Editor’s Note: The author of this obituary, longtime TNR staffer Walter Shapiro, died in July. We published remembrances of Walter by James Fallows and Matthew Cooper shortly after he passed away; his TNR archive can be found here.
Everyone who cares about politics—if they are lucky—gets a president that they believe in. For me, that president was Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100.
After the snickers of more than four decades about the thirty-ninth president, it is hard to convey what Carter embodied in the 1976 primaries. His red-clay-of-Georgia heritage and civil rights record as governor gave rise to the hope that a Southerner could heal the nation from the brutal legacy of segregation. After John Kennedy’s “the best and the brightest” had arrogantly blundered into the Vietnam War and after Washington insiders had gushed over the German-accented cynicism of Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy, Carter’s populist instincts and passionate advocacy of human rights seemed a welcome response to the failure of the political establishment. Carter also affirmed the patriotic belief that at moments of national crisis leaders could emerge from unlikely backgrounds—even a one-term governor of Georgia who had served aboard nuclear submarines.
As a result of my faith in Carter, I played a minor role as a speechwriter in the 1976 general election campaign. In your twenties, the coin of the realm in presidential politics is to wangle a job somewhere along the corridor of power. My reward was two years on the staff of Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall (which taught me how government works) and a 1979 stint as a White House speechwriter (which burnished my résumé).
A strong case can be made that Carter was a far better president than his reputation would suggest. Championing human rights, preaching energy conservation, orchestrating the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, relinquishing control of the Panama Canal, and running a relatively scandal-free administration are lasting achievements. Carter also deserves credit for his determined efforts to downsize the imperial presidency that had grown up around Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, even though his anti-royalist efforts ultimately dimmed his own aura.
But Carter’s presidency was upended by two unfortunate decisions—and the self-indulgent chaos and arrogance of the 1970s Democratic Party.
Carter’s ascension to the Oval Office in 1977 is the midpoint between today and the presidency of Herbert Hoover during the darkest days of the Depression. Fewer than 40 percent of Americans are old enough to remember, even as children, a jubilant Carter on Inauguration Day walking the mile and a half from the Capitol to the White House. That time gap partly explains why it is so difficult to have perspective on the successes and the failures of Carter’s time in the White House. It is so much easier to dismiss Carter as a “great ex-president” and leave it at that.
Contrary to the familiar narrative, the speech was a dramatic success. Carter’s approval rating in the New York Times/CBS News Poll jumped from a dire 26 percent to 37 percent in a week. Working on some of Carter’s follow-up speeches, I read a sampling of the letters to the president from ordinary citizens that flooded the White House. Their tone reflected a hunger for honesty from the president after a decade of Lyndon Johnson dissembling over Vietnam and Richard Nixon lying about Watergate.
Carter’s mistake—and this was the one that probably cost him the 1980 election—was to stick with the second part of his plan to revitalize his presidency by purging his Cabinet. Carter accepted the resignation of five Cabinet members, including Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal. Carter then moved G. William Miller, his loyal easy-money Federal Reserve chairman, to Treasury. But that did not appease the global money markets, which equated the Cabinet shake-up with the fall of a government under a parliamentary system. As a result, Carter was forced to name inflation hawk Paul Volcker as Fed chairman.
Volcker was a laudable public servant, but, as he explained to Carter, he was no team player. To drive inflation out of the economy for the next four decades, Volcker raised interest rates to a stunning 20 percent. As a result, Carter is the only president in history to run for reelection in the midst of a recession brought on by his own Fed chairman.
Carter’s second major miscue was his reluctant October 1979 decision to allow the defrocked shah of Iran to enter this country for medical treatment. As biographer Jonathan Alter writes, “From the start, Carter’s instincts told him that it was wrong to bring the shah to the United States.” But repeatedly as president, Carter, perhaps a little insecure about his own Georgia background, yielded to the voices of the establishment. Pressed by David Rockefeller and Kissinger, and wrongly convinced that the shah could only receive effective medical treatment in America, Carter made the fateful decision that led to the 444-day hostage crisis that defined his last year in office.
From the perspective of 2024, when every presidential election is a white-knuckle affair, it is hard to appreciate the arrogance of Democrats in the 1970s. So many of the missteps of the Carter years have their roots in the widespread belief that the Democrats were America’s natural governing party. The only times the Republicans had won the White House since 1928 were when they nominated a widely popular war hero (Dwight Eisenhower) or when the Democrats fractured over Vietnam (Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972). During the Carter presidency, the Democrats had lopsided margins in Congress: a more than 120-seat edge in the House and always around 60 Senate seats. Since the Great Depression, Republicans had only held majorities in Congress for two sessions. It seemed unfathomable until election night 1980 that Democrats could lose the Senate in the Ronald Reagan landslide.
During the Carter years, Democrats felt that free expression was infinitely more important than party unity. The pattern was set during the 1976 Democratic primaries when Carter, instead of wrapping up the nomination after his early victories, had to contend with last-minute challenges from California Governor Jerry Brown and Idaho Senator Frank Church. After he became president, despite the huge Democratic margins on Capitol Hill, Carter’s relations with Congress were often rocky. Cabinet members even quietly lobbied key legislators to oppose the White House’s priorities. As Alter makes clear in his biography, the dominant issue for the president as the Iranian revolution was raging in January 1979 was what to do about Bella Abzug, the left-wing former New York congresswoman who freely denounced Carter’s priorities while she worked out of an office in the White House. (Carter fired her from her post as the chair of the National Advisory Committee on Women.)
At the Labor Department, I witnessed the messiness of the Carter years. The president had reluctantly approved a massive New Deal–style public service jobs program that created over 700,000 annual positions for the unemployed. But, for the most part, the administration was more interested in catering to boodling Democratic mayors and liberal interest groups (especially public service unions) than in running an effective program. The prevailing naïve attitude was that the voters would give Democrats the benefit of the doubt since, unquestionably, our hearts were in the right place.
Nothing was more self-destructive for the party than Ted Kennedy’s decision to challenge Carter for the 1980 nomination. Unlike Eugene McCarthy and later Bobby Kennedy opposing Lyndon Johnson in 1968 over the Vietnam War, Ted Kennedy never had a rationale for his candidacy other than family entitlement. Asked by CBS newsman Roger Mudd why he was running for president, Kennedy stammered and stumbled through an embarrassingly vacuous answer. Even after he lost the primaries, Kennedy kept fighting Carter at the convention. On the night that Carter was nominated for a second term, Kennedy could barely go through the ritual motions of a celebratory on-stage handshake.
My most memorable speech for Carter were the words that I composed when 32 solar panels were installed on the White House roof in June 1979. Calling on my college memories of Robert Frost, I wrote, “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people: harnessing the power of the sun.”
Looking back on the occasion of the death of this underappreciated president, I think of the Carter years as the “road not taken” for America. And it made all the difference.
