How does one reconcile Jimmy Carter's mediocre presidency with his undoubted success as an ex-president? A sampling of the growing Carter bookshelf shows that this is a persistent conundrum for scholars and scribblers trying to figure out the 39th president.
His supporters rail against the judgment of voters who retired him from office in 1980 after one very troubled term. They insist his presidency was not a failure though they do not claim greatness. His detractors insist that Carter got what he deserved by trying to convert the presidency into an isolated aerie from which he issued pious wisdom for the edification of ordinary folk and the political establishment.
Yet most authors give him high marks for his accomplishments since leaving Washington -- accomplishments that culminated in his capture of the latest Nobel Peace Prize after a quarter-century pursuit. He now is confirmed as the world's No. 1 do-gooder, free-lance diplomatic mediator, global election monitor of choice and Habitat for Humanity carpenter-in-chief.
Perhaps Carter's hubris is a good place to begin to consider the Carter dichotomy. William B. Quandt, a Brookings scholar speaking at a Carter symposium, attributes the president's problems to his "almost total belief that if he made the right decision -- through diligent study, hard work, sincere application, looking at the globe, putting himself in the shoes of other persons -- people would support it because it was right."
A Carter biographer, Betty Glad, told the same conference that Carter is "a proud man, very certain of his moral and intellectual superiority ... [who] aimed high, in part, because he saw himself as destined to accomplish great and difficult goals."
Burton I. Kaufman, author of The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr., a 1993 biography published by the University Press of Kansas, said the president believed he had "wisdom superior to the collective wisdom of Congress" and thus "disregarded the pluralistic nature of American society."
"The president buried himself in an endless flow of paper, distancing himself from his own staff and curtailing his time for thought and reflection." The result? "An image ... of a presidency that was increasingly divided, lacking in leadership, ineffective in dealing with Congress, incapable of defending America's honor abroad and uncertain about its purpose and priorities," wrote Kaufman.
Garland A. Haas, in his 1992 book, Jimmy Carter and the Politics of Frustration, (McFarland & Co.), said Carter ignored Democratic Party interest groups, subordinated Congressional opinion to hold out for the "right" solution, drained the presidency of its majesty and fought with the media -- all to his own detriment.
However, many of the characteristics that troubled Carter as president served him well as a post-president in charge of the highly active Carter Center in Atlanta. "While in office, Carter projected the image of being constrained by events beyond his control," wrote Mark Rozell in his article "Carter Rehabilitated: What Caused the 39th President's Press Transformation?," an attack on contemporaneous media treatment of his presidency. "As a private citizen he has the luxury to pick and choose the issues he cares about most." Leveraging the majesty of the office he once held, he could gain access to dictators and tyrants and use his belief in redemption and morality to tamp potentially explosive conflicts.
In Jimmy Carter, a Comprehensive Biography (Scribner, 1997), Peter G. Bourne, an aide in the Carter White House, cites his subject's encounters with such bogeymen as Syria's Hafez Assad, Panama's Manuel Noriega, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega and North Korea's Kim Il Sung as examples of "Carter's Christian belief in the power of moral persuasion."
"What Carter really wanted was to find some way to continue the undertakings of his presidency," wrote Douglas Brinkley in his 1998 Viking book, The Unfinished Presidency. "No matter what the American press said, most nations revered Jimmy Carter as the most trustworthy American politician alive . . . Nothing about the White House so became Carter as his having left it."
From the composite of portraits on the Carter bookshelf, one pattern that emerges is the continuity between the president and the post-president on foreign policy issues. If he had any real success in the Oval Office, it was in pursuit of conflict resolution between the United States and Panama (the Panama Canal Treaties), between Israel and Egypt (the Camp David Accords) and between the superpowers (recognition of China, Salt II pacts with the Soviet Union.) Though the Iran hostage crisis undercut his chances for re-election, he avoided war despite immense provocation. Since the mid-1980s, he has mediated at least a dozen Third World conflicts.
Nevertheless, even his hagiographers concede this ex-governor of Georgia was inept in managing the presidency or in dealing with such domestic issues as sky-high inflation and interest rates, persistent energy shortages and a feeling of drift that he famously blamed on the American people rather than his own leadership.
One little-remembered aspect of the Carter presidency, perhaps because it conflicts with his post-presidential image, was his switch to a Cold War hard line in the latter part of his presidency. Fortunately, there is a 1996 book, Reversing Course, by David Skidmore (Vanderbilt University Press) that deals with this important issue.
Skidmore noted that Carter began his tour at the White House vowing he would overcome America's obsession with Communism. But within two years, this liberal agenda had been cast aside. Carter soon almost doubled the annual rate of increase in the defense budget, began readying rapid deployment forces for possible intervention in Third World countries and took an aggressive stand against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan -- even cutting off grain exports to Russia as Midwestern farmers chafed and boycotting U.S. participation in the Moscow Olympics to the lasting disappointment of American athletes.
The reason Skidmore assigned for this "paradigmatic shift"? Rising domestic criticism of president, indicating that Carter was not so removed from American reality as current composite judgment would indicate. "Public skepticism and elite opposition to [liberal] reform raised the costs of policy change to intolerable levels prompting the administration to retreat," he wrote.
Once out of office, Carter reverted to his earlier approach to foreign affairs -- a contempt for the State Department bureaucracy, a resistance to U.S. military intervention everywhere (even against Iraq after its seizure of Kuwait) and a tendency to advocate alternate courses to those followed by his successors. He insisted he cleared everything with the administration in power in dealing with foreign principals, but this did not preclude his speaking his own mind.
That he got the Nobel Prize from a Norwegian committee eager to give George Bush II a "kick in the leg" over his current Iraq policies bothered Carter not at all. In his acceptance speech, which undoubtedly will figure in future studies, the ex-president called for working through the United Nations, rather than acting unilaterally. "For powerful countries to adopt a principle of preventive war may well set an example that can have catastrophic consequences," he declared. Would-be Carter biographers will get the message.
Actually, despite some titles suggesting the contrary, a wholly satisfactory biography of Jimmy Carter has yet to be written and probably won't be so long as he is continuing to add to his legacy. Kaufman's work is the best of the lot -- cool, detached, critical. But time and space are needed for more considered evaluations as Carter vows to "make good use" of his Nobel Prize.
Joseph R. L. Sterne was, for 12 years, editorial page editor of The Sun. He was the London correspondent from 1957 to 1960 and then a reporter in The Sun's Washington bureau from 1960 to 1969. He is now senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies.