Reevaluating Jimmy Carter’s Presidency

The consensus among historians, journalists, and analysts has long been that President Jimmy Carter’s four-year presidency was a low point in a decent man’s century-long life. In fact, the implicit rap on Carter was that he brought a naïvete to public office that, at best, required a certain moral flexibility. Now that Carter has passed at the age of 100, this simplistic and conventional narrative of his presidency should be reassessed.

Let’s not forget that the voters chose Carter’s principled approach in the 1976 election because of the long national disillusionment surrounding the JFK and MLK assassinations, LBJ and Nixon’s dishonest debacle in Vietnam, Nixon’s criminal activities during Watergate, and Gerald Ford’s trashing the rule of law by pardoning his predecessor even before charges were filed. Voters yearned to bring back some semblance of morality and honesty to government.

Upon arriving in office, Carter was so squeaky clean that he refused to intimidate lawmakers or horse-trade with Congress to adopt policies on his agenda. If Republican Richard Nixon is regarded as the last progressive president before Barack Obama, Democrat Carter was the first conservative president since Calvin Coo lidge. Carter laid the basis for more conservative policies before Ronald Reagan perfected the sales pitch. In addition to opposing interest groups feeding at the public trough, Carter championed limiting the federal government, cutting the federal budget, deregulating industries, and greater local and personal responsibility. He believed welfare eroded the family and the work ethic.

In a herculean effort, Carter fully or partially deregulated four sectors of the economy: finance, communication, energy, and transportation, making them more efficient. At first, Carter contributed to the inflation left over from the Vietnam War and Nixon’s permissive monetary policy. However, Carter then appointed inflation hawk Paul Volcker as Fed chairman, who slammed on the monetary brakes, which caused a soft economy and then a recession but made possible the economic growth during Reagan’s administration.

Analysts have rightly claimed that Reagan defeated Carter in the 1980 election because of stagflation (a sluggish economy and inflation) and the Iran hostage crisis. In the long term, Carter helped solve both of those crises, but at election time, the results weren’t in yet. In the hostage crisis, he didn’t fall victim to the hawks’ criticism that he should attack Iran, which would have gotten the hostages killed. Of course, at election time, this made him look weak. Reagan apparently succeeded in delaying the release of the hostages until after he was elected president, but Carter had negotiated their release.

Even Carter’s substantial domestic achievements were eclipsed by his foreign policy successes. His negotiation of the Camp David peace accords and Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty is one of the few lasting peace agreements in the Middle East (even the later Oslo accords have failed). Disregarding the hawks, Carter ended the embarrassing U.S. colonial presence in the Canal Zone in the middle of sovereign Panama. Furthermore, Richard Nixon’s opening to China got all the attention, but the improvement of relations between the United States and China languished until Carter formally recognized China. Finally, Carter signed the SALT II agreement with the Soviets, which limited nuclear arms but was never ratified by the Senate. Nonetheless, both countries abided by its terms.

In my book, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, which ranks the presidents on the end results of their policies, I found that no president was perfect. Carter was no exception. He overreacted to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, believing that the Soviets were making a play for Persian Gulf oil. In reality, Moscow was trying to support its client government in Kabul and prevent a potential Islamist revolution from spreading into the Soviet Union. Yet, Carter boycotted the Olympics in Moscow, instituted a grain embargo that merely hurt American farm exports, and proclaimed the “Carter Doctrine,” which stated the United States would use military force to secure its vital national interests (read: oil) in the Persian Gulf against an outside power trying to control it.

In the end, although subsequent presidents could have disavowed the doctrine, especially after the Cold War ended, they unfortunately and eagerly embraced it by building up U.S. forces around the Gulf. This included the needless meddling in the Iran-Iraq War, including conducting the “tanker war” in the Gulf against Iran and two Gulf Wars later against Iraq. Yet Carter and subsequent presidents should have realized that the best and cheapest way to obtain oil is by paying the world market price. Finally, Carter was so scarred by the Iranian Revolution’s oil price hikes that he fully embraced the canard of the need for U.S. energy independence and attempted to popularize expensive synthetic fuels via the boondoggle of the failed Synfuels Corporation.

However, in sum, Carter can rightly be celebrated for his many heroic deeds after leaving the White House. Still, his presidential accomplishments in foreign and domestic policy should not be neglected—which they often are—because they vastly outstripped his more limited failures.