Jimmy Carter was a presidential paradox – a son of the Deep South devoted to civil rights, a small businessman wary of his party’s labor union base, a devout Baptist abhorred by the rising religious right, a submarine officer who was reluctant to commit American forces in war and a ferocious campaigner who disdained the compromises of governing. He parked politics at the Oval Office door, believing he would be reelected if he did “the right thing,” freeing him to take on challenges other presidents shirked.
Congress enacted 70% of his ambitious agenda, a record surpassed only slightly by the fabled President Lyndon Johnson. Carter, who died Sunday at age 100 at his home in Plains, Georgia, was our most accomplished one-term modern president, whose enduring achievements were eclipsed by inflation, Iran, inexperience and interparty warfare.
The energy security America enjoys rests on the foundation of his three comprehensive energy bills, ending price controls on domestic production of oil and natural gas, focusing on conservation, and inaugurating the era of wind and solar energy.
Average Americans benefited from the consumer advocates he placed in regulatory agencies, along with legislation that opened up transportation to competition, from trucking to railroads to airlines, making air travel affordable for the middle class and clearing the way for new carriers like Southwest Airlines and JetBlue Airways.
He even removed Prohibition-era regulations that had blocked the rise of the local craft beer industry and began telecommunications deregulation that ushered in the cable era.
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Carter was the greatest environmental president since Theodore Roosevelt, doubling the size of the national park system through the Alaska Lands Act. With typical attention to detail, he spread a map of Alaska on the Oval Office rug and on his hands and knees persuaded Alaska’s senior Republican senator to accept setting aside over 157 million acres for protection against development.
In ethically challenged Washington, Carter’s campaign pledges – “I will never lie to you” and seeking a government “as good” as the American people – were translated into lasting reforms: the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, prohibiting companies from paying bribes to foreign officials to get business; the 1978 Inspector General Act, creating independent inspectors general to root out fraud and abuse in federal agencies; and the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, requiring senior officials to disclose their assets, restrict gifts and limit post-employment lobbying, and authorizing the appointment of special prosecutors to investigate wrongdoing – the precursor to special counsel Robert Mueller and his Russia investigation during the Trump presidency.
With Walter Mondale, Carter created the modern vice presidency, making his running mate a full partner in government with a West Wing office and access to all classified papers. He appointed more women and minorities to judgeships and senior posts than all the previous 38 presidents together, and he supported affirmative action, angering his conservative Southern base.
Carter’s domestic Achilles’ heel was also his finest hour: tackling a decade of runaway inflation impervious to traditional remedies. Inflation was high during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford presidencies and rose further under Carter, with the oil shock and gas lines from the radical Iranian revolution.
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He told us that every measure he tried had failed, and that even if it doomed his reelection he would choose Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve, knowing full well it would mean tight money and sky-high interest rates that his advisers, including me, warned would be political poison.
Carter never complained. Volcker’s prescription worked – not in time to earn him a second term, but it laid the foundation for the low inflation we enjoy today, even with the temporary spike from the pandemic recovery.
Stronger America at home and abroad
From left, Egypt President Anwar Sadat, U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign a Middle East agreement at the White House in 1978 after a Camp David summit that September.
In foreign policy, Carter’s most lasting success was the greatest feat of personal presidential diplomacy in American history. Deliberately isolated at Camp David for 13 agonizing days in September 1978 with the mutually distrustful Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Carter crafted more than 20 successive draft agreements seeking common ground.
With all participants exhausted, Begin was ready to go home. Carter applied a personal touch by inscribing photographs of the three leaders to Begin’s eight grandchildren. The Israeli prime minister’s eyes teared, he relented and the rest is history: For more than four decades, the peace treaty Carter negotiated between Egypt and Israel has been central to Israel’s security and to America’s national interest.
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Carter made human rights a central tenet and applied those principles to the Latin American dictatorships, creating a new era in hemispheric relations along with the Panama Canal Treaty.
With the Soviet Union, he combined soft and hard power: championing human rights for Soviet Jews and others, increasing defense spending, greenlighting military modernization programs (that President Ronald Reagan later built upon) and taking a tough stand on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
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It was confrontation with the Iranian revolution, a conundrum no president has resolved, that brought down Carter. He supported our ally, the shah of Iran, to the bitter end, and urged the shah’s army to stand up to the Islamic regime that followed. Carter was the last holdout, and after he agreed to let the shah enter the United States for cancer treatment, radical students took American diplomats hostage in our Tehran embassy.
Carter mistakenly promised their families he would put their safety first, giving the Iranians leverage, and refused to blockade Iran’s oil export ports. He holed himself up in the White House to concentrate on their release, keeping the humiliating story on television for 444 nights.
The crowning blow was a bold but unsuccessful rescue mission doomed by too few helicopters, unexpected sandstorms, and the failure of our four military services to coordinate the complex mission. But as commander in chief, he took sole responsibility.
David Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, recounted to me in an interview for my book what Carter had told him: If the mission succeeded, it would be their success; if it failed, it would be on his shoulders.
Carter’s enemies dismissed him as ineffectual, and former President Donald Trump called his accomplishments “peanuts,” but they were wrong.
Jimmy Carter does not deserve a place on Mount Rushmore with our greatest presidents, but he belongs in the foothills with others who strengthened our country and its place in the world.
His vice president, Walter Mondale, put it succinctly in words now etched on the Carter Presidential Library: “We told the truth, we obeyed the law, we kept the peace.”
Stuart E. Eizenstat was chief White House domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981 and held several senior positions in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001, including U.S. ambassador to the European Union, undersecretary of Commerce, undersecretary of State and deputy secretary of the Treasury. He is the author of “President Carter: The White House Years.”
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Carter’s death shines light on president’s underrated legacy | Opinion