A popular narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy Carter is that as president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him politically but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former president.
Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.
A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and national name recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended up in the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest, moderate, and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an antidote to the corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from the vulnerabilities of the sitting president, Gerald Ford.
Once in office as an unlikely president, Carter spent his one and only term showing the American people, and the rest of the world, that he was not up to the job.
When he took the presidential oath in January 1977, the unemployment rate was a high 7.5 percent; when he left office in January 1981, it was just as high. Meanwhile, inflation, which was already elevated at 5.7 percent in 1976, the year he was elected, went up in each of his years in office — and reached a staggering 13.5 percent in 1980, the year he was booted out. The only year in the post–World War II period in which inflation was higher was 1947, when the economy was booming and unemployment was minuscule. Put another way, to maintain the buying power that $100 had on the month Carter was sworn into office, you’d need $150 by the time he left the White House just four years later. Under Carter, gas prices doubled, and the supply became so scarce that Americans had to endure long lines at stations to fill up their tanks.
On the international stage, Carter showed weakness, and America’s enemies took notice. Rather than recognize the true nature of the Soviet threat, he preached the defeatist ideology of “peaceful coexistence,” and the USSR steamrolled into Afghanistan. Also under his watch, radical Islamic revolutionaries took over Iran, holding Americans hostage for the last 444 days of his presidency.
It is telling that the defining speech of his presidency was known as the “malaise speech,” in which he spoke not as a leader but as an essayist writing on the “crisis of confidence” in America. He observed: “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.” As he built a legacy of scarcity, he criticized Americans for wanting plenty, lamenting that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”
It should be no surprise that Ronald Reagan’s message of strength and optimism turned 1980 into a complete rout. Carter not only lost 489 electoral votes to 49, but he got trounced by ten points in the popular vote — even though an independent candidate, John Anderson, drew 7 percent.
Carter, who performatively carried his own luggage as president, tried to present himself as humble. But somebody actually humble would have taken the hint by the magnitude of his defeat. The real Jimmy Carter was stubborn and arrogant. He had plans for a second term, and he wanted to see them through despite the overwhelming rejection by the American people. So instead of stepping away, he spent the rest of his life simply pretending that he was still president and pursuing foreign policy goals even when it meant undermining the actual president.
The two most egregious examples of this came in his efforts to stop the first Iraq War and his freelance nuclear diplomacy with North Korea.
In his mostly sycophantic 1998 book on Carter’s post–White House career, The Unfinished Presidency, Douglas Brinkley gave a startling account of Carter’s behavior in the run-up to the 1990–91 Persian Gulf conflict.
Concerned by the looming threat of war after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Carter pulled out all the stops — and then some — to try to thwart the president, George H. W. Bush. Carter’s efforts started off within the realm of acceptable opposition for a former president. He wrote op-eds, hosted conferences, gave speeches — all urging peace talks as an alternative to repelling Saddam with the use of military force.
But when that failed, he took things to an extraordinary level. Carter wrote a letter to the leaders of every country on the U.N. Security Council, as well as a dozen other world leaders, Brinkley recounted, making “a direct appeal to hold ‘good faith’ negotiations with Saddam Hussein before entering upon a war. Carter implied that mature nations should not act like lemmings, blindly following George Bush’s inflammatory ‘line in the sand rhetoric.’”
As if this weren’t enough, on January 10, 1991 — just five days before a deadline that had been set for Saddam to withdraw — Carter wrote to key Arab leaders urging them to abandon their support for the U.S., undermining months of careful diplomacy by the Bush administration. “You may have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets and others fully supportive,” Carter advised them.
It is one thing for a former president to express opposition to a policy of the sitting president, but by actively working to get foreign leaders to withdraw support for the U.S. days before troops were to be in the cross fire, Carter was taking actions that were closer to treason than they were to legitimate peace activism.
Carter’s meddling was not limited to the first Iraq War or to Republican administrations. In 1994, there was a standoff between the U.S., its allies, and North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program. The U.S. was floating the idea of sanctions at the United Nations. Over the years, Carter had received multiple invitations to visit North Korea from Kim Il-sung and was eager to fly over and defuse the situation with an ultimate goal of convening a North–South peace summit and unifying the peninsula. Begrudgingly, the Clinton administration agreed to let Carter meet with Kim as long as Carter made clear that he was a private citizen and that he was merely gathering information on the North Korean perspective, which he would then report back to the Clinton administration.
Without telling the Clinton administration, however, Carter flew to North Korea with a CNN film crew and proceeded to negotiate the framework of an agreement. He then informed the Clinton team after the fact, with little warning, that he was about to go on CNN to announce the deal. This infuriated the Clinton administration, and according to Brinkley’s account, one cabinet member called the former president a “treasonous prick.” To make matters worse, Carter then accepted a dinner invitation from Kim, at which point Carter claimed on camera that the U.S. had stopped pursuing sanctions at the U.N., which was untrue. Nevertheless, once Carter went on television to announce all this, Clinton felt completely boxed in, and he was forced to accept the deal and abandon sanction efforts.
Over time, it became clear that Kim had just used Carter to take the heat off, get economic relief, and buy time while still continuing to enrich uranium in violation of the agreement, which it withdrew from in 2002 after being called out for cheating. Within a few years, North Korea had built a nuclear arsenal. Carter’s effort at freelance diplomacy, in addition to advancing a foreign policy at odds with the administration, squandered a crucial window to stop North Korea from going nuclear.
When it came to unrealized ambitions, nothing frustrated Carter more than the Middle East. He was convinced that, had he been reelected, he would have been able to build on the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt and resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians — even though there were significant differences between the two conflicts. In 2003, he boasted to the New York Times, “Had I been elected to a second term, with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation I had in the region, we could have moved to a final solution.” It was quite a choice of words.
During the pro-Israel Reagan administration, Carter saw little opportunity to advance his agenda, but he perceived an opening when Bush took over. In 1990, he befriended PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, and, Brinkley writes, “Carter began coaching Arafat on how to not frighten democracies by using inflammatory rhetoric: it was a strategy that would eventually lead to the Oslo Agreements of September 1993.”
Throughout the 1990s, Arafat pursued a strategy of talking peace to the world at large while working behind the scenes to continue terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. He was infamous for appearing moderate when speaking in English while fuming radically and inciting violence in Arabic. Throughout this time, he was being mentored by Carter, who not only advised him but even personally wrote a sample speech for him suggesting language to use that would allow him to more effectively gain sympathy from Western audiences. At one point, he went on a Saudi fundraising mission for the PLO at Arafat’s behest. Of course, Arafat had no interest in peace, which became crystal clear in 2000 when he rejected an offer of Palestinian statehood and launched a campaign of terror known as the Second Intifada instead.
Carter’s friendship with Arafat was part of a pattern in which he would chastise Israel in the most extreme terms while ignoring or minimizing the actions of terrorists and dictators whose enemies happened to be Israel. On a Middle East trip in 1990, he visited Syria to meet with Hafez al-Assad and had nothing to say about the brutal dictator’s violations of human rights, but then he went to Israel and blasted its human rights record as it was trying to form a government. Carter met with and embraced Hamas and, in 2015, the year after thousands of rockets were fired indiscriminately at Israel civilians, claimed that the group, which in its charter calls for the extermination of Israel, was the party actually committed to peace and that Israel was not.
In 2007, Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which was not only one-sided in its attacks on Israel but was filled with inaccuracies and distortions. At one point in the book, he invoked the story of Jesus to liken Israeli authorities to the Pharisees. In the first edition, he included a line in which he asserted that terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians were justified until Israel submits to demands: “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel.” While he claimed this line was a mistake, he defended the rest of his work and dismissed legitimate criticism as merely coming from Jews.
“Most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish American organizations,” Carter said in an interview with Al Jazeera, in which he also claimed that Palestinian rocket attacks on Israelis were not acts of terrorism. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, he further advanced old tropes of nefarious Jewish control. He complained that the pro-Israel lobby made it “almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine” and lamented that “book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations.” This wasn’t true, and, further, it means that he described all Jewish writers (such as Jeffrey Goldberg, who reviewed the book for the Washington Post) as representing “Jewish organizations.”
In a speech at George Washington University on the same book tour, he argued that the obstacle to peace was “a minority of the more conservative [Israeli] leaders who have intruded into Palestine and who are unfortunately supported by AIPAC and most of the vocal American Jewish communities.”
At the event, one student asked about the fact that 14 members of the Carter Center’s advisory board had resigned over the book, and Carter had a familiar response: “They all happen to be Jewish Americans; I understand the tremendous pressures on them.”
One of the members to resign was a close associate, Ken Stein, an Emory University professor who had spent decades at the center — as its first permanent director, and then as the Middle East fellow, during which time he traveled with Carter and took notes on their meetings with foreign leaders. In a blistering review for the Middle East Quarterly, Stein wrote, “While Carter says that he wrote the book to educate and provoke debate, the narrative aims its attack toward Israel, Israeli politicians, and Israel’s supporters. It contains egregious errors of both commission and omission. To suit his desired ends, he manipulates information, redefines facts, and exaggerates conclusions.”
Among the examples he gives is an account of a meeting Carter had with Hafez al-Assad, in which Stein was the notetaker. Even though Stein shared his notes from the meeting, Carter’s account of the same meeting in the book was manipulated to make Assad seem more flexible than he actually was.
Stein also included the revelation that “Carter’s distrust of the U.S. Jewish community and other supporters of Israel runs deep.” Stein recalled an interview he once conducted for his 1991 book in which Carter bitterly told him:
[Vice president] Fritz Mondale was much more deeply immersed in the Jewish organization leadership than I was. That was an alien world to me. They [American Jews] didn’t support me during the presidential campaign [that] had been predicated greatly upon Jewish money. . . . Almost all of them were supportive of Scoop Jackson — Scoop Jackson was their spokesman . . . their hero. So I was looked upon as an alien challenger to their own candidate. You know, I don’t mean unanimously but . . . overwhelmingly. So I didn’t feel obligated to them or to labor unions and so forth. Fritz . . . was committed to Israel. . . . It was an act just like breathing to him — it wasn’t like breathing to me. So I was willing to break the shell more than he was.
It probably didn’t help Carter’s mood that, in 1980, he received a lower share of the Jewish vote than any Democratic candidate since 1920.
In the coming days and weeks, there will be an effort to rewrite history and claim that the 39th president was underappreciated and that people have been too harsh on him. But the truth is that historians have not been harsh enough. One of the few silver linings that can be offered about Jimmy Carter is that, thankfully, he was too politically inept to be given the opportunity do even more damage.
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