WSJ What’s News - Jimmy Carter Built His Biggest Legacy Post-Presidency

Episode Date: December 29, 2024

Special Edition for Dec. 29. Jimmy Carter, America’s 39th president and the one with the longest post-presidency, has died . Former WSJ Washington editor Gerald F. Seib discusses Carter’s legacy, from the famous Oval Office address that tackled an energy crisis with a rare, introspective call to action, to the foreign-policy error that may have cost him re-election in 1980 and a post-presidency spent eschewing fame in favor of modesty and good works. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is a special edition of What's News. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, has died. He was 100. The Georgia Peanut Farmer, who served one term in the Oval Office and was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, was the longest-lived former president in U.S. history and had been in hospice since February 2023. Today we'll be taking a look back at Carter's time in the White House and after, with some reflections from the Wall Street Journal's Jerry Seib. He was a reporter in our Washington bureau during the final year of the Carter administration

and he's our former Washington editor. One of the key domestic challenges that Carter faced is one that might feel familiar today — inflation. Under his administration, the economy was saddled with high energy prices, and in a 1977 TV speech, he sat next to a fireplace wearing a cardigan sweater and said this to Americans. We'll ask private companies to sacrifice, just as private citizens must do. All of us must learn to waste less energy. All of us must learn to waste less energy. Simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night,

we could save half the current shortage of natural gas. Jerry Seib told us that Carter took office at a time when the era of plentiful oil was coming to an end. The country had become addicted to cheap oil, and increasingly over time, cheap imported oil from overseas, and it was Jimmy Carter's misfortune to become president just when that transition had to be made. He was trying to essentially say, we can conserve our way out of this.

I think one of the criticisms people on the right had of that strategy was that they thought the U.S. should produce its way out of the crisis but in any case this was a big transitional moment in the US economy in the beginning of a transition away from industries heavy industries that were fueled by cheap energy and to a different kind of economy service and tech and ironically because he was a Democrat and some people saw him as a liberal Democrat he actually

introduced the era of deregulation he He deregulated the American airline industry, which is a significant act. To some extent, he deregulated the trucking industry and energy prices as well. And so he actually introduced free market elements into the economy as a way to try to cope with these changes that were underway. He never got the full benefit

of those deregulatory changes. The U.S. was particularly dependent on Middle Eastern oil. Suppliers in the Middle East had come to realize they could turn the spigots off if they wanted to and create great pain on the U.S. for political reasons, not economic reasons. The Carter presidency was colored by those facts from beginning to end. But there was more going on domestically than just high energy prices. And in one of his best-known speeches in 1979, Carter said the nation was suffering from a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in

the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The crisis of confidence speech evolved in a fascinating way. The idea was to simply give a speech about energy policy because of an oil crisis. But as President Carter contemplated that speech, he decided there was something deeper going on and he did something remarkable that's never been done since or hadn't been done before, which was to retreat to the Camp David presidential retreat for 10 days, having a whole procession of significant figures in American society just talk about what's wrong with the soul of the country, why

are we suffering what he came to describe as a crisis of confidence, and then emerged to give a nationalist speech that yes talked about energy but Why are we suffering what he came to describe as a crisis of confidence? And then emerged to give a nationalist speech that yes, talked about energy, but talked about how the country needed to get out ahead of its problems and be more confident as it did so. It became known as the Malays speech

because he was describing a kind of a national Malays, though interestingly, he never used that word in the speech. And it went over well initially with the public, but over time, I think it came back to haunt him to some extent because people thought he was blaming Americans and voters and others for the problems he was hired to solve. Coming up, we'll look at Carter's foreign policy record

and his life after leaving the White House after the break. On the international affairs side, one of Carter's greatest achievements were the Camp David Accords that led to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979. He reflected on that accomplishment and the work he felt was still left to do in a video interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2016. The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has been completely successful. There hadn't been any conflict between them since then. But the promises that Israel made about the Palestinians have not been fulfilled.

So we still have dissension and so forth in the Middle East. So I'm very disappointed about that. Still, Jerry told us the Accords changed the Middle East for the next half century. The implications of that were being felt as recently as the Trump administration, which was able to build on them with the so-called Abraham Accords and extend the peace treaties, now plural, between Arab states and Israel. One of the things it did was it took the idea

that there could be a war between Israel and a united Arab world, which had happened twice previously. It took it off the table and that opened the way to an era of prosperity in Israel that just wouldn't have been possible otherwise. Eventually it made the oil situation ease off a little bit because the US was seen as an honest broker

in the Middle East, not as somebody who was on one side of the other of the Arab-Israeli divide. It didn't end that divide by any means, of course, but it was a signal achievement. But one of the major foreign policy challenges of Carter's presidency was the Iran hostage crisis when 52 Americans were held for more than a year at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. In fact, Carter would later

name it as one of his biggest regrets. I think the Iran hostage crisis, which began at the end of 1979, his third year in office, in some ways marked the beginning of the end of the Carter presidency. It was a problem he could never resolve. He feared looking weak if he did nothing but also threatening the lives of the hostages if he took military action. He was trapped in a way. The low point in the hostage crisis really came in the spring of 1980 when after resisting the idea for a long time, President Carter finally approved an attempted military rescue of the hostages. There were commandos who were supposed to swoop into Tehran in helicopters, grab the hostages out of the embassy, get them out of the country in an overnight and secretive raid.

That raid turned disastrous when the helicopters carrying the commandos in landed in a distant desert airspace to refuel, had trouble refueling, one of them had a mechanical failure, two of them collided, there was a catastrophe in the desert and the rescue mission was a failure and that was a black eye for President Carter, made him look as if he was again helpless and as he said later, that may have been the act that sealed his failure to win re-election. But I think you have to say that in the end, he negotiated the release of those hostages

in his final days, even his final hours in office and they all came home safe and sound. And for a humanitarian like Jimmy Carter, that was always the goal and you have to admit that that goal was achieved. I would guess that's probably the single happiest moment of my whole life. I went out of office but my hostages were free and safe. But the combination of events in 1979, the hostage crisis, the energy crisis, the conflict

in Afghanistan kind of sealed the fate of the Carter presidency. It also kind of marked an end to four decades of democratic dominance in politics and opened the way for Ronald Reagan, who defeated him in 1980 when Jimmy Carter sought re-election and allowed Reagan to turn the country to the right. I think people were ready for something different in an odd way. I don't think you could have had the Reagan revolution without Jimmy Carter preceding it. But Carter was also known for much of what he did after he left the White House, including his work at the Carter Center, which advocates for human rights and with Habitat for

Humanity. And in 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Here was a clip of his acceptance speech from the Carter Center. The most serious and universal problem is a growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on Earth. I think the best way to summarize life after the presidency is to say that Jimmy Carter is the most successful and respected former president

of modern times. I mean, he decided to make his post presidency years not a time to disappear, but a time to contribute and to get active. And he did that by helping the poor, by building housing for the poor, by becoming a conflict mediator around the world, and by trying to extend the idea

that human rights should matter in foreign policy. He did all those things as a former president, but he showed that you could be a former president who didn't in any way try to cash in on fame as a former president financially into his own benefit. He lived a modest life while trying to contribute in many ways, and I think that should be a model for former presidents. You'd like to think it would be a model for former presidents. And he was in some ways I think more admired for that post-presidency than he was for his presidency in the eyes of many people. And that does it for this special episode of What's News.

It was produced by Pierre Bienneme with supervising producer Michael Kosmides and deputy editor Chris Sinzley. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal.