HIS VERY BEST: JIMMY CARTER, A LIFE – A Review

Jimmy Carter's achievements have too readily been overlooked by historians. Journalist Robert Alter's magisterial biography provides the needed corrective.

For those with even limited interest in presidential history, it has long been a cliché that Jimmy Carter was much more successful after he left the presidency than when he occupied the oval office.

Jonathan Alter's magisterial biography of Jimmy Carter, His Very Best, is dedicated to documenting that such a dismissive assessment unfairly overlooks Carter's formidable achievements during his four years in the White House. Carter was not charismatic, but what he lacked in ebullience and political finesse was more than compensated for by his commitment to excellence, fierce intelligence, penchant for detail, and courage despite the political fallout of the controversial decisions that confronted him and the nation. He also innovated large policy changes that have gone largely unrecognized.

In our age rife with mendacity and craven self-interest, it is salutary and morally redemptive to remember a politically different time. Carter embodied that difference. He was the very rare politician who was scrupulously honest. Early in his term, he pledged that he would not lie to the American public, and with few exceptions, he kept to his word.

In his preface, Alter, a former Newsweek editor and biographer of Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt, bluntly concludes that “...he (ie. Carter) was a surprisingly consequential president – a political and stylistic failure but a substantive and far-sighted success.” In a nearly 800-page treatise brimming with detail, Alter documents with uncompromising realism both Carter's shortcomings and virtues. While the reader senses his respect and admiration for his subject, Alter's biography is neither hagiographic nor does he hold back in elaborating Carter's shortcomings, gleaned over the course of more than a dozen interviews. Carter's life story is an amalgam of triumphs and failures. Beyond words and deeds, Alter is most interested in how character has informed the presidency. Such is his approach here, and much of his treatise assesses Carter's personality in public and private life, thus giving the reader information and a perspective that has been hitherto unknown.

Descriptions of Carter's character, how it informed his decision-making. and the impressions it left on others are strewn throughout factual descriptions of Carter's achievements. It has long been my impression that Jimmy Carter is overall a decent and moral person who attempted to apply his religious-based ethics to his presidency. Alter confirms that this is true, but Carter was also flawed and hardly a saint. One can do no better than quote from Alter's prologue:

“He was a disciplined and incorruptible president equipped with a sharp, omnivorous mind; a calm and able president, dependable in a crisis; a friendless president, who, in the 1976 primaries, has defeated or alienated a good portion of the Democratic Party; a stubborn and acerbic president, never demeaning but sometimes cold; a non-ideological president who worshiped science long with God and saw governing as a series of engineering problem sets; an austere, even spartan president out of sync with American consumer culture, a focused president whose diamond-cutter attention to detail brought ridicule but also historic results; a charming president in small groups and when speaking off the cuff but awkward in front of a teleprompter and then allergic to small talk and offering a simple “Thank you”; an insular all business president who seemed sometimes to prefer humanity to human beings but prayed for the strength to do better.” A welter of contradictions indeed, wherein his virtues did not always serve him well.

As these contradictions imply, Carter has not fit the conventional political profile. The product of a small rural town in southern Georgia, and raised in a childhood home that lacked electricity, Carter seemed to come from nowhere to achieve the highest office in the nation. In Georgia, he was president of his local school board, served in the state senate, and became governor, while ambitiously keeping his sights on the White House. He was the first governor since Franklin Roosevelt to become president. But he was an outlier in several notable ways. Carter is very much his own man who refused to ingratiate himself with others for the sake of political ends. Alter notes that throughout his life, Carter has been hard to read. He had few friends in Congress, leading Tip O'Neill to conclude that Carter “never learned how the system worked.” He also noted that Carter was “the smartest politician I have ever known,” but Alter adds, “he (O'Neill) had no respect for his political skills.”

Noting that a picture speaks a thousand words, among the photos included in His Very Best is one of a reunion of then-living presidents gathered in the Oval Office. It unmistakably portrays Carter's status as an isolate. To the left are George Bush, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, clearly relaxed and enjoying each other's company. To the right, with a noticeable gap between him and Clinton, Jimmy Carter stands alone, stiff, with a stern grimace on his face gazing ahead, facing no one. The caption under the photo reads, “Carter's barbed comments about his successors ensured that he would remain outside their club.”

There are strong reasons why progressives would find Carter wanting. Amid the description Alter provides, and perhaps the most politically significant, is that Carter possessed no recognizable political ideology. While the family were Democrats, and he wept on hearing of the death of Franklin Roosevelt, Carter was not a proponent of the New Deal and did not see the redistribution of wealth to be a function of the federal government. He was no critic of capitalism. Nor was Carter a union man and he never developed good relations with the labor movement. Yet he was practically reform-minded and rejected special interests. Carter's grit and determination that animated his engineering mentality led to the reality that Carter “...enacted more of his agenda than any postwar American president except Lyndon Johnson...Even little publicized Carter bills changed parts of American life, from requiring banks to invest in low-income communities to legalizing craft breweries. While Carter suffered painful defeats – on tax reform, welfare reform, consumer protection, and health care – he won much more than he lost. This scorecard went largely unnoticed, in part because the aggressive post-Watergate press tended to assume the worst about him”

Alter sees Carter as a pioneer of center-left “New Democrat” thinking, and as such a forerunner of Clinton and Obama, but whatever achievements could be assessed as progressive would be overshadowed by circumstances, among them stagflation, energy shortages, and global events largely beyond his control.

Absent an identified ideology, Carter remains an anomaly among the roster of postwar presidents. The ambiguity of his political commitments is perhaps manifest most awkwardly in his views on race. Carter had respectful relations with African-Americans who populated his youth around Plains, Georgia. Racist pressure was omnipresent, but he refused to join the racist White Citizens Council where he lived. However, Carter was not a supporter of, nor was he involved in, the Civil Rights Movement. He never met Martin Luther King Jr., a fellow Georgian. To get ahead in Georgia's politics he had to ally himself with wanton racists, George Wallace among them, and Carter was not above employing racist dog whistles to augment a political following. Alter reports that when Carter was a Georgia state senator, out-of-state civil rights workers associated with the Student Non-violence Coordinating Committee were charged with sedition, and in principle subject to the death penalty. This concerned Carter, but like every prominent white attorney, Carter remained silent. Alter concludes that Carter was the kind of moderate King had in mind when he famously penned in the Letter from the Birmingham Jail that he had “almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice.”

With the attainment of the White House, Carter's approach to race underwent an overt transformation. He spoke out against racial discrimination and for racial justice. The Carters sent their daughter, Amy, to a prevailing Black public school in Washington. It is arguable that Carter saw, at least in part, his commitment to racial justice as folded into his defense of international human rights. Indeed, Alter asserts that he sought out Andrew Young as his ambassador to the United Nations in order to connect human rights as a centerpiece of his foreign policy to the American Civil Rights movement, hearkening back to the time when Young marched by the side of Martin Luther King Jr.

There is little doubt that Carter's silence on race in the first half of his life was a major moral lapse for which he felt he needed to atone. His deep-rooted commitment as a born-again Christian who took his religion most seriously would have required that reflection. In his years after the presidency, Carter became energetically devoted to Africa with the effect of saving countless Africans from the scourge of horrible diseases.

When Jimmy Carter took the office of the presidency and identified himself as a born-again Christian, it sent northern journalists scrambling for their encyclopedias of religion to familiarize themselves with a term that eluded them. But here, too, Carter was very much his own man. He ended up quitting the Southern Baptist Conference that traded devotion to the teachings of Jesus for extreme right-wing politics, becoming a bastion of the Republican Party. However his ethics reflected his religious commitments, Carter adhered to the historical norm of officeholders keeping their doctrinal commitments out of politics. Baptists, going back to Roger Williams, including Southern Baptists, had a strong commitment to the separation of church and state. Carter did as well, and he was as committed to protecting the rights of atheists as he was to devout believers.

Carter's commitment to the wall of separation, which is now being torn down by ultra-conservatives on the Supreme Court, along with their evangelical supporters, has born monumental consequences. It was arguably responsible for motivating evangelicals back into the political fray after a half-century of quiescence. Carter was instrumental in removing the tax exemption of segregated private schools, including Bob Jones University, many founded in reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating school integration. As a result of Carter's move, the evangelicals repolitcized with the result that the entire American political landscape has moved far to the right. His onetime co-religionists turned their backs on Carter and threw their support behind Ronald Reagan, who seldom went to church, ushering in the evangelical identification with the Republican Party. Subsequent to Carter, Republican candidate and presidents have religionized their politics in ways unrecognizable to the Founders, leading to ominous consequences. It is my strong view that Carter modeled the position on church-state relations to which we need to return if our democracy is to be preserved.

Alter is unsparing in his elaboration of Carter's achievements, many unknown or undervalued. Carter signed the first and most important piece of legislation providing mental health services. It mandated that mental illness be treated by the government on par with other diseases. It funded community mental health centers and transitional housing, initiatives undone by the Reagan administration. But many of Carter's provisions, which were envisioned by Rosalind Carter, who made mental health her signature issue, were resurrected in the Affordable Care Act. Another Carter initiative, which in this critic's view deserves great notice, is that Carter expanded the food stamp program, which in its time virtually abolished hunger in America.

It is the area of conservation and environmental stewardship that arguably was Carter's greatest domestic achievement. Borrowing from an essay by the philosopher William James, he advocated for an aggressive environmental ethic that would be “the moral equivalent of war.” Carter was well known for placing solar panels on the roof of the White House. But his commitment to the environment was far and wide.

Carter was responsible for creating thirty-nine new national park designations, doubling the size of the national park system. At the end of his term, he signed the Alaska Lands Bill that protected 25 percent of the state from development. He expanded and protected California's National Redwood Forest, which Alter assesses as his least well-known major achievement. He signed legislation that gave the government the authority to curb pollution of all kinds. With Carter's Clean Air Act of 1977, air quality began dramatic improvement. He banned fluorocarbons and lead paint and initiated cap and trade that greatly eliminated acid rain. In the midst of gas shortages, Carter championed the use of coal, but he also signed legislation heavily regulating coal mines and laws funding the reclamation of strip-mined lands. Alter summarizes Carter's environmental achievements as follows:

“While the details could be mind-numbing for reporters, Carter's many bills on energy and the environment had a profound cumulative impact on the life of the twenty-first century. His policies sharply reduced dependence on foreign oil, began the transition to green energy, mandated energy efficiency, and moved across a broad front to clean up the environment.”

To bring us up to the moment, Alter tersely notes, “Jimmy Carter was the first leader anywhere in the world to recognize the problem of climate change.” In this regard, Carter was assuredly a prophet. One can only imagine how the prospects of the planet would look much more hopeful if his Republican successors had built upon his insight and commitments rather than torn them down.

On the positive side, Carter's achievements in foreign policy are, arguably, those for which he will be most remembered. In almost every instance, it was his commitment to detail and his doggedness that paid off. It's a strength of Alter's narrative that he provides facts behind the events to fill in the specifics and nuances which are mostly remembered only in their outlines.

If searching for an overall rubric to describe Carter's foreign policy, “peacemakee” would be most appropriate. Temperamentally, Carter favored diplomacy over conflict and violence. Nixon had opened China to the West, but it was Carter and Deng Xiaoping who swung it wide open. Diplomatic relations were inaugurated. There was a robust educational exchange. China maintained a central command authoritarian regime but it embraced capitalism. As a result, it ushered in the world economy, and close to a billion Chinese peasants were lifted out of grinding poverty. Arguably, today China has replaced Russia in a new Cold War. But it is Alter's conclusion that an aggressive as well as repressive China would have arisen anyway, and we are far safer because “China's rise came with a web of commercial and educational connections to the West that began with Jimmy Carter.” Carter considered normalizing relations with China to be his most lasting foreign policy achievement.

Carter's relations to war and peace were enigmatic and arguably, contradictory. Hawks and liberal detractors will notice that he greatly increased the defense budget. And perhaps the most fateful decision he made was to arm the Afghan mujahideen, the “freedom fighters,” against their Soviet occupiers. The Cold War, and anti-Soviet containment policy still provided the main framework of foreign policy, no doubt Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser and a fervent anti-communist, was a major influence, believing that the Soviets would invade, turning Afghanistan into a Soviet Vietnam. Brzezinski's presumption was correct, and the failed Soviet invasion of Afghanistan has been credited as one of the causes of the downfall of the Soviet empire. But what went unforeseen is that the mujahideen was transformed into the Taliban, providing a safe haven to Al Qaeda. An irony unmentioned by Alter is that Osama bin Laden was then our ally in the war against the Soviets. But Brzezinski's view was unchanging. He believed to the end that the arming of the freedom fighters was worth the consequences.

Alter credits Carter for pushing for the treaty to return the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. It was a courageous risk for peace and the process was politically very fraught. Confrontation had long been brewing and there was reasonable fear that a violent revolt by the Panamanians would precipitate a massive American military intervention. Long-standing American imperial hegemony was deeply resented, not merely by Panama, but by Latin America as a whole. Despite great internal resistance, Carter pushed hard for the treaty and it narrowly squeaked through the Senate. Again, Carter was dismissive of the political domestic fallout, but the international consequences turned out to be benign and in time helped to transform the internal politics of Latin American autocracies.

History may recall the Camp David Accords as Carter's greatest foreign policy success, though in the end he personally lamented that they fell short of his ambitions. Egypt's Anwar Sadat's surprise visit to Jerusalem provided the opening. At issue was brokering a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, which possessed the largest Arab army, and was the only military force that posed an existential threat to the survival of the Jewish State. The greatest obstacle was the lands that Israel occupied after the 1967 war and the invasion by surrounding Arab forces.

I have long marveled how long-standing and deeply rooted hostilities can actually be resolved by face-to-face negotiations between leading actors. Carter brought Sadat and Menachem Begin, Israel's prime minister and their associates, together at Camp David for negotiations that dragged on much longer than the principles had planned. Alter provides a fascinating picture of how nettlesome these discussions were. They frequently broke down, only to be salvaged by Carter's persistence and negotiating skills. Carter had warm relations with Sadat, but he found Begin prickly and difficult. Nevertheless, he was able to win concessions, and peace between Israel and Egypt was established. The Sinai was returned to Egypt, but Carter never got over the disappointment that he could not bring the talks to a complete conclusion, which would have required the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Today the peace between Egypt and Israel remains a cold peace. But the two long-standing adversaries maintain an open border, and since Camp David barely a shot has been fired between them. Here I cannot resist my own assessment. It is true that no president has been more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians than Carter. Arguably his sympathy for those under occupation, now persisting for 56 years, was informed by his experience of the oppression of Blacks in the Jim Crow South. Israelis resent Carter for it and for authoring a book identifying Israel's occupation with apartheid, which arguably it is. Yet considering the larger picture, Egypt comprises almost half of the entire Arab world, and its peace with Israel thanks to Jimmy Carter, has initiated peace treaties between Israel and a growing number of its Arab neighbors. From my standpoint, Carter merits Israel's gratitude and not the excoriation he has received. Now that Jimmy Carter is in his last days, a gesture of apology would be a deserving act of grace.

Then there was Iran, arguably the most complex and dire international circumstance Carter confronted. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was a world-shaking event. It ushered in a global movement toward religious nationalism which has challenged the underpinnings of secular democracy. It has Islamicized large swaths of the Muslim world and has set in motion religiously-based political movements in India, Russia, Israel, and elsewhere. Parallel initiatives are manifest among evangelical Christians who advocate for Christian nationalism in the United States.

Carter saw an important anti-Soviet ally in the Shah, who was committed to secularizing Iranian society while marginalizing the religious classes and their clerics. American policy makers' blindness to foreign cultures has been tragically commonplace, and so it was here. There was scant attention paid to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who rallied his followers from exile in France.

As the Shah became more autocratic, - imprisonment and torture were commonplace – the regime was faced with increased rebellion, setting off debate in the Carter administration as to how to respond. The regime was overthrown by a coalition of opposing forces, and in short order, the Islamicists took control of the government. The Shah fled, becoming an international pariah. Having contracted cancer, he sought medical assistance in the United States. At first, Carter rejected his pleas, but he finally relented on humanitarian grounds. For five weeks the Shah found treatment in a New York hospital.

It was his admittance to the United States that incited Iranian students, and with Khomeini's blessing, they took over the American embassy and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, Hostages were badly mistreated. The siege was slow-burning agony for Carter, his administration, and the American nation as a whole. Carter placed the fate of the hostages at the forefront of his concerns. But Carter's helplessness was augmented by the news media, none less than by Roone Arledge's ABC, which was seeking to boost its rating. The new program, Nightline, anchored by the charismatic Ted Koppel, ended each program with the count of the number of days that the hostages were kept in captivity. New findings lend credence to the assumption, cited by Alter, that operatives of the Reagan campaign covertly worked to extend the captivity of the hostages in order to boost Reagan's chances of winning the upcoming election. Reprehensibly and unconscionable maneuvering was not a creation of our previous incumbent.

The hostages were finally set free on January 20th, 1981 at the exact moment Carter's presidency ended. While the crisis was arguably Carter's greatest failure, he was assured in pointing out that every hostage, despite their torment, returned home alive. But the Iran hostage was the greatest cause that resulted in his losing the election to Ronald Reagan.

Among the most intriguing chapters in Alter's narrative deals with the ill-fated attempt to rescue the hostages. Clearly, efforts to extract by force the captives held in the center of a densely populated city seem on its face a near impossibility. The mission was compromised almost from the beginning and ended with two helicopters crashing in the Iranian desert. Eight American soldiers were killed in the effort. Yet, it is an interesting fact that this represents the fewest number of Americans killed in military action under the leadership of any president in the twentieth century. And Jonathan Alter reminded me that not a single soldier lost his or her life in combat under Carter's command. One needs to go back to the presidency of Thomas Jefferson to find a similar occurrence.

This fact, often overlooked, reveals another salient dimension of Carter's values and character. While he advocated for an increase in defense spending, at the same time, Carter, while not a pacifist, we may conclude was pacifistically oriented. I believe it was another manifestation originating in his religiously based ethics.

So was his commitment to human rights. In his inaugural address, Carter declared that human rights would be the centerpiece of American foreign policy. It was Carter's commitment to place in a global context what was best in America. Yet a moment's reflection will lead to the conclusion human rights must necessarily be compromised by the requirements of national security and self-interest. It should therefore be no surprise that Carter's human rights commitments were applied inconsistently. In general, he was more effective in promoting human rights in individual cases, than in cases of widespread human rights abuse.

Foreign policy is governed by realpolitik, or political realism, which during the Cold War had the United States supporting regimes, no matter how repressive or autocratic, as long as they were anti-communist. Carter's approach may be termed “neo-realist.” He believed that supporting movements opposing their autocratic rulers, if successful, would bring to power democratic governments allied with the United States. Supporting human rights abroad would simultaneously serve American interests.

But again, Carter's policies were applied inconsistently. It was a period of flourishing dictatorship. Carter spoke out against Argentina's military junta, and his administration was successful in saving the life of Argentinian journalist, Jacobo Timmerman, who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime. He denounced Pinochet's cruel dictatorship in Chile, and Somoza's Nicaragua. And he was condemnatory of white rule in Rhodesia and South African apartheid. But his administration remained supportive of the military rule in El Salvador, which was fighting a war against revolutionaries, and he considered the Philippines of Ferdinand Marcos strategically too valuable to touch. There was the fear that if Marcos was removed the country would fall to Marxist adversaries. But when it came to Latin America, Carter delivered a powerful message that America would no longer turn a blind eye to political oppression. And the message was received. When Carter took office almost every country in Latin America was a dictatorship. By 2000, every country but two was a democracy. We may well conclude that Carter's human rights agenda set that propitious transformation into motion.

We have never had a president before or after Jimmy Carter more favorable to human rights. Carter's human rights policy gave hope to dissidents everywhere. No less a personage than Mikhail Gorbachev concluded that Carter's human rights policy, by inspiring Soviet dissidents, helped propel the demise of the Soviet Union from within.

Carter established a separate sub-department of the State Department to monitor and speak out in favor of human rights. He signed into law the Refugee Act of 1980, which brought federal law into conformity with the 1951 UN Convention of Refugees.

I cannot resist recounting a personal anecdote. During the Carter years, I chaired an Amnesty International adoption group. We were working on the case of an imprisoned Nicaraguan and we needed additional information to carry forward our task. I phoned the U.S. State Department to see if it could research the information we needed. Two weeks later I received a return call in my office. “State Department calling,” and the information we sought was rendered. When Reagan took office, I would call the State Department seeking similar assistance. Those calls went unanswered. An anecdote, to be sure. But I conclude that my return calls were an index as to how seriously the Carter administration supported human rights.

Before Carter took office, human rights was a phrase seldom heard. Today, human rights are all over the place. Today there are many thousands of human rights non-governmental organizations promoting human rights around the world. The human rights factor has become a mainstay of international parlance and global relations. While too often violated how nations treat their citizens and the protect their fundamental rights can no longer be ignored. More than any other person, Jimmy Carter can be credited with having created the human rights culture and bringing to the fore that sanguine reality.

We cannot escape the tragedy of Jimmy Carter's presidency. Its end was brought about by circumstances that were greatly beyond his control: punishing inflation, an oil embargo, (who can forget those gas lines?), and the Iranian hostage crisis. His moral values no doubt added to his falling out of favor with much of the American public. His famous “malaise speech” (though it never mentioned the word) was given amid an energy crisis that Carter construed led to a crisis of confidence. Before an audience of 100 million, Carter claimed that his fellow Americans “...worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

How true, I say. We certainly need that message now more than ever. But Carter misgauged his audience. The American public didn't accept it, and they turned away from Carter in the next election.

While Donald Trump receives scant mention in Alter's book, the implications, I believe, are inescapable. Jimmy Carter was elected to the presidency in great measure because Americans were tired of Nixon and his immorality. They were looking for a leader who would provide an ethical alternative. Let us hope that our current moment will inspire a similar longing, and a future presidency will speak to the best in us as Jimmy Carter did.

Jimmy Carter is 98 years old, far outliving any of his predecessors. He is now in hospice, in his last months or weeks. Carter has lived a very diverse and rich life, and in the years after his presidency has devoted himself to the welfare of humankind and those most in need. Whether monitoring elections around the world to ensure their fairness, building housing (with his own hands) for those in need, and combating with admirable success dreaded diseases in the developing world, Carter has been a unique and exemplary ex-president. His deeds speak to the lasting moral measure of the man. He deserves our greatest respect.

Among the presidents, Carter has received less attention from historians than he has deserved. Jonathan's Alter biography of Jimmy Carter, his character, and his deeds, has gone far in correcting that oversight. It is an excellent and important book, and its relevance to our current circumstances cannot be overstated.