James Earl Carter
My real-time reaction to President Jimmy Carter was one of pure, nonpartisan practicality. I was an impecunious twenty year old university student and what I came to think of as “Carter’s inflation” was eating me alive. Moreover, I WAS deeply partisan about the Olympics, and in the last year of his presidency Carter boycotted the games. Those were the days when it really was true that “all politics is local,” and as far as I was concerned, Carter was history’s worst president up to that time for reasons purely local to me.
That opinion has since changed. And no, I am not about to parrot the tired Carter cliché. Let’s sing it together, in the key of F# minor, shall we choir? “Jimmy Carter was a lousy President but a great ex-President.” Poppycock. Carter was both a good President and a great ex-President, and it’s about time we give him credit for both.
First of all, and I don’t think this can be said enough, James Earl Carter Jr was a deeply moral man, and none of it was for show. Up to that time every president in my lifetime was at best morally flexible, and one was even a criminal. And with the possible minor exceptions of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, there hasn’t been much in the way of improvement over that shameful status quo since.
It’s true, the Carter presidency was rough for America. In fairness Carter inherited a bad economy from the two disastrous previous Republican regimes of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The times were made worse by the OPEC oil embargo and the energy crisis, two problems the rest of the world also endured and were most emphatically not Carter’s fault.
Carter deregulated trucking and the airlines, pardoned Vietnam draft dodgers and instituted sound economic reforms that, while not curing inflation, certainly helped. The hostage crisis in Iran and the (supposed) behind-the-scenes machinations of allies to Ronald Reagan further sabotaged the presidency of this good and decent man.
But Jimmy Carter did something that no other President in history has done before or since. He brought peace to the Middle East. The Camp David Accords did what was previously thought not possible, it brought peace between Anwar Sadat’s Egypt and Menachem Begin’s Israel, a peace that survives to this very day. I don’t remember which, but Sadat or Begin called it the “Jimmy Carter Accords,” and with good reason.
Carter also announced the Carter Doctrine, declaring the Persian Gulf region of “vital interest” to the United States and forbidding any major power from establishing dominance in the region. To what extent the Carter Doctrine has spared the world from conflict can never be known for sure, but I shudder to imagine what might have happened had it been otherwise. It might have attracted a Soviet power grab that could have saved the Soviet Union, a decline begun by Carter himself when he funded the mujahideen in Afghanistan, tempting the Russians to invade and thereby take their first catastrophic step toward the crumbling of their empire.
Yesterday, as I write this, Jimmy Carter did something else no other American President has ever done before. He began his second century of life. (Let us hope he’s the last for a while. I do not believe I could handle another 22 years of Trump!)
But I come not to bury Jimmy Carter but to praise him. Yes, he’s been our greatest ex-President. But let us never forget he was also a pretty damned good President as well. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.