Nevertheless critics still disregard the breadth of Carter’s accomplishments and accuse him of being an indecisive president. That is simply not true; if anything, he was too bold and determined in attacking too many challenges that other presidents had sidestepped or ignored, such as energy, the Panama Canal, or the Middle East, while nevertheless achieving lasting results. He reflected that if he had concentrated on a “few major issues, it would have given an image of accomplishment.”4 The art of presidential compromise rests on the ability to obtain at least half of what the administration proposes to Congress and then to claim victory. President Carter was maladroit at this political sleight of hand largely because he was uncomfortable with compromising what seemed to him so obviously the right course.
He was also unable to develop the close relationships necessary to persuade others who might not fully share his principles, despite having weekly Democratic congressional leadership breakfasts without fail when he was in town, and many with the Republican leadership. Yet because of his vision and determination, he actually came away with much of what he wanted, while obtaining it in a manner that made it appear he had caved to pressure and lost.
One reason his substantial victories are discounted is that he sought such broad and sweeping measures that what he gained in return often looked paltry. Winning was often ugly: He dissipated the political capital that presidents must constantly nourish and replenish for the next battle. He was too unbending while simultaneously tackling too many important issues without clear priorities, venturing where other presidents felt blocked because of the very same political considerations that he dismissed as unworthy of any president. As he told me, “Whenever I felt an issue was important to the country and needed to be addressed, my inclination was to go ahead and do it.”5
In advancing what is admittedly a revisionist view of the Carter presidency, my perspective benefits not only from the passage of time but from my White House position as his domestic-policy director. I have admired him since I first worked as his policy adviser during his successful 1970 campaign for governor of my home state of Georgia, as well as in his presidential campaign, and I was proud to serve him as one of his closest presidential aides. I was at his side as he made the kinds of decisions that only presidents are called upon to make, where there are often no good options. I was only one of a handful of aides with direct phone lines to the president in my office and home. Every domestic and economic issue passed across my desk, as well as every major piece of legislation. In foreign policy I was kept informed of many decisions even when I was not directly involved. And I was significantly involved in the Middle East, particularly relations with Israel, as a back channel, and with American Jewry, stemming from the president’s peace initiatives, as well as with the sanctions arising from the Iranian hostage crisis, and those against the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan.
Inside the White House I was renowned—or, more accurately, the butt of jokes—for my yellow legal pads. There were more than one hundred of them, over five thousand pages, on which I took detailed, often verbatim notes of every meeting I attended and all my telephone conversations, not with the thought of writing a book but as a discipline to stay on top of the issues that it was my job to coordinate. The pads have been essential in writing this book. Over more than three decades, I also conducted more than 350 interviews of almost every major figure in the administration and many outside with a special perspective, including five with Carter himself, two with Rosalynn Carter, and several with Vice President Walter Mondale. I have also been granted access to now-declassified documents at the Carter Presidential Library, including my private memos as well as those of other key officials. These newly released documents also include the daily Evening Reports from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Weekly Reports from National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.
This level of access, at once both wide and intimate, gives this book its authority. I knew from the outset that it could be taken seriously only if I also accepted the responsibility of telling an unflinchingly honest story of Carter and his administration. I have not shirked analyzing the failures and limitations of his presidency (including my own), secure in the knowledge that they are already better known than his lasting accomplishments. The risk is that skeptics may conclude this only confirms their impressions of Jimmy Carter. On the contrary, I count showing the negatives along with the positives as a sign of my credibility as both participant and author of a book that is part memoir and part an effort to set the historical record right.
But even with Carter’s limitations, I refuse to let the mistakes overwhelm the achievements. We still benefit from his vision of the challenges faced by our country and the world; from his willingness to confront and deal directly with them regardless of the political cost; and finally from his essential integrity. He gained the presidency in a post-Vietnam and post-Watergate era of cynicism about government with a personal pledge that “I will never lie to you”—a promise that he worked hard to keep, and is now more important than ever in a new era of “fake news” and post-truth political rhetoric.
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It is impossible to understand Carter’s term in the Oval Office without appreciating the nature of the 1970s. It was an epic period of change in the American political landscape. The centrist political consensus of the postwar era was unraveling under the combined pressures of a ruinous decade of the Great Stagflation and military defeat in Vietnam—indelibly punctuated by the ignominious image of an American helicopter abandoning the U.S. Embassy with the fall of Saigon in 1975, as desperate South Vietnamese struggled to board their last lifeline to escape the victorious North Vietnamese troops. Jimmy Carter told me there was a personal element: He saw his son Jack, who volunteered to serve in Vietnam, come home on leave, “and was not honored or welcomed, but derided.”6
At home, social norms were in flux with the rise of the consumer and environmental movements, women’s rights, gay rights, abortion rights, and affirmative action for black Americans. This led to a counterrevolution of Nixon’s “silent majority” and the rise of the Christian evangelical movement as a potent political force, which Ronald Reagan skillfully made a key part of his winning political coalition, and which remains ascendant today.
Abroad, the Cold War was raging, with aggressive Soviet expansionism, especially in Africa, through Cuban proxies; support for Western European Communist parties; along with a crackdown on the stirrings of change by Soviet democratic dissidents and Jewish refuseniks, and a significant military buildup. American intercontinental missiles were challenged by Soviet technological advances in long-range rocketry; the Soviet Navy was approaching superiority as the number of new American ships declined; and the Red Army’s buildup of conventional ground forces in Europe put NATO at a disadvantage.
At the same time, a Polish-born pope came into the Vatican, offering hope to the oppressed peoples in the Communist bloc, as did Jimmy Carter’s human rights campaign. A new great power was rising in China under a new reformist leader, Deng Xiaoping, who was determined to take the first halting steps to integrate his country into the world economy. Latin America was largely controlled by military autocracies, but democratic movements were arising, and Carter helped catalyze them. And the first Islamic republic was created in Iran after the fall of America’s decades-long ally, the shah of Iran, leading to a debilitating hostage crisis and ushering in a new era of Islamic radicalism and state-sponsored terrorism, with which we struggle today.
Carter was attacked from the right within his own fractured Democratic Party by a group of former New Deal liberal defense hawks, who were called neoconservatives. More debilitating, he was attacked from the Democratic left for being too conservative on domestic and economic issues. He had won the Democratic nomination through an outsider’s nonideological appeal to restore trust and confidence in the presidency rather than a promise of the second coming of the New Deal and Great Society. A traditional liberal Democrat could not
have been elected in 1976, and in the White House he tried to drag the Democratic Party into a new political reality although he never felt comfortable with his party and regarded it as an “albatross.” Flinty in his personal habits (“tight as a tick,” Jody Powell joked), and believing, as he flatly told Democratic congressional leaders, that “the Achilles heel of the Democratic Party was fiscal irresponsibility,”7 he opposed a wave of new spending in an era of high inflation—not what the liberal and labor wing of the party expected after eight lean Republican years.
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These ideological and political upheavals not only hindered the substantial accomplishments of the Carter administration, but overshadowed them in the perspective of history. In the diplomatic field, I discuss his success in permanently placing human rights on the domestic and international agendas, by which future presidents are still measured; his influence on the decline of the Soviet Union and the rise of China; establishing a new, positive relationship with Latin America; and his crown jewel, giving birth to the first peace between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors, Egypt. He blunted Soviet interests in the Middle East and Persian Gulf and strengthened U.S. relations with moderate Arab nations.
At home Carter laid the foundation for this century’s revival of the domestic energy industry by deregulating crude oil and natural gas prices, championing bills that placed alternative energy and conservation firmly on the nation’s agenda, profoundly reformed electricity generation for the benefit of consumers, and laid the foundation—with three major energy bills—for our growing independence from foreign oil producers. One of his most satisfying accomplishments was setting aside huge tracts of public lands for national parks, doubling the size of our National Park System for public enjoyment.
He made government and private corporations more transparent and accountable after Watergate, through the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Carter transformed the American transportation industry through deregulation, and he began to loosen federal constraints on the communications and financial industries. He helped save both Chrysler and New York City from bankruptcy through federal loan guarantees, but only after being the first president to demand new management, major labor concessions, and formal oversight before putting federal money at risk. And finally, fully aware that he was putting his own reelection at great risk, Carter set in motion the successful battle against the ruinous inflation of the 1970s, which increased to double-digit levels on his watch, by appointing Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve and giving him free rein.
Even this abbreviated list of accomplishments far outpaces those of other one-term presidents, and not just Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, or Herbert Hoover, but the underestimated George H. W. Bush and even my first political hero, John F. Kennedy. Indeed, I believe that they equal or exceed some two-term presidents—Bill Clinton, whom I served for eight years and regard as an outstanding president, and Barack Obama, in whose administration I held an advisory position dealing with Holocaust-related issues, and whose place in history remains to be determined. And while there is also no question that Ronald Reagan decisively changed the ideological debate and political direction of the country, many of the measures put in place by Carter only matured during the early years of the Reagan administration—controlling inflation, increasing military spending, arming the mujahedeen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, negotiating a nuclear arms reduction agreement, catalyzing the democratic movement in Latin America, and laying the foundations for Ronald Reagan’s signature policies of decreasing government regulation.
Public recognition of Carter’s legacy of accomplishments has been obscured by inexperience in the critical early stage of the administration; iconoclastic, idiosyncratic decision making; double-digit inflation and interest rates; internal Democratic Party strife; and the Iran hostage crisis. But, like the successes of Truman, Clinton, and the senior Bush, Carter’s achievements shine brighter over time, few more than his unique determination to put human rights at the forefront of his foreign policy from the start of his presidency.
At the time, this shift from the realpolitik of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger was derided by some as utopian, and indeed some events demanded responses that did take precedence over human rights. But when backed by actions like cutting military aid to Latin American dictatorships such as Chile and Argentina, his human rights policies helped convert most of our Latin American neighbors from authoritarian rule to democracy. The administration’s public advocacy of human rights also weakened the Soviet empire by attacking its soft underbelly—its domestic repression. No less than Anatoly Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador to Washington, conceded that Carter’s human rights policies “played a significant role in the … long and difficult process of liberalization inside the Soviet Union and the nations of Eastern Europe. This in turn caused the fundamental changes in all these countries and helped end the Cold War.”8 First enshrined during the Ford administration—even as he soft-pedaled them—in the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, human rights have been established as an essential element of American and international diplomacy. Although several later presidents have given less emphasis to human rights, because of Carter they were not free to ignore them totally, without risking public criticism.
As an Annapolis-trained submarine officer, Carter was no pacifist but was nevertheless very cautious—perhaps excessively so—about deploying American military power until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. No American soldiers were killed in combat on his watch. He signed the second and most ambitious Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union, which served as the basis for future arms limitation agreements. At the same time he did not hesitate to support cutting-edge weapons technology.
Despite his campaign promise to cut defense spending, he in fact increased it by an annual average of almost 3 percent in real terms, and proposed further increases after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Major new weapons systems such as the MX missile and the Stealth bomber were green-lighted, thus providing the foundation upon which Ronald Reagan built the strong U.S. defense posture that his supporters claim as the principal cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse. But it was Carter, not Reagan, who reversed the post-Vietnam decline in military spending and began upgrading America’s defenses. “The Reagan revolution in defense spending began during the later years of the Carter Administration,” concludes the Pentagon’s authorized history of the tenure of Carter’s Defense secretary Harold Brown.9
Despite allied resistance, Carter persuaded European governments to begin deploying middle-range nuclear weapons in Europe to counter the Soviets’ new mobile missiles. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, later called this allied response a significant factor in convincing him that his predecessors’ policies of military threats to the West should be replaced by disarmament and accommodation.10
Though Carter was ambivalent about Soviet intentions during a signficant part of his administration, torn between the hard-line Brzezinski and the dovish Vance, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan dispelled any remaining doubts. He acted firmly with tough sanctions and armed the Afghan mujahedeen in a war that lasted nine years and bled Soviet resources. After the Soviet invasion he promulgated the Carter Doctrine in his January 1980 State of the Union Address, declaring that an attempt by an outside force like the Soviet Union to gain control of the Persian Gulf region “would be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”11 This permanently expanded the U.S. naval presence in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, and created the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, which became the U.S. military’s Central Command three years later.
In another bold step, taken over ferocious and emotional opposition from conservatives, his administration negotiated a treaty with Panama that yielded American sovereignty over the canal, avoiding an almost certain guerrilla war by Panama against this vital sea link, while ful
ly protecting America’s priority use of the vital seaway. It led to a giant step in elevating U.S. relations with Latin America. And while Nixon and Kissinger deserve great credit for their dramatic outreach to the People’s Republic of China, they could go no further because of fierce opposition from the Taiwan lobby, a major force in the Republican Party. It fell to Carter to take the lasting step of normalizing diplomatic relations with the most populous nation in the world as it grew into a power that could not be ignored.
If ever there was an area in which Carter’s strengths as well as his limitations were evident, it was the Middle East. He increased arms sales to solidify our alliances with moderate Arab states against the Soviet Union, despite angry objections from Israel and vehement opposition by the American Jewish leadership. At the same time he was a Middle East peacemaker par excellence, building on Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem. Carter stepped in to break the impasse in negotiations between Israel and Egypt by summoning both sides to his retreat at Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, near Washington. This was a courageous, almost reckless gamble of his presidential influence, against the virtually unanimous opposition of his own advisers. But the accord negotiated over thirteen cliff-hanging days in 1978 represented one of the greatest feats of personal presidential diplomacy in American history. He then took the risky step of going to the region in a last-ditch attempt to salvage the peace effort and convert the Camp David Accords into a binding treaty that removed Israel’s strongest Arab neighbor from the battlefield after five wars and has remained the foundation of American foreign policy in the Middle East for almost forty years.
President Carter Page 2