Shortly after Jimmy Carter left the White House “to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of citizen” (to paraphrase former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis) his former speechwriter, Hendrick Hertzberg, took part in a panel discussion of the Carter presidency on C-SPAN.
When someone asked him what the most distinctive characteristic was of his old boss, he replied, “He was the only president in my lifetime who wasn’t criminally insane.” The whole panel gave a collective gasp, but Hertzberg explained, “Look up the definition of criminal insanity in the dictionary. It means the inability to tell right from wrong.”
Hertzberg was right. Unlike many of his predecessors, Carter lacked what Kurt Vonnegut called “a genial willingness to sacrifice others’ lives for his own purposes.” That’s because he wasn’t a cynic; he aspired to be a saint. He was, after all, the president who based U.S. foreign policy around his belief that “we should lead our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon.”
The standard take on Carter these days is “great ex-president, lousy president.” Is that really true, though? Thanks to his belief that policy should be based on morality, he did some great things, including inserting human rights into our foreign policy; brokering the Israeli-Egyptian Camp David accords, the closest we’ve ever come to a solution for that terrible conflict; and signing the Panama Canal treaties, which have saved us countless headaches in Latin America.
He anticipated the global warming crisis decades before Al Gore by installing solar panels on the White House roof and urging the rest of us to do likewise. When Ronald Reagan came in, though, the first thing he did was order them removed. Now Trump is threatening to do the same thing with the canal treaties. If you think we have problems with Latin America now, just wait until he seizes the canal.
Cynicism has a bad history of poisoning our foreign policy. Look at Franklin Roosevelt, who waved off complaints about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.”
It might have seemed like the smart move at the time, but in the long run it was a disaster, and every president after FDR had to struggle with unrest south of the border until Carter came along. Again, his good work was undone by his successor, who blundered his way right into the Iran-Contra affair.
Carter was cut from a different cloth, and he often drove his successors, Republicans and Democrats, right up the wall. He had a saint’s strength and weakness: a steadfast determination to do right (as he felt God gave him the ability to see) and a maddening inability to consider the possibility that he could be wrong. Humorist Art Buchwald expressed admiration and ruefulness when he said of Carter, “I worship the very quicksand he walks on.”
Now though, 45 years after he was chased out of the White House, he’s being remembered as our best ex-president, leading an honorable list that includes John Quincy Adams, who spent the 20 years after his presidency crusading against slavery as a member of Congress; William Howard Taft, who finally got the job he really wanted all along when he became the U.S. Supreme Court’s chief justice; Herbert Hoover, who chaired the influential Hoover Commission on government reform; and Ulysses Grant, whose courageous struggle to provide for his family by finishing his memoirs before he died from cancer inspired the nation and helped heal the chasm between North and South.
And our worst ex-president? John Tyler, who turned traitor and got elected to the Confederate Congress after the Civil War broke out but providentially died before he could be sworn into office.
Carter wasn’t perfect, and why should we expect him to be? Even the greatest of saints have human flaws. St. Peter, after all, denied knowing Jesus three times before the cock crowed. Carter was a good man who tried his best every day to do the right thing, though, and he more than deserved his Nobel Prize. He leaves some mighty big shoes to fill.
P.S.: Did you see Biden giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Magic Johnson on Saturday? Congratulations to Magic, but Biden missed his big chance. He should have given one to Anita Hill too. He did say, “I’m sorry if Anita feels she wasn’t treated fairly” a few years ago, but Miss Manners would call that a non-apology apology.
Martin Snapp can be reached at catman442@comcast.net.