Jimmy Carter: 'History’s Greatest Monster' or America’s Last Great President?
The 39th U.S. President has died at the age of 100. His legacy should be brighter.
By William S. Bike
Political historian and author of “Winning Political Campaigns”
Dec. 29, 2024
In Season 4, Episode 21 of the television show, The Simpsons, when Springfield’s Mayor Quimby unveils a statue of former President Jimmy Carter, somebody in the crowd yells out, “He’s history’s greatest monster!”
During Carter’s presidency and in his immediate post-presidential years, many in the government and media establishment certainly treated him that way.
However, once he established the Carter Center and started building homes for poor people, the establishment narrative morphed to “Carter was a lousy president, but he had the greatest post-presidency career of anyone.”
The part about Carter’s post-presidency is certainly true.
The part about his presidency is not.
Although historians and most of the establishment talking heads do not place him there, Carter should be ranked among the near-greats.
Carter may have been no Franklin D. Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln but his record compares favorably to those whom historians rank as great in their own way, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower.
What makes a president great
Historians judge presidents on such factors as: their vision, economics, public persuasion, crisis leadership vis a vis foreign affairs, commitment to equality, diversity, working people and the powerless, relationship with Congress and, in recent years, ability to help the environment.
In retrospect, Carter should get high marks on all of these, even foreign affairs.
Vision: Carter not only had a vision for peace in the Middle East (and what president since the 1940s has not?) but he actually fulfilled it. It was Carter who sat a reluctant Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel down and made a peace treaty, the Camp David accords, happen — something than no president before or since has come close to doing.
It was Jimmy Carter who more than anyone was responsible for ending a 31-year state of war between Egypt and Israel.
Economics: In the late 1970s, Carter was telling Americans to conserve energy and to switch to solar power and other renewable fuels. Had America done so, it would have been energy independent years ago, instead of paying $3 per gallon for gasoline as Americans are doing now.
But what about the recession of 1980? As Harry Truman said of Herbert Hoover, “He didn’t create the Depression; the Depression was created for him.” Likewise with the economic woes of 1980; the Federal Reserve he was stuck with believed in tight monetary policy to fight inflation, triggering the recession.
The Federal Reserve did the crime, but Carter did the time.
Public persuasion: Establishment media critics ridiculed what they called Carter’s malaise speech, in which he asked Americans to unite and sacrifice to deal with the energy crisis.
However, at the time, the public’s reception to the speech was overwhelmingly positive, resulting in thousands of positive phone calls and letters to the White House.
Members of the media lauded presidents such as FDR, John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush when they asked Americans to unite in a crisis. They laughed at Carter when he did the same and worked to turn the public against him.
Crisis leadership vis a vis foreign affairs: Until President-elect Donald Trump brought the Panama Canal into the news again, anyone remembered how Carter avoided war in Central America through the Panama Canal treaties. But they were a resounding success that at the time were lauded even by such prominent conservatives as John Wayne.
And, as usual, none of the dire predictions of conservative opponents as to the horrors that would befall the United States if we signed the treaties came true. Not one.
Carter negotiated the SALT II arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union and established US diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Carter easily moved into a global leadership role in organizing the opposition. He cut off American grain sales to the Soviet Union, deeply hurt the Soviet Union’s international prestige by boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics and supported Afghan opposition forces so well with funding and arms that they eventually beat the mighty Soviet Army.
Throughout his presidency, Carter made human rights central to his foreign policy and helped spread democracy around the globe, something that in hindsight appears even more valuable, as in 2024 we are in an era in which democracy is in retreat and fascism on the march around the globe.
But Carter’s foreign affairs Waterloo was the hostage crisis in which more than 60 Americans were taken captive and held in Iran for 444 days. But in retrospect, did Carter really do so badly?
Most presidents would have bombed Tehran or the Iranian oil fields and started a war that would have resulted in the deaths of the hostages and thousands of innocent civilians.
“If we had bombed Tehran, I think Jimmy would have been re-elected, even though the hostages would have died,” Rosalynn Carter, his wife, was quoted as saying in a 1990 New York Times article.
Carter instead was willing to move at a snail’s pace using boring tools such as economic sanctions and diplomacy. The result was not one American hostage’s life lost, all hostages returned home safely — and no war. Carter’s behavior wasn’t macho — just effective.
Environment: Carter signed into law a ban on the dumping of sewage in the ocean, the Strip Mining Control and Reclamation Act, and the Alaska Land Act, which set aside 104 million acres in national parks, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas.
All of these, it turned out, had to be done in the Carter Administration, because the subsequent Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump Administrations would not even have considered these pro-environment moves and the subsequent Clinton, Obama, and Biden Administrations could not have passed them.
Carter also proposed a comprehensive energy plan that did not pass; had it done so, America would have been energy independent, instead of foreign energy dependent, for the next 40 years and the United States never even would have gotten into the two Iraq wars and the war in Afghanistan.
Under Carter, America imported 30% of its oil. Today, the figure is 76%.
Commitment to equality, diversity, working people and the powerless: Carter routinely appointed — and got the Senate to confirm — minorities and women, usually with extreme liberal views, to Federal posts and Federal judgeships, often the types of liberals, such as the strong opponent of firearms, former Congressman Abner Mikva, to a Federal judgeship) that subsequent Democratic Presidents would not even consider trying to appoint because they knew they would never be confirmed by the Senate.
As for working people, Carter’s labor secretary, F. Ray Marshall, told the New York Times in 1990 that “The Carter administration had the best labor record of any president since FDR,” with “the largest relative job growth of any postwar (World War II) administration,” with collective bargaining strengthened, work safety laws passed and job creation programs created.
Carter also pardoned Vietnam draft evaders, an act that served to heal the lingering wounds of that unpopular war.
“Carter was unreservedly committed to the egalitarian ideal,” said New York University law professor Bret Neuborne in a 1990 Newsday article.
Relationship with Congress: Congress did not love Jimmy Carter. As the first President without prior Washington experience since Woodrow Wilson, Carter was an outsider with whom the Congress had no relationship.
As a student at DePaul University in the 1970s, I remember Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, coming to speak to one of my classes and complaining that Carter didn’t drink, noting that many Presidential initiatives’ passing were lubricated with negotiations over liquor.
Lyndon Johnson, for example, bought Cutty Sark by the case for his meetings with Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. And Carter wanted policy based on information and the public good, not on political deals.
But despite Carter having all this going against him, the fact that he got so much legislation passed, legislation that could never have been passed since, shows his skill in dealing with a reluctant Congress.
“He spent an extraordinary amount of time talking with members of Congress, more than his two predecessors or successors,” said Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary.
The election of 1980
Popular with the electorate and successful in treaty-making and in passing legislation, Carter was sailing along to re-election. In the fall of 1979, in a theoretical matchup between Carter and Ronald Reagan, polls showed Carter winning by an unprecedented 70-30 margin.
But Washington politicos and media still did not like this born-again Christian outsider who “provoked the establishment,” as the Chicago Tribune wrote in 2002, and was shaking things up for the good of the people.
Senator Ted Kennedy, the very embodiment of the Washington insider establishment, decided to challenge Carter in the Democratic presidential primaries — literally for no reason Kennedy could ever articulate.
Carter beat Kennedy, but not without spending a lot of money and people power that could have been better saved for the general election, had the arrogant Kennedy not decided to challenge a sitting President from his own party.
The Washington media jumped on every chance to criticize and ridicule Carter.
As Carter himself said, “My family was depicted as hillbillies, with straw sticking out of our ears.” To the establishment media, everything small became a big story, whether it was Carter being attacked by a rabbit on a fishing trip, one Democratic county chairman in Florida deciding he wasn’t going to back Carter or the Mayor of Chicago switching her support from Carter to Kennedy.
Ronald Reagan, whom many Americans and most Republicans consider a great president, wasn’t looked at that way during the 1980 campaign.
His gaffes as the Republican presidential nominee, such as saying trees cause pollution but oil spills don’t and promotion of states’ rights (long a code phrase for racism) had people wondering if the Gipper had enough mental capacity to do the job.
But once again, the Washington insiders stepped up to help get rid of Carter.
National hero and Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had once called Reagan an “extremist,” suddenly became honorary chair of Democrats for Reagan. A one-time lefty liberal hero, former Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, endorsed not Carter, but Reagan. The late journalist Walter Karp called Carter a “partyless president.”
Liberal Republican (yes, those existed at the time) Congressman John Anderson did his part, running a strong third-party campaign, which cut deeply into liberal support for Carter.
The East Coast media stepped up, too. ABC-TV began a nightly TV show called The Iran Crisis-America Held Hostage, which held up Carter’s alleged failures in the crisis to public exposure every single night.
James Reston of the New York Times called Carter “morbidly conscientious.” And generally, coverage of Reagan was more favorable than that of Carter, as media salivated over how interesting it would be to have a personable, avuncular actor in the White House instead of a church-going tee-totaler.
Despite all this, deep into October Carter was actually leading Reagan in the polls. It all came down to their one debate in Cleveland, where tragically Carter fumbled the one big question on everyone’s mind — what to do about the hostages in Iran.
Carter answered the question by talking about his daughter and about nuclear weapons. Reagan, meanwhile, answered every question adroitly, quelling America’s fears about him. After that debate, America’s undecideds broke 16-1 for Reagan — an unprecedented percentage — and the Republican candidate was elected President.
But in what the establishment media called a “landslide” for Reagan, the Gipper tallied only 50.8 percent of the vote.
The little-remembered Anderson put the final nails in the coffin of the Carter campaign, garnering 6.6% of the vote, most of which would have gone to Carter and turned the election into a squeaker.
A sea change
In retrospect, Carter’s was the last New Deal Presidency. Like every President since FDR — even the Republicans — Carter proposed liberal legislation and got it through Congress.
As author and radio talk host Thom Hartmann has said, during the Roosevelt-to-Carter period, national legislation routinely benefitted the average American. Since then, the vast majority of national legislation has benefitted the special interests, with the average American forgotten.
As Hartmann also has written, Reagan-ism brought America the collapse of the middle class, student and medical debt that is largely impossible to pay, predatory charges from health insurance companies and for-profit medical providers, political manipulation by corporations and billionaires, an explosion of homelessness and untreated mental illness and a proliferation of guns and mass shootings.
None of which would have happened under Carter.
In November 1990, I attended the conference “Keeping Faith” at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY, about the Carter presidency.
Many members of the Carter Administration were there: Powell, Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Bert Lance, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Strauss and Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, among many others.
There was a sense of vindication, as Carter was riding a crest of public popularity at the time (Newsday did a two-panel cartoon of Ronald Reagan towering over a dwarflike Carter in 1980, but Carter towering over a dwarflike Reagan in 1990), but also a sense of unfulfilled promise.
Time and time again administration officials talked about their plans for a second term that would have been the fulfillment of the New Deal, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, JFK’s New Frontier, and LBJ’s Great Society, with social programs and laws designed to make life better for all Americans.
The best post-presidency
While most recent presidents have spent their post-presidency playing golf and collecting fat speaking fees, Carter spent the last 40+ years serving humanity.
He established the Carter Center, which actively works to alleviate conflict, reduce suffering, promote democracy and fair elections and promote cooperation among people all over the world.
The center has helped produce medical prostheses in China and taught African farmers to increase grain production.
Through Global 2000, he helped establish and improve health and agricultural services in developing countries. Through the Carter-Menil Human Rights Foundation, he helped protect human rights globally. Through the Task Force for Child Survival, he facilitated immunization and other health efforts throughout the world.
He is the person in history most responsible for almost wiping out Guinea Worm, a debilitating parasitic disease that used to cause blindness and untold suffering in the undeveloped world.
He spent decades building homes for the poor through Habitat for Humanity.
Carter continued achieving policy victories as an ex-president. He convinced Daniel Ortega to accept losing a presidential election in Nicaragua. He got the Ethiopian government to meet with Eritrean rebels to sit down and discuss a settlement, at the Carter Center in Atlanta. He facilitated a détente between the George H.W. Bush administration and Syria. He helped negotiate a peace agreement in Haiti and brokered a ceasefire in Boznia-Herzegovina.
Carter’s list of awards won since his presidency is huge, and includes the International Mediation Medal, the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize, the international Human Rights Award and the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism.
As The Nation wrote in 1990, “Carter used his presidency as a stepping stone to higher things.”
“No other president in our history has done anything at all comparable,” Yale University historian Gaddis Smith was quoted as saying in Newsday at the time.
Several references in this article come from 1990, which was one of the high watermarks of Carter’s post-presidency popularity. After ten years of Reagan and Bush cutting social programs and engaging in questionable clandestine adventures in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada and other countries, Americans and even the East Coast media and establishment started to realize that Carter had been a good president and a good post-president.
U.S. News & World Report gave Carter its 1990 Excellence in Government-Best Social Advocate Award, and Hofstra University held its conference on the Carter presidency.
Carter’s popularity has waxed and waned with the media since then, particularly since the rise of conservative media that began with Fox News in 1996. Conservative media has praised Carter when he criticized Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, or helped out Republican Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump but suddenly acted like he was history’s greatest monster when he praised those Democrats or criticized those Republicans.
A great human being and yes, a great president
But other than the most ardent Fox News viewers, the world has generally respected and admired Carter for enthusiastically doing good, meeting what he believes are his moral obligations and working with people different from himself — over four decades in which such idealism in action generally has been met with more derision than praise.
The Nobel Committee understood this when it awarded Carter the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. When the Carter Center announced that the former president was going into home hospice, even Fox News commentators recalled that Carter promised he would never lie to the American people and said, “that’s what we need today.”
As for a presidency once met with more derision than praise, in hindsight we can see foreign policy success after foreign policy success while waging peace instead of waging war, a vision for energy independence that would have helped America avoid some of the major problems it has experienced for four decades, a vision for saving the environment and success in passing laws and social programs that benefitted and continue to serve the nation’s workers and underserved — all hallmarks of a near-great or great presidency.
Perhaps it was the members of the governmental and media establishments who went out of their way to cripple and destroy the Carter presidency, who were some of history’s greatest monsters.
May Jimmy Carter — perhaps America’s last great president — rest in peace after 100 years of a life devoted to serving others.
The contributor piece is by William S. Bike, a political historian and the author of “Winning Political Campaigns”
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Thank you for writing this insightful view of Jimmy Carter. I have also wondered why his legacy as president was not more positive. Those were some tough years.