Jimmy Carter 1924-2024: An Appreciation

The death of former President Jimmy Carter at the age of 100 offers an opportunity to reconsider the conventional assessment of Carter as an ineffectual, unsuccessful, one-term president, the worst since Herbert Hoover. After all, those who were alive during his administration from 1977-81 recall high inflation and high interest rates, long gas lines, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We can also recall the so-called “malaise speech,” which soon became counteracted by Ronald Reagan’s sunny disposition and cemented into national consciousness with his campaign question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” With Reagan, it became “Morning in America” or so it seemed.

And yet, 43 years after he was defeated in his reelection bid, we owe it to history to reassess our judgment.

Carter’s initiatives on energy policy and the environment have stood the test of time, innovating and sensitizing Americans — initiatives that may even withstand the efforts to dismantle them and all subsequent initiatives by the incoming administration. He even put solar panels on the White House, which the Reagan administration promptly took down.  His efforts on the economy included saving Chrysler and New York City from bankruptcy. He appointed Paul Volker as chairman of the Federal Reserve, setting him lose to tackle inflation and stagflation, the twin plagues of the 1970s.

He also had to deal with the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict and Lyndon Johnson’s domestic agenda without paying for them. Carter appointed Volker because it was good policy. Volker remained independent of White House pressures although Carter understood that the Fed’s policies to crush inflation would hurt him politically. On foreign policy, Carter is remembered for the fall of a Shah and the Iran hostage crisis, yet we should remember also his work on the Panama Canal treaty, Salt II and the openings to China and the Soviet Union.

There are multiple narratives as to why the Soviet Union fell. Surely, one reason is that the focus on human rights, so central to the Carter administration, highlighted the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly [now Natan] Sharansky deserve some of the credit, along with Pope John Paul II, whose visit to Poland undermined communism and Jimmy Carter.

The most severe critique of Carter’s emphasis on human rights came from Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who argued that authoritarian regimes could turn democratic but totalitarian regimes could not. In the early 1990s, her thesis was proved demonstrably wrong as Eastern European regimes became laboratories of democracy. Today we must worry when these democratic regimes turn authoritarian, and when there is a yearning for authoritarian rule in many countries, including our own!

Today, as we debate whether character counts in political leadership and if honesty is important in politics, we remember Carter as a man of unblemished character. Devoutly religious, he promised the American people after the Watergate scandal that “he would never lie.” His piety was apparent during his presidency and beyond, and along with his  decency made him perhaps the most consequential former presidents in history. He is a man who, even after he was diagnosed with brain cancer, got up on Sunday morning to teach Bible class in his Plains, Ga., church. A man of uncommon character and unrivaled integrity, it seemed he was ineffective.

Jews have a particular memory of the Carter years. There was pressure on Israel, the first mention of the Palestinians’ aspirations, the tension with then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the awful feeling that the U.S. might sell out Jews for barrels of oil at a reasonable price. We also remember that Carter received the lowest percentage of votes for a Democratic candidate for president since before Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. The Jewish community had split its vote between Reagan and Carter at approximately 40 percent each, with John Anderson, the third-party candidate, receiving some 20 percent.

But our recollections may be at odds with the evidence.

President Carter’s contributions have been underrated. He is often judged, even by those who should know better, by the title of one of his many post-presidency books, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” Jewish critics hastened to charge him with calling Israel an apartheid state. Yet Carter saw then what was obvious since the beginning of his presidency and what many in Israel still see, despite the sad state of current events in the Middle East. That is, if there is only one state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, it cannot be both a Jewish state and a democratic state without subordinating the rights of the Palestinians. Seven million Jews and 5 million Palestinians live between the River and the Sea – that is the demographic reality. Many on the Israeli right are now confronting this issue and are fumbling into articulating diminished rights for the Arabs of Israel and even lesser rights for those in the occupied territories. Unlike Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the new Jewish state law makes no mention of respecting minority rights, and Israel has reduced the status of Arabic, the language spoken by 1 in 5 Israelis.

On Soviet Jewry, Carter’s contribution was essential. He elevated human rights to the center of American foreign policy, reversing the course that former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger chartered before him; and once human rights took front and center, the Soviet Jewry movement became a human rights movement and massive support was forthcoming from Cold Warriors and more importantly, from human rights activists. This was a major breakthrough in the movement, which previously had lukewarm support from the Nixon White House, which had openly — and in Kissinger’s case, cravenly — opposed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment.

Jimmy Carter was essential to the resettlement of Iranian Jews in the United States, essential because his chief of domestic affairs Stuart Eizenstat could take a Judeo-centric concern to the president of the United States directly, unapologetically and proudly, something his predecessors with easy access to the Oval Office did not do during FDR’s administration.

The story is worth repeating. In Executive Order 12172, Carter expelled all non-resident Iranians and suspended visas for all new arrivals in retaliation for Iranians taking American Embassy officials hostage in Tehran. Eizenstat was informed of the plight of Iranian-Jewish students and their families by Mark Talisman, who was working for the Council of Jewish Federations in Washington. Iranian leaders and students, among them Moussa Kermanian, his son Sam and Isaac Moradis. He convened a meeting with all the significant officials. For the Jews attending this meeting, there was the haunting memory of the Holocaust — when entry to the United States was barred to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. Iranian-Jewish students would be allowed to secretly file for asylum so as not to endanger their families back home. While these appeals were being adjudicated, their expulsions would be rescinded and exceptions to the Executive Order would be made for those facing religious persecution — Jews and also Baha’i and Christians as well as Zoroastrians.

Ever sensitive to religion, Carter agreed, and one can see the results daily in Los Angeles, with its thriving Persian-Jewish community. In 1979, unlike 1933-44, pressure from establishment Jewish institutions, in cooperation with Jewish White House staff, was able to secure the president’s immediate consent to rescue Jews.

Camp David

The Camp David Accords would have never happened without Jimmy Carter. It began, as even as ardent a supporter of Carter’s as Stuart Eizenstat admits, with the President’s mistake. Carter invited the Soviet Union into the peace process, not recognizing that then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had expelled the Soviet presence from Egypt and was so frightened at the prospect of the Soviets returning, that Jerusalem became preferable to Moscow.

At a meeting in Cairo attended by a mid-level Carter administration official, Sadat said that he was willing to go to Jerusalem. The State Department was slow on the uptake because that move didn’t fit in with its Mideast policy. Yet soon the breakthrough spiraled out of State Department’s control. Sadat went to Jerusalem and the U.S. administration stood idly by.

When it became clear that the parties could not achieve peace on their own, Carter’s most basic values projected the peace process forward. A religious Christian, he relished the task of making peace between Muslims and Jews. Yet for Camp David to happen, carter had to separate politics and policy, as there was little political upside required to make peace between Egypt and Israel. Jews were furious as to what they perceived as one-sided pressure on Israel. He regarded Sadat as a visionary; not so Begin.

Carter risked it all in inviting the parties to Camp David. The full prestige of his office and his presidency were at stake; their failure would become his failure and unlike most summits where every moment, even the final statement is carefully orchestrated, nothing was certain. The chance of failure was real.

Carter was trusted by Sadat and distrusted by Begin, both because Begin distrusted Carter himself, and because Begin distrusted Sadat’s trust in Carter. The rural presidential setting in Maryland isolated and insulated the parties, and Carter deftly handled Sadat and Begin’s outbursts. Both were prima donnas, both strong willed. Sadat was facing pressure from his delegation that he was giving too much and Begin faced pressure from his delegation including Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizmann that he was offering too little. To the very end, success was uncertain, and Carter was at his finest during the negotiations.

It was during these negotiations that the breach between Carter and Begin developed. Carter thought that Begin had agreed to a suspension of settlements while Begin believed that he had merely agreed to suspend settlements during the final negotiations for the Camp David Accords. When, months later settlement building on the West Bank resumed
Carter felt betrayed and Begin felt betrayed by Carter’s feelings of betrayal. Nevertheless, Carter continued to invest his prestige in the peace process, and, without that pressure, no accord would have been reached.

Carter incentivized the peace accords with a multifold increase in foreign aid to Israel to be spent in the United States on military purchases, with a lesser amount for Egypt, tying both countries to American equipment for the past 45 years.

Israel resented the pressure, yet without that pressure, there would have been no agreement. In the years since, the pattern has repeated itself as Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden pressured Israel and paid a political price by losing Jewish political support; Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump haven’t pressured Israel, and therefore reaped the political benefits.

Carter was the first to attack American dependence on non-renewable energy sources and sought to limit Arab power. Yet Jews were silent when, soon after he left office, solar panels were removed from the White House roof. Dependence on Arab countries for energy enriches them, emboldens them, enables them to be more reckless and weakens Israel and the United States.

I will always feel a sense of gratitude to Jimmy Carter as at the initiative of his Jewish staffers Mark Siegel, Ellen Goldstein and Stuart Eizenstat established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, which led to the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, an enduring American Memorial to the Shoah and a reminder that Human Rights and Human Dignity are central values to all humanity. For reasons unknown, he is the only American President since 1980 never to have visited the Museum.

On accepting the Report to the President of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust on September 27, 1979, President Carter said:

Out of our memory… of the Holocaust we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world …fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.

That was Carter the idealist, 44 years later we can only say: would that it were true.

Carter lived a remarkable life. His faith was simple, his values deep, his accomplishments genuine, his life one of service. He should be remembered for his decency and his integrity and for his determination to do good. Even when disagrees with his decisions and his pronouncements, as this observer must, it is essential to confront and engage their moral clarity.

Michael Berenbaum is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute and a distinguished professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University.