America's 39th president is widely regarded as a great former president. Jimmy Carter is second to none among erstwhile occupants of the Oval Office when it comes to the humanitarian work he has done through the Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity. Yet as Carter's former domestic affairs advisor Stuart Eizenstat explained, it does his old boss a disservice to act like his post-presidency is the only memorable aspect of his legacy.
In his rich and fascinating new book, "President Carter: The White House Years," Eizenstat makes a convincing case for why Carter is one of the most underrated presidents in the modern era.
"The broader message of my book is that this was the most accomplished one-term president we’ve had in the modern era and that he accomplished more than most two-term presidents," Eizenstat told Salon. "Congress passed 70 percent of his legislation. That's just under the master of the Congress, Lyndon Johnson, whose White House I served."
Eizenstat's emphasis on Carter's domestic achievements is important: Few historians would deny that Carter deserves credit for forging peace between Egypt and Israel, returning the Panama Canal to the Panamanian people and reorienting American foreign policy to focus on human rights (at least for a while). But on domestic policy, Carter is usually regarded as having been ineffective. Eizenstat takes issue with that assessment.
"The energy security we enjoy today is due to the energy bills he passed," Eizenstat told Salon. "The ethics legislation, more important than ever today, all was done during his time. He was the greatest environmental president, doubling the size of the National Park System with the Alaska Lands bill and the deregulation of everything from trucks to railroads to airlines. The airline deregulation really brought air travel to the middle class, made it affordable, allowed new carriers like Southwest and Jet Blue to come in."
He added, "This Southern president appointed more women and more African-Americans to judgeships and to senior positions that all 38 Presidents before him put together."
In a cruel twist of fate, one of Carter's most important domestic achievements — bringing the American economy out of the chronic inflation that had plagued it throughout the 1970s — not only contributed to his loss in the 1980 presidential election but was ultimately credited to his successor.
"He appointed Paul Volcker [as chairman of the Federal Reserve] — having tried everything else to deal with inflation — and he knew, because Volcker told him, that he was going to choke the economy, raise interest rates, raise inflation to choke the economy and squeeze out inflation," Eizenstat recalled. "And Carter said, 'I know this is going to affect my re-election, but I’d rather do that than leave a legacy of double-digit inflation in the future.'"
Carter's predictions ultimately bore out — both involving the inflation hurting his chances at reelection and about Volcker's policies reducing inflation.
Which brings us to one of the ways that the dismissive attitude toward Carter's presidency highlights a problem with Americans' political perspective. One-term presidents are almost considered to be failures simply because they were defeated, all the more so if they lost in either a landslide or an upset. For Carter, the 1980 presidential election was both: The race between himself and Reagan was very tight according to pre-election polls, yet Carter wound up losing by 51 percent to 41 percent in the popular vote and 489 to 49 in the electoral vote on Election Day.
Because of America's winning-obsessed mentality, Carter's defeat in 1980 is viewed by many as a sign that he simply hadn't done a good job. "When you lose an election, the American people write you off, you’re a failure," Eizenstat explained. "If you win re-election and your first term was not so great, somehow you’re a success."
He added, "Americans like winners. He didn’t win his re-election and therefore, he’s been cast aside. Now, almost 40 years later — based again on contemporary, contemporaneous notes that I’ve taken at every single meeting I was in, 103 legal pads, 350 interviews, both positive and negative ones — I’m trying to bring back the full range of the Carter presidency and take it away from just that perception, 'OK, he lost the election -- let’s go on to somebody else. He couldn't have been a success.'"
The other problem with the dismissive attitude toward Carter's presidency is perhaps an even more fundamental one: It demonstrates that Americans have forgotten about the importance of character.
It's easy to draw a contrast between Carter and President Donald Trump when making this point, and certainly, that comparison is relevant given the scandal-plagued nature of the current White House. As a broader rule, however, Americans should hold in high esteem those political leaders who keep their promises, tell the truth, work hard and respect the august offices that they have been privileged to have entrusted to them.
These simple verities may seem so obvious that they need not be worthy of mention, but the reality is that they have become increasingly rare in our political leaders. Just look at the post-Carter era: Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush told regular lies and were caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal; Bill Clinton's infidelities and slipperiness under oath nearly got him removed from office; George W. Bush's own lies shed thousands of innocent lives, both American and Iraqi, as he immersed the country in a war that has never been adequately explained; and Trump, of course, has been hounded by scandals that are plastered across our headlines every day. Only Barack Obama's legacy can be held up as on par with Carter's among nearly forty years of presidents, when it comes to sheer basic human decency.
"He honored the presidency," Eizenstat told Salon. "He respected the institutions of the presidency, the Justice Department, the FBI, his own cabinet. He never denigrated them. Interestingly, the first investigation under the special counsel law was a false allegation against his chief of staff, Ham Jordan, that he had smoked cocaine in a Studio 54 bar in New York. Totally fictitious, made up by Roy Cohn . . ."
At this point, I noted that Cohn had advised Trump on legal matters back in the 1970s.
"Yes, an adviser to our current president and one of Senator [Joseph] McCarthy’s hatchet men," Eizenstat pointed out. "And yet when that special counsel was appointed with absolutely no proof, and Ham was ultimately fully vindicated, Carter never blasted the special counsel. He respected the institutions and let them play themselves out. That’s the lesson that could be very well followed today."
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