Jimmy Carter and the Great Presidency That Never Was

Jimmy Carter and the Great Presidency That Never Was January 2, 2025

In the wave of obituaries for Jimmy Carter, the common theme is that as president, he was a decent and honorable man who faced near-impossible circumstances at home and abroad, which made his time in office a failure in many respects. Arguably, the Camp David agreements marked a bright spot, but there is plenty to debate about even that. Only after he left the White House did he come into his own, as the best ex-President we ever had. Such a condescending view fails to acknowledge some real achievements of his that remain obscure because they are better associated with his successor, Ronald Reagan, and unfairly so.

Carter thoroughly laid the foundations for the Reagan Era, so much so that if matters had turned out only a little differently, we would remember Carter in the fulsome and triumphalist terms which we associate with Reagan. This is one of the great might-have-beens of American history, and it raises real questions about the artificial periods and divisions that we impose on American history in any era. It forces us to think about how we dubiously and misleadingly credit presidents for the events and trends that just happen to take place on their watch.

Just to be clear here, I am in no sense trying to run down Reagan and his achievements, but rather to suggest that we should properly look at the whole period from about 1978 through 1986 as one continuous trajectory, under the guidance of that famous hyphenated President, Carter-Reagan.

Carter’s failures are obvious. Many grew out of an ill-considered foreign policy that so totally emphasized human rights concerns, which sounds wonderful in principle. What it meant in practice was weakening and subverting admittedly flawed US allies overseas, who were threatened or defeated by infinitely worse and more dangerous rivals. The classic case was Iran, where the Shah’s regime need not have crumbled if it had continued to receive proper US support. We have lived with the consequences of the Iranian Revolution since 1979, and it (or most of it) was Carter’s fault.

Saving NATO

That story is well known, but others are not. Think about the Reagan years. What were Reagan’s great accomplishments? Well, for one thing, vastly strengthening NATO positions in Europe against the Soviets, and rearming the US so successfully that the Soviets realized they could not possibly compete. They turned to reformism, which ultimately collapsed the system. According to the familiar narrative, Reagan won the Cold War.

But now turn to the pivotal event in that story, which occurred on Carter’s watch in 1978-79, the time of a deep crisis unknown to most non-specialists, but which in its way was as critically dangerous as the Cuba Missile affair.  The Soviets were installing medium range missiles in Eastern Europe, while also deploying lethal bombers, and the two threats together could intimidate the whole western part of the continent without directly threatening the US, and thereby inviting a direct reaction. Meanwhile, detailed war plans were in preparation. The 1979 exercise Seven Days to the River Rhine envisaged a massive Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. The Soviets would immediately use nuclear weapons against many European cities, including Vienna, Munich, Nuremberg, and Padua. In such a setting, the US would face a critical question: would it risk losing New York to save those centers, as well as Bonn and Paris and Milan? Surely not. By the way, an audience in 2023 can understand the potential threat of such assaults at least as well as that earlier generation, as it daily witnesses Russian savagery in Ukraine.

Facing even the threat of such horrors, a terrified and unprotected Western Europe would be detached from NATO, and shifted to the Soviet sphere. In that vision, the Cold War would end in a Soviet victory, and without the need to fire a shot.The only possible response involved developing and installing major US missile systems in Europe, which could threaten the western regions of the USSR, and pose a deadly counter-threat, and an effective deterrent. That is what eventually happened in 1983-84, and it proved a Western master-stroke. The Soviets realized they could not compete with Western military technologies, or Western resolve.

Seemingly, the whole affair irrefutably proved the courage and macho quality of Ronald Reagan, who was in the White House in 1983-84, and who determined to over-ride the massive political opposition – but the decision that really mattered predated him. In the late 1970s, the key European leaders were Germany’s Helmut Schmidt and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, and the Carter administration worked hand in glove with those hard-liners. In December 1979, the NATO meeting in Brussels reached the Double Track Decision, which sought to persuade the Soviets to reduce or remove their new weapons. If that diplomatic course failed, then the West would deploy its own modernized and improved missiles, which were just as mobile and concealable as their Soviet counterparts. The implementation was scheduled for 1983, at a time when nobody had a clue that Reagan would be in power, or that he would take credit for the act.

If the US had refused the Double Track, or if Carter had flinched on the Euromissile question, the consequences would have been catastrophic, but nothing of the kind occurred. Arguably, it was Carter’s greatest moment, at least as significant as the Camp David agreement.

Never forget that Carter’s National Security Adviser throughout his time in office was Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose anti-Soviet views were (at least) as hard-line as anything we got in the Reagan administration.

Thwarting the Soviets

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 (Carter called it “a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people”), it was also Carter who shifted the US into full rearmament mode. His administration began a systematic modernization of the nation’s arsenal, expanding the use of submarine-launched missiles with MIRVed nuclear weaponry, and arming B-52s with Cruise missiles. It was the Carter administration that laid down the new Ohio-class generation of nuclear submarines, although the first examples were not officially delivered until the Reagan years, naturally leaving Reagan to take the credit.

Carter even restored registration for the military draft, a policy that Reagan condemned in forthright terms as a violation of American values.

Carter’s policy was aimed at limiting and reversing Communist advances, in just the way that Reagan would famously do in later years, and using very similar tactics. In the last days of his presidency, Carter was sufficiently alarmed by the imminent collapse of the Salvadoran regime to restore U.S. military aid, which stemmed what the guerrillas vaunted as their final offensive. The US supported the Solidarity movement in Poland, and in December 1980, Carter directly warned the Soviets against military intervention. And we all know how Reagan armed highly effective anti-Communist proxy forces – but the policy began under Carter. Well before the 1980 election, Carter began U.S. support for Afghan mujahideen. In his 1980 State of the Union address, he stressed US cooperation with Pakistan, which would be the main channel for aid to the resistance through the coming decade.

Throughout 1980, under Carter, we discern the stark anti-Soviet mood of the Reagan years, the renewed patriotic upsurge – and all the practical moves growing out of that.

The Carter Boom

The economy presents a similar picture, where Reagan received the credit for decisions originally made by Carter, which were necessary, courageous, and initially unpopular. Carter had already pioneered the fiscal conservatism commonly associated with Reagan, and he was repeatedly in conflict with liberals over drastic cuts to social programs. To quote Bruce Schulman, President Carter was already “slouching toward the supply side.” He also made initial steps toward deregulation, notably with the airline industry.

Crucially, it was on his watch that the Federal Reserve took the critical steps necessary to cut inflation that was running out of control. Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chair of the Fed in August 1979, and Volcker presided over the ruthless financial squeeze that really did effectively remove inflation for the system. That caused a nasty recession in 1981-1982, but in turn, that set the stage for the phenomenal recovery that began in 1983, and roared along with few interruptions until 2007. This was the longest boom in US history, and Carter deserves much of the credit that normally falls to Reagan.

Disaster in the Desert

In retrospect, we know that Carter suffered an electoral massacre in 1980, winning only 41 percent of the popular vote to Reagan’s 51, with the remainder going to independent John Anderson. But events could have proved quite different. The key political issue in that year concerned the 52 US hostages held in Iran, presenting an appalling example of American weakness and failure. They would ultimately be held for a tortuous 444 days. It is hard to recall today just what a national obsession this issue became. On a personal note, when I arrived at Penn State in the Summer of 1980, the campus bell used to chime 52 time each day, to ensure that the hostages were always in our thoughts.

Months of diplomacy proved fruitless but in April 1980, Carter ordered a daring rescue mission by special forces, Operation Eagle Claw. This would follow the model pioneered by the Israelis at Entebbe in 1976, and subsequently imitated by the Germans, British, and Dutch in dealing with their own terrorists and hostage-takers. The decision even to attempt such a bold military venture runs flat contrary to the conventional stereotype of Carter as a timid wimp. In stark contrast, it was Ronald Reagan, several years afterward, who paid ransoms for other US hostages in the Middle East – and those ransoms included heavy weaponry for Iran.

Remind me, who was the tough guy?

For multiple reasons, the US effort in 1980 failed miserably, and the disaster at the Desert One base left awful images of burned-out helicopters, inevitably recalling the abandonment of Saigon. A telling joke at the time suggested that if Jimmy Carter had been president in 1945, the United States would have dropped the atomic bomb on Honolulu.

The Alternative 1980s

We can argue at length whether Eagle Claw could potentially have succeeded, but for the sake of argument, assume that it had. The hostages would have returned to a messianic welcome, and national pride would be running at fever pitch. Even after this debacle, Reagan supporters were desperately worried that Carter might arrange an October Surprise, a last-minute diplomatic breakthrough that would bring the Tehran hostages home in time for the election. Even at that point, the euphoria produced by such an outcome would have returned Carter quite comfortably.

Then think through the consequences of Carter’s imagined re-election. The reinvigorated Carter would indeed have suffered from the recession of 1981-1982, but he would also have profited mightily from the ensuing Carter Boom, which was reinforced by lavish spending on rearmament. By 1984, American pride would have been further buoyed by the Los Angeles Olympics, just as occurred under Reagan, and the Democrats would assuredly have won a landslide that November. Walter Mondale would likely have served as president through 1993, presiding over the second part of that great era of Democratic triumph with which we would associate the 1980s – a Second New Deal, perhaps. Jimmy Carter would have gone back to Georgia, to participate fully in Habitat for Humanity and to teach Sunday School, while modestly rejecting the widespread claims that he had saved the nation, if not the world.

Ronald Reagan would have faded into irrelevance. He would have become a trivia question about political “whatever happened to that guy?” figures, alongside Tom Dewey and Robert Taft.

Before Reagan

You don’t have to accept any of those alternative history approaches, but what is undeniable is that many of the key trends of the “Reagan Years” were firmly and irreversibly established under Jimmy Carter, and he should receive proper credit (or blame, depending on one’s point of view). It is hard to exaggerate just how transformational those late 1970s years were – politically, socially, economically, culturally. I argue that in my own book Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (2006) for the United States, while on the global stage, Christian Caryl has an excellent book called Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (2013).

Quite independent of any presidential action or top-down decision, social currents in the US in the late 1970s were already turning strongly conservative, with the surging concern about illicit drug abuse, child protection, and child sexual abuse, and about sexual libertinism more generally defined. Across the interfaith spectrum, there was a powerful drift to conservative, moralist, and even reactionary religion. Such things absolutely did not spring into life fully formed the day that Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.

Nor did the new structures of media and news presentation that so reshaped popular attitudes over the coming years. Presumably, if Jimmy Carter had indeed won re-election, MTV would still have kicked off in August 1981 with “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and the teenaged Amy Carter would have been watching it in the White House. The whole 1980s world of popular culture would have unrolled just as it did in our timeline, with all those John Hughes movies.

Equally independent of presidential politics, the new world of information technology and computing was about to hit hard in 1980-81, with all the consequences for the economy and for society more generally. Time‘s Man of the Year for 1982 would still have been the personal computer. The radical principle of WIMP – windows, icons, mouse, pointer – was already fundamental to computer design. During the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple would still have launched its legendary “1984” ad, which became a potent symbolic marker for popular access to user-friendly personal computing. Inextricably connected to that technological change, the massive shift to service industries and employment was a major force in reshaping gender roles and attitudes. Regardless of who sat in the White House, the 1980s were going to look much like “The Eighties” as we recall them, probably including the hair and the big shoulders.

The whole story raises powerful questions about how far we can speak of any president’s “greatness” or “weakness” when so much of their success or failure depends on matters beyond their control, and that certainly includes the situation they inherit from their predecessors. The past has baked their loaf. In good measure, Ronald Reagan’s loaf was baked in Plains, Georgia.

 

On a different tack, I end with a true Carter story I like, which I paraphrase from veteran Civil Rights leader Andrew Young. It is 1976, and the Congressional Black Caucus is meeting all the Democratic Presidential candidates. Every one takes their turn, and promptly declares support for all the Black Caucus’s positions. The Caucus members then ask each one a standard question: “How many Blacks do you have on your campaign staff?” The answer is always the same: one.

Then enters Jimmy Carter, the most conservative of the candidates, whom up till that point, nobody in the Caucus has treated seriously. Carter politely but firmly states why he disagrees with most or all of all the Black Caucus’s positions, which leads the members to accord him some grudging respect for sheer toughness. He then faces the “How many Blacks?” question, and answers, “I have no idea.”

“Well, try and think.”

“Gee, I don’t know, there is him, and him, and there’s him, and him …”

By the time he has reached well into double digits (and they tell him to stop counting), they realize with astonishment that he is running a genuinely and un-self-consciously multi-racial campaign, a radical departure from anything the Democratic Party had known hitherto. And this is in Georgia. Georgia?

Which is when the hitherto skeptical Andy Young himself joined the Carter campaign.

 

Apart from my Decade of Nightmares, I am drawing material here from my book A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991 (2021).

 

 

 

 

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