"To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven." - Ecclesiastes 1:3
It's from the Bible. It was subsequently turned into a folk song that was very popular in my youth. It is a poetic way of saying that things go in and out of fashion, then back in. Jimmy (he insisted everyone call him "Jimmy" rather than James or some other, more formal option) Carter was our thirty-ninth President. (He was President a long time ago, but he is still with us.) His Presidency has generally been considered a failure since shortly after he left office in 1981.
Since then, he has become beloved, not for anything he did as President, but for what he has been doing in the forty years since he left office. Most people only know him for this later period. They know little about him as POTUS. But I am going to focus on Carter as President.
Until extremely recently, that was a subject no one wanted to talk about. But a few months ago Jonathan Alter put out a book called His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life. Okay, so some political wonk puts out a "politics" book. But it's not just Alter.
CNN recently aired a two hour movie called Jimmy Carter: A Rock and Roll President. That's surprising because Carter is known for his piety. He's still married to the same woman. He still lives quietly in the small town he was born in, Plains, Georgia. That is not a standard "Rock 'n Roller" profile.
I have seen the CNN show. It makes a compelling case that the title of the show is accurate. I have purchased but not read the Alter Book. My head just has not been in the right space to tackle it. But I promise you I will read it at some point. And I may even review it in this blog.
On the other hand, I lived through the Carter Presidency. So this post will be my perception of Carter's term rather than a deeply researched look at the subject. And we can't start at the beginning. We need to start before the beginning. And that's with Richard Nixon.
Nixon was very familiar with failure and the prospect of failure. He was an up-and-coming pol in '52 when the extremely popular Eisenhower tapped him to be his running mate. Then it emerged that he had a slush fund, a fund put together by some of his wealthy supporters to cover "miscellaneous expenses".
It was your standard "unvouchered funds" account that shows up so frequently in spy novels. Nixon could spend the money however he wanted and did not have to get anybody's approval to do so. Additionally, no records were kept concerning what the funds were spent on.
"It was a different time", as they say. And this was considered such a big deal that it could have gotten Nixon kicked off the ticket. Nixon redeemed himself by giving his famous "Checkers" speech. It is a brilliant piece of work. I'll skip over the details but I recommend you find it on the internet. it is well worth the roughly twenty minutes it takes to watch.
The goal of the speech was to justify the fact that people had given Nixon gifts. He ended the speech by talking about a dog that someone had given his daughters. He vowed that, no matter what happened, he was not going to give the dog back. The name of the dog was Checkers, and that's where the name of the speech came from. The speech worked. Eisenhower kept Nixon on the ticket. And the pair served two terms.
Then Nixon lost to Kennedy in '60 when he ran for the top spot. He again lost in '62 when he ran for Governor of California. But he found his way back from the political wilderness to win the Presidency in '68. You have to admire his tenacity and the political skill that this almost impossible move demonstrated.
What he was ill equipped to handle was success. He somehow managed to become very popular as President. I was there and he did NOT rise in my esteem. But I was in the minority. And that brings us to the '72 Presidential campaign.
Nixon had everything going for him and he used his advantages wisely. First, he took nothing for granted. He assembled a top tier campaign organization. He ran a smart and very aggressive campaign even though he was running against a weak opponent. He raised what was then considered a shitload of money. (Now, it would be considered pocket change.) And it turned out that it was the money that did him in.
His campaign staff, the "Committee to Reelect the President", abbreviated CRP by the staff and CREEP by everybody else, laid out a spending plan. Everything was generously funded. No stone was left unturned. The problem was that they still had money left over. It seemed a sin to waste it. (Again, it was a different time. Nixon never considered just pocketing it.)
So, everybody tried to think up schemes on which to spend the extra money. There was no need to eliminate even the most hairbrained ones. As a result the "plumbers" ("we find and fix leaks") were organized and funded. Their job was to spy on the opposition.
Famously, we learned a couple of years later, that these plumbers broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee looking for secret plans the Nixon people didn't already know about. The DNC offices were located in an office building that was part of a group of buildings known collectively as "The Watergate Complex". If Nixon had raised less money, or if his Democratic opponent had been stronger, "Watergate" would probably never have happened.
The Watergate scandal played out on TV news over several years. So, it made a strong impression. Nixon resigned and was replaced by Ford, a good and decent man. But Ford ended up with a stain on his reputation. He pardoned Nixon. Most say that was the problem but I think it's more subtle. I think the problem stems from the way he pardoned Nixon.
Ford, for reasons I am not going to get into, had to be confirmed by the Senate. There he promised he wouldn't pardon Nixon. Then he assumed office and continued to say in no uncertain words that he would not pardon Nixon. Then one day, out of the blue, he pardoned Nixon. I understand the thinking behind his decision to pardon Nixon. I disagree with it but I understand it. And it was his decision to make.
But I think it was completely wrong to pardon Nixon without laying the ground work by first publicly entertaining the possibility of pardoning him. That would have set off a political firestorm. But that's okay. If you make a decision that you know will be unpopular you should expect to take some heat over it.
I'm sure Ford did not telegraph his decision because, for various reasons, he wanted to avoid the heat. Or at least to put it off until after the deed was done and couldn't be taken back. If an objective was to reduce the amount of heat he was ultimately subjected to, he failed. And the combination of the pardon and he way he handled it was enough to move Ford out of the "nice guy - straight arrow politician" category and into the "standard sleazy politician" one.
And that's the runup to the '76 Presidential campaign. Carter succeeded in selling himself as a nice guy, straight arrow politician. It was only a few years after Watergate, and it was an even shorter time since the Nixon pardon, so the public was yearning for what Carter was selling. As a result, he won. And that brings us to the heart of the issue, his term as President.
Going in he had a hard reputation to live up to. But he worked to live up to his reputation. One thing that I didn't understand at the time was how unprepared he was for the job. He had been Governor of Georgia when he ran. The experience of being Governor stood two very different people in good stead, namely Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. So, why did they succeed while Carter failed.
Ragan had been the Governor of California. California is an activist state with a large, sprawling bureaucracy. It takes a team to run something that big. Reagan had successfully assembled a team that was large enough for him to to succeed as an administrator. It takes an even bigger team to run the U.S. government. But he had the basic idea down pat when he entered office.
Georgia is a southern state. They believe in small government and a light regulatory hand. That meant that the Georgia bureaucracy was easier for one person with a small staff of assistants to manage. And that staff, nicknamed "the Georgia mafia" was pretty much all Carter brought to Washington D.C.
Unfortunately, he had little or no connections and little or no experience in putting together the large team necessary to manage the Federal Government. He was never able to get the hang of it. He was known as a hands-on micromanager. The Federal Government is too big and too complicated for that to work. That left him isolated with few of the connections he needed to succeed.
Usually, when an Administration leaves office a lot of people stay behind and stay on in some role or another. The Carter Administration left very little behind because they never integrated themselves into the network of connections and relationships that is the lifeblood of D.C.
Clinton was from a southern state that is even smaller than Georgia. So, on paper he was in an even poorer position to become successful. But Clinton was a champion networker. He found a way to meet everybody and to know, or know something about, everybody.
Like Carter, Clinton brought only a small team from Arkansas to D.C. But he was quickly able to expand it by making use of all of the connections he had developed. He was able to put a team together that was somehow his team. But they were also able to plug themselves into the D.C. network. As a result he left a lot of Clintonites behind that continued to be powerful and successful long after he left office.
Back to Carter and his time in office. Most people have forgotten just how consequential his term in office was. We have perhaps had a surfeit of consequential Presidents since. And a lot of people have the excuse that they hadn't even been born yet or, if they had been born, they were a small child at the time. Others have, for one reason or another, blanked the period out. Let me give you some examples of just how consequential his term was.
The energy debate started in earnest under Carter. It was initially of primarily academic interest, but that changed quickly. At the time the U.S. economy was heavily dependent on cheap oil. Europeans, for instance, drove smaller, more fuel efficient cars than Americans. Why? Because due to high taxes and government policy, gas was twice as expensive there. American drivers could afford to drive "gas guzzler" cars, because gas was cheap.
Then OPEC flexed it's muscles. For a long time Middle East oil was controlled by large American, British, and French companies. Not surprisingly, they favored low prices. But gradually the Arab countries gained control of these companies. Then they formed OPEC. But it was pretty toothless in the early years. Then these same countries got mad at the U.S. due to the '73 Yom Kippur War in which Israel yet again dispatched a coalition of Arab armies with substantial American help.
The Arab members arranged an oil boycott against the U.S. This put the U.S. economy into a tight squeeze. It was mostly for show. Oil is a "fungible commodity". That means that oil is oil is oil. Although U.S. was cut off from Middle East oil there was lots of oil available elsewhere, including in the U.S. All the U.S. had to do was to shift suppliers, which they did with little difficulty.
But various people took advantage of the optics. And the press fell down on the job. So various crises', some real, some phony, occurred. A real effect of all this chaos was that Arab countries were able to jack up the price they could charge for their oil. In reality, various short term disruptions were quickly dealt with. But the "crisis" atmosphere that prevailed allowed American oil companies to substantially increase their profits.
And Carter got caught up in one of these crisis cycles. OPEC raised prices substantially early in his term. All parts of the U.S. oil industry took advantage of this to increase their leverage and their profits. All of a sudden, we had lines everywhere. And that panicked people into lining up even if their tank was two third's full. Market manipulation and price gouging was rampant. But Carter never developed an effective strategy for dealing with this. And lots of people were happy to send the blame this way.
Carter successfully diagnosed the situation as pointing to a need for the U.S. to reduce its dependence on fossil fuel. Global warming was not a thing at the time so it didn't play a part. But his diagnosis of the long term problem was completely accurate.
The biggest problem was that he didn't have any alternatives that would be effective and that could be brought online quickly. For instance, he put solar panels on the roof of the White House. But solar panels, while being a nice symbol, were not practical at the time. (They are now.)
His other initiatives were more practical but also very unpopular. One thing that would help in the short term would be for everybody to turn down the thermostat in homes and buildings. It would only require people to dress warmer, wear a sweater, for instance. A more long term solution would be to increase the efficiency of cars, appliances, buildings, etc.
These, and other ideas, made a lot of sense from a cost effectiveness perspective. But no one wanted to hear of it. And there were many entrenched interests that favored low efficiency. They cranked up their respective PR machines and unloaded.
Carter response to the largely manufactures "oil crisis" was monumentally unsuccessful, but he did lay a foundation that others were later able to build on. And Reagan started the GOP trend of blindly opposing this sort of thing. He publicly had the solar panels removed from the White House. He rolled back other energy efficiency measures that Carter had begun. This would not be the only issue where Carter was ahead of his time.
Most people have forgotten "Love Canal" by now. But it was the first time the public became alarmed by the medical dangers of pollution. Carter put the "Superfund" law into place. It was the first mechanism specifically designed to clean up polluted land. It was wholly inadequate. Cleaning up pollution is far more difficult and expensive than doing the polluting in the first place is. But it was a start.
The public was alarmed enough at the time to pressure Congress into passing the Superfund bill. But, as the costs and difficulties have become apparent, a backlash has since developed. We now have two entrenched sides on this issue, essentially the "pro" and "anti" pollution factions. But taking pollution seriously, even if its to oppose mitigation measures and regulations, started with Carter.
Carter was a fiscal conservative. In that, he joins many other Democratic Presidents. He inherited a fiscal mess from his predecessor. By modern standards it was a tiny mess. But it was a big deal at the time. Carter got Federal spending under control, and with it, the deficit.
But, in a pattern that should now be apparent to everyone, his Republican successor (Reagan) reversed this situation and implemented spendthrift policies. All the GOP Presidents that followed Reagan have also been spendthrifts. Now doubt, the pattern will continue as Biden takes over from Trump.
Carter was a pioneer in another area, deregulation. Starting with the Great Depression and FDR, various administrations had used extensive regulation to try to manage the economy to stability. Federal agencies set prices and controlled entry to markets in many industries. There was a broad consensus that this trend had gone too far by the time Carter entered office. Carter decided to do something about this, and succeeded.
He started with airlines. Prior to his Administration, they had to file for changes in rates, changes in their route structures, and much else. Carter changed this by "deregulating" them. Airlines became free to raise and lower rates, to add and remove routes, and much else. It now became possible for anyone with enough money to start an airline. The result was, in part, discount airlines like Southwest.
The result was also bankruptcy, a substantial decline in the quality of service, some markets being overserved and others underserved, or even having no service at all. But overall, we went from a period where flying was only for the rich to a period when flying is by far the cheapest way for people of modest means to travel long distances.
Most people think that airline deregulation has made us better off. But the change has definitely had its plusses and minuses. There have been "bailouts" by the Federal Government of too many airlines to count. The current COVID related crisis has resulted in more bailouts of the airline industry by the Federal governments.
This bailout behavior should be vigorously opposed by Republicans on philosophical grounds. But it is not.
This deregulation business started under Carter and has continued since. Even Carter didn't confine himself to airlines. He also deregulated trucking. His successors have deregulated many other industries or industry segments. The deregulation of the financial sector is widely blamed for the crash of '08. There is now talk of reregulating. But nothing has actually come of it yet.
Carter began the U.S. involvement with Afghanistan. At the start of his term no one would have been able to find Afghanistan on a map. By the end of his term that had changed completely.
Sticking with the highlights, the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Carter saw an opportunity to "Vietnam" the Russians and he took it. There is a great book (and movie) called Charlie Wilson's War, if you are interested in the details. The bottom line is that under Carter the Russians did get Vietnam-ed at a tiny cost to the U.S.
The post-Carter approach to Afghanistan has been bungled badly by several Administrations. As a result, we find ourselves investing American troops and pouring vast quantities of money into the country more than forty years later. But again, the U.S. involvement with Afghanistan started with Carter.
Like many Democrats before him and many after, Carter took a stab at healthcare. Like all but Johnson and Obama, he failed to make significant progress. Where Carter did have more success was in the area of education. The Department of Education was created at his insistence.
He also saved the Chrysler Corporation, then one of the "big three" U.S. car companies. Like Obama's later auto industry effort, it was a success. And Chrysler was bailed out at zero eventual cost to the U.S. taxpayer. Chrysler paid all the money taxpayers loaned it back in full, and with interest. (Obama saved the entire U.S. auto industry. It also paid everything it was loaned back in full, and with interest.)
Before moving on to the rest of the world, specifically the parts outside of Israel and Afghanistan, let me spend some more time on the economy. Carter was dealt a difficult hand. The economy was in bad shape when he entered office. Then relatively early in his term, oil prices shot up. This second price increase happened only a few years after they had first shot up. The result was something many are no longer familiar with, inflation.
There is (or at least used to be) something called the wage-price-spiral. Workers get their wages increased. (Remember, it was a different time.) Businesses raise prices in order to be able to pay for the wage increases. This, in turn, results in demands for still higher wages. Rinse. Repeat. The result is that both wages and prices spiral upward. And, at the large scale economic level, what we see is prices on everything increasing. And that's called inflation.
The economy got caught up in a wage-price-spiral during Carter's term. There is a way to deal with this but Carter didn't go there. Famously, there was a trucker's strike. A number of economists at the time were saying "let them strike. It will take some steam out of the economy and break the wage-price-spiral". Carter instead jawboned the trucking industry into setting the strike by raising wages.
And the race was on. Wages and prices spiraled upwards even faster. Interest rates for super-safe government securities moved to above 15%. For contrast, those same types of securities now fetch interest rates below 1%. Then the portion of the Federal budget devoted to paying interest on government bonds was high. Now is is tiny.
I think President Carter made a mistake. In the short term it was good for truckers. Their income went up. But in the long term everybody lost. This is not the only time Carter came down on the side of a short term gain at the expense of a long term loss. I will get around to another example below.
It is also not a mistake his successor made. Reagan went to war with the unions. Strikes ensued. But in the short run, and later in the long run, the unions lost. The back of the wage-price-spiral was broken. This was hard on the economy for a year or so. But the economy benefitted over the longer term.
Finally, it was a different time. Back then, the U.S. economy was largely self contained. It has since been internationalized. That gives companies little ability to raise prices. They can also outsource jobs. That means the bargaining power of workers is much diminished. And that makes it hard to imagine a wage-price-spiral either starting or continuing.
And the FED and the FED's counterparts in other countries, have all found that they can drive interest rates down as low as they want them to go. And they keep finding reasons to want interest rates to be very low. That means that it is hard to imagine the interest rate on government bonds rising very far.
On to the foreign sphere. I am going to leave the big one for last. I'll start with another consequential move by President Carter. He returned the Panama Canal to control by the Panamanians. This was an extremely controversial move at the time.
There was lots of fearmongering on the "anti" side of the argument. The Panamanians won't be able to run the canal. (They have now been doing a fine job for decades.) The U.S. military will suffer some severe loss. (Nope!) The U.S. will look weak and lose prestige. (We looked strong and gained prestige.) And on and on.
At the start of Carter's term the U.S. actually had a poor reputation in the third world. Starting with Iran in '53, and moving on to countries too numerous to easily keep track of in the '50s, '60s, and early '70s, the U.S. had been fomenting revolution and pulling strings behind the scenes all over the third world.
And often we replaced a democratic institution with an authoritarian regime. After all, we replaced a democratically elected government with a dictator in that very first Coup we instigated. The "sins" of the democracies we ousted typically consisted of some combination of being too hard on American corporations and/or being insufficiently anti-communist.
As a result, in most of the third world the U.S. was seen by the bulk of the population as being imperialists and colonialists. By returning the Panama Canal and by other actions, Carter reversed that perception in a short four years. The U.S. reputation went from "bad guy" to "good guy" in what seemed like overnight. Our reputation has never been as high since.
Central and South America, for instance, started seeing us not as "Yankee Imperialists" but as being on the side of freedom and democracy. The number of countries that transitioned from authoritarian rule to democratic rule in the Carter era is astonishing. No one else has come close. In fact, in most Administrations the number of democracies goes down and the number of authoritarian states goes up.
Carter was equally successful, perhaps more successful, in Africa. And right next to Africa is the Middle East. He worked hard to bring peace and tranquility to the region. His great success was the "Camp David Accords". They brought about peace between Israel and its most powerful neighbor Egypt. And it was a personal triumph for Carter for which he later received the Nobel Peace Prize. He spent thirteen days personally doing shuttle diplomacy between the Israelis and the Egyptians.
President Trump has succeeded in breaking the Middle East out of the gridlock that has gripped it in the decades since Camp David. It is too soon to tell if these actions will have a long term benefit. But prospects look good at the moment.
And that brings me to Carter's big failure, the Iran Hostage Crisis. I think he pretty much bungled it from start to finish. Remember the first country the CIA was able to pull a Coup off successfully in? And don't forget that, at the time, that Coup was seen as being so successful and so easy to pull off, that it became the model for dozens of later attempts by the CIA to replicate its results. Yes! That Coup. The one that put the Shah of Iran into power.
Those particular chickens came back to roost late in Carter's term. The Shah had gotten old and lost a step or two when it came to manipulating the levers of power. And he had put no obvious successor in place. That produced an opening, and religious radicals moved into that opening. If the Shah had been on his game he would most likely have been able to handle them. But he wasn't.
Carter's first mistake was to allow the Shah into the U.S. for much needed medical treatment. He did this primarily at the instigation of Republicans, but they have managed to successfully dodge blame. In any case, a sick Shah in the U.S. was opening enough for the religious radicals to successfully pull off a Coup. It was what happened next that was critical.
The radicals stormed the U.S. Embassy and took everyone still there prisoner. (A bunch of people had managed to get out and sneak into the Canadian Embassy. See the book and movie Argo, if you are interested in learning more.) Here's where Carter made his second mistake. And he made this one all on his own. And it was another example of doing something for short term gain that ends up having long term costs.
If I had been in charge, I would have immediately issued an ultimatum: Release them all within 48 hours or expect fire to rain down from the sky. I believe the Iranians would have caved and that would have been that.
But I could be wrong. It's possible that instead a bunch of U.S. diplomats would have ended up dead. Even if that happened it would still have been the right thing to do. Since then, for four decades and counting, diplomats have been in danger all over the world. And its all because Carter failed to take a hard line.
At the time Carter used a number of excuses, which I am not going to bother listing, to dither rather than reacting forcefully. The result is the famous standoff. It made Ted Koppel famous. At the time ABC had some dead time after 11:30 in the evening. The "Kimmel" show now occupies that time slot, but at the time ABC had nothing.
ABC News executives picked a then second stringer named Ted Koppel and told him to fill a half hour every night. His one and only topic was the hostage situation. The show was titled "America Held Hostage" for a while. That gives you a feel for the flavor of the content.
Koppel turned out to be brilliant. He managed to find a way to fill the time and look good doing it. He soon became a first stringer. He stayed a first stringer until he retired many years later.
The whole business went on for 444 days. Carter managed to secure the release of the hostages in the end. But it was his successor that got all the credit because the Iranians decided that was to their advantage. But wait, there's more.
Eventually a rescue attempt was staged. It was another first. The whole thing was monitored in real time by satellite from the White House Situation Room. That's now standard fare, both in the movies and in the real world. But this was the first time it was actually done.
The mission was a fiasco. The primary group responsible was the CIA. They refused to share weather data with the Pentagon. A dust storm, not an uncommon phenomenon, came up and wrecked havoc with the helicopters used. The only reason it came as close to success as it did was due to Carter's interventions.
But the CIA and the rest of the military were let off the hook by Carter. If I had been in charge, I would have fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I would then have put the second in line in charge of a witch hunt. "Find me some people to blame then fire them" would have been his marching orders. But Carter chose to do nothing while others maneuvered for political advantage.
Then there's the fact that he spent the last hundred days of the campaign holed up in the White House obsessing over the hostage crisis. But, as I have indicated above, not taking effect action with respect to it. The polls said the race was close up to about two weeks before the election. Then polling stopped and a big shift in sentiment was missed. (Sound familiar?) Reagan won in a landslide, but I think Carter could have beat him if he had campaigned vigorously and smartly. But he didn't, and that's how he came to be a one term President.
As we all now know, Carter has been a superior ex-President. While being President was a poor fit for his abilities, the role of ex-President has turned out to be a perfect match. He went back to Plains where he set up the Carter Library and the Carter Center. Both are the kinds of small, focused operations he is well suited to lead.
And, while he didn't network with the D.C. establishment, and he especially didn't network with Congress, it turns out that he did network with heads of state and other world leaders while he was in office. He has since leveraged those connections into playing a powerful and positive role on the world stage.
And he continues to not shy away from hard problems. He has attacked Guinea Worm, a devastating disease in the third world. He has set out to eradicate it completely. He has yet to succeed, but he has made tremendous progress.
The Carter Center has also become the "go to" organization when it comes to monitoring elections. It is seen as competent, fair, and impartial. If the Carter Center says that an election has been run fairly and well, they get believed.
An area where he has had seen less success is in the field of diplomacy. He has offered to be an informal spokesman and troubleshooter for the U.S. in sticky situations. But, for one reason or another, Administrations don't trust him to stay on the reservation. So they have made use of him in far fewer situations that he would prefer.
It is important to recognize that all the actions he has taken since he returned to private life have reflected well on the U.S. The same can not be said for many of the moves made by many of the Administrations that have followed him. That's not a bad reputation to have to carry around.
No comments:
Post a Comment