Disheartening is to hear that people view Carter as a nice guy but incompetent. "Nice guys finish last." Perhaps it is ingrained in our Western culture that we expect leaders to be aggressive and aggrandizing.
Carter is the only modern president to have a successful second career after presidency -- through the Carter Center. He has detractors as all politicians do, but to call him incompetent belies his long and varied career, including the one in this article.
i disagree. there is nothing in common between the modernist “nice guys finish last” and the principles of the kings, emperors and PMs. the latter were driven by divine right, by imbalances in knowledge, by having massive armies, by thinking their were right. the former is a mainly US anti-elitism, anti-education mantra that’s been a staple in that country for a few generations.
During Carter's presidency, you had the Iranian hostage crisis, the '79 energy crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent end of Détente.
I think Carter has relatively little blame for these things, but nevertheless, it's easy for me to see why people think Carter was a nice guy but too weak.
And a paper I wrote about it in 1988 for a college writing class, with lots citations to sources I looked up in newspaper microfilm archives (what researchers had to do before google and youtube and wikipedia were a thing), plus a couple links at the end I added later when I transcribed it to html, once the world wide web existed:
Here's my criticism of Carter's response to the hostage crisis, and a description of the failed hostage rescue mission that Oliver North, Richard Secord, and Albert Hakim sabotaged, years before they caused the Iran Contra Scandal by trading arms to Iran for money and hostages, then illegally channeling the money to the Contras:
>III. Carter's Response
>From the beginning, President Jimmy Carter gave the hostage crisis a high profile. It was the focus his and his country's attention, day after day. But that was exactly wrong approach to take if he wanted to get the hostages out, without making it seem like he conceded to terrorism. Not only did the Iranians benefit from the publicity, but the constant crisis took time away and attention from other important problems, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the 1980 presidential election.
>What Carter should have recognized was that there were different factions in the Iranian government competing with each other for power, and the hostage situation would go on as long as the Iranians could use the situation to their political advantage. If there was not as much attention on the hostage crisis, it would have not been as useful a propaganda tool.
>The President threatened a military response if the hostages were harmed or put on trial. The threat was deterrent, not coercive. Such threats are most effective at keeping somebody from doing something they haven't already done. The threat worked. Iran stopped saying they were going to put the hostages on trial and execute them.
>Carter considered several courses of military action. He decided not to mine Iranian ports, as that would interfere with other countries, and might provoke the Iranians to harm the hostages. He did however order that a rescue plan be drawn up, but he hoped it wouldn't have to be used.
>The other effective measures he took were to freeze Iranian monetary assets, and to impose an arms embargo and economic sanctions. His goal was to get other countries to go along with the embargo and sanctions.
>IV. The Hostage Rescue Mission
>On April 23, 1980, an abortive Iranian hostage rescue mission took place, conducted under the utmost secrecy. The plan was to storm the American embassy in Tehran, and bring home the hostages.
>8 helicopters, 6 C-130 transport planes, and 93 Delta force commandoes secretly invaded Iran. They were to rendezvous at a place in Iran they called Desert One, move out to another point called Desert Two, and then go on to Tehran to rescue the hostages. But Delta force never made it to Desert Two or Tehran. The mission was aborted after three of the eight helicopters failed, on the way to Desert One. The operation was a miserable failure, resulting in an accident that caused the loss of 8 American lives. Later investigation revealed a surprising level of negligence. [4] [7] [13]
>Just before the rescue mission took place, several other countries had finally agreed to level economic sanctions on Iran. Some of them agreed to the sanctions because they thought that if they did, the U.S. would not take any military action. They were quite irate when they heard about the rescue mission after the fact.
>At least three central figures in the Iran-Contra Scandal were involved with the Iranian hostage rescue mission: Secord, Hakim, an North.
>General Richard Secord helped to organize the abortive rescue mission. After the first mission failed, he was the head of the planning group that eventually decided against another rescue attempt. Because the whereabouts of the hostages were unknown, the second rescue attempt (the October Surprise that the Reagan-Bush campaign was so worried about) never happened.
>Secord was later suspended from his Pentagon post because of the EATSCO probe. EATSCO is a company that belongs to Edwin Wilson, the CIA operative who is currently serving time in a federal maximum-security prison for, among other things, secretly supplying 43,000 pounds of plastic explosives to Kadaffi. [21]
>In 1981, he became Chief Middle East arms-sales adviser to Secretary of Defense Casper W. Weinberger. [21]
>Albert Hakim is a wealthy arms merchant, an Iranian exile, and CIA informant, who had a "sensitive intelligence" role in 1980 hostage rescue. He worked for the CIA near the Turkish boarder, handling the logistics of the rescue mission in Tehran. Hakim purchased trucks and vans, and rented a warehouse on the edge of Tehran to hide them in until they were needed for the operation. Unexpectedly however, he skipped town the day before the rescue mission. [2] [13] [25] Later on, in July, 1981, Hakim approached the CIA, with a plan to gain favor with the Iranian government by selling it arms. [22]
>Oliver North led a secret detachment to eastern Turkey. He was in the mother ship on the Turkish border awaiting the cue from Secord to fly into Teheran and rescue the hostages. [2] [25] After the first aborted rescue mission, he worked with Secord on a second rescue plan.
>According to the October Surprise theory, Secord, North and Hakim did not intend Desert One to carry through. The miserable failure of Carter's Desert One rescue attempt may have been deliberate.
>The Reagan-Bush campaign was afraid Carter would rescue the hostages and win the election. Before the election, there were many rumors and security leaks about an "October Surprise" hostage rescue attempt. Richard Werthlin, Reagan-Bush 1980 presidential campaign pollster, determined that an "October Surprise" would end their chances of winning the election. [25]
>On April 20, 1980, days before the actual mission, Mike Copeland ran a hypothetical hostage rescue story in the Washington Star that almost exactly predicted the real thing.
>Members of the Reagan-Bush campaign formed the October Surprise Working Group, to keep Carter from bringing hostages successfully home. [25] Richard Allen, Reagan's foreign policy advisor, was the head of the group. The group included William Casey, Reagan's 1980 campaign manager, who was later appointed CIA director. Casey was at the heart of the Iran-Contra Scandal, and died before he could testify. The group also included Vice Presidential candidate George Bush, who was eventually elected President of the United States in 1988.
What matters is how the public perceives the issue at the time of the election. Ditto the Iranian hostage crisis. Those hostages were not yet free by the time of the 1980 election. You can argue their eventually release in 1981 as a result of Carter's actions and that Reagan doesn't deserve credit for it, but that doesn't change the way the public perceived the situation in 1980.
What matters now is that disingenuous Republicans like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are still pushing the bald faced lie that Reagan instead of Carter deserves credit for the release of the hostages.
>The Republican myth of Ronald Reagan and the Iran hostages, debunked
[...]
>"When I become president," Rubio claimed, "it will be like Ronald Reagan, where as soon as he took office, the hostages were released from Iran," because "our adversaries around the world will know that America is no longer under the command of someone weak like Barack Obama."
>Ted Cruz gave a remarkably similar statement the same day on Fox News, saying that the temporary seizure of the US sailors by Iran was "the direct result of the weakness of this presidency," and that "it’s worth remembering, this same nation, Iran, in 1981 released our hostages the day Ronald Reagan was sworn into office."
>The problem with this story: Iran released the embassy hostages because of Carter's negotiations, not in spite of them.
[...]
>But Carter and his negotiators kept working through the very end of his presidency, and eventually, at the last possible moment, they succeeded. On January 19, 1981, the US and Iran signed the Algiers Accords, an agreement brokered by the Algerian government that secured the hostages' release in exchange for concessions by the US, including sanctions relief, the release of frozen Iranian assets, and the creation of the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal that would remove cases against Iran from US courts.
>The hostages were released the following day, January 20, 1981 — the day Reagan was inaugurated.
>In other words, Rubio and Cruz's version of events is straight-up false. The hostages were released in exchange for sizable concessions from the United States — exactly the sort of process they deride as weak — and not because Ronald Reagan was a tough and scary gentleman whose mere presence in the Oval Office panicked Khomeini into capitulating.
The 79 oil crisis and rationing was caused by the disruption of oil from the Iran, but the US suffered much more from the disruption of the oil from Iran than other countries that also relied on this oil. It would be wrong to ignore the role the government played in making this oil disruption significantly worse.
From "TheU.S. Petroleum Crisis of 1979", PHILIP K. VERLEGER, JR.
>...On February 28, 1979, DOE published the following notice in the Federal Register: "It is essential that refiners enter the spring driving season with adequate gasoline stocks to meet seasonal demand requirements. We recognize that gasoline stocks are currently at adequate levels for this time of year, which is usually a period of low demand. Recent industry data indicate that total stocks are now in excess of 265 million barrels, which is less than last year's record high levels during the same period but above the average levels of previous years. Our concern is that these stocks not be drawn down precipitously as soon as the impacts of the Iranian shortfall are felt by refiners. Refiners are urged to keep stocks high enough to meet expected demand during the 1979 summer driving season, even if it is necessary to restrict somewhat the amount of surplus gasoline that is made available to purchasers currently"
>The implementation of these instructions had the effect of restricting the volume of gasoline available to service stations to between 80 and 90 percent of 1978 levels. This reduction was greater than the reduction in total gasoline supplies.
>...In April 1979, DOE ordered the fifteen largest refiners to sell 7.8 million barrels of crude oil to smaller firms that were unable to obtain supplies on the world market at competitive prices. …These transfers probably reduced the volume of gasoline produced in the second quarter because the refineries that purchased the crude oil had only a limited capacity to produce gasoline, while the refineries that sold it could have produced more. ...In addition to reducing the supply of gasoline, the buy/sell program appears to have affected the geographic distribution of crude oil and gasoline. This is because the primary recipients of the crude oil were refineries in the Midwest and the gulf coast areas, while the sellers were companies that were marketing throughout the nation.
>...…In April, DOE turned its attention to the low stock of distillate fuel oil … Two impacts were observed on domestic markets. First, excessive stocks of heating oil were accumulated. Second, companies may have been influenced to increase gasoline stocks in anticipation of the mandator yield controls that DOE threatened to impose. These controls specified the percent of refiner output that had to be heating oil. Such controls were designed to curtail the output of gasoline. By building higher gasoline inventories, refiners could smooth out the month-to-month distribution of gasoline despite the controls.
>...Price controls on gasoline may have also created an incentive to withhold gasoline from the market when the prices of crude oil were rising rapidly. …In summary, the refiners had the capacity and the knowledge to take advantage of this opportunity. Ironically, the instructions from DOE to the companies were to do precisely what was most profitable.
>...In addition to encouraging the buildup of stocks, DOE may have added to the shortages by creating an incentive to reduce the output of crude oil. Although it is difficult to estimate what domestic supplies of crude oil might have been in the absence of any restriction, a DOE announcement in November that control levels of the base period were to be reviewed may have constrained production in the first half of 1979.
It's a fallacy to believe that intelligence or competency in one field translates to competency in all fields.
An admittedly intelligent and nice guy he wasn't a particularly competent president. Looking at his term through the lense of sympathy rather than history gives a distorted picture.
Carter successfully deregulated the railroad industry, the trucking industry, the airline industry, and the craft brewing industry. A huge amount of the economic growth often attributed to his successors is actually due to his success in identifying sources of stagflation and systematically eliminating them. Carter was better than a good president, he was just a victim of shitty politics.
Also one of the many victims of the short-termism that 4-year mandates inevitably produce.
A US president never gets to see the results of his policies in the first mandate. Realistically, it takes a year just to get to grip with the duties, and by the time they're productive the midterms arrive and dramatically reduce space for bipartisan compromise. Once that's done, soon after it's time to gear up for re-election. Even if they manage to pass anything significant in those short windows of activity, new laws have to get into force (which can take a year), kickstart the various first-order and second-order effects (again time passes), and then go through some sort of statistical collection - itself typically a process that gives results over 6-18 months.
US Presidents effectively get judged first and foremost on the day-to-day executive orders, which is why they tend to be keen on starting wars. If they secure re-election, only then they'll get to be judged on the actual legacy of their policies.
Also translator (with his wife Lou) of Latin into English -- specifically Agricola's De Re Metallica (an early treatise on mining). Their 1912 edition (obviously published long before his presidency) is still the most common English translation of the work to this day.
The stories people tell of politicians are not exactly always fact-based. Well-known people, especially those who don't speak for themselves (in social media) they get a reputation that sticks.
> Looking at his term through the lense of sympathy rather than history gives a distorted picture.
In light of comparisons of the current President to him, the current meme seems to be to consider Carter “an actually very good, misunderstood President” in the hopes of neutering the insult.
Carter is a deeply moral man who successfully fought off a killer rabbit. While his presidency was unsuccessful, he is my favorite president in my lifetime. Didn’t Willie Nelson smoke dope at the white house during the Carter admin?
>SNL Transcripts: Gary Busey: 03/10/79: The Carters In Israel
[...]
>Lillian Carter: Jimmy.. Jimmy.. I’ve come to talk to you about your brother.
>President Jimmy Carter: Oh, Mama. Let’s not talk about Billy now.
>Lillian Carter: Ohhh.. Jimmy, you’ve gotta remember that it hasn’t been easy for Billy. You were the oldest and the favorite – you got the wagon, he got the cardboard box; you got the bicycle, he got the cardboard box; you got the brains, he got the cardboard box.
The gas queues started well before Carter. They started in '73. And Carter was calling for the US to move to alternative energy sources that would make us less vulnerable to undemocratic states - this was well before any other prominent pols were calling for this. Had we listened to him we wouldn't be in a lot of the messes we're currently in.
It blows my mind to think that Nixon, in an effort to combat inflation, unilaterally decreed that there would be price and wage freezes across the board. There was certainly dissent and discussion about it, but nobody stormed the capital, nobody called for blood. Imagine what would happen today if Biden tried the same edict.
There were several race riots in the late 60’s. The National Guard was called out. Bombing campaigns by radical groups, kidnappings. Many violent protests about the Vietnam war.
It wasn’t that different just because nobody protested price controls.
The completely 100% ordinary process of certifying the election on Jan 6, 2021 resulted in people storming the capital and multiple people dying; others had mace and restraining cuffs and have been filmed seeking out targets, including Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.
In Michigan, a group of armed men stormed the state capital because they thought asking people to wear masks during a pandemic was tyrannical government overreach. Another group were arrested for plotting to abduct the same governor for the same reason.
Imagine Biden decreed what Nixon did: nobody can raise the price of any goods or services and nobody can get a pay raise until I say so. You really doubt that there wouldn't be an armed rebellion?
btw, the group that plotted to kidnap the governor was not found guilty, because FBI "double-agents" pushed them so hard on this that the jury considered it entrapment.
I think Thompson there was suffering from buyer's remorse. His Rolling Stones article, instigated by a speech that probably lost Carter a few important friends, significantly contributed to selling the candidate to the hard left, which was large and influential at the time. A year later, I think he felt the classic sense of "betrayal of the revolution", or maybe was just trying to distance himself from the promises he had helped popularize in '76. The sort of things he said, beyond the showmanship, basically apply to any post-Kennedy politician, and possibly even the ones before: they will sell their mother if it gets them elected. In this respect Carter was not really different, or he wouldn't have been elected US President.
Being viewed as a good president is often luck. Carter had very bad timing. Iranian hostages, inflation and other issues. Reagan on the other hand had lucky timing with the economy going up and Gorbachev coming in which sealed the end of the Soviet Union. Clinton was lucky riding the .COM bubble and which then blew up on Bush. Bush also had bad luck with 9/11 and the real estate bubble blowing up during his presidency and not two years later under Obama. Trump was lucky that the upturn from 2008 on kept going during his 4 years. Seems Biden has bad luck that the bubble created by easy money seems to finally cause negative consequences.
He would not have. He was an unpopular buffoon, and a lot of the population viewed him as illegitimate due to the Supreme Court effectively appointing him over Gore. (In fairness, Gore did win the count once all of the counting was complete, so the population had a point here.) Before 9/11, there was a sitcom about how incompetent he was [1].
And no, there would not have been an Iraq war, because even if hypothetical President Gore hadn’t been able to ramp up security after the “bin laden determined to strike in the US”, he wouldn’t have immediately invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. The Bush administration pushed the lies that sold it to the world. And they knew it was bullshit. Gore definitely wouldn’t have done that bit.
> a lot of the population viewed him as illegitimate due to the Supreme Court effectively appointing him over Gore.
That may have been the perception, but that's not an accurate reflection of what the Supreme Court actually decided. They decided two things.
First, the Supreme Court ruled (by a 7-2 vote) that Gore could not selectively recount. Gore was very carefully asking for recounts in precincts where he was likely to gain votes, and not asking for recounts in precincts where Bush would be likely to gain votes. The court ruled that he couldn't do that. He had to recount generally, not super-selectively.
Second, the court ruled (by a 5-4 vote) that he couldn't keep recounting forever. Florida had to have an answer to give to the Electoral College; if they missed the deadline, that would disenfranchise the entire state of Florida. The court ruled that they had to stop recounting and produce an answer.
Look at Trump's attempts to recount in Arizona and Wisconsin months to years after the vote was over. Think what would happen if those were official recounts, and we were having to wait on them. That's what the court voted against.
> In fairness, Gore did win the count once all of the counting was complete
When the unofficial recount done by the press was finished - months after the Electoral College vote - yes, Gore won... by two votes. Would that have been the result of an official recount? Hard to say, but I bet the margin of error of the press operation was higher than two votes.
Even though the closeness of the initial results triggered an automatic recount across every county in Florida, not all of them did.
The infamous "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach diverted something like 15% of the vote to Pat Buchanan. Even Buchanan said his votes were unearned due to the construction of the ballot. Bush was listed first and voting for him was unambiguous; Gore was listed second under Bush, but to vote for him one had to punch the 3rd hole down. Buchanan was the first name on the right hand page and the hole corresponding to him was the 2nd one down.
The Florida Republican party (and the GOP broadly) did everything to stop the recount, attempting to run out the clock. The Florida supreme court ultimately sided with Gore's claim that the stoppage was illegal, but weeks had already gone by. In your telling Gore kept counting over and over.
Finally, there is the way Florida scrubbed the rolls of "illegal" voters. By Florida law, ex-felons were not allowed to vote, even though they had completed their sentences. However, the scrubbing wasn't in good faith. The Secretary of State intentionally did the scrub weeks before the election so there wouldn't be enough time to fix any problems that came up. The majority of the scrubbed votes were not ex-felons, and overwhelmingly those affected were likely to vote D (if they voted). For instance, if your name was D'Andre Weber born in 1975, your name was removed from the list if Florida found any D'Andre Weber born in 1975 anywhere in the country; no effort was made to be more specific. Kathrine Harris was not only the Florida Secretary of State, but she was also co-chair of Bush's Florida reelection committee.
Gore did keep counting over and over - but only in certain places. They had a recount. Then Gore asked for a recount of the recount in certain... at least counties, and maybe down to individual precincts. I forget whether he took a third bite at the apple; he definitely took at least two.
It is almost a given that he wouldn't have. He had squeezed through on the technicalities of the electoral college (not unlike Trump), significantly losing the popular vote (also considering that the hard-left Nader had his best result ever, attracting 3m votes and forever discrediting the wisdom of voting for a third-party candidate). GWB's ratings pre-9/11 were consistently low almost from the start. He set up a cabinet of old-school industrialist cronies, led by Dick Cheney, focused largely on exploiting energy markets and neutering antitrust laws, and substantially expanded the doctrine on executive privilege to block laws he didn't like or hide Cheney's shenanigans.
Then 9/11 happened, he made the best of the photo ops, and then rode a wave of proto-fascism all the way to Katrina.
See also the utterly disgraceful handling of HIV/AIDS under his watch, throwing long standing gay friends of Nancy and himself under the bus to woo the evangelical vote.
Carter is the only modern president to have a successful second career after presidency -- through the Carter Center. He has detractors as all politicians do, but to call him incompetent belies his long and varied career, including the one in this article.