigration, Carter sounded a theme that echoes in some of his pronouncements to this day:
I think that the so-called “Jackson Amendment” was ill-advised. . . . Russia is a proud nation, like we are, and if Russian Communist leaders had passed a resolution saying that they were not going to do this or that if we didn’t do something domestically, we would have reacted adversely to it.
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As this episode suggests, Carter was also initially cold to the subject of human rights. His 1975 book, Why Not the Best?, issued as a launching pad for his presidential campaign, makes no mention of it. Nor did he utter a word about human rights during the 1976 primaries. It was only in the course of hammering out the Democratic party’s platform that his interest was kindled. By that time, with the nomination in hand, Carter’s overriding goal was to unite his fissiparous party for the general election. With the Jacksonites animated against Communist regimes and the McGovernites against rightist ones, a possible common ground emerged. As Carter’s chief speech writer, Patrick Anderson, explained, human rights “was seen politically as a no-lose issue. Liberals liked human rights because it involved political freedom and getting liberals out of jail in dictatorships, and conservatives liked it because it involved criticisms of Russia.”
Not only was the subject a common denominator among Democrats, it helped Carter to put his Republican opponent, incumbent President Gerald Ford, on the defensive about the “realist” policies of his administration and especially of his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. As the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew reported: “Human rights was an issue with which you could bracket Kissinger and Ford on both sides. . . . [I]t was a beautiful campaign issue, an issue on which there was a real degree of public opinion hostile to the administration.”
On Kissinger’s advice, Ford had refused to receive the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the most famous Soviet dissident, upon his expulsion from the Soviet Union. In an ironic reprise of his gubernatorial campaign promise to invite George Wallace to speak to the Georgia legislature, Carter now announced that he would invite the Russian writer to the White House. He also caught Ford in a fatal gaffe when, in their televised debate on foreign policy, the incumbent declared that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Ford probably meant that he would not recognize Soviet domination there, but whatever he had in mind, he sounded hopelessly naive, and Carter pounced. The effect was that by election day, Carter was positioned as tougher on Communism than Ford.
But just as he had once reversed himself dramatically on the subject of race, so now, upon his election as President, Carter began at once to lay the groundwork for foreign policies that were the opposite of those he had led the voters to believe he intended to pursue. This was made manifest even before his inauguration as he went about staffing his administration. George McGovern was quoted as saying that most of Carter’s State Department appointees were “quite close to those I would have made myself.” Meanwhile, Carter excluded the Scoop Jackson wing of the party almost entirely from his administration. His surprising tilt away from anti-Communism was made explicit in his first major foreign-policy address when he proclaimed: “we are now free of th[e] inordinate fear of Communism. . . . We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water.”
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It did not take long for Carter to discover that he was in a quandary. The idea of quenching fire with water expressed his most cherished goal, namely, achieving reconciliation with states with which America had been at odds and thus laying to rest the legacy of Vietnam, perhaps even ushering in an era of peace on earth. However, the Communist and other radical leaders with whom he was hoping to find comity happened to represent most of the world’s most implacably oppressive regimes. This contradiction was never resolved, imparting an uneven and sometimes hypocritical quality to the human-rights advocacy with which Carter became identified.
The effect was exacerbated by one of Carter’s personality tics, strange in a man who boasted so often of his honesty: a compulsion to engage in flattery. At times, this could manifest itself toward a rightist ally like the Shah of Iran. Just months before the outbreak of the revolution that culminated in his toppling, Carter declared in a toast that Iran was an “island of stability” thanks to the “love which your people give you.” But the impulse expressed itself most strongly toward leftist strongmen. Carter hailed Yugoslav dictator Josip Tito as “a man who believes in human rights” and as a “great and courageous leader” who “has led his people and protected their freedom almost for the last forty years.” Visiting Poland, then ruled by the Stalinist hack Edward Gierek, he offered a toast to its “enlightened leaders” and declared that “our concept of human rights is preserved in Poland . . . much better than other European nations with which I am familiar.” He outdid himself in receiving Romania’s iron-fisted ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, enthusing:
Our goals are the same, to have a just system of economics and politics, to let the people of the world share in growth, in peace, in personal freedom, and in the benefits to be derived from the proper utilization of natural resources. We believe in enhancing human rights. We believe that we should enhance, as independent nations, the freedom of our own people.
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Footnotes
1 In percentage terms, the degree of Carter's rebuff was exceeded only by Herbert Hoover's loss to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 at the depths of the Great Depression; William Taft's loss to Woodrow Wilson in 1912 (when Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote); and John Quincy Adams's loss to Andrew Jackson in 1828
2 A Moment of Crisis: Jimmy Carter, the Power of a Peacemaker, and North Korea's Nuclear Ambitions
3 For some of the details, see my article Facing Up to North Korea in COMMENTARY, March 2003.
4 Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $27.00.
5 Success at Camp David imbued Carter with supreme confidence in his own abilities as a mediator, but once Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat had taken his remarkable peace journey to Israel in 1977, the rest was a matter of resolving details. This is a far cry from situations like Bosnia or Korea, where the goals of the parties remained fundamentally antagonistic. Ironically, Carter, fixated on multilateral initiatives in the Middle East, had at first responded coolly to Sadat’s gesture.
6 This is nonsense. Religious authorities maintain control over various public and legal functions, such as Sabbath operations of government services or marriage and conversion, not over “worship”; and the authority of Christian and Muslim clergy is recognized as applying to members of those faiths.
© 2009 Commentary Inc.
