Jimmy Carter reconsidered
Tyler Cowen didn’t like him. George Will didn’t like him. Ken Layne made me laugh:
Aren’t we always interested in the history that came right before we appear?
Delta Airlines has not one but two documentaries about Jimmy Carter available to view: Carterland and Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President. (Do these movies make money? Who is funding them?) I was able to watch most of both of them (without sound, with subtitles) on recent transcontinental travels. Rock and Roll President was particularly interesting, for example how Carter did not turn on Gregg Allman even after he was busted for and then testified in a case involving pharmaceutical cocaine, or the role John Wayne played in helping the Panama Canal treaty to pass
All this has me to prepared to somewhat revise my view of Carter’s presidency. His inability to “do something” about the Iranian hostage crisis was because he was unwilling to start a war or kill a lot of innocent Iranians. Though his temperament may not have suited him to win reelection, he improved life in the United States, made a lot of difficult choices on tough problems, avoided war (Panama could’ve been one). His presidency was devoted to peace, and helped heal the United States.
The contradictions are endless but was it not good for us, in that moment, to have a prayerful man of peace and leadership that reached for the spiritual?
Similar to the way Gerald Ford was later honored for his courage (?) in pardoning Richard Nixon, should Jimmy Carter be honored for absorbing political consequences of hard decisions and hard efforts that kept the peace?
At the Carter Library the fact that Carter never dropped a bomb or fired a missile during his presidency is highlighted. He’s the last president of whom that can be said. The American people don’t seem to want that.
Perhaps his story is a Christian story, of the martyr, the saint, who suffers as he absorbs our sins. A traveling preacher who came to town.
Perhaps all post-1945 US presidents should be judged on one standard only: whether there was a nuclear war on their watch. We must give Carter an A!
In his Miller Center interview, Jimmy Carter notes several times that the governor of Georgia is very powerful – more powerful, relative to the legislature, than the president is to Congress:
Fenno
Mr. President, I just wanted to follow up one question about the energy preparation. In your book you note that when you came to present the energy package, you were shocked, I think the word was shocked, by finding out how many committees and subcommittees this package would have to go through.
Carter
Yes.
Fenno
I guess my question is in the preparation that you went through, didn’t Congressmen tell you what you were going to find? Why were you shocked?
Carter
Well, I don’t know if I expressed it accurately in the book. I don’t think it was just one moment when all of a sudden somebody came in the Oval Office and said there was more than one committee in the Congress that has got to deal with energy. I had better sense than to labor under that misapprehension. But I think when Tip O’Neill and I sat down to go over the energy package route through the House, I think Jim Wright was there also, there were seventeen committee or subcommittee chairmen with whom we would have to deal. That was a surprise to me, maybe shock is too strong a word. But in that session or immediately after that, Tip agreed as you know to put together an ad hoc committee, an omnibus committee, and to let [Thomas Ludlow] Ashley do the work.
That, in effect, short-circuited all those fragmented committees. The understanding was, after the committee chairmen objected, that when the conglomerate committee did its work, then the bill would have to be resubmitted, I believe to five different, major committees. There were some tight restraints on what they could do in the way of amendment. So that process was completed as you know between April and August, an unbelievable legislative achievement.
In the Senate though, there were two major committees and there had to be five different bills and unfortunately, Scoop Jackson was on one side and Russell Long was on the other. They were personally incompatible with each other and they had a different perspective as well. Scoop had been in the forefront of those who were for environmental quality and that sort of thing, and Russell represented the oil interest. That was one of the things that caused us a problem. But we were never able to overcome the complexities in the Senate. In the House, we did short circuit the process. I never realized before I got to Washington, to add one more sentence, how fragmented the Congress was and how little discipline there was, and how little loyalty there would be to an incumbent Democratic President. All three of those things were a surprise to me.
Truman
Were those in sharp contrast to the experience in the Georgia legislature?
Carter
Well, there’s no Democratic-Republican alignment of the Georgia legislature. It’s all Democrats, and therefore, there is no party loyalty. You had to deal with individual members. The Governor is really much more powerful in Georgia than the President is in the United States. As Georgia Governor, I had line-item veto, for instance, in the appropriations bills. And, as you also know, in Georgia and in Washington, most of the major initiatives come from the executive branch. There’s very seldom a major piece of legislation that ever originates in the legislature. I think that there is a parallel relationship between the independent legislature confronting an independent Governor or the independent Congress confronting an independent President. At the state level, the Governor, at least in Georgia, is much more powerful than the President in Washington.
Neustadt
Did you have the same kind of subcommittee structure?
Carter
No. It’s not nearly so complicated.
Neustadt
That helps you too.
Carter
The seniority and the guarding of turf and so forth is not nearly so much of a pork barrel arrangement in the state legislature. Also, the Georgia legislature only serves forty days a year. They come and do their work in a hurry, and then they go home.
Truman
A simple legislature doesn’t have much staff either.
Carter
They are growing rapidly in staff, but nothing like the Congress. And you don’t have the insidious, legal bribery in the Georgia legislature that is so pervasive in the Congress. That’s a problem that’s becoming much more serious and I don’t believe that it’s going to be corrected until we have a major, national scandal in the Congress. I think it’s much worse than most people realize.
The reviews all focus on the presidency but Carter was an extremely effective governor of Georgia.
wish I could read this redacted story:
The ex-presidency of Carter is often cited as admirable, the work on guinea worm is undeniable. James Baker contacted Carter frequently. He helped convince Daniel Ortega to leave office. But then:
In the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, Carter’s relationship with President Bush turned sour. Carter felt passionately that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait wasn’t worth going to war over, even though Bush cited the Carter Doctrine in justifying it. The former president said so publicly, then took matters a fateful step further, writing each member of the UN Security Council and urging them to vote against the United States on the resolution.
That is wild! Brian Mulroney told the Bush White House about it and they were unsurprisingly pissed!
The Carter/ Bill Clinton relationship is funny, Alter says Carter’s freelance riffing with North Korea made Clinton apoplectic. Bill and Jimmy, could make an almost not boring play.
Maybe I will stake out the take that Carter was a great president and a mixed bag as an ex-president. Could be fun!
Consider this:
In 2016, the squabbling children of Martin Luther King Jr. needed Carter to mediate. They were at one another’s throats over their family’s possessions, including an old pool table. Brothers Marty and Dexter teamed up to sue sister Bernice, who had possession of their father’s Bible (used by Barack Obama to take the oath of office) and his Nobel Peace Prize. Carter’s approach was the same as at Camp David: both sides would agree at the end of the process to one document. This time, the document went through six or seven drafts, with the parties finally agreeing that Carter’s decisions on what would be sold or kept were to be final. One night Carter would be hard on Bernice; the next, on Dexter or Marty. Carter finally determined — and a judge soon ratified that Marty, as chairman of the estate, had control of the Bible and the Nobel, but they would be displayed at the King Center in Atlanta, not sold.
The one document method might be something practical we can all learn from Jimmy Carter. I haven’t felt like time spent studying this American original has been wasted. The more I learn about him the more complex he becomes.
(photo of Dolly and Jimmy borrowed from Parton News instagram)
