* * *
Carter’s accomplishments in domestic policy have also stood the test of time, despite his distant attitude toward Congress. Yet by the reckoning of the respected CQ Almanac and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, the Carter administration’s success rate in passing major legislation is one of the highest of any modern president beginning with Dwight Eisenhower, and by one estimate, with a success rate of over 70 percent, not far below that of his most immediate Democratic predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, the storied master of Congress.12 Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd, who had seen many presidents in action, concluded that too many commentators slight his legislative accomplishments, when in fact, with an “extensive and ambitious” legislative agenda, “he won more often than he lost,” and “could be justly proud of his legislative accomplishments. History will be more kind to Mr. Carter than were his contemporaries.”13
The measures most directly affecting ordinary Americans brought lower air fares and cheaper goods to homes and businesses by deregulating the airline, trucking, and railroad industries, and beginning the restructuring of the communications and banking industries. Carter revolutionized America’s energy future before other political leaders saw the dangers of America’s growing dependence on Middle East oil. He persuaded Congress to pass three major energy bills in four years, which set the United States on a new, revolutionary course of conservation, alternative energy sources, and greater production of traditional American fossil fuel resources. The ending of federal price controls, together with the creation of a Department of Energy, soon allowed the United States to reclaim its position as one of the world’s leading producers of natural gas and crude oil.
Carter was also the greatest environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt, and none since have come close to his accomplishments. He set more land aside for national parks than had all his predecessors combined, overriding persistent demands by the Republicans and oil companies to open huge swaths of Alaskan land to oil drilling. Over the strenuous objections of the automobile industry, he issued far-reaching fuel efficiency standards, forcing America’s automakers to produce cars that could compete with Japan’s.
The man who made the improbable journey from Plains, Georgia, to the Oval Office by running against Watergate and the Washington status quo put in place major reforms that survive to make government more accountable. Independent inspectors general were installed in every department of the executive branch. In the most important reform of the federal civil service since its founding, Carter established the Senior Executive Service, a more highly paid and flexible career track to attract and retain top-quality candidates into public service based upon merit, which it does to this day. It also shielded civil servants from partisan political pressures, and was invoked to protect government employees from a 2016 Trump transition team request for the names of those engaged in climate change work under President Obama.14 Walter Schaub, Jr., the nonpartisan head of the Office of Government Ethics, created by Carter’s 1978 Ethics in Government Act, resigned over what he saw as the Trump administration’s repeated flouting of laws and standards.15
He tightened disclosure rules for incoming federal officials (setting a standard that eventually led to the resignation of his most valuable adviser and confidant, Bert Lance); passed an ethics bill with a hair-trigger special prosecutor for serving senior officials (which unfairly caught up his chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan); with congressional support instituted a unique bipartisan system for selecting his nominees for federal judgeships on the basis of legal competence; imposed strict gift rules for senior officials in office; and restricted the “revolving door” that allowed outgoing top officials to lobby their former departments. By signing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in his first year in office, Carter fulfilled his campaign pledge to abolish bribery and similar crookedness by American multinational corporations to obtain foreign contracts. In any given year, major cases are brought against American companies trying to evade the law. Carter also signed a tough law to prevent American corporations from joining the Arab boycott of Israel, which I helped negotiate with business groups and Jewish organizations on his behalf. We then issued stringent regulations to ensure the law was strictly enforced.
Carter also created the modern vice presidency by giving authority and access to Walter Mondale, in historic contrast to his predecessors’ often humiliating and even crippling exclusion from secret information and the presidential decision-making process. He moved the vice president’s office from the Executive Office Building to the West Wing of the White House and granted Mondale full access to the paper flow, including intelligence analyses and other classified documents. With variations to suit each personal relationship, this pattern has held ever since. And Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter elevated the position of first lady to greater importance than it occupied since the days of Eleanor Roosevelt, setting a path for Hillary Clinton and other first ladies.
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More broadly, Carter was the first “New Democrat”—more conservative on spending than the traditional base, a social and civil rights progressive, and an engaged liberal internationalist seeking diplomatic rather than purely military solutions. In the end he was too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the conservatives. He departed from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal without abandoning it, and supported Johnson’s Great Society without expanding it, thus creating a new framework for the Democratic Party. This was a difficult political balancing act he could not always master in the White House, although he campaigned brilliantly as a Southerner reaching out to the northern white working class. Carter constantly had to tack between the domestic spending demands of his party’s congressional leadership and its liberal wing, and his own and his Southern supporters’ inherent fiscal conservatism—a reflection of their historic rejection of federal power. It would be left to Bill Clinton, another Southerner and a natural politician with an extraordinary grasp of policy, to deploy his rhetorical mastery in articulating and holding a centrist path for the party, better than the man who had begun to map the way under the worst possible economic circumstances—Jimmy Carter the engineer, businessman, and stern moralist.
Notwithstanding Carter’s mishandling of the political challenge posed by the activities of his closest friend, Bert Lance, as a small-town banker before he joined the government, Jimmy Carter ran an honest administration. He did not resort to the illegal activities of the Nixon administration, he reined in their CIA excesses, and he did not yield to the temptation of secretly selling arms to Iran to free American hostages in the manner of the Reagan administration’s convoluted deal.
Like his idol, Harry Truman, whose favorite slogan, “The Buck Stops Here,” he kept on his Oval Office desk, Carter left the White House a widely unpopular president. But Truman now is recognized more for his achievements than his faults, and I hope this book will contribute to a similar reassessment of Jimmy Carter’s term in the White House. His administration was consequential, and America became a better and more secure country because of it. As his vice president, Walter Mondale, put it, in words now exhibited in the Carter Presidential Library: “We told the truth, we obeyed the law, we kept the peace.”16
PART I
INTO THE WHITE HOUSE
1
THE 1976 CAMPAIGN
James Earl Carter, Jr., was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, a town of some 550 people in the deeply segregated South, and was raised there and in the nearby village of Archery, where he spent part of his childhood. Few had indoor plumbing or electricity, and mule-drawn wagons were more common than automobiles. Whites were a distinct minority, only about one-third of the residents, and young Jimmy played baseball with black children and worked with them in the fields. But his was no log cabin upbringing. His family occupied the top rung in a hierarchical society. James Earl Carter, Sr., owned 350 acres of his own land, raised peanuts, and sold them through his own warehouse. Even during the Great D
epression, the father of the future president prospered. By the late 1930s he employed more than two hundred workers, and five black sharecropper families lived on his farm. As in many Southern homes of the era, the maids and cooks were black and cared for the children, including Jimmy and his siblings, and his playmates were often the children of his family’s black workers.1
As a boy, Jimmy developed an early love of the outdoors, playing hide-and-seek in the woods, fishing, and hiking.2 He also enjoyed listening to baseball games on the family’s battery-powered radio, and absorbing discussions of politics, which ran in the family. His maternal grandfather went into politics simply because he enjoyed it, and his father served in the Georgia legislature because he wanted to protect the rural electrification system established under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. As he recalled decades later, the arrival of electricity “had as much of an impact on me as any single event. When people ask me what is the most notable event of your life, I have a hard time not saying the day I married Rosalynn or my appointment to Annapolis; but very few days in my life were more important than the day they turned the lights on in our home, and I saw the federal government giving me a better life.”3
As a young boy he wanted most to please his father, a stern taskmaster, by helping around the farm. While James senior held traditional Southern segregationist views on race, his wife, “Miss Lillian,” was a registered nurse who insisted on equal treatment for black and white people, and spent a great deal of time helping deliver babies and caring for poor, sick people of both races in their homes across the county, often paid in chickens or vegetables.4 Jimmy saw his mother resist strong pressure to conform to racial norms and never forgot her example. As he said, “She never apologized for it, and I never knew anyone else when I was growing up who had that willingness to circumvent the segregated racial society. She was my inspiration to look beyond what was then the separate but so-called equal society to a more moral environment.”5 At the age of sixty-eight the indomitable Lillian Carter enrolled in the Peace Corps and served in a community hospital in India on the outskirts of Mumbai (then Bombay). She was a captivating personality who came into my life during the early stages of the Carter presidential campaign. Her hair had turned totally white, and her skin was wrinkled, but her youthful enthusiasm and translucent smile seemed to emanate from the inside. I found her sparkling, warm, and loving, always with a hug and good word for me, my wife, Fran, and my boys, Jay and Brian.
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There was good reason for Carter to win a disproportionate number of black votes against far more liberal opponents in Democratic primaries on the road to the White House: He understood black Americans as individuals, while they viewed blacks as a group. Still, as Georgia and the other Southern states required, he attended the all-white Plains High School while there was no high school at all for black children. He explained it to me in searing, highly personal terms: “I grew up with blacks. I got to know them, and I could see the ravages in their lives of a second-class existence,” especially when contrasted with his own. His father was determined that he finish high school and go on to college, a rarity even for a privileged white boy during the Depression, especially for one who was the first in his family even to graduate from high school. He began a lifelong, ceaseless commitment to educational self-improvement, making all As in school, while playing basketball and joining the book club.6
From the time he was five years old, his ambition was to attend the U.S. Naval Academy, which he eventually reached only by a circuitous route. Through his father’s political connections, Jimmy won an appointment through the local congressman but first had to wait a year because the slot had been promised to another candidate. So he studied engineering at Georgia Southwestern Junior College, and when the Navy asked for additional engineering courses, he made the honor roll at Georgia Tech and studied nuclear physics at Union College in Schenectady, New York.7 His determination to qualify for the Naval Academy went beyond extra study; concerned that his flat feet and skinny frame would disqualify him, he rolled his feet over Coca-Cola bottles to strengthen his arches and went on a banana diet to bulk up.8
Carter’s four years at Annapolis opened a world far wider than the rural hamlet where he was raised. As he told me, “When I went to the Naval Academy I was a different person from what I am now. I was smart. I never had any problem with studies, but I spent a lot of my time reading great literature and philosophical books, and sailing and flying airplanes, and I studied classical music. I could name almost every piano concerto that had ever been written, and I could listen to a record and I could tell which artist was playing. I stood fifty-sixth in a class of eight hundred.” A squib in his academy yearbook read, “Jimmy Carter never opened a book, unless it was to help one of his classmates study.” While Carter dismissed this backhanded compliment as untrue, he did tell me that the “point is that I was learning more than just how to tie knots and how to run a steam turbine, and how to navigate a ship.”9
He also befriended and defended the only black midshipman, Wesley A. Brown, the sixth black man in the academy’s history and the first to graduate, his predecessors having been hounded out during their first year by racial harassment. White midshipmen refused to sit next to him, he was barred from joining the choir, and so many racial epithets were thrown at him by his classmates that he considered quitting every day he was there. What led him to stick it out was the support of a small handful of midshipmen who intervened. Carter, then an upperclassman, visited Brown in his dorm to encourage him to hang on and hang tough against seniors who gave him demerits with the aim of forcing his discharge. “If not for that, I’m not sure I would have made it,” said Brown. The two were runners on the cross-country team, and in a speech Carter made at a Naval Academy event in 2011, he described his encounters with Brown as “my first personal experience with total integration.” That was in 1945, three years before President Truman desegregated America’s armed forces.10 Carter recalled to me that Brown, who retired eventually as a lieutenant commander, “was a better runner than I was, and so I defended him to anyone. It didn’t seem like any courageous thing, but when he wrote his biography, he pointed out that I was the midshipman who came and helped him.”11
RICKOVER’S PROTÉGÉ
After graduating, the young naval officer married his local sweetheart, Rosalynn Smith, in 1946, and together they escaped the confining environment of rural southwest Georgia in a career that took him and his young wife to assignments in Norfolk, Pearl Harbor, submarine training in Groton, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. Great opportunity knocked in 1952, when he applied to join the new nuclear navy headed by then captain (later admiral) Hyman Rickover, who became another formative force in his life. During his initial interview he proudly told Rickover that he had finished in the top 10 percent of his Naval Academy class. Unimpressed, Rickover asked: “Did you always do your best?” The young officer stammered and admitted he had not. “Why not?” Rickover asked, turning his back and ending the interview. Carter continued sitting on an uncomfortable chair that Rickover had prepared with the front legs two inches shorter than the back ones, and then stumbled out of the room, certain he had washed out. Rickover brought him on board, however, and Carter always assumed it was because of his honesty. This seminal event was memorialized in the title of his presidential-campaign book, Why Not the Best?
Working in the nuclear navy was itself transformative, recalling that Rickover “drove all of us to levels of effort that we had never before contemplated, and he set an example for us, and he did as much or more than we did.”12 Carter remembered taking off for an eleven-hour flight to Seattle with Rickover aboard an old Constellation prop airplane, and working as hard as he could but nevertheless dozing off. When they landed, Rickover was still working. Carter said: “He was obsessed with his work, very demanding, and I responded well to it, although he never said a congratulatory word to me until after I was governor. He would find something wrong, if possible, with which to
condemn me publicly in front of my men, or if he couldn’t find anything wrong, he wouldn’t say anything.… I still think he was the greatest engineer who ever lived, because he made sure that things were designed right, built right, worked right, and operated safely.”13 In a nuclear submarine there was no room for error, and I believe that Carter’s own relatively reclusive lifestyle was shaped by his time in the Silent Service. It was normal to stay submerged for thirty days or longer in the notoriously tight quarters of a nuclear submarine.
But his most harrowing experience as a submarine officer came during a storm, as he stood watch on the bridge after midnight, when a huge wave washed him overboard into the Pacific. He managed to swim back to the sub, grab onto its five-inch gun and clamber back on board. If the boat had been traveling just a few degrees at an angle to the waves instead of directly into them, he would have been lost at sea. The storm damaged the radio antenna, so the captain was unable to check in at the usual eight-hour interval, and for the three days it took to reach an island base, the USS Pomfret was listed as lost, and next of kin were notified. Fortunately for Rosalynn, she was in Georgia at the time and never got the news.14 While he never used this incident in his political campaigns, it showed him the fragility of life.
Rickover was unsmiling and always parsimonious in praising his officers, a trait his most famous acolyte shared in dealing with us on his staff. There was a lot of Hyman Rickover in Jimmy Carter. They were both slight in stature, and they both made it to the top the hard way. Rickover was born Chaim Godalia Rickover, into a Jewish family in Russian-controlled Poland, not exactly the normal background for a rise to rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, while Carter through intelligence and diligence vaulted from a town of five hundred people in rural Georgia. Both men had a fierce commitment to public service and to principle, as well as personal austerity and an abhorrence of waste, especially of public money. When Rickover’s office was moved from the old Navy Building to nearby Crystal City, the navy wanted to build a wall to block the view from nearby high-rises to protect the classified papers on his desk; Rickover said he would simply close the blinds. He also patched the decrepit linoleum instead of replacing it, and when he brought in projects under budget, he enjoyed testifying before Congress that he was returning the unused funds to the Treasury.15
President Carter Page 3
