What if Jimmy Carter Had Tried to Run for President Again

Chapter ONE

The Unfinished Presidency
Jimmy Carter's Journeying Beyond the White House

---

By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
Viking

Read the Review

Election Twenty-four hours 1980

    On November four, 1980, at 9:01 P.Thou. Eastern time, President Jimmy Carter telephoned erstwhile governor Ronald Reagan at the Republican'south imposing home in southern California; he added to the courtesy with a brusque telegram congratulating the president-elect on his decisive victory. An 60 minutes after at the Sheraton Washington Hotel ballroom--only an hr and a one-half after the first network projections of Reagan's victory--Carter appear the verdict officially. Information technology was the earliest concession past a presidential candidate since 1904, when Alton B. Parker had bowed before Theodore Roosevelt. "I promised you four years ago that I would never lie to you," Carter told his weeping supporters, echoing the best-known line from his 1976 campaign. "So I can't stand here tonight and say it doesn't injure."

    White Firm press secretary Jody Powell had tried to get the soon-to-be ex-president to delay his speech until eleven o'clock Eastern time, when the California polls would shut, but Carter didn't desire anyone to call back he was sulking in the White Business firm and insisted, "It'due south ridiculous. Let'south go and get it over with." Many in the Democratic establishment were furious with Carter for conceding more than an hr before the polls closed on the West Coast, thus hurting other Autonomous candidates in the Pacific fourth dimension zone. "What in God's name is wrong with you people?" Speaker of the Firm Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill fumed by telephone from Boston to Carter's congressional liaison, Frank Moore. When Moore told O'Neill that Carter just wanted to "get it over with," damn the western Democrats, the speaker exploded with rage, yelling, "You guys came in similar a bunch of jerks, and I meet yous're going out the aforementioned way." Representative Tom Foley of Washington Country put it more succinctly: "It was vintage Carter at its dead worst."

    To some, such as Democratic congressmen Al Ullman of Oregon and James Corman of California, Carter's unconscionable human action seemed an apt metaphor for everything that had been askew with his presidency, from bad public relations to political fatuity. Both Ullman and Corman blamed Carter's early concession for their ain narrow defeats, and they were hardly lonely in their cloy; even those who had come to expect such slights from the "partyless president" were appalled.

    Of course, robust cheer was in curt supply anywhere Democrats were assembled. A profound numbness had settled over the White House fifty-fifty earlier viii:xv P.M., when John Chancellor of NBC News showtime announced to the nation that Carter had go the only elected president to lose his bid to stay in the White House since Republican Herbert Hoover in 1932. An part on the second floor of the Westward Fly contained the loyal but exhausted foot soldiers who had moaned when their greatest fear became inescapable fact: the swashbuckling, authorities-hating Reagan had been called in place of their dominate. "I had been convinced for at least six months that nosotros were going to lose," then thirty-7-yr-erstwhile White House staffer Stuart Eizenstat recalled. "Simply it was similar preparing yourself for the death of a family member: when information technology comes, information technology's still devastating." The grim mood caused sometime White House counsel Robert Lipshutz to dub the mournful occasion "The Wake in the White House," as evidenced by the funeral mien of anybody in the official photographs. "A part of my soul died that dark," campaign director Hamilton Jordan confessed later. Despite a coast-to-coast entrada to muster last-minute support, the light at the end of the tunnel, as poet Robert Lowell once put information technology, was the light of an oncoming train. Carter had come to power four years before with an expansionary economical platform and a fresh face full of political promise; now he was about to exit Washington as perhaps the nigh conservative Democratic commander in chief since Grover Cleveland, who was also done in past a recessionary economic system.

    During the frenetic final days of Carter's desperate quest for reelection, he pleaded with the throngs out to glimpse a real alive president at rallies and boondocks hall meetings, repeating "I demand you! I need you!" But Americans turned a deaf ear. With aggrandizement in the double digits, oil prices triple what they had been, unemployment higher up 7 percent, involvement rates topping 20 percent, fifty-two American hostages nonetheless held captive in Iran, and unsettling memories of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lingering, it's inappreciably surprising that there was no ballot day surge to the Jimmy Carter-Walter Mondale ticket. Having gone four years without projecting a unifying vision or instituting a sweeping program like FDR's New Deal, Truman'southward Fair Deal, JFK's New Frontier, or LBJ's Smashing Society, Carter was judged inept and uninspiring, and voters rejected him in no uncertain terms.

    Jody Powell, all of 30-six years old, tried to take a stoic view of the imminent debacle. Nonplussed by the idea of losing, similar the final Confederate soldier he spent election day spinning visions of victory to skeptical newsmen. Until he got home, that is--then he had to inform his thirteen-yr-former daughter, Emily, that Jimmy Carter was going to lose. "She was but devastated," Powell sighed much after. "I had a hard fourth dimension telling her the game was over."

    Apathy characterized the 1980 ballot--only 52.four per centum of eligible voters participated, the lowest turnout since 1948 (and the first of a downwards trend)--but those who did vote clearly shifted to the right. When all was said and done, Reagan--the sixty-nine-yr-old conservative Carter had pronounced "untruthful" and "unsafe"--had won a commanding 51 percent (43,899,248) of the pop vote to Carter's sorry 41 percent (35,481,435). Dark-horse alternative John Anderson, a liberal Republican congressman from Illinois who had run every bit an Contained, managed to pull in 7 per centum (5,719,437), primarily from upper-eye-form libertarians and disgruntled liberals. The electoral vote looked fifty-fifty better for Reagan: 489 votes to Carter's 49, with none for Anderson. The Lord's day Belt and Rocky Mountain regions came in and then overwhelmingly Republican that billboards were erected overnight in Oklahoma and Wyoming: WELCOME TO THE REAGAN REVOLUTION. Far worse for Carter, the ex-Confederate states, with the exception of Georgia, as well went Republican.

    Carter had entered the White Business firm believing that the failures of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had been moral ones, and that he had been elected to reestablish a government "equally good and honest and decent and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people." And then information technology stung all the more that be had lost to a man he thought immoral to the cadre: an unprincipled merely telegenic B-grade Hollywood cowboy who had ridden into the White Business firm on such "patriotic" themes as abhorrence of government, xenophobia, and massive tax cuts. "Reagan is different from me in almost every basic chemical element of commitment and experience and promise to the American people," Carter had said at a town hall meeting in Independence, Missouri, two months before. Years later he would go further and land that "assuasive Ronald Reagan to get president was by far my biggest failure in office."

    About immediately, commentators began comparing Carter'south clobbering with what Richard Nixon had done to George McGovern in 1972. Some even raised the specter of Herbert Hoover, who had failed to provide the forward-looking leadership the nation craved during the Great Depression. Of course, Carter was used to that charge; throughout the campaign Republicans had mocked him every bit "Jimmy Hoover," another well-intentioned engineer-president who deserved to exist ousted from office for a lack of vision. History, equally usual, would repeat itself: but as the Democrats made meat of Hoover's "prosperity is merely around the comer" well into the 1950s, the Republicans would campaign against the ghost of Carter's "malaise" for the side by side decade and beyond.

    As bad as the rest were, the worst moment for Carter that ballot day was when he bankrupt the bad news to his married woman. "Don't say anything yet to Rosalynn," Carter had instructed his staff. "Let me tell her." Offset Lady Rosalynn Carter, whose soft-edged toughness had earned her the nickname "Steel Magnolia," simply refused to believe the lopsided verdict. "I was in such deprival," she admitted years later. "It was incommunicable for me to believe that anybody could take looked at the facts and voted for Reagan."

    When voters were asked why they chose Reagan, most said it was "time for a change." The 1980 ballot indeed marked a truthful sea modify in American history. Reagan was FDR in opposite, and fabricated it clear that equally president he intended to dismantle the welfare land created under the New Deal. Like his Republican predecessors Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, Reagan planned to lower taxes on the rich in social club to stimulate America's productive energies. Merely where Harding and Coolidge pressed for disarmament, Reagan vocally wanted to accelerate the arms race plenty to vanquish the Soviet Union in the cold war.

    Plainly that'south what Americans wanted as well. Riding Reagan's coattails and a surging tide of conservatism, the Republicans too captured the Senate for the first time since 1952 and managed to reduce the Autonomous majority in the House by 33 votes. Leading liberal senators including Frank Church building of Idaho, George McGovern of Southward Dakota, John Culver of Iowa, and Birch Bayh of Indiana suffered upsets largely considering they were associated with Carter'south policies. Fifty-fifty reelected Democrats such as Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts were jeered in the press for a 1960s-style "sideburn liberalism" as passe as Woodstock and the lava lamp. "If I had realized more fully what would follow u.s.a. in Washington, I would have listened more carefully to your good political communication apropos how to deal with the Democratic liberals, the grain embargo, typhoon registration, and an overload[ed] agenda," Carter afterwards confessed to Walter Mondale. "Perchance nosotros could take spared the state a lot of suffering and embarrassment."

    Carter'due south drubbing extended fifty-fifty into the left wing of the Democratic party. Ane postelection poll reported that fewer than a third of those who described themselves as liberal voted for him; the rest opted for Independent candidate John Anderson or stayed abode. This came equally no surprise to Carter, who had confided in his White House diary on January nineteen, 1978, "In many cases I feel more than at domicile with the conservative Democratic and Republican members of Congress than I do with the others." In fact, the penny-pincher in Carter had always considered the and then-called liberal coalition little more than a smug coterie of coin-hungry involvement groups. He saw himself, past contrast, as a New Due south populist morally above party allegiance who had been elected to serve "the people direct." He prided himself on having little to practice with the Wall Street, Washington, or Hollywood Democratic establishments, which he regarded as elitist individual clubs for the rich. "I exercise non condemn the cocktail circuit," Carter noted "Information technology'southward but not natural for me to be a part of it."

    Only in the end, being the consummate outsider proved fatal. Carter never fought in the trenches alongside his boyfriend Washington Democrats in the great battles of the era--over the Vietnam War, Medicaid and Medicare, civil rights legislation, Nixon's Supreme Court appointments, or Watergate--and therefore he could merely exist viewed as a political fluke by his own party. Carter mistakenly assumed that he could compensate for lacking the requisite battle scars by devising rational policies to evidence his presidential leadership. On height of that naivete he failed to sympathize that making policies was just the beginning--then he had to sell them to the American people, and "selling" seemed such muddy business organization.

    Tales of Carter's contempt for and ineptitude at politicking were legion on Capitol Hill throughout his term in office. "When it came to the politics of Washington, D.C., he never really understood how the system worked," Tip O'Neill wrote in his memoirs. "And although this was out of character for Jimmy Carter, he didn't want to learn about it either." In fact, O'Neill couldn't escape the feeling that Carter was working against fellow Democrats--including the Speaker himself. "One time, when the city of Boston applied for a government grant for some roads, I called the Carter people to attempt to speed it forth," O'Neill wrote. "Instead of assisting me, all the same, they did everything possible to block my way."

    Other perceived slights were more than subtle. Indiana congressman John Brademas, the Democratic whip who said he had to spell his name to the receptionist every time he chosen the Carter White House, got an even sharper slap in the face up when Carter visited his commune and fabricated his landmark man rights voice communication at Notre Dame University. Brademas felt exultant that Carter had come to South Bend as he and Senator Birch Bayh introduced the chief executive to Notre Matriarch'due south distinguished president, Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh. The thrill didn't last long; later that afternoon, Carter delivered his voice communication without either recognizing or thanking the ii leading Democratic politicians of Indiana, both of whom were sitting right behind him on the platform. Brademas felt snubbed and humiliated. "When a president comes to your district, addresses your constituency, and doesn't even mention your name when yous're standing right abreast him ... something is incorrect," Brademas declared later. "I was on Nixon'due south enemies list, but he never treated me that way." When Brademas lost his congressional seat in 1980--after having won eleven straight terms--he didn't hesitate to pivot office of the arraign on Carter.

    Simply to Carter, many Democratic senators were at all-time little more than than celebrity lobbyists. Oregon senator Mark Hatfield, a Rockefeller Republican who had befriended Carter in the early on 1970s, was startled by the president's inability to connect with other Democratic politicians. "Carter was then much smarter than nearly of the Democrats in Congress--and he permit them know it," Hatfield explained: Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington State and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts in detail were known to "grind their teeth" as they walked out of White House meetings, livid that Carter had "talked downwardly to them."

    More than any other president in memory, Carter had turned his back on money lenders and influence peddlers. He believed that fifty-fifty individual conversations with senators, for example, might cause him to compromise--or look every bit though he were compromising--his principles. "Carter invited my hubby and me to the White House for a private dinner only once," remembered Bethine Church, widow of the erstwhile Senate Foreign Relations Commission chairman Frank Church, "and he just refused to talk politics. It was then odd. He actually believed his 1976 outsider campaign." In a Dec 1980 postmortem on Carter'south presidency, Newsweek commented that he had "shown Reagan how not to do business organisation in an insider's city" past acting "standoffish" toward "the lords and ladies of Washington guild."

    Carter never fit in the uppercase considering his leadership style was essentially religious in nature, more preacher than politician. Among American presidents merely Carter peppered his speeches with the discussion "love" and earnest Christian entreaties for "tenderness" and "healing." As commentator Eric Severeid in one case quipped, Carter was a "wheeler-healer" who simply refused to go a "wheeler-dealer." As president he spoke openly of his Christian faith and all information technology entailed: daily prayers, abhorrence of violence, the belief that the meek shall inherit the world, the backbone to champion the underdog. Nearly of all, his organized religion taught him that a clear conscience was always preferable to Machiavellian expediency--a pretty good for you attitude that proved both Carter'southward greatest forcefulness and his bane.

    Soon later the 1980 presidential election Kenneth Kline, a politics vitrify from Mogadore, Ohio, took information technology upon himself to send two hundred notable personages a questionnaire asking why Jimmy Carter had lost so overwhelmingly to Ronald Reagan. Kline'due south embrace alphabetic character pointed out that it had been only 4 years since Carter had been anointed the perfect elixir to as suage the political ills during the 1970s, when Americans still raw from the trauma of Vietnam saturday transfixed earlier their television set sets watching the Nixon administration unravel. Past 1976, America's bicentennial year, a nation disheartened past political abuse capped by a suspicious presidential pardon wanted to believe in something--and there was Jimmy Carter, a devout evangelical Christian who promised "to brand authorities every bit good as its people." So what happened?

    Nearly every U.S. senator Kline polled, from William Proxmire on the left to Barry Goldwater on the right, attributed the Carter presidency'southward implosion to the prolonged Islamic republic of iran earnest crisis and the stagnant U.S. economy. Republican senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina put it in grander terms, boasting that Carter'southward defeat was part of a paradigm shift that "marked the decline and fall of the public's religion in statist liberalism ... the idea that the solution to all our issues as a nation and as individuals is to be found in some sort of intervention by [the] federal government."

    Even those who were not overtly hostile were melancholy over what might have been. Responding to Kline's survey, Begetter Hesburgh wrote, "I accept always had the feeling that [Carter] is a skillful human being, but somehow was not able to bring his vision to reality. That is not unusual on this earth." This benign assessment was shared by many, including Jesse Jackson and Billy Graham. Veteran NBC News commentator David Brinkley summed the matter up crisply in 1981:

* He had no base in the Democratic party and few friends in the federal government, making it difficult for him to achieve his purposes.

* Despite his intelligence, he had a vindictive streak, a hateful streak, that surfaced frequently and antagonized people,

* He became and then captivated in detail he never was able to clear a coherent public policy, foreign or domestic.

* Several failures during his term were not his fault, but nevertheless hurt him politically: inflation, the hostages, the blundered rescue attempt....

* The extravagant promises in his campaign by and large were not kept. Many could not have been kept and he should never have fabricated them.

* And [he exhibited some] examples of excruciatingly bad gustation, such as telling an insulting and unfunny joke [about Montezuma's revenge] at a dinner in Mexico Metropolis.

    To Brinkleys corrosive litany the political historian might add together that the public'south repudiation of Carter was in line with a broader post-Vietnam tendency: faced with myriad domestic and international quagmires, the people simply evicted their president--again. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and now "outsider" Jimmy Carter had all been either forced out by public outrage or rejected by the voters. Polls in 1980 may take rated Carter as the least popular president since Truman, but they also showed that Ronald Reagan was the to the lowest degree popular candidate to win the White Business firm since Truman. After Vietnam and Watergate, the power of Congress grew while that of the White Business firm dwindled. The presidency had become the "burn hydrant of the nation," as Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, had phrased it, if indelicately, during the 1980 campaign.

    The appeal of king-making-and-breaking fueled this next round of media reassessments. The same reporters who had helped propel peanut farmer "Jimmy Who?" from political obscurity to the Oval Office just because it was a good story turned on him merely days later his arrival in the nation's capital letter. When Carter actually causeless the role of citizen-president and acted on his disdain for bamboozlement--selling the presidential yacht Sequoia, carrying his ain luggage, abolishing limousine service for pinnacle White House staff, banning "Hail to the Primary"--the Washington press corps lit into him equally a sanctimonious hick. Information technology was too easy, what with the Christian moralizing, beatific grin, and treacly Georgia drawl, and journalists took to brutalizing the president'southward Calvinistic quirks largely for the fun of it. But Carter ignored their mockery and stuck to his moral certitude that a people's president had no call to be putting on airs. If the Protestant Reformation had taught Carter anything it was that pomp and circumstance were non smiled upon favorably past God. "By 1980 the press was very much confronting me," Carter maintained. "But I all the same idea I could beat Reagan."

    There were expert reasons why Carter was confident Ronald Reagan could be whipped equally easily equally Senator Edward Kennedy in the Democratic primaries. Once described as "an affable dunce" by Lyndon Johnson'due south secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, Reagan seemed an easy target. His daily rhetorical gaffes on the campaign trail on matters from the national security to the price of bread neatly offset Carter'southward piety equally something for the press to have fun with. It seemed impossible for Carter's team to believe that Americans would really elect a president who blamed trees for smog, who expressed doubts about development and favored teaching "creationism" in the public schools. It wasn't much of a stretch to assume that the idea of Hollywood'due south "Gipper," whom Carter portrayed every bit a kind of "mad bomber," with his finger on the nuclear button would give the public pause. On August eleven Reagan had a commanding lead of 27 percentage points in the polls, simply merely a week later "Comeback Carter" had trimmed information technology to vii points. "If Reagan keeps putting his foot in his mouth for another calendar week or so, we tin close down campaign headquarters," a cocky Pat Caddell snickered in a memo to the president.

    What the Carterites underestimated was the reward Reagan gained by operating from a strict ideological framework. His positions were always clear: if information technology was a tax, he was against it; if it was a new weapons organization, he was for it. Carter, on the other hand, was always mired in specifics, trying to explain why he was confronting the B-1 bomber but for the Stealth fighters, and it confused people.

    And Carter had problems beyond Reagan: he had secured only a pocket-sized portion of the organized-labor support that had backed Ted Kennedy, and he could non stanch the steady flow of liberals to John Anderson'south tertiary-party candidacy. Millions of anti-Reagan liberals lashed out at Carter for his "vapidity," as novelist East. L. Doctorow subsequently put it, which was allowing "the electorate to bring in the wolves on the right who had all the time been pacing back and forth fitfully, baying in the darkness across the army camp." As poet Allen Ginsberg noted, "Whatsoever soul with even a balmy streak of progressivism in their bones felt betrayed by Carter." The litany continued. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who ended upward voting for Carter, concluded that it was his economic advisers who doomed his hopes of reelection. "Carter was an admirable man," Galbraith maintained, "bailiwick to far from admirable advice on how to command inflation." To historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. the born-once again president was a "narcissistic loner" who should never have been elected in 1976 and whose operation in the Oval Function certainly didn't merit a second term. "Information technology was the only time in my life that I voted for anyone but a Democrat for president," Schlesinger admitted. "Carter'due south handling of the Iran hostage crisis and the economy had been disastrous."

    Even the Democrat'southward almost stalwart constituency--women--felt by and large betrayed that Carter had given only lukewarm support to the Equal Rights Amendment, opposed a ramble amendment to legalize ballgame, fired the popular Midge Costanza as presidential assistant, clashed with the indomitable Bella Abzug, and failed to mention women at all in his programme to stimulate the economy. Carter's cultural retardation certainly didn't help matters: feminists found information technology hard to believe that a born-again Southern Baptist known to accost women as "honey" and "beautiful" could be on their side. In fact Carter had appointed more than women, including a handful of genuine feminists, to federal agencies and the White House staff than any president in history. But in 1980 nobody--particularly liberals--felt like giving Jimmy Carter a suspension.

    Looking back at the 1980 election, it does seem possible that the Democrats could accept ironed out their interparty squabbles had the crisis in Iran been resolved. But fifty-two of the Americans who had been taken hostage when Iranian militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran exactly a twelvemonth before the election remained in captivity. And Walter Cronkite of the CBS Evening News and Ted Koppel of ABC's Nightline reminded their viewers of the deplorable fact daily.

    The crisis had erupted after Iran's exiled shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi arrived in New York on October 22, 1979, and was admitted to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center to be treated for cancer and gallstones. Under the influence of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini--an aged fundamentalist fanatic who had returned to Iran from Parisian exile in February 1979, hoping to launch an Islamic revolution throughout the Middle Eastward--the militants had seized the diplomatic mission to demand the shah's return to stand trial. Carter refused to extradite him, making for a long stalemate--and every day those l-two Americans remained hostage, the Carter administration looked more confused and ineffective. "To the public, Iran became a metaphor for everything," equally media adviser Gerald Rafshoon remarked years later on. For nearly a yr the crisis handcuffed the administration, which tried everything it could think of to finish the standoff: suspending oil imports, freezing Iranian avails, expelling Iranian diplomats, imposing economic sanctions, even conducting clandestine negotiations. Islamic republic of iran was looking more and more similar an Achilles' heel that would cripple the Democratic ticket on election solar day if a confront-saving remedy were not found--and presently. Carter had made a fatal mistake to state at the outset that his primary concern was bringing the hostages domicile alive. The Iranians used this to bribery the Carter assistants.

    Angry and desperate, Carter finally made the near unfortunate decision of his presidency: on April 24 he sent a team of commandos to attempt to rescue the hostages. Six C-130 transport planes carrying 90 commandos landed on a remote airstrip in Iran's Dasht-e Kavir desert. Eight helicopters were sent for the assault on the embassy, but only 6 made it to the rendezvous site and one of those developed hydraulic problems. The ground commander said the rescue could not be constructive with merely the remaining helicopters. Carter agreed to call up the rescue squad. As they were parting, however, i of the helicopters struck a ship airplane that was refueling on the ground, setting off a series of mishaps that would accept been comic had the consequence not been so tragic: eight American servicemen died, and four others were badly burned in the burn and explosions that ensued. The surviving commandos did get out of Iran in the remaining planes, but the militants later put the charred bodies of the other 8 commandos on display in the square of the occupied U.S. diplomatic mission. Carter went on Tv to disembalm the attempted rescue and its failure, taking full responsibleness for the debacle, which the New Republic dubbed "The Jimmy Carter Desert Classic."

    After the aborted rescue attempt, many believed that Carter had not only tarnished the nation'due south award but lost control of his own administration in the process. Critics condemned him for failing to mount a rescue operation sooner, for not putting enough military hardware into it once he did act, and then for retreating at the get-go sign of run a risk. "Let's face information technology," foreign policy sage Paul Nitze remarked years later, "Carter'due south rescue mission was a flop earlier it was even conceptualized."

    In June 1980 the shah, then in Cairo, died, prompting speculation that the crisis might end. Khomeini, notwithstanding, had other ideas, demanding the render of the shah's assets, the release of Iranian avails in the United States, and a U.Due south. pledge non to interfere in Iranian affairs. When that wasn't forthcoming, on September 9 the Iranian government informed Carter through the West German foreign minister, who was in Tehran, that Khomeini was ready to discuss a resolution of the earnest state of affairs. A breakthrough finally occurred on September 22, 1980, when Iraq and Iran went to war; suddenly Khomeini realized his nation could non take on two powerful enemies at in one case.

    Diplomatic headway toward resolving the crisis began inching forward hour by hour. Newspaper editorials and television commentaries insisted that Carter and his primary crisis negotiator, Deputy Secretary of Land Warren Christopher, had an "Oct Surprise" up their sleeves. Other media reports intimated that the Reagan squad was so worried the Carter administration would procure the release of the American captives earlier ballot solar day that Republican campaign manager William Casey had made a cloak-and-dagger deal with Iran to hold on to the hostages until afterwards Nov 4. Speculation aside, information technology was manifestly that a Carter failure to bring the hostages home alive would mitt Reagan the White House. "Unless the hostage yo-yo all of a sudden stops, the 1980 campaign is over," a New York Times editorial declared the Sunday before the election.

    Xv years after the fact, Carter said he still believed he could have been reelected if he had bombed Tehran until the hostages were released or incinerated along with the unabridged Iranian government. But that kind of ground-zero solution, favored by some Republicans, was too morally repugnant for Carter fifty-fifty to consider at the time. And then was selling arms to the ayatollah, equally Khomeini wanted, so Carter held his ground. "There were a lot of grumbles about my handling of the hostage crisis," he said looking dorsum, "merely not a single responsible politician offered a more realistic alternative."

    The Carter administration's strategy toward Iran had revolved around 2 fundamental objectives: protecting America's vital petroleum interests and finding the quickest possible route to the hostages' safe release. Just when asked past a college student in 1987 what i matter he would have washed differently as president, Carter simply half-jokingly replied, "I would have ordered one more helicopter."

    In the finish, of course, it's non entrada cliches or hostage situations or nuclear arms command that become presidents elected and reelected; information technology is, in James Carville's famous dictum, "the economic system, stupid"--and that was where Carter was well-nigh vulnerable. Ronald Reagan fabricated sure everyone knew it, too; the Great Communicator made an art of attacking the administration's economic weaknesses, painting Carter as a spendthrift liberal responsible for sending America into a "depression." When economists criticized Reagan's upgrading of the actual recession, he began telling audiences, "I'g told I tin't utilise the word depression. Well, I'll tell you the definition. A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; low is when you lose your job. Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."

    Writer John Updike captured the mood of the Carter years perfectly in his 1981 novel Rabbit Is Rich, set in 1979: "The people are out there getting frantic, they know the groovy American ride is ending. Gas lines at ninety-ix cents a gallon and ninety per centum of the stations to be airtight for the weekend. People are going wild, their dollars are going rotten." Merely days before the election Reagan played to Rabbit Angstrom's economic anxieties in a speech in Des Plaines, Illinois: "Jimmy Carter'south persistent double-digit inflation has made it virtually impossible for many families to properly feed and clothe their children. High unemployment has brought fearfulness of job loss as the silent visitor at the dinner tabular array each evening. And his nigh-tape involvement rates accept all but concluded the dream of buying a decent home for millions of American families."

    Carter'southward promises that his 2nd term would bring greater productivity and higher employment through revenue enhancement cuts gave voters scant hope. Carter tried to showcase on the campaign trail his success at deregulating transportation industries, merely few working-form voters were impressed. Shortly before election day, a poll including such traditional Democratic constituencies as blue-collar workers and inner-urban center residents showed that 31 pct of Americans had concluded that the economy would exist irretrievably damaged if Carter remained in the White Firm. "The reason for Carter's horrible failure in economic policy is plain plenty," Schlesinger wrote during the 1980 campaign. "He is non a Democrat--at least in anything more than the Grover Cleveland sense of the word."

    When information technology was all over, pundits reviewing Carter'south White Firm tenure applauded him most for what he didn't do. In a January 10, 1981, commodity entitled "Not to Worry, Jimmy," New York Times humorist Russell Baker imagined high-school students in the year 2081 preparing for a test on twentieth-century U.S. presidents by request their teacher to tell them what Jimmy Carter had achieved in the White Business firm. "I fancy the teacher will have to reflect a minute before maxim something similar, `Well, he really didn't do anything dreadful at all,'" Baker wrote. "For the era of 1961-1981 that is not a bad detect from the history critics."

    This sentiment was articulated fifty-fifty more succinctly by Carter spoken communication-writer Hendrik Hertzberg, who used to tell his liberal friends that "Jimmy Carter is the first president of my adult life who is not criminally insane." Both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had continued the war in Vietnam even though they knew it could not be won, just to save political face with the electorate. These presidents also taped assembly' phone conversations, sponsored covert assassinations by the CIA away, and harassed whatever number of citizens, including not bad ceremonious rights leaders such every bit Martin Luther Male monarch Jr. and Ralph Abernathy. Even the relatively benign Gerald Ford had sent 18 U.Southward. servicemen to their deaths in the Mayaguez incident, all in the name of patriotism. "It is wrong to impale people for no reason other than political gain or political fear," Hertzberg explained. "Jimmy Carter never did anything like that."

    Presidential scholar James David Barber made a similar assessment of Carter'south tenure: "It was 4 years without state of war or social unrest. Because our recent tape, that is no modest achievement." In other words, at all-time Carter was damned with faint praise by Due east Coast opinion makers and students of presidential politics.

    Public opinion paralleled that of the experts. In the final Gallup Poll on Carter'due south performance equally president, only 3 percent of respondents thought history would regard him as an outstanding" president, while 46 percent expected him to exist rated "below average" or "poor." Where Carter'due south immediate predecessor, Gerald Ford, had left part with an blessing rating of 53 per centum, Carter could muster simply an anemic 34 percent. Dismissing the zeitgeist problem, Lyndon Johnson'due south White Business firm counsel Harry McPherson lay the blame squarely on the human being: Carter "never displayed that `burn down in the abdomen' quality that people want in a politico.... This is not the stuff of history."

    Throughout the campaign, whenever Reagan asked the powerful question, "Are you lot meliorate off now than you were iv years agone?" virtually Americans answered with a resounding no. Every bit McPherson pointed out, Carter ignored the blue-collar, populist resentment that had sprung up toward large government, affirmative action, the welfare land, and Keynesian economic science, which advocated government spending to create jobs. A principal at reading the pulse of the nation, Reagan--who on the entrada trail had once referred to Carter as "a little schmuck"--understood, embodied, and benefited from the mail-Vietnam hunger for a renewed sense of America's greatness and global mission. "Reaganomics was a fraud," Carter would tell Time magazine in Oct 1982, "merely [Reagan] is a persuasive speaker, and the American people bought information technology."

    The day after the election, Carter held a meeting with reporters to assert that he wanted a "good, positive relationship" with Reagan--but the president-elect turned out to accept other ideas. In gimmicky memory only the celebrated animosity betwixt Truman and Eisenhower subsequently the 1952 election reached the level of bitterness between Carter and Reagan.

    This was hardly surprising--Reagan had won the White Firm in part by pounding on Carter'due south approach to foreign diplomacy, such as his human rights advocacy, his incomparably strict Soviet grain embargo, and his boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow--the latter two levied against Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev for ordering the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. All in all, Reagan considered Carter "also soft." While Carter spoke of decision-making the cold state of war proliferation of nuclear weapons as "the most important single issue in this campaign," Reagan scarcely mentioned information technology. And where Carter championed the Panama Canal Treaties that would relinquish U.S. control of the passageway to the Panamanians in Dec 1999, no influential American politician was as vehemently against the notion as Reagan. Even surprising pleas from Reagan's right-wing friend John Wayne to support the legislation for the sake of hemispheric harmony had no effect on the president-elect's opposition.

    In the same vein, Reagan also ridiculed the Camp David accords, which Carter considered his greatest presidential legacy. In September 1978 Carter had brought together Israeli prime government minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat to renew the stalled Middle East peace talks at Camp David, where the two leaders hammered out two documents--a Framework for Peace in the Eye East and a Framework for the Decision of a Peace Treaty. In March 1979 Begin and Sadat formally signed the unprecedented peace treaty; Reagan, with the Jewish vote in mind, claimed Carter had gotten too cozy with the Arabs.

    On the campaign trail, Reagan besides chastised Carter for developing the Salt 2 treaty, which would take limited the number of offensive nuclear weapons stockpiled in both the U.s. and the Soviet Union. Met with stark opposition past conservatives in Congress, the treaty was never sent to the full Senate for ratification later the Soviet Marriage invaded Afghanistan. The criticisms didn't stop there: disgusted that Carter had connected Richard Nixon's piece of work and normalized relations with China, Reagan made a series of entrada statements near the need to restore "official" dealings with Taiwan--the unsaid message being that if elected president, he would repudiate recognition of China. (In fact, he promised to plow the People's Republic into "a country of laundromats.")

    The irony of Reagan's attacks on Carter's strange policy was that so much of it were but continuing ideas and efforts that had been initiated past Carter's Republican predecessors. The SALT procedure, for example, picked up where Gerald Ford had left off in Vladivostok. The Panama Canal Treaties grew out of a negotiating framework begun past Lyndon Johnson and resumed by Richard Nixon in 1973. The dramatic transformation in Washington'south relations with Beijing, symbolized by the official recognition and exchange of ambassadors that took place under Carter, had been set in motion by President Nixon's trip to China in 1972. Carter's human rights program built on the "Final Deed" of the Helsinki Accords. And even in the Heart Eastward, after having failed to organize a general peace briefing in Geneva, the Carter administration had returned to Kissinger's stride-by-step approach, including some very productive shuttle affairs in the form of Carter'due south walks back and forth between the Military camp David cabins occupied by Menachem Begin and Anwar al-Sadat.

    If one had to sum up Carter's leadership fashion in a phrase, it would exist "handson applied science." Among Carter's greatest flaws as president--and one the Republicans exploited without mercy--was his excessive micromanagerial way. For better or worse, Carter was a control freak who wanted to know exactly what was happening around him at all times. The Panama Canal Treaties, for case, probably would never have been executed without the president'south direct involvement in everything from seeing that CBS anchor Walter Cronkite pronounced Panamanian names correctly on the evening news to making sure that dictator Omar Torrijos was treated as a political equal. Carter may accept wanted to be a great chief executive, Republicans argued, but he was blind to the fact that great presidents are so because they build great teams. The charge was valid: Americans had put an obsessive micromanager in the White House. Uninterested in assembling a dynamic squad of surrogates, Carter wanted to do it all himself from beginning to end. He would be a i-man ring; there would be none of Eisenhower'southward "subconscious-manus" advisers, FDR's "brain trust," or JFK's "best and brightest."

    Instead, Carter approached the presidency similar a family farmer: plow the fields, spread the fertilizer, harvest the crop--and proceed an eye on every detail the whole way. Y'all hire assist, of course, but sharecroppers, migrants, or day-wagers simply don't accept the aforementioned stake in the piece of work every bit the farmer; a good harvest depends on his devotion and God's will. Just while that philosophy may work down on the farm, it is hardly sensible for governing the world's strongest nation. For proof i demand only compare the results achieved by easily-on farmer Carter with those of "bear witness me my mark" actor Ronald Reagan.

    The "Gipper" from Hollywood recognized the importance of star power to box office success, but he also understood that there would be no flick without a director, producer, cinematographer, makeup creative person, sound engineer, and scores of other experts. Still, in that location was a certain advantage in being the leading homo in the White House: you could stay in a higher place the fray while Cabinet staff and members scurried about to make you look good. The motto of Carter's Oval Office had been Truman's The Buck Stops Here; Reagan's was Ignorance Is Elation, as the Islamic republic of iran-Contra affair demonstrated. Where Carter stood at the podium dryly preaching austerity, Reagan divisional onstage waving the American flag, delighted to be starring in his greatest function. Carter may have known all the nitty-gritty details of every policy, but Reagan understood intuitively what the modern American presidency demanded, and information technology wasn't facts and figures. Image mattered fifty-fifty more than outcomes: Reagan ran on slashing government, simply the presidential transition that ushered him into office was one of the biggest and priciest in American history--because the public preferred a picayune pomp to the sight of a president toting his ain luggage down Pennsylvania Avenue.

    Given the vigorous policy disagreements between the outgoing and incoming presidents, it was no surprise that Carter decided to devote much of the xi-week interim to making sure Reagan could not undo his assistants'south accomplishments. Nevertheless, out of a sense of obligation Carter invited Reagan to the Oval Office on November twenty for a detailed briefing on twenty top-hush-hush subjects, importantly national security and nuclear policy. Carter discussed the earnest crisis, Nicaragua and El salvador, and the war between Islamic republic of iran and Iraq. "Reagan listened without comment while I covered each point," Carter recalled years after. "Some of [the issues] were very sensitive, involving such matters as the management of our nuclear forces in fourth dimension of attack on our nation." Much of the ninety-minute briefing focused on Poland, where the Solidarity movement was making the Soviets uneasy. Both men agreed that stern U.S. warnings should exist issued constantly, and that any Soviet invasion of Poland would have to be met head-on by a U.S. war machine counteroffensive. Richard 5. Allen, soon to be Reagan'south national security adviser, used the opportunity to inquire Carter to postpone selling AWACS shipping to Saudi Arabia until Reagan and his team had fourth dimension to consider the ramifications of the deal. The president agreed.

    According to Republican transition managing director Ed Meese, who would soon become chaser full general, Reagan left the meeting impressed by Carter's "graciousness" and "mastery of detail." Although he took few notes, Reagan came abroad concerned nearly a possible Soviet invasion of Poland and convinced that information technology would be all-time to let the Carter administration extract America from the Iran hostage crunch by themselves before his inauguration. After the briefing Reagan, Meese, and Allen reviewed the essence of what Carter had said in a private, xl-5-minute coming together. "Reagan recalled verbatim everything Carter had told us," Meese remembered, defending his old boss against accusations from the Carter military camp that the president-elect had been inattentive. "He didn't take notes because he didn't need to." Meese believed that Reagan had felt distressing for Carter at the White House that day--that the Gipper was just not a good hater. "Though he profoundly disagreed with Carter on policy problems, Reagan harbored no mean-spiritedness toward Carter," Meese insisted. "It'south normally the loser that is full of sour grapes."

    GOP adviser Richard Darman, who subsequently became President George Bush-league's manager of the Office of Management and Upkeep, later laughed about the awkwardness of the Carter-Reagan transition coming together. "We've both been governors," Darman remembered Carter telling Reagan, like a concerned Sunday school teacher. "But allow me tell you--it'south unlike in the White Business firm. The day begins early. A CIA officeholder briefs you at 7:00 A.1000." Co-ordinate to Darman, at that moment Reagan smiled and interrupted, "Well, he's sure going to have to look a long while for me." Carter merely stared at the president-elect, unamused.

    Personal styles bated, there was one issue that cropped upwards during the transition on which Carter and Reagan did see eye to heart: a pressing man rights violation in South korea. Carter's personal devotion to private homo rights matters had e'er made him a rarity among politicians, merely the example of Kim Dae Jung, a political opposition leader who had been sentenced to death on charges of sedition, defenseless the attention of the president-elect besides. At Carter's request, Reagan ordered Allen to send discussion to S Korean president Chun Doo Hwan that relations between Washington and Seoul would be "strained" should Kim be executed. The tactic worked: Kim'due south life was spared, and in the bargain Carter finally constitute something positive to say about Reagan. When Kim Dae Jung visited America in December 1982, he contacted Carter personally to give thanks him.

    Apart from that moment of cooperation, however, the transition was marked by an exchange of barbs betwixt the Carter and Reagan camps, much to the delight of the media, In addition to all the policy disagreements, a stir was created over Nancy Reagan's "gentle hint," reported to Rosalynn Carter past seasoned UPI White House correspondent Helen Thomas, that the Carters movement into Blair Business firm a few weeks before inauguration day and then Mrs. Reagan could redecorate the executive mansion. With her swank California tastes for red dresses and David Hockney paintings, Nancy Reagan looked downwardly her nose at Rosalynn Carter, such a drab bumpkin whose White House was and then, well, beige. One tabloid reported that the Reagans' interior designer from Los Angeles couldn't expect to "get the smell of catfish out of the White House." Nancy Reagan apace called the First Lady with assurances that these remarks had been taken out of context. But the very next mean solar day the president-elect'due south son Ronald, a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, told reporters that he would refuse to milkshake President Carter's hand at his father's inauguration considering the Georgian had "the morals of a serpent" and "would accept sold his mother to get reelected."

    To attack Carter's morals was mean-spirited and ridiculous. A deeply ethical man full of practiced intentions, Carter could have bombed Tehran to stay in the White House, but his Christian belief in the sanctity of life wouldn't let him. In fact, although his critics saw him as self-righteous, Carter was the most principled American president since Harry Truman--and nowhere was his morality on clearer display than in his insistence that human rights be a cardinal principle of global governance. "Because we are all costless, we tin can never exist indifferent to the fate of liberty elsewhere.... Our delivery to human rights must be absolute," Carter alleged in his inaugural address. And these weren't just pretty words; human being rights became the authentication of his assistants, or as he put information technology, "the soul of our foreign policy." Equally he prepared to leave office, it was little wonder that Carter wanted his work for human rights to exist remembered higher up all else.

    As president, Carter had been realistic enough to recognize that human being rights policy could never be completely pure and adept, and thus could non be "based on a blind adherence to consistency." But at the same time he believed that the United states should denounce, with varying degrees of vehemence, absolutism wherever it held sway, particularly in the class of regime-sanctioned kidnappings, torture, and murder. Thus Carter became the get-go American president since Woodrow Wilson to try actively to reform repressive regimes in other nations. "This does not mean that we tin conduct our strange policy past rigid moral maxims," Carter stated in May 1977. "We live in a world that is imperfect, and which will ever exist imperfect; a world that is complex and confused. I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We take no illusion that changes will come up easily."

    Presidential moralizing during the cold state of war was often written off as just a variation on the usual hard-nosed anti-Soviet rhetoric. Just for Carter--whose soul still sang "We Shall Overcome" in spiritual sympathy with the civil rights movement that had inspired the Supreme Court to smash the nation's shameful Jim Crow laws--it was a guiding principle. Although information technology's true that as president he pressed harder for homo rights on the Soviet Union, Argentina, and Chile than he did on such stalwart American allies every bit South Korea, the Philippines, and the shah's Iran, Carter's arroyo to world affairs did focus across the lath on international human rights and the importance of building democracy. Under Carter'due south direct orders the Agency for International Development and the United states Information Agency began making human rights a priority in every project. Carter cemented this thrust in early 1977 by establishing a State Department bureau of human rights headed by Assistant Secretary Patricia Derian, a well-known Mississippi civil rights activist.

    Under Carter, human rights considerations became the litmus test for deciding which governments--left- or right-fly--received American aid and political support. The State Department was ordered to certificate the human rights standards of all governments receiving American strange aid and to make its almanac assessments public. This meant that some of the rightist regimes that had grown used to getting substantial economic and military assist from the United States, including El Salvador, Republic of guatemala, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia, suffered major cutbacks. The Carter administration'southward human rights policy hitting hardest in Latin America, where U.Southward. war machine assist was slashed from $210 million in 1977 to only $54 million in 1979.

    If Carter's new emphasis on man rights bolstered America's credibility in criticizing the Soviet bloc countries, it also undermined such traditional anti-communist allies as Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza, a West Bespeak graduate and longtime friend of conservative Americans, who imprisoned those who dared disagree with his authoritarian policies. In 1979 Somoza was overthrown in a pop defection led past the left-wing Sandinistas. "The virtue of the Carter [assistants] so far equally liberal democratic internationalism was concerned," political scientist Tony Smith wrote in America's Mission, "was its unambiguous conviction that authoritative governments were poor custodians of American security interests abroad."

    In essence, the Carter administration had championed a post-cold-war strange policy earlier the cold war was over. Predictably, this policy--dubbed "resurgent Wilsonianism" by Smith--met with staunch resistance from many of the more than hawkish Washington institution types. In 1979 Georgetown University professor and Reagan's future ambassador to the Un Jeane Kirkpatrick derided the Carter administration's human rights policy as not only too soft on the Soviet Marriage but too difficult on what she termed "moderately repressive regimes" on the right. But then her offset deed as UN ambassador was to meet with the Argentine military machine junta that had been responsible for the disappearance of 9,000 citizens, children and adults alike; she followed up by calling on Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Kirkpatrick wasn't an anti-human-rights loose cannon: the first foreign leaders invited to the Reagan White House were Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and South Korea'due south Chun Doo Hwan. "This was a deliberate betoken sent out by the Reagan administration that the so-called Carter human rights era was over," Carter complained.

    Not everyone mourned its passing. In fact, some foreign leaders thought Carter's focus on human rights had been naive all along; Due west High german Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, for example, said the American president had acted like an evangelist formulating "policy from the pulpit." Carter'south relationships with other First World European leaders such as Valery Giscard d'Estaing of France and Margaret Thatcher of the Britain were equally frosty. It is telling that his closest leader-to-leader friendships developed with such non-Europeans as Egypt's Anwar al-Sadat, People's republic of china's Deng Xiaoping, Japan's Masayoshi Ohira, and Panama's Omar Torrijos. Dissimilar the Europeans, all these leaders flattered Carter, stressing the importance of personalities. In any case, Carter'southward human rights calendar never quite worked as a coherent strategy, largely because he failed to comprehend that it was incommunicable to "combine support for our more authoritative allies and friends with the effective promotion of homo rights within their countries."

    By the finish of Carter'southward term and in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, human rights were eclipsing on the American foreign policy screen. Ronald Reagan had promised that if elected he would usher back in the traditional cold war trinity that dated to Harry Truman: containment, realpolitik, and anti-communism nether the imprint of "peace through strength." All the same no matter what Reagan said on the campaign trail, Carter'due south human being rights policy had given the United States moral credibility around the world--no small feat afterward Vietnam--while putting the Soviet Matrimony on the defensive by exposing the Kremlin equally "evil," just similar Reagan said. Due to his Christian conventionalities in redemption--and the power of positive thinking--Carter was prodemocracy, non anti-communist. He wanted to wean Russians away from communism and toward the Bible.

    In sharp contrast to the general public's perception, human being rights champion Jimmy Carter was no pacifist. It should non be forgotten that the only twentieth-century American president who had a longer armed services career than Carter's in the U.S. Navy--from 1943 to 1954--was four-star full general Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme Allied commander in World War II. Carter abhorred only the unnecessary employ of military force, and as president he worked to modernize the armed forces, not weaken them. "I'chiliad a armed forces human being past grooming and background, and the statistics are there," he pointed out years later to rebut Reagan's claim that his predecessor had left America's armed forces in shambles. After all, it was the hard-line Carter administration defense policies Reagan inherited and built on that led to the end of the common cold war. "I believe historians and political observers alike have failed to appreciate the importance of Jimmy Carter's contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Spousal relationship and the cease of the Cold War," Bush assistants CIA director Robert Chiliad. Gates has maintained. "He was the first president during the Cold War to challenge publicly and consistently the legitimacy of Soviet dominion at abode. Carter's homo rights policy ... past the testimony of countless Soviet and East European dissidents and future democratic leaders challenged the moral authority of the Soviet government and gave American sanction and back up to those resisting that authorities." Martin Walker, U.S. bureau chief of Britain's Guardian, in his book The Cold War (1994) laments the fact that a mythology has been created that "Reagan arrived to find a West half-disarmed and thoroughly demoralized, and wrought a great transformation." As Walker made clear, this Tory view of America'due south later on cold war history was nonsense, as the facts bore out. Carter strengthened and modernized the U.S. military during a very difficult mail-Vietnam War period, when the Pentagon was unpopular.

    Just months later he became president, Carter began badgering the NATO allies to rearm; in fact he demanded solid commitment from every member to increase their defence force budgets by 3 percent a year. When the Soviets started deploying SS-20 missiles, information technology was Carter who countered by proposing that NATO prowl and Pershing missiles be based in Western Europe. And far from slashing American armed forces in Europe, Carter deployed an additional 35,000 troops to boost the American NATO contingent above 300,000, which more than compensated for the cuts the Nixon and Ford administrations had made under detente. Besides modernizing NATO, Carter approved deployment of both nuclear prowl missiles and the Pershing II IRBMs--intermediate range nuclear forces--in Europe.

    Carter had no intention of appeasing the Soviets; in fact his very concentration on human rights was in function intended to weaken the Kremlin. Where Gerald Ford had refused to welcome exiled Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the White House, Carter had embraced political dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and Andrei Sakharov with open arms. Perhaps the most moving document on display at the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta is the Feb 5, 1977, note he sent to Sakharov: "Human rights is the central business concern of my administration," Carter wrote. "You lot may residuum bodacious that the American people and our government volition go along our firm commitment to promote respect for human being rights not only in our country, but also abroad." This epistle, which the Nobel Prize--winning physicist proudly waved in President Leonid Brezhnev'southward face, prompted the Soviet leader to pronounce Sakharov an enemy of the country. Equally Robert Gates noted, "Whether isolated and fiddling-known Soviet dissident or earth-famous Soviet scientist, Carter's policy encouraged them to press on."

    More to the point, it was Carter--not Reagan--who first exploited the homo rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords in social club to let movements such as Czechoslovakia'south Lease 77, Poland'due south Solidarity, and the Helsinki Scout groups in East Germany and the Soviet Wedlock to flourish. Czech Commonwealth president Vaclav Havel went then far equally to claim that Carter's human being rights agenda and so undermined the legitimacy and self-confidence of the Warsaw Pacts chieftains that dissidents across Eastern Europe regained the hope that carried them on to democracy. Lech Walesa claimed that information technology was Carter'southward tough December 3, 1980, statement--which warned the Soviets about the consequences of their military building on the Smoothen border--that sent a signal that, dissimilar Czechoslovakia in 1968, the The states would non carelessness "anti-Socialist" forces in Poland. And that wasn't all: Carter's man rights policy also created an surroundings that immune 118,591 Soviet Jews to immigrate during his presidency, and encouraged Republic of indonesia alone to release some 30,000 political prisoners from jail. Under Carter's direct order, the CIA began covertly smuggling into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe literature virtually democracy and books similar Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Perchance even more inspired, Carter had the CIA infiltrate the Soviet Union with thousands of books promoting the heritage of ethnic minorities, All in all, the Carter administration's insistence on man rights, no thing how inconsistent in practice, saved thousands of lives and put the Soviets on the defensive to kick. And, earlier long, Soviet-style communism collapsed more or less peacefully within and without, thanks in part to Carter's promotion of human rights.

    Few would argue that Carter had not made a sincere endeavor to coexist with the Soviets--and Reagan claimed that this pusillanimity made it possible for the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. Still that brutal incursion proved a fatal miscalculation on Brezhnev'due south role and the final turning point in the cold war. The Soviet Union's deportment in Afghanistan revealed what it had been all along: truly expansionistic and utterly unconcerned with human rights. Subsequently that, whoever took the harder line against the Soviets was jump to look better to the American people, and during the 1980 presidential campaign Carter had pledged to increase defense spending by a full v percent, compared with Reagan's proposed vii percent hike. This difference hardly qualified Carter as a pigeon. Meanwhile, it was Carter who first imposed economic sanctions on the Soviets, outraging U.Due south. farmers and businessmen; Reagan would continue punishing Moscow with economic measures.

    Thus as Reagan prepared to take office, information technology was far easier for him--thanks to Carter--to rally a consensus backside his strident policies for winning the cold war. Carter tried peaceful coexistence with the Kremlin and had been betrayed. The stupidity of the Soviet invasion of Transitional islamic state of afghanistan turned Carter into a hawk. Every bit journalist Martin Walker afterward wrote, "Americans should call up the steel beneath the gentleness; the real historical legacy of Jimmy Carter is [equally] 1 of the men who won the Common cold War." Yet it was the compassion of the homo rights program that had freed political prisoners across Latin America and the Soviet Matrimony that Carter wanted to be his lasting legacy--and that is what he set his mind to upon leaving the White House.

(C) 1998 Douglas Brinkley All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-670-88006-X

livelyfoused.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/brinkley-unfinished.html

Share this post