Editors at National Review Online assess former President Jimmy Carter’s legacy.
He won the nomination, and the election, in great part because of who he was not. He was not a lefty freak à la George McGovern or a race-monger like George Wallace. He did not belong to the party of Richard Nixon. He was a mildly liberalish white southerner who would exorcise memories of Vietnam and Watergate simply by being himself.
His tenure turned out to be far more fraught than that. With an effort, one can recall a number of good things he did. He put missiles in Europe to defy Soviet buildups and bolster the NATO alliance. He brokered peace between Israel and Egypt. He installed Paul Volcker, the man who finally broke inflation, as chairman of the Fed. He approved an audacious plan for rescuing American diplomats held hostage in Tehran.
It needs an effort to recall these because so much else went wrong. The Soviet Union and its clients had been on a roll worldwide throughout the Seventies, from Africa to Indochina; during his administration, Afghanistan would fall too. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat paid for his peace with his life. Inflation, pre-Volcker, raged simultaneously with recession, something liberal economists said could not happen. The shah of Iran fell to a despotic anti-American zealot, and the helicopters sent to rescue our kidnapped diplomats crashed in the Iranian desert.
Carter had a personality that leaned into his travails. He was nagging, almost canting — his Southern Baptist faith could sour him as much as it sustained him — yet at the same time he seemed feeble. A submarine commander, an agribusinessman, and an ex-governor, he could not lead. Ronald Reagan, the man who unseated him after one term, had actor’s chops but was also a man with plans. Supply-side economics seemed new, bold, and easy to explain; his view of the Cold War was even simpler: As he outlined it to adviser Richard Allen, “We win, they lose.”
Carter’s post-presidency, widely praised, was overpraised.