American History Hit - Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

In this special episode, Don Wildman is joined by experts Jonathan Alter and Jefferson Cowie to delve into the remarkable life of the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100.Carter, who served in office from 1977 to 1981, is the longest-lived president.From his early days in rural Georgia, to a hostage crisis which cost him his second term, and his extensive humanitarian efforts post-presidency; hear about the pivotal moments and challenges in Carter's life.Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 MediaAmerican History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special episode of American History Hit. Well, it was sad to get the news. President Jimmy Carter, our 39th and longest-lived President of the United States,

died at the age of 100 while at home in Plains, Georgia. In today's episode, this special episode, we're going to look back at the life and legacy of Jimmy Carter, who served in the White House from 1977 to 1981. And for this, I'm joined by two special guests. experts Jonathan Alter and Jefferson Cowie. First up, Jonathan, who authored Carter's biography. Normal American History Yet programming will resume from tomorrow. Hello to all. This is American History Hit, and I'm your host, Don Wildman. Glad you're listening.

This week, sadly, we are saying goodbye. Former President Jimmy Carter has reached the end of his lengthy life of American service. The longest living U.S. president in history. Back in February, 2023, when it was announced that he had entered into hospice care, we all braced for the end then. But in typical fashion, Jimmy Carter was, well, he just went on living, to the point that most of us forgot he was in hospice care. The man had spunk.

No matter what your political affiliation, you have to give him that. And then his wife, First Lady Rosalind Carter, also full of vim and vigor into her elder years, while she passed on November 19, 2003, 96 years old. And once more, we all felt badly for President Carter, who at 99 was somehow able to attend his wife's memorial, services in Atlanta. Jimmy Carter, President, Governor, Farmer, Engineer, Navy Man, Husband, Father, and Son has left an indelible mark upon the American landscape and the world. And today we celebrate this American president by examining his life in times to come to some fresh understanding of what

his presence has meant to our nation and ourselves now that his days have finally waned. We do this guided by the wisdom and experience of Jonathan Alter, author of the definitive biography of the man, his very best, Jimmy Carter, A Life, published by Simon and Schuster in 2020. Welcome to the podcast, Jonathan Alter. I feel lucky to meet you. Great to meet you, Don. Glad to be here. It has been a long, long time with Jimmy Carter and four and a half decades since he was president. For many of us, living Carter's post-presidency was as much as presidency, really. You have kindly agreed to take us through his lifespan, starting at the beginning with perhaps,

in my opinion, the most unlikely biographical fact that he was from Georgia. How much of Carter's Southern childhood set him up for this amazing life in the public and in the politics? I think it had a central role in Jimmy Carter's life more so than another person, in part because he always called Plains Georgia home. This is a tiny community of 650 people in rural southwest Georgia. Traveling there is like traveling to a totally different country than most people connect. with the United States. Pretty much everything about it is different, down to the fact that you can spot a Confederate flag down there just across the street from where the Carter's lived. And this connection to the land and where he was from was complicated because Sumter County, Georgia,

which is where Plains is located, was one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South. And as I think people know, Jim Crow was white terrorism. This is what we were talking about. And this is what Jimmy Carter was faced with when he was a young man just back from the Navy, assuming his late father's business and civic responsibilities. And so he came back just before the Brown versus Board of Education decision, which desegregated schools in the United States or was intended to, but was met with what was called massive resistance. A lot of racial strife broke out when Carter was around 30 years old, and he had to deal with all of that, and his family connections made it even more complicated. His father had been a white supremacist, very much in league with what other businessmen in the area

believed. His mother, however, Lillian Carter, was a nurse who took care of black patients for free, as well as delivering Rosalind Carter. Wow. They met that early, huh? Yeah. So Jimmy and Rosalind Carter knew each other for 96 years. That's amazing. I can imagine. They were married for 77, which is longer than all but a thousand couples in the United States. So this life in rural Georgia, which I spent a lot of time unpacking and researching, it shaped him, but he sided more with his mother.

and with a illiterate black woman sharecropper named Rachel Clark, who he thought of as a third parent. His mother was often gone nursing, and his father was busy, and this woman, Rachel Clark, gave him his great love of nature, which led him to be one of the greatest environmental presidents in American history, signed 15 major pieces of environmental legislation. He was the first leader anywhere in the world who recognized the problem of global warming. Strong ties to the land. Strong ties to the land. And was an outdoorsman. And then she also gave him his faith.

And he was arguably the most devout man ever to be president of the United States. So this background there was central to who he became. But just one more quick point on this. He ducked the civil rights movement. You know, we tend to think of him as some kind of secular saint or Mahatma Gandhi figure. But he didn't say anything racist. but he was a bystander, and he later regretted that. And I argue in my book that he spent the second half of his life after age 50 making up for

what he did not do in the first half of his life, which was to stand up for civil rights. And so he never bothered to meet Martin Luther King Jr. He later became very close to Daddy King, Dr. King's father, and to Coretic King, Dr. King's widow. But before 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated, Jimmy, Carter, you know, wasn't safe for him in business or politics to have anything to do with them. And so this is what makes for a very complicated figure. And then, of course, after having ducked the civil rights movement, what does he do when he becomes president? He internationalizes

the civil rights movement with his human rights policy, which did so much to shift dozens of countries from autocracies to democracies. Now, we're worried about all these authoritative. regimes now, but there are fewer than when Jimmy Carter was president. And one of the reasons there are fewer is because Carter had this, you know, enormous commitment to human rights, which he took from his presidency into his post-presidency. Interesting. So many of us, you know, make up for things we lacked when we're young later on if you get to live a long enough life. Humble beginnings, I think that's an important thing to put a pin in because that will play out in his attitudes throughout his presidency. He's also a very successful Navy man, right?

Yes, his youth, it might as well have been in the 19th century. They had no running water, no electricity, no mechanized farm equipment, but they were not poor. And Carter was the only person in his high school class to go to a four-year college. But from a very young age, he aspired to be in the Navy like his uncle, his mother's brother. And not just an enlisted man, he wanted to be an officer. And he wanted to go to the U.S. Naval Academy. And after a lot of of effort. He finally went and began to achieve what he thought was his life ambition, which was to become an admiral and eventually chief of naval operations. But in between, he met a man named Hyman Rickover, an admiral who was the father of the nuclear navy, nuclear powered submarines. People don't realize this, but they put a nuclear power plant on the back and bottom of a submarine before they had them on land. And nuclear power, nuclear-powered submarines, this was the most exciting tech project

of the middle part of the 20th century, highly classified, extremely elite and exciting. And Carter was in this, and at one point between service on conventionally powered submarines, after service on those submarines, there was a meltdown at an experimental nuclear reactor in Canada, and Carter had to run into this melted down nuclear reactor. It was only for 90 seconds because they thought he would be killed.

They knew so little about it. It was a very dangerous mission in any event. And they prevented this reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, from flooding into the river and causing untold harm. They didn't know much about nuclear power nuclear reactors in 1952. Well, that's a foreshadowing event, isn't it? Yes, it was. But not long after that, his father died and he quit the Navy.

Otherwise, the peanut warehouse business that his father was running would have gone bankrupt. It almost went bankrupt anyway when Carter and Rosalind returned to Georgia. But that experience in the Navy, especially with Admiral Rickover, who was his role model, was instrumental in making the Jimmy Carter that we're all familiar with. It's pretty astonishing when you look at this young guy's resume, how he might have. envisioned this to happen because, I mean, you come from those kinds of beginnings. He's out there in the rural country, yet seeing himself doing what he does. I guess World War II had a lot to do with it. It made that story for a lot of young men back then, including my own father. But it launches him into a much bigger vision of life, which he had to have had himself. We didn't even mention

some fact I've got on a sheet here. When he was 13, he bought five houses in planes, which he then put on the market at bottom prices because of the Depression and all that, but then rented him out. I mean, this was a savvy kid. This is a very smart individual who was, you know, at the top of his class. He actually wasn't at the very top of his class at the Naval Academy. My book is called his very best. And Jimmy Carter's first very short campaign autobiography that he published just before he ran for president the first time is called Why Not the Best. And that's because when he was being interviewed by Admiral Rickover, Rickover said, where did you stand in your class? and Carter said I was 39th, you know, in a class of, I don't know, 600-something. And he thought that was pretty good.

And Rick Over said, did you do your best? And Carter answered honestly, he said, no, I didn't. And Rick Over said, why not your best? And he turned around. The interview was over. And Carter thought that he would not be admitted to the nuclear navy, which was his dream job. But he was. And I argue that from that day in 1952, until the day he died, whatever he did, he was all in.

He was giving his utmost. And for a man of that immense intelligence, and he was one of the most intelligent men ever to be president of the United States, and he had some pretty stiff competition, that made him enormously formidable. And as his son, Jeff said to me, when I asked him to use one word to describe him, that word was intense. So people tend to remember Jimmy Carter as this kindly grandfather with a benign smile. There was nothing laid back about him. And there was nothing humble about him. This is important to understand. There's no politician that's humble. He was very, very ambitious. But he was ambitious for more than just himself. He was ambitious to help people and to make the world better and to use his power to leverage change in the lives of ordinary. people all over the world. And he worked at that. He worked at that every day. Even when he was

relaxing, he was doing it in a very intense way. He was fishing in Siberia when he was 93 years old, that kind of thing. There's an interesting story about the Navy. While in Pramuda, he was invited, his British officials invited the white only crew members to a party. Carter urged everyone to refuse that invitation. He was already beginning to shape up his outlook on that. Yes, he had unusually enlightened views on race for somebody from his part of the country. And that came from his mother and Rachel Clark, as I mentioned. So he did try to do that. But then later, it was almost like dissidents in the old Soviet Union.

He and Rosalind and their family were the only ones who wanted to allow black people to, it wasn't that they were trying to get membership in the Plains Baptist Church, just to be able to cross the threshold and enter the church. And Carter tried to make that happen and he lost. But then when he was in the state Senate and first running for governor, he didn't want to advertise that. Because as he said to me at one point, when I was interviewing, we said, I had a choice. I could either be part of the civil rights movement or I could be governor of Georgia. And I chose to be governor of Georgia.

But what he did, which was so remarkable, is that just moments after taking the oath of office, as governor in early 1971, he said the time for racial discrimination is over. Now, in a lot of the rest of the country or in other parts of the world, it was long past time for it to be over. These were revolutionary words in Georgia, and he went on to integrate state government in Georgia and appoint black judges and other black folks to high office and, of course, did the same as president when he took the United States government from tokenism to genuine diversity and began to become the Jimmy Carter that we know. But this was a process. And I think there's a lesson here, which Jimmy Carter himself, after the murder of George Floyd, he reflected on this,

you know, that silence is death and that we do need to speak up, but also better late than never. It's never too late to join the cause of justice. and that's part of what his life represents. I'm curious how he went from desiring to be an engineer, also had a peanut farm to run, how he ends up choosing politics. Well, first he got involved in education. So his father had been on the school board, and he decided to go on the school board as well.

And even though there was nothing he could do, even as chair of the county school board, to integrate the schools, he could do things to improve the black schools, which at the time he went on the school board, didn't even have any school buses. So they got the hand-me-down buses. In any event, he became interested in education, and he realized that he couldn't really do much unless he went into politics. He ran for the Georgia State Senate in 1962, and the guy he was running against, literally,

no exaggeration, stuffed the ballot boxes. And at first, it looked like Carter would have the election stolen from him, but he went to court and was able to get his seat. And then in 1966, he ran unsuccessfully for governor, and then he had a kind of a spiritual crisis and went in the north door to door for Jesus and had some unusual experiences there, including coming upon a brothel at one point and trying to convert the madam unsuccessfully. And then he decides he's going to run again and is elected in 1970 as governor. How did his political career intersect with the changing democratic politics down there? So he was the first real representative of what they called the New South, the post-segregationist South. But it didn't really, well, it impacted them

in that their son, Chip, as he described at Rosalind Carter's funeral, was beaten up for wearing a Lyndon Johnson button in the 1964 election Johnson was for civil rights. And the rest of the family was hassled as well. So he was kind of caught in the middle of that as a businessman and a state senator, and then he nudged Georgia forward as governor. And then the key moment, I think, came in the 1976 presidential campaign when he came out of nowhere to be the Democratic nominee and then got elected president. The key primary that year was the Florida primary. And winning there, set him on the path to the presidency, or made it quite likely that he would be president. But more important, he beat George Wallace in that primary. And Wallace was the representative of the

American segregationists. And he had been governor of Alabama. And by beating Wallace and driving George Wallace out of politics in that 1976 Florida Democratic primary, Jimmy Carter eliminated what had been the segregationist racist wing of the Democratic Party, which went back to the founding of the American Republic. Remember that the South was solidly democratic until the 1970s. The Democrats were the party of segregation and secession in the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. By the way, Jimmy Carter's mother was the only person in the county who ever had anything nice to say about Abraham Lincoln when he was growing up. So by ending the racist wing of the Democratic Party, Carter, before he became president, had done something very historic. And today, if you have those

views, you're not a Democrat. There's no room in the party for that. And that's been true since Jimmy Carter. And he had already started that under his governorship. How many terms was he governor? He was only governor for one term. He was not allowed to run for re-election by state law. But he changed so much and offended so many of the segregationists as he told me in one of our many interviews, if he had been allowed to run for governor again, he would have lost. He had a reputation. I mean, there's a lot of duality about this guy, and certainly his demeanor is just largely a PR effect. He was an intense guy, as you said, also considered arrogant by many in those circles, yes? I think some people considered him arrogant. He could be a little

bit intellectually arrogant, showing that he was the smartest guy in the room, which he usually was, but that can be politically unhelpful. He didn't have an arrogant demeanor when you met him, and certainly in public, he was far from arrogant. There was none of that from the podium. In fact, he could argue that he wasn't commanding enough, and that his depomping of the presidency was very harmful to him politically. But in private, he could be snappish and prickly. And so he often had trouble getting along with other politicians. He got along with the, average people that he met extraordinarily well. And he was a brilliant retail politician. And that was why he succeeded so well in Iowa and New Hampshire, in those caucuses and primaries where meeting voters

is what really counts. It wasn't great on TV. But I think where a number of analysts and historians and journalists have gone wrong is they thought that his prickly qualities, which were unappealing on Capitol Hill, that that meant that he didn't get much done. And actually, that's at odds with the historical record. He got a tremendous amount done as president. So he was a political failure, but a substantive success in many ways. It's always surprising me, you know, how involved he was. I mean, so much of his brand was the outsider coming from nowhere. In fact, he was very much involved in really shaping the Democratic Party even before he became president. He was chair of the Democratic Governor's Campaign Committee, 1974 campaign chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He was in the works. Yes, but those were instruments for his personal ambition. He was already running for president at that point. And he actually did not. do very much to remake the Democratic Party in his image, in a more moderate image. And that was why he was challenged by Ted Kennedy for the nomination in 1980. And when I asked him at one point what his great regrets were, the first one was that his failure to win a second term meant that he couldn't

provide a two-state solution in the Middle East, which he was deeply concerned about what he called the Holy Land. You know, he had completed the Camp David Accords, bringing peace between Israel and Egypt, which we can talk about, but he really regretted that he didn't get the Palestinian state that he was the first to advocate. But his second biggest regret was that by his description, he mishandled his relationships inside the Democratic Party. And he was not able to have a unified Democratic Party behind him when he ran for re-election. Tough time to do that with. I mean, there was a lot of shifting going on all over the place. It's arguable that his presidency would never have come to pass without what had happened before. A complete collapse of public trust in the presidency

coming off of Watergate. There was a whole reconfiguration being done in the electorate. In 1976, he's elected post-Watergate election. How did he utilize that time? Was he the source of that branding? Did he understand the value of being an outsider? Yes. And I don't think he could have been president without Watergate. So he was the perfect antidote. to Watergate, this honest, moral politician from the outside without any of the stench of Washington hadn't served in Congress, and he promised that he would never lie and that he would bring a government as good as its people, is the way he put it. And it was a very fresh, different kind of message. And he understood from the get-go that without even having to mention Watergate, he could be a figure of

healing for the country. And he was. But in the same way that he was made by Watergate, he was also unmade by Watergate, because when he became president, Watergate had been turned into, or the gate part of Watergate, had been turned into a suffix on any little flap that happened. Any little, you know, story of the week would be called something gate. So he had an aide, his budget director and friend from Georgia had had some banking problems well before the presidency. His name was Bert Lance and a New York Times columnist won a Pulitzer Prize for what was called Lance Gate. And Carter's brother, Billy, ran into some problems that are a little bit like Hunter Biden's, except not as bad. And that was called Billy Gate. You multiply that by 20 and you get a sense of how besieged

he was by the media, which assumed before any honeymoon, like in the first few days of his presidency, they just assumed he would be another corrupt president like Nixon. And that was the way people in my business, and I'm, you know, I'm a journalist, that's the way we rolled. I was a little young for it. I wasn't out of college yet, but, you know, I could sense then that the whole game in Washington was, let's rip down the president. And he was subjected to that after Watergate. His presidency is a very complicated time, mostly because the country is in a complicated moment. There's shifting ground under his presidency like maybe no others. I mean, it was really a different cultural moment going on there.

It definitely starts with the election that he's defeating the guy who pardons Nixon. He comes in with this fresh, clean slate idea. I remember that. I was 14 years old. We kind of bought that and then we kind of didn't. Like it seemed like a bit of a sales job. And he was not the greatest salesman of himself. which was unfortunate because you knew he was really smart that had come across in all the magazines

and so forth. But it was a slow start and a difficult kind of thing to pedal, right? Exactly. So I described Jimmy Carter as a visionary who wasn't really a leader. So, you know, a guy who would go charging up the right hills, but turn around and there was nobody behind him. And part of this was that he wasn't a very good politician, who was a very good candidate. And even in 1980, he wasn't a bad candidate. He knew how to run for office. But he wasn't an especially skillful politician. His wife, Rosalind, was much shrewder when it came to the politics of the presidency.

And a successful president has to be a good politician. And Carter thought that if you could get to the right solution, which he usually did, that the American people would recognize that and they would go along with him. And he sometimes failed to understand that the president, when you boil it all down, only has one power. And this was described by one of my mentors when I was at Harvard, a great political scientist and a historian named Richard Neustadt. And he wrote a book that was very influential with JFK, who made Neustadt as a transition director. And the book was called Presidential Power. And it said that the president only has one power.

that's the power to persuade. And if the president can't persuade, he can't govern effectively. Carter defied that in some ways because he had an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, and he was good at winning Republican votes on important bills like the Panama Canal treaties and a number of other important laws that he got approved. So he wasn't by any means a failure on Capitol Hill, but he was more broadly a political failure when he got at odds with the American people and his support started slipping away even when there was a rally around the flag quality in his last year when the hostages were seized in Iran. He had lost his deeper connection to the American people for the early in the presidency.

There's so many eras to talk about in what we have limited time to do. I want to be sure to cover Israel and Egypt. the Camp Data of Accords. Had he come into the presidency with that desire, or was he responding to events of the day? It was some combination. He had visited Israel when he was governor, and he had always been interested in the issues there. And then when he was running for president, he went on something called the Trilateral Commission and really educated himself on foreign policy and became deeply steeped in it. But then there were these opportunities. that really came out of Anwar Sadat's decision to visit Jerusalem, which was historic and transformed things,

but by itself was not enough to bring peace between those two countries. And that took Jimmy Carter as both Sadat, who became a very close friend of Carter and Manakum Began, the Prime Minister of Israel. They both readily attested that deal would never have happened without Jimmy Carter's just almost obsessive interest and his attention to detail, which he was much criticized for. But in this case, and in the Alaska lands bill, which doubled the size of the national park system in the United States, and the Panama Canal treaties that prevented a war and long war in Central America and on other issues, normalization with China, which became the foundation of a global economy. These huge foreign policy wins were partly the product of Carter's obsession with getting the details right,

which I think comes out of his engineering background and his faith. I remember so well the hopefulness of that moment, though, those guys shaking hands. It is a remarkable absence, though, culturally. There hasn't been the kind of coverage in the, you know, popular media, the movies and so forth. We just haven't never seen that really covered in a big movie, for instance, even though you have huge stars, Sadat, et cetera. And yet it was such a massive thing. And it still works. I mean, that treaty is still in place.

Yeah, there's a play. Richard Thomas played Jimmy Carter. and I think Ben Kingsley was in one of the stage productions as Sadat. So, you know, there's a play about Camp David, but you're right that it would make a great movie. And to be totally honest with you, I've been trying a little bit to get Carter's life covered more by Hollywood because I think it's very dramatic and has been underappreciated over the years.

Every one of these, I guess this is probably true of most presidencies, but every one of these bullet points on my list here is the 10. of a massive iceberg that's just all kinds of things involved. The Salt 2 Treaty, 1979, of course, Afghanistan and the cancellation of our participation in the 1980 Olympics. The list goes on and we'll get in a moment to the hostage crisis, but they're all huge deals that all took place within those four years. I mean, this is a one-term presidency, which is remarkable. Yeah, and some of them you put in the column of mistakes like boycotting the Olympics and the grain embargo that Carter imposed. It was very popular before it was very unpopular. So, you know,

it won overwhelmingly in Congress. And then pretty much everybody agreed that it didn't really do much to alter Soviet behavior and took it out on the athletes and was probably not such a great idea. But you're right that there were these major events. And then these were all playing out against backdrop of a terrible economy. I'll be back after this short break. Sure, which is inherited. And this is always the case with Presidencies. Your first term is what you deal with from the previous terms. These were conditions that were taking place in the early 70s. We associate them with Jimmy Carter. I mean, he's been painted with this brush that he was the creator of this economy, not even the case. Correct. And actually, the improvement of the economy should go on Carter's record. is what happened was, so I think, you know, your listeners know, the president doesn't really determine the economy. It's the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Now we've had some chairwomen. So in 1979, Jimmy Carter was facing this horrible inflation, which, as you correctly say,

mostly came out of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which was not on Carter's watch, and then was worsened by the Iranian Revolution, which, contrary to what Henry Kist, and some others maintain, and I argued with Kissinger about this, I think, fairly successfully. There really is not any evidence that Jimmy Carter could have prevented the Iranian revolution. But these things, these external events, caused this ruinous inflation, double-digit inflation. And Carter appoints Volker to be chair of the Federal Reserve. Volker jacks up interest rates. At one point they go as high is 19%.

Try getting re-elected when you have 19% interest rates. And this is very, very harsh medicine that Volcker, who told me at the end of his life that he was a big admirer of Jimmy Carter. So he applies this really harsh medicine. It doesn't start working until Reagan is president. So what do we have? We have because of these interest rates and other policies at the Fed, you have a short, extremely steep recession in 1982 when Reagan is in the second year of his presidency. and then after that recession ends, no inflation until 2020. It had been completely rung out of the economy, and Reagan goes on to get reelected thanks to Volker's policy.

I asked Volker, you know, people say that you cost Jimmy Carter the presidency, and you elected Reagan twice, and he said, you know, I've heard that. And he said, I met Carter at a fishing lodge after his presidency. We were both into fly fishing, and I went up to him when I said, President Carter, you know, I'm sorry if some of my policies cost you the presidency. And he looked at me and he smiled. And I could tell that it was actually one of Carter's genuine smiles, not one of his fake ones. And he said, Paul, there were many factors. And I think Carter was right about that. Not the least of which it happens in 1979. Again, this has lots of preceding events

that have nothing to do with Jimmy Carter, one of which is the Iranian Revolution against the Shah, which, you know, we can argue another way about that. But nonetheless, the unthinkable happens. And American hostages are taken by a revolutionary government, and we are held hostage as a nation for over a year, 444 days. All of this terrible experience for everyone. How many times we saw Nightline and all those, you know, day-to-day discussions of this terrible tragedy and this terrible embarrassment,

all that gets attached to Jimmy Carter. How do you get elected with that? That's the toughest thing anybody's had to do at the end of their term. Well, first, it was a decision that Carter made, which was arguably the worst of his presidency, that precipitated the seizing of the hostages. Just days before, Carter had agreed to let the Shah of Iran, who had left the peacock throne and was being treated for cancer in Mexico to come into the United States. And what happened was the Rockefellers, who were very close to the Shah, pulled the wool over the eyes of the State Department. It's a really quite fascinating story that I tell in my book. They convinced the State Department that the Shah could not be treated adequately in Mexico,

which was not true. But Carter, in a kind of humanitarian moment, agreed to let the Shah in in November of 1979, and shortly thereafter, these student militants in Tehran seized the embassy. If they hadn't had that as a pretext, it wouldn't have happened. And the Shah didn't stay in the United States for very long for his treatment. And, you know, he died the next year in Egypt. He was in several countries after he left the throne. But it was a mistake to let him in.

And then the way Carter handled it was probably not wise politically, not probably. It was very unwise politically, as his mother and wife told him repeatedly. And he knew, and he and I discussed this, that if he had taken military action, he very likely would have been re-elected. And, you know, if he had bombed Tehran, but he thought the hostages would be killed. So he didn't do that. He did try to stage a hostage rescue mission in April of 1980,

and it failed miserably. Just exacerbating the American opinion of their president. I remember that very well. Just shaking one's head in the morning, as you heard what had happened the night before. Yeah, and he took total responsibility for it, which is unlike what some of his successor would do in a similar situation.

It basically ended any opportunity to get the hostages out before the election, although they came close, and then there may have been, you know, what they call the October surprise. I've been writing about this lately. You know, there's increasing evidence that there was an effort by the Reagan campaign to delay the release of the hostages. But then eventually Carter did get them out just moments before he left office. Mission accomplished. Those hostages were all safe.

Now we've seen that movie. Everyone knows there was a good ending, but boy, did it just put the nail in the coffin as far as Carter's presidency's going. But that's the beautiful thing about this story. If we may end on an upnote here, Jimmy Carter surprises everyone. He goes on living and he embraces his post-presidency. To a point that very soon afterwards, there's a real tilt I would imagine if there's such a thing as approval ratings of ex-presidents. His must have been soaring, right? Yeah.

So basically, first he revolutionized the vice presidency by giving well, Walter Mondale stuff to do, which almost none of his predecessors had. Then he revolutionizes the office of First Lady or the position of First Lady by empowering Rosalind Carter. And then after leaving office, he revolutionizes the post-presidency. And there's this myth that he got more done as a former president than his president. That's completely wrong. You don't have the levers of power when you're not in office. So the Carter Center did wonderful work in essentially eradicating getting worm disease, making great progress against river blindness. He did get some political prisoners released in monitored elections in more than 100 countries. In 1994, he was very involved in preventing

wars in Haiti and arguably in North Korea. But mostly he became a symbol that you can keep on serving, keep on helping other people, keep on inspiring other people to do their best on behalf of not just themselves, but others. And the Carter's did this in literally hundreds of ways after leaving office. And we could talk all day about the smaller things that they did as he tried to show that you don't have to just play golf and serve on corporate boards and take big speaking gigs when you're a former president. I think you're already answering my question.

Did he see this post-presidency ambitiously? Did he understand that he was going to have the effect that he had? Or was this just the organic actions of a good man who wants to do good things? I think it's some combination. What happened was both he and Rosalind Carter were depressed after he was shellacked by Ronald Reagan. And she wanted him to try to make a comeback. And he brushed that aside. But then in the middle of the night, it occurred to him,

why can't I do what I did at Camp David in Atlanta? And so first, in association with Emery is called the Carter Center, which is a terrific organization. They began to hold conferences, and then that evolved into other projects. Not all of them worked, but they created an institution that is now outliving him. It's chaired by his grandson, Jason, and they continue to do terrific work all around the world on many different important, mostly health-related issues. You've met him how many times, Jonathan?

Well, I interviewed him a dozen times, and I had met him when I was. a columnist for Newsweek magazine in 2000, I interviewed him on a Habitat for Humanity site. And then I helped the Carter's build a house in Memphis in 2015. I traveled with him up to Annapolis for his 75th reunion, 75 years after he graduated in the Maple Academy. So I did spend quite a bit of time with him and his family. And I just came to have immense respect for his decency and his drive. He really was the only president, with the exception of Thomas Jefferson, who could be fairly called a Renaissance man. And so in addition to doing all of these other humanitarian things, you know, he wrote a book of poetry. Some of the poems are not bad. He built all the furniture

in his house, and it's beautiful. The woodworking book that he wrote is beautiful. It's very high quality. And he wrote a novel, which is less good. So not all the things that he taught himself to do were equally successful, but he was an engineer with the soul of a humanist. And he used his engineering skills to solve all kinds of problems, including the problem of how do you learn to write a poem. Yeah. He was a work in progress, I think, right? I'm not sure that he was so much of a work in progress. Because I think because of the grounding of his faith and his value structure, that there really wasn't that much change, although he did move to the left after he left office. But I think that it was more his many works in progress. And he knew an immense amount about a huge

variety of subjects. And you could have a fascinating conversation with him. on just about anything. Music, art, he turned himself into a decent painter as well. And not just culture, but science, history. His mind was such an active and interesting place. And that was something that is very hard to see when you're looking at him from afar. And so I felt like I had to really spend as much time as I could with him in order to get at the deeper questions of what drove this very complex individual. Yeah, I think that the mistakes he made will fade with time. And the actions of his post-presidency especially

will have the effect of burnishing his legacy, along with the good works that you have done. He was married for 77 years. Let that be a lesson to us all. It can be done. Remarkable man. The only thing I'd want to say to your audience, Don, because I know that many of the people listening

really know a lot about history, is that as a Dutch historian, Vanek once wrote, history is an argument without end. And I am interested in opening an argument about Jimmy Carter's presidency and true legacy. I'm not expecting to win it on every particular, but I do think that he has been badly misjudged and underestimated. And while nobody would nominate him for Mount Rushmore,

I think it's a mistake to try to depict him as a saint or try to apologize for his many mistakes. Notwithstanding that, historians have a different mission than journalists. As a journalist, I judge politicians in some cases by how popular they are. How successful are they at bringing the American people along with them. But historians have a different mission. We need to look at presidents by how they changed the country and the world. And if you look at something like normalization with China, Deng Xiaoping leaves after meeting with Carter in 1979.

He goes home, he legalizes private property. And China goes from a country with a GDP like that of a sub-Saharan African nation to the greatest, fastest growth in human history. None of that is possible without this bilateral relationship that Carter and Deng Xiaoping initiated. So Carter thinks that will be the most long-lasting accomplishment. of his presidency. My point is that you have to look at what changed, what were the downstream effects, and that's a complicated historical project. So just to take one other small example

that I think people can relate to, before Carter, you couldn't drink craft beer. The brewery industry was under these ancient regulations. If you wanted to fly from New York to L.A., it would cost you $13 or $1,400 in today's dollars when Carter deregulated the airline industry that changed. There are so many things that not just Carter, but that any president does or doesn't do, that look different later, that we need to resist superficial judgments like mediocre president, great former president, and just look in a little bit more of a sophisticated way at how a complex, decent man governed in what you accurately described as very complicated, fraught times in the 1970s. Interesting. Well, thank you very much. I think you've started the conversation right there.

Jonathan H. Alter is an American journalist, best-selling author, Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and television producer, who was a columnist and senior editor for Newsweek magazine in the good old days, 1983 until 2011. He wrote his very best, Jimmy Carter, life interviewed 250 people who worked or knew Jimmy Carter. He's interviewed the man many times. Jonathan has also interviewed nine out of ten of the last presidents. I have a feeling we'll be talking to you again before too long. Thank you so much. Jonathan, it was a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for having me, Don. After the break, I'll be joined by author Jefferson Cowie to talk about some of the highlights and challenges Carter faced while in office. In the grand scheme of the

20th century in America, each decade seems to have a very definite identity, the roaring 20s, the 30s, and in Great Depression, the 40s are World War II, 50s Cold War, 60s rock and roll, even the 80s are big hair and junk bonds. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but it's really to make a point about the 1970s, a complicated decade of American history, which leaves even those of us who were alive at the time wanting for a label to hang our hats on. Was it Ford Pintoes and Watergate, OPEC and Recession, disco in Studio 54? Well, how about Vietnam and the hostages in Iran. Well, bigger thinkers than I have worked on this cultural question, and we have one with us today. Jefferson Cowie offered the book Staying Alive, the 1970s and

the last days of the working class, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Freedom's Dominion, a saga of white resistance to federal power. Welcome, Jefferson. We need perspective. I'm happy to be here, and I'll see what I can do. Every presidency is a mirror of its times. Jimmy Carter was certainly ours back in the 1970s. He was in various ways managing a transition. Fair to say, a transformation from one idea of American society to the next. Do you agree with that? That's exactly right. When we think about decades, I think it can be a little misleading,

especially when it comes to something like the 70s, because I see the 70s less as a period of 10 years than I do a break between epics. You have a sort of post-war era of relative affluence, a shared affluence, and rising expectations. And then the 70s are a period of rupture, and then we have sort of the birth of the Reagan era, free market, neoliberal kind of new consensus. It really starts with a tremendous amount of cynicism. It is set up by the great hope, certainly the early 1960s, with this booming economy.

And things are pretty clear for America in those days. And then, of course, really every decade cleaves down the middle when you think about it. It's a carryover from the previous one. Then we define ourselves. The 70 starts with the cynicism from Watergate, from Vietnam, all the leftover stuff. And really, it's the rise of resistance against all the liberalism that was so apparent in the 60s. The silent majority, which really elects Richard Nixon's landslide in 72. That's how it all starts out.

And things start to change a little bit in the middle part of that time. How does it go for Jimmy Carter when he gets into power? Right. So I think that's a really powerful way to think about it, that the 1970s are sort of half post-60s and half pre-80s. And Carter is a sort of hinge right there in the center of that. And when Carter runs for the presidency, you know, his tagline is, I'm not going to lie to you. You know, that's the kind of salve that the American people are looking for at that particular juncture after the Pentagon papers and Watergate and the failures in Vietnam and the church committee in the mid-70s, which revealed all this shenanigans that the Americans had been up to abroad. So you have this earnest guy coming from the rural South.

And the South is sort of on the rise as a Sunbelt creation. And I think he becomes a sort of repository of a certain kind of political virtue. I don't want to gloss over this stuff. I mean, you're talking about my early teenage years here. I want to really identify the fact that something major was happening. We had an America that was really soaring, certainly after World War II. It was kind of what my parents expected it to be. They were FDR Democrats. And the right people were in power as far as we were concerned. Maybe Nixon tilted it the wrong way for them. But it was a very hopeful time that I had an early life in. When things go wrong, we get presidential commissions on TV. The right. of the press. We have an enormous amount of information coming to us that we never had before. And it starts to infiltrate the American consciousness that we've been, as you said, lied to, and this government is not to be trusted. And in some way, if I may editorialize for a moment, in some ways that was correct as well. Like that was a confirmation of the fact that we lived in a world where we could not trust the government. But then it started to go sour. And it gets really, really

sort of just a negative. And that's where Carter comes in, because he's able to, to sort of address this with this honest small-town farmer guy. It's just ironic that he was from the South, right? I mean, he's a completely outsider as far as the North's concerned. He's a complete outsider, and that's what's refreshing about him. It's not just that he's from the South. He's just completely outside the Beltway, right? He just has no connections, and which ends up becoming one of his failures,

is that he doesn't really know how to run Washington. Carter runs just when George Wallace, who is this kind of, you know, this segregationist snarling governor of Alabama, getting tremendous traction in 68 and 72. And so the South becomes really important. There's this sort of political churn there, and Carter emerges as somebody who could win the South as a racial progressive. That's a really important dimension of who he was,

because a lot of people were really worried about the direction of the South, which was a core part of the Democratic Party at that time. And we forget that. You know, it's lost to the Democratic Party now. But at the time, the Democratic Party completely dependent upon the South and was losing it after the Civil Rights and voting rights. He's more of an insider than we give him credit for, though. He's the Democratic machinery.

I mean, he's the head of the Democratic Party, right, before he becomes president? To say he's an insider, I think, I mean, we're talking about who he is as a candidate, right? He shows up in Iowa. Nobody really knows. You know, the famous line is Jimmy Who. The Atlanta paper, I think, said, Jimmy Who is running for president of what? He's not musky. He's not Humphrey.

He's not any of these people who had absolute complete name recognition. He was doing full-on retail politics in the president. primary. So he was just out there at the plant gates and in the neighborhoods and, you know. He goes up against Gerald Ford, of course, who's coming off of a real honker, you know, of pardoning Richard Nixon. I remember the moment of the gasp when that happened. I think I was in a football stadium or something. It might have been a day when the college was playing in the town next door. And there was literally a gasp as people got the word that he had done this. That's how America felt about that action. So Ford was not the strongest candidate. Right. And he was facing off an

attack from the right from Ronald Reagan, and a lot of people at the 76 Republican convention kind of felt the wrong guy won the convention. Like Reagan's star was rising, but Ford inherited the mantle. So they're in a transition from a sort of traditional liberal Republican position to a much more conservative politics. In our brief conversation today, I'm going to be flashing back to the 70s in these days. I mean, there are so many events. I literally had to print out a timeline just to remember what all was going on in those days. It's incredible. I mean, there's everything from ERA, the women's rights movement, to, of course, the OPEC rise to gay liberation. I'm literally looking at pages saying anti-war movement, Watergate scandal.

It's just one of these crazy times when there's just one thing after another. And like I said before, we have news organizations making their hay on this stuff. Careers are being built on steering us left and right through this whole thing. It's incredible. Yeah. And Warden Bernstein, after the stories on Watergate and all the president's men, kind of create a template for a lot of hungry journalists. If you want to make it, those are the guys to emulate.

Find the nasty, dark secret in the American state and reveal it. That's really central to sort of that kind of investigation. There's a lot of hope. You know, we see it as a dark decade. But the first half, it's cynical about the federal government, but I think there's a lot of political hope for what might come next, that the whole idealism of the 60s might find some sort of institutional presence of the 70s. You're talking about the BGs, of course.

Yeah, absolutely. who saved us from ourselves. His sort of spiritual quality, he has this kind of ministerial presence to us back then. At least that's how he was marketing himself. What I found refreshing about him, frankly, as a probably 14, 15-year-old, was that he was willing to call it out.

You know, he knew that we were coming off this wave of things going wrong in America, and he wanted to attribute it to causes that we could identify and fix. What that eventually leads to is ourselves, which was a very dangerous, choice to make as a president. Right. So I presume you're leading us up to the crisis of confidence speech, which was supposed

to be an energy speech. The energy crisis is defining the decade. We're literally running out of gas, right, which is a great metaphor and a reality. And it's causing stagnation, both high unemployment and high inflation, which are not supposed to go up at the same time. So nothing's working right. And he's given speech after speech on the energy crisis. And then he disappears for 10 days. And nobody knows where he is. People are worried about his health. But he's been at Camp David and he's been traveling and talking to regular people and community leaders and religious leaders and scholars and stuff about what's wrong with America. And he comes out and gives this speech in 1979 where he basically says the problem is us. The problem is we're too materialistic.

We're too self-absorbed. We've lost our way. It was very much a sermon, like you're saying. He was very much a kind of come-to-Jesus sort of moment. And it was a very risky political move. I found it refreshing. I remember it. I remember going good for you, man. You know, yeah, we got problems. And, you know, it's the oldest thing in the therapy book because don't blame anyone else for your problems. Look at yourself. And he was basically calling that out. Yes. And there were a couple contradictions. One is you were just talking about the post-World War II boom. Essentially the promise was you work hard and we're going to give you lots of stuff. Right. And he now suddenly, Jimmy Carter is at, you know, in the Oval Office saying, you like stuff too much. And you need to stop buying stuff because that's bad for your spirit. Do you think that if OPEC had not formed and prices had not going so high, what would his presidency have been like, do you think? That's a really interesting question. I mean, counterfactuals are so dangerous.

He basically spent his entire presidency fighting first inflation and the oil crisis and then the hostage crisis. And so all of that is tied up with Middle East and energy policy. And it would have been a completely different game. You also have to see Carter moving away from traditional democratic norms. He's not a new dealer. He's not a great society guy. He has a few things he wants to do, like national health insurance and things like that that he's not going to be able to do because of inflation. So maybe that would have gone in a positive direction. It's very hard to tell. So domestic things are a constant shifting ground underneath of his presidency and underneath of all of us back then. It was just a sense of insecurity in the country, which he tried to address in his way for better or worse. Internationally, he was more successful. The Camp David Accords and all of that negotiation, did that fall into his lap or did he really make that happen? It's hard to imagine somebody else doing the Camp David Accords.

I mean, he so profoundly believed in peace. You know, he's coming off this realpolitik of Henry Kissinger and Nixon or trying to rebuild a world order and moving chess pieces around the global board. And this guy sits down with Menachan Began and Amar Sadat and says, let's talk. Let's figure this out together. and let's reason together, and he does it. Now, the Sinai Peninsula at that particular moment was a huge bargaining chip, and he was able to use that to get Egypt in there and stuff. So there's actually pretty important exogenous issues.

But I think Carter's the guy for that, and it is because of his core moral principle was this sense that peace could work. Also that he was an opportunity for them. I mean, certainly for Sadat, who'd been around for a while, and coming off of Nixon and coming off of Kissinger, all that stuff was so hard to deal with. for those guys, suddenly there's this man with kind of a clean slate. It's a chance for them to

get on with things. I mean, to Sadat's demise, you know, it's just not a, it doesn't work out well for him at all. But he also comes to power, Carter comes to power saying that human rights are going to be the center of the core principle, which is a very risky move because that means you got to punish your allies, because a lot of our allies were really nasty people. But this is one place where that kind of formula came together pretty effectively. Interesting. And still one of the longest, or perhaps the longest treaty still in play, you know, it's the remarkably durable thing, given the reality of what we've been living with just recently. It's incredible. Quickly overshadowed by the hostage crisis. So that was his big win, but his big loss. And essentially, the loss of any hope of re-election came with the storming of the embassy. Let me get to that in a moment, because that really is the final moment. I just want to mention the fact that Panama, he concludes the matters with Panama, gives that country,

the canal, certainly with lots of conditions involved. The Olympics with Soviet Union held a line there, very, very moral stand. Really got a lot of support for his actions in that regard, didn't he? He did. There were some people who thought that the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 was because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Some people thought, oh, here's a moral sort of position. He's using the sort of cultural weapons. He can soft power he can use. Others were like, this is kind of milk toast. American athletes aren't going to get to compete. And the Russians are going to basically get to do their adventures in Afghanistan. So the reception, especially on the right, was quite mixed.

I think it played out in his favor, though. I really do. Yeah, probably did. In the final tally, the Soviet Union obviously didn't work out for them. No, it was a disaster. Yeah, that was one of the first major international blows that kind of tipped them off the edge there. Yeah, but I don't think that was because of Carter, though. No, I agree.

The Mujahideen had a little more to do with that. That's true. Where we planted our own seeds of problems. Exactly. Yes, we did. We did. The big problem at the end of his term, this really has its roots in the Shah's eventual death. The revolution against him. Pomanie comes into power and all of that which takes hold in that 78, 79 time period. And the students take the hostages into custody. And suddenly Jimmy Carter has to deal with something no American president should ever have to deal with in the American people's view and can't resolve it. I'm curious how that went on so long for Carter. What was it in his mechanisms that he wasn't capable of finishing that off so fast? It is absolutely unprecedented. But he also went into that week.

He was kind of a new kind of Democrat. He wasn't firmly rooted in the civil rights groups. He wasn't firmly rooted in labor. He wasn't in the urban groups. You know, he's weak going in. This just brings him down. And he is suddenly the United States, which is lost in Vietnam, and Saigon had fallen, and Cambodia was becoming a killing field,

and everything's going terrible. This becomes the last blow of the image of the sort of pitiless giant that can't defend itself. and Carter takes on the sort of symbol of that kind of waffling, what can we do as the hostages are being held in the embassy? But he did try. On day 100 and some odd, he launched this attempted rescue operation with all the helicopters in the planes in the desert

and ended in a sort of absolute everything went wrong. And it became a kind of metaphor for the whole thing. There were no tools at Carter's disposal for this besides seizing assets and things like that. And the hostages family didn't want any violence. or invasion because they were afraid they'd be killed. So he was really hamstrung, and the greatest irony probably of his presidency is he spent that last 444 days just worrying about hostages. And then on the day that Ronald Reagan's inaugurated in January, 1981, is the same day

that the hostages are released. Talk about pulling the rug out from under you, everything that he had tried to do, every step in the process of redirecting this country, which is sort of the theme that we started talking about at the beginning of this conversation. Gone. Gone. Utterly gone. Right.

For me, it was, I remember it was gone when the helicopters went down. I mean, that was like, oh, my goodness. You know, like even the supporters. It was just an unthinkable situation. And it was also kind of the end of the Democratic Party, as we had known it as well. As deeply moral and thoughtful and intelligent as he was, he was not able to keep the party glued together. And they went into the 1980 election weekend. And sadly, that's his legacy.

Then again, his legacy then becomes this four and a half decades of post-presidency which frankly replace the presidency in most people's minds. This man just never gives up. And he's a tremendous humanitarian. He's involved in monitoring elections. He just keeps popping up. And he's a good guy. We always felt that about him, basically.

And suddenly he's making differences in the world as only an ex-president can really do. Well, most ex-presidents disappear, right? And he becomes, as you say, a great humanitarian, a great principled leader. And probably the only analogy would be John Quincy Adams, another one, term president who becomes a great abolitionist. But other than that, most of them kind of fade away. Which speaks to the man himself, and I want to go out on that note, because I don't think he saw himself defined by the presidency, which is what I admire about him. So many people who strive for that position of power, that kind of level in whatever world they're in, really

walk away from it, you know, carrying that mantle with him. And he never needed to do that. I always admired that about him. Yeah, and I think he was more driven by interest in power than maybe some of us want to believe. But ultimately, I don't think that's why he did what he did. I actually think he thought he could bring a sort of moral core back to the leadership of the United States of America. And he did outside the presidency. Never forget. He won a Nobel Peace Prize. Only four presidents have won that, including Roosevelt, Wilson, and Obama, wrote many, many books,

contributed to all of us knowing about habit tap for humanity. Like, nobody heard of that before Carter started showing up with a hammer and nails. You know, he's an amazing guy that way. Not a bad poet either. Seriously, his poetry is pretty good. I have not encountered the poetry. I now know where to look. Jefferson Cowie is an American historian, author, and academic.

James G. Stallman, Professor of History and Director of Economics and History Major at Vanderbilt University. I just want to mention and congratulate you again on the 2003 Pulitzer Prize that you've won. Well done, sir. Thanks very much, and it's great talking to you. Thanks for listening to this special episode of American History yet. If you liked what you heard, please don't forget to find. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. Much appreciated. Also, if you like learning about U.S. presidents,

why not check out our series which deep dives into each of the U.S. presidents from Washington all the way up to number 32, where we're at now, FDR. We're making our way through all 46, so please follow and please never miss an episode. Thanks for listening. Normal American History at Programming will resume from tomorrow.