It was a beautiful North Carolina spring day in 2000 at the governor’s mansion in Raleigh, and Governor Jim Hunt was sprinting down the giant ruby-red stairs. I was his then-young press aide, and we were running late because he had been on the phone with President Bill Clinton.

Naively, I noted something about their discussing a state issue. Without missing a beat, the governor said of Clinton, his fellow Democrat, “I was telling him what he was doing wrong with the country and how to fix it!”

So began my real education in politics, which I was quickly learning had even more to do with human interactions than I realized.

Last week, Hunt died at 88, a historic figure in North Carolina politics who served 16 years as governor. Appointed governors from the Colonial Era served longer, but no one has yet matched Hunt’s tenure as governor from 1977 to 1985 and again from 1993 to 2001.

The obituaries are full of his accomplishments and his most notable defeat, a 1984 bid to unseat U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. Hunt once told me his TV ads were “all wrong,” which may be true, but that was a bad year to be a Democrat, especially in the South. Ronald Reagan carried the state with almost 62 percent of the vote. Helms got 51 percent.

But I’m drawn to the dynamic between Hunt and Clinton, southern Democratic moderate governors who had to find a policy and political path forward as the South became increasingly Republican in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. They weren’t alone. Democratic southern governors like Ray Mabus in Mississippi, Richard Riley in South Carolina, Roy Barnes in Georgia, and Reubin Askew in Florida had similar dilemmas. They had a common goal, but they were all rivals in a way, too.

Clinton had real indebtedness to Hunt, nine years his senior. Hunt’s advocacy led to him serving as chair of the Democratic Governors Association. Clinton recalled “[I]t was the first significant national position of any kind I had.”

Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory aligned with Hunt’s return to the governor’s seat. Together, they used their bully pulpits in Washington and Raleigh to advance policies that could push the progressive envelope in a conservative era.

In 1997, when Clinton spoke before a joint session of the North Carolina legislature, as part of his crusade for national education standards and a testing plan, he called Hunt a “mentor and friend,” whose work was influenced by Hunt’s labors to create national teaching standards. Indeed, Hunt’s wilderness years outside elective office were spent as founding chair of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which to date has certified over 141,000 teachers with the profession’s highest credential.

Hunt never missed an opportunity to promote this cause to Clinton, even if it meant being aggressive. A White House staffer once told me that Clinton always insisted on understanding how the federally supported teaching certification program was progressing because Hunt was sure to grill him about it.

Photos of Hunt and Clinton are like a time capsule from a bygone era. For instance, there was a joint announcement of a public-private partnership to bring Internet access to the state (and a bit of a tug-of-war over who should get credit).

There were their combined efforts to pass a “global settlement agreement” between tobacco companies and the feds, which faltered, and later a “master settlement agreement” with the states that was sealed. There was their mutual understanding that education had to start before kindergarten and that it was a winning issue with voters—something New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani latched onto over 30 years after Hunt.

The Clinton-Hunt friendship is a testament to the ideals of intergovernmental relations—that federal and state leaders should cooperate. One area that’s particularly telling about how things have changed is disaster funding. The Clinton years allowed Hunt to boast about securing federal dollars for North Carolina after devastating hurricanes; one wonders how Hunt would navigate President Donald Trump’s truculent withholding of disaster relief.

Just because both men were Democrats didn’t guarantee success. Hunt served as governor during Jimmy Carter’s administration, but that relationship was fraught, with fights over college funding and tobacco, the state’s cash crop.

January will mark a quarter-century since Clinton and Hunt last held elective office. North Carolinians should remember that their bond produced outcomes that benefited the Tar Heel State. So should the rest of us. Their relationship continues to serve as a national model during these divisive times.

The post What Bill Clinton Learned from Jim Hunt and Why It Still Matters appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When I started at the Department of Education in the 1990s, student loans were a popular middle-class benefit. College affordability was rarely front-page news. Our dingy offices, a converted World War II warehouse, were a daily reminder of how our work seemed overlooked, too. But in those hallways—literally, my desk was in a hallway—we celebrated lower interest rates, fewer loan defaults, and record college enrollments.

When I returned to the Education Department a decade later, reports of deceptive recruiting tactics at for-profit colleges raised new questions about the value of college loans. My bosses wanted to know whether these abuses were widespread. Were they a few bad apples or a rotten orchard?

College degrees still led to huge earnings gains, on average, for students who were awarded them. The Department of Labor economists pegged the value of bachelor’s degrees at $1 million over a career. But there was very little data on the actual payoff from any particular college or program.

Instead, we looked at a simple proxy to measure the program’s value: whether loan balances were growing or shrinking. If interest accrued faster than borrowers could pay it down, that was a problem with student loan debt. We thought that might be the case for about a third of borrowers who recently left school. But the real number gave me a knot in my stomach. It was double our estimate: more than two-thirds of students saw their loans getting bigger, not smaller, over time. And while some caught up after years in repayment, one in three borrowers were still underwater, even on the oldest loans in the analysis.

These data led Barack Obama’s administration to set minimum standards for for-profit colleges and career programs, protecting hundreds of thousands of students from unaffordable debts. But there remained a larger question: How many students had education loans they would never pay down—and what would become of them?

In her new book, Sunk Cost, Jillian Berman sets out to explain how student loans went from a widely supported student benefit to a generational grievance. Covering the student loan industry for over a decade at the financial news service, MarketWatch, she explains how the student loan programs evolved, revealing how key policy decisions ultimately affected the lives of individual students.

In Berman’s telling, policy debates have a familiar echo from decade to decade. Political leaders call for the opening of the doors of college to everyone, regardless of income, but few were willing to invest the money necessary to pay college costs. Student loans were how they reconciled lofty ideals with paltry budgets. 

“Lawmakers were interested in expanding access to college,” Berman writes, but “they wanted to keep costs to the government low. Crucially, policymakers were confident that students would benefit financially from their education, which justified the idea that students should be investing in it themselves.” 

President Lyndon B. Johnson created the federal student loan program in 1965, saying, “This nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.” But his student loan program was “trying to hold the budget down,” according to the New York Times.

Johnson, Richard Nixon (who signed Pell Grants into law in 1972), and Jimmy Carter argued that making college affordable was in the country’s and individual students’ best interests. That view changed under Ronald Reagan. As governor, Reagan imposed the first tuition charges at the University of California. As president, he starved Pell Grants of funding. As his Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said, “Students are the principal beneficiaries of their investment in higher education” and therefore should “shoulder most of the costs.”

Other themes echo through the decades: Ostensibly a benefit for students, loan programs were shaped by commercial interests, intentionally providing ample profits to financial institutions. Quality standards were watered down to benefit for-profit colleges. Student aid programs also tolerated or even exacerbated racial disparities, even before the advent of LBJ’s student loan program. The G.I. Bill funded a segregated system of higher education. Tuition hikes in California and other states coincided with the growing enrollment of students of color. Black students were—and still are—more likely to go into debt, borrow more, and struggle to repay their loans.

To assess these policies, Berman relies on the voices of borrowers. Her reporting is filled with arresting accounts: single mothers piecing together child care around full-time jobs and full-time course loads, students lured by false promises and left with unpayable debts, some never finishing, others graduating only to find their degrees worthless, and some carrying student debt into retirement.

Crippling student debt is often painted as the consequence of irresponsible decisions. But, as Berman points out, it usually isn’t a choice at all. Many of these borrowers believed they were enrolled in the cheapest college they could find or that it represented their only option for post-secondary education.

Looking for a chance to be her own boss, Patricia Gary enrolled in a Bronx beauty school. The instruction was poor, and she dropped out owing $6,000. Over the next 30 years, as an educator and social worker, she repaid $23,000—sometimes through garnished wages and tax refunds—but could not repay her entire loan. Her balance was finally forgiven at age 75.

Sandra Hinz returned to school in her fifties to become a medical assistant. But when her adult son became disabled in a motorcycle accident, she was forced to become a full-time caregiver. She struggled to get help with her $28,000 loan despite income-driven repayment plans designed to help people like her.

As a young mother, Kendra Brooks attended community college for seven years, followed up with a four-year degree and an MBA at age 50. She borrowed $50,000 over the years to pursue economic security for her family. Now, a Philadelphia council member, Brooks, says that her personal experience—and that of her constituents—is that college never quite pays off.

I have met many people with similar stories. But student loans are a double-edged sword. Many borrowers do graduate and go on to successful careers. Economists say that, at least at current tuition levels, loans increase graduation rates and pay off in the long run. Berman never grapples with the question of whether, in some circumstances, loans might be a reasonable way to pay tuition bills.

But the numbers also say that it is not rare for borrowers to be worse off than if they had never gone to college. Before the student loan pause during the pandemic, a million students defaulted on their loans yearly. One in three borrowers never graduate. Typical Black borrowers owe nearly as much as they borrowed, even 10 years later, having made no dent in the principal. The experiences Berman describes may not be universal, but they are far from isolated anecdotes. The stories and data suggest something is seriously wrong with the student loan program.

As I was peering at my charts around 2010, the student loan debt problem was getting worse. The Great Recession triggered state budget cuts, increasing tuition and student borrowing. For-profit online universities boomed, leaving millions with unaffordable debts. Graduates struggled to find footing in a weak job market, making their loan payments even more burdensome.

Around the same time, a political movement was brewing in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. The Occupy Wall Street activists called for free college, student loan debt cancellation, and broader economic reforms. From that ferment emerged the Debt Collective, a determined and idealistic group of borrower activists.

Berman describes how the Debt Collective spent years raising grassroots funds to buy and forgive defaulted loans. They organized borrowers cheated by their colleges to press for their legal rights. They recruited allies to push for change through the political process.

In 2020, one of their allies, Senator Elizabeth Warren, then running for president, made debt cancellation mainstream with a campaign pledge to forgive up to $50,000 in debt for each borrower. It resonated. Soon, other presidential candidates joined her, as did teachers’ unions, civil rights groups, and a new cadre of borrower groups like the Student Borrower Protection Center.

When President Joe Biden won the White House in 2020, the focus turned to executive action rather than legislation. In 2022, Biden canceled up to $20,000 in debt per borrower. But only months later, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden plan, finding it to be an executive overreach.

President Biden advanced a second set of student loan reforms that received less attention but had a similar price tag, were intended to be permanent, and provided complete forgiveness to struggling borrowers. The Washington Monthly called the Saving for a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan a “revolutionary” solution for borrowers with low incomes and large debts. The administration also broke down the bureaucratic obstacles within existing loan forgiveness programs—for public servants and borrowers with disabilities, among others—from discharging the entire loans of 5 million borrowers, including several people Berman profiles. But the income-driven SAVE plan is now tied up in courts, and the Donald Trump administration laid off entire teams that help borrowers receive benefits.

So, where do student-loan borrowers go from here?

Berman says we need a “philosophical shift to change our higher education system to one in which individuals take on less of a risk and taxpayers take on more.” She calls for fixes to the student loan program, “truly free” options at public colleges, and addressing broader economic issues that have made college—and therefore student loans—feel indispensable to young people.

Right now, Congress is going the other direction. The Republican budget bill would cut Pell Grants and make loans more expensive for many borrowers, redirecting some $300 billion to help pay for tax cuts that accrue primarily to high earners and corporations. Republicans also plan to cut off loans for programs whose former students have low earnings. In principle, this is right—we should stop making loans, as we know borrowers will not be able to repay them—and a spirit similar to Biden’s college accountability rules.

But without replacing more loans with more scholarships, the Republican plan will only encourage higher-cost private student loans and push college further out of reach for low-income students and students of color. It would also whittle down the goals of college to students’ future earnings at the expense of upward mobility, public service, religion, the arts, and many other social goals. A better approach would replace loans with a combination of free college, scholarships, and student loan benefits, especially for students who did not receive the ordinary economic benefits of a college degree.

We can also make college a more reliable investment. Over the last decade, we have boosted the college graduation rate by 8 percentage points, but it is still only 61 percent. Leading colleges have found ways to help many students graduate and then connect their degrees to promising careers, using data and fostering advising and counseling. But we have not yet invested in making those steps the norm, particularly at the community colleges and regional public universities that serve most students.

Readers wondering how debt relief became a top-tier political issue should confront the stories in Sunk Cost. It tells the same story as that chart I saw over a decade ago: The system is not working for a sizeable share of borrowers. A new approach to college finance, with substantial new investments, is needed to finally take advantage of higher education’s potential to build stronger lives and a stronger society.

The post Student Loan Debt: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In Walter Mondale’s posthumous eulogy for Jimmy Carter, published yesterday by The New York Times, he summed up the record of their administration: “We told the truth, we obeyed the law, and we kept the peace.”

It sounds so simple. But how they kept the peace—or more precisely, forged peace between Israel and Egypt—required actions more morally nebulous than simple truth-telling and law-obeying.

Rarely emphasized in the history of the Camp David Accords is Carter’s use of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency to perform clandestine surveillance on Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in advance of their historic three-way summit.

I’ll share more of that story. But first, here’s what else the Washington Monthly is offering in remembrance of Jimmy Carter:

***

Jimmy Carter’s Very Best (1924-2024): Contributing Editor Jonathan Alter shares what it was like to be Carter’s biographer. Click here for the full story.

The Jimmy Carter Way: Contributing Writer Chris Matthews makes the case that Carter’s “finest achievement” was how he won the presidency. Click here for the full story.

The Surprising Greatness of Jimmy Carter: From our 2021 archives, an in-depth conversation about Carter’s legacy with his biographers Alter and Kai Bird, moderated by Contributing Editor Tim Noah. Click here for the full story.

***

The role played by the CIA and NSA in the preparations for the Camp David summit was not known until November 2013, when the federal government declassified a trove of related memos. Also, the Carter Center hosted an event to discuss the newly released information featuring Carter himself and a panel of intelligence operatives and historians.

From the releases and the public discussion, we learned that soon after the Carter administration announced on August 8, 1978 plans for a Camp David summit beginning on September 5, Carter visited a group of intelligence agents at the CIA.

According to a declassified article published by the in-house CIA academic journal, Studies in Intelligence, written by psychiatrist and CIA analyst Jerrold Post, Carter told them he wanted to be “steeped in the personalities of Begin and Sadat.”

The former president elaborated at the Carter Center event that he asked for “a personal profile, a complete analysis, of the character of Begin and Sadat,” including “what were their attitudes toward me, and what were they toward the United States when they spoke in private … and what were their attitudes toward each other both publicly and privately.”

In describing the research conducted, Post only alluded to spying, noting there was “continued monitoring of the target leaders,” but otherwise referred to “open literature” and “debriefings” of people who had direct dealings with Begin and Sadat. (Initial analyses on the two were previously completed in 1977.)

The former 30-year CIA intelligence officer Martha Neff Kessler was more precise, revealing at the Carter Center that, “My recollection is that a great deal of it was clandestinely collected information … in a lot of the interchange on the Palestinian issue, some it was intercepted traffic … Somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of what I was reading every day was CIA-collected information. The rest was a variety—NSA [and] open source … It didn’t constitute the majority of what we were reading, [but] it was the most critical.”

Post wrote that a “senior official advanced the notion that the personality differences were so profound that the two leaders [Begin and Sadat] should never be brought together in the same room,” an insight that would be the crux of the Camp David negotiating strategy. (For example, “Sadat’s abhorrence of detail contrasted with Begin’s predilection for precision and legalism.”)

Carter shared additional details at the Carter Center event: “[Begin] didn’t really trust any of his cabinet members completely. He trusted his attorney general [Aharon] Barak, [while Sadat] trusted Osama el-Baz … his private political adviser. And those were about the only ones within their own delegations of almost 50 people that they really trusted. And that turned out to be crucial during the final days of the negotiations.” Instead of Begin and Sadat meeting face-to-face, it was Barak and el-Baz who helped seal the deal.

I first explored the role of spying at Camp David when also writing, for Politico, about its use at the 1945 San Francisco Conference that birthed the United Nations. I dug deeper into the U.N. episode, and the critical role of the unsung Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, for a podcast and for the Washington Monthly.

Spying is often treated as intrinsically nefarious and only used in service of evil objectives. But Carter and Stettinius used spying, successfully, to prevent needless bloodshed.

Telling the truth and obeying the law are great. But to forge peace, sometimes you have to get creative.

Happy new year,

Bill

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It’s entirely tax deductible. For $50 or more, you’ll receive a complimentary subscription to the magazine’s print edition. 

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The post How Jimmy Carter Used the CIA and NSA to Forge Middle East Peace appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Washington Monthly is often at its best in times of liberal despair. Charlie Peters founded the publication at just such a moment—in 1969, in the early months of Richard Nixon’s presidency, as the New Frontier and Great Society ended, and the McCarthy-era redbaiter hated by liberals made an impossible political comeback. (Sound familiar?) The Monthly is thriving right now, in this perilous moment, as Jimmy Carter’s century of service ends and Donald Trump’s comeback culminates in his swearing-in as the 47^th president of the United States. But we need your contributions to keep going. 

Peters, a former West Virginia state legislator, founded the Monthly amid Nixonian darkness, believing that government could help Americans do great things. A World War II veteran, FDR lover, GI bill beneficiary, and JFK appointee, he knew from his life experience, including as a founder of the Peace Corps, that government is not the enemy. But as he saw with LBJ, it could go off the rails, whether sinking into the Vietnam quagmire or running amok through failed programs and misplaced altruism. “Criminals Belong in Jail” was an early Monthly cover story—an unremarkable truism but, at the time, heresy for a liberal to say. As Nixon took office, Peters wanted a magazine about making government work, skewering conservative misanthropy, and saving liberalism from itself. 

Peters encouraged journalists to do the same because he had worked in politics and government. Monthly alums are the rare journalistic tribe who have often worked in government, often at the highest levels. Two Washington Monthly contributing editors—James Fallows and the late Walter Shapiro, who we lost this year—were White House speechwriters in the Carter administration, as was Chris Matthews, the author, historian, broadcaster, and our contributing writer. Jon Meacham was a biographer and friend of George H.W. Bush and a friend and ally of Joe Biden during his presidency. Steven Waldman helped run AmeriCorps. Taylor Branch ran the George McGovern campaign in Texas with a fellow named Bill Clinton before becoming the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King. I had two stints in government, working on independent commissions investigating civil rights and the financial crisis. 

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Paul Glastris, the editor-in-chief of this magazine, took over from Peters after serving as a speechwriter toward the end of Bill Clinton’s administration, penning addresses on everything from education policy to American engagement in Europe, where he had been a correspondent during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Liberalism was in another crisis as Glastris took the helm. Clinton may have left behind peace, prosperity, and surpluses, but George W. Bush was in office; the country, barreling blind toward Baghdad and the Democrats, again, lost. The Monthly was full of ideas, often championing tried-and-true liberal solutions that had fallen out of fashion even among Democrats, like VA health care, sensible regulation, and vigorous antitrust enforcement. Some of those new-old positions put Glastris’s Washington Monthly at odds with the deregulatory zeal of the Carter years when laissez-faire came to the airline industry and energy prices. But being willing to reassess one’s positions has always been a hallmark of the Monthly, and, hopefully, anyone who isn’t a lemming. 

The Washington Monthly has always operated on a slim financial margin. Finances always feel like a high-wire act around here, and this is especially true now. That’s why we need your help. We can’t do our investigative reporting without your help. We can’t be a fount of new ideas for reviving liberalism without your donations. Do it now. As Jimmy Carter’s body takes the long journey from Plains, Georgia, to lie in state in Washington and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance ready to take office, this is a vital and essential time to donate to the Monthly. 

It’s entirely tax deductible. For $50 or more, you’ll receive a complimentary subscription to the magazine’s print edition. 

All the best, 

Matthew Cooper 

Executive Editor-Digital 

The post Jimmy Carter, the Washington Monthly, and the Future of Liberalism appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When I heard the news of Jimmy Carter’s death, I felt a sense of loss for the country and the world. We need his sense of decency and ceaseless commitment to helping other people. But I was also flooded with personal memories—not just of my time with Carter and his family but of the whole process of trying to write a biography of a formidable, complex man who became a world-historical figure. Rather than writing another piece about his legacy, which I did here when he went into hospice in early 2023 and in TIME, I thought I’d take you back to researching and writing the book between 2015 and 2020.

The timing was auspicious. When I began my research, the importance of character in the White House was not yet an issue in America. I was working in the Carter Library in Atlanta when Donald Trump came down the escalator on June 16, 2015. MSNBC asked me to go to a studio and comment on his attacks on Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. When I returned to the library, I found that turning the pages of documents that validated Carter’s core values had the effect of brushing away some of the toxins of our times. My book became a kind of balm—and continued providing relief for me in the following years.

At the same time, Trump’s election in 2016 gave my Carter project a new urgency—and it kindled a fragile hope that his life story might help light our way back to at least a slightly better politics.

I first met Jimmy Carter—for a split-second handshake—on the South Lawn of the White House on the 4th of July, 1978, when I was a college intern in his speechwriting office. In early 1980, like so many Democrats, I grew disillusioned with him. I worked for a few weeks as a part-time volunteer on Ted Kennedy’s campaign against him in the Democratic primaries. That was dumb. Carter wasn’t a bad president, just swamped by cataclysmic events and ideologically trapped: Too conservative for liberals, too liberal for conservatives.

Thirty-five years later, I found myself drawn back to a perplexing leader and to his virtuoso achievement—the 1978 Camp David Accords, which brought peace to Israel and Egypt after 2000 years of enmity and became the most durable major treaty of the postwar era.

My book group in New York was reading a book about Camp David by Lawrence Wright, and one of our members had worked in Jason Carter’s unsuccessful campaign for governor of Georgia in 2014. He arranged for Jason and the former president to come to our group. Carter was 90 and ridiculously sharp. As he talked about Camp David, the idea of a book took shape. If he pulled that off, I figured, there must be more to him than the easy shorthand—inept president/noble ex-president. Fortuitously, my editor, the late Alice Mayhew, was also Carter’s book editor, and she smoothed the way for lots of access to the Carters and their whole family. When I learned that he would almost certainly have begun to address global warming in the early 1980s had he been reelected, I was hooked. I became a bit obsessed with trying to understand the most misunderstood president in American history.

Carter was politically tone-deaf and made plenty of mistakes in office; even as he moved up a few places in the latest historians’ list, he will never be in the top tier of chief executives. But I came to believe he was one of America’s most consequential one-term presidents, with a long list of unheralded achievements and an enduring moral vision.

I was surprised to learn that Carter was our greatest environmental president. (Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were also historic conservationists, but in the era before efforts to combat industrial pollution). I knew about his human rights policy but had no clue how much change it helped bring worldwide. Many little-known accomplishments—from normalizing relations with China to diversifying the federal judiciary to enacting the whistleblower protections that made the impeachment of Donald Trump possible—have shaped our own time in ways that almost no one connects to Carter.

Now, thanks to the publication of a handful of new books, the long goodbye afforded by his time in hospice, and the striking contrast to Trump, more people are beginning to appreciate him, and a broader reappraisal is underway. I hope that interest and appreciation will grow in death.

From the start of my research, Carter’s journey from barefoot farm boy to global icon struck me as an American epic. I wanted to understand how he evolved from a short, timid kid nicknamed “Peewee” into an ambitious and born-again governor of Georgia; how—straddling two worlds—he miraculously advanced from obscure outsider to President of the United States; how he stumbled as a leader at the time but succeeded in reinventing himself as a warrior for peace.

Carter was warm in public, brisk—sometimes peevish—in private, and decent at his core. Throughout his long life, he passed what his Naval Academy rule book called “the final test of a man”—honesty. Like most politicians, he exaggerated. But he fulfilled his famous promise in his 1976 campaign and never lied to the American people, which is no small thing today.

I decided to call my book His Very Best because it reflects not just the title of Carter’s 1975 campaign autobiography (Why Not the Best?) but his intensity and his sense of obligation to God, humanity, and himself. In his daily, even hourly, prayers, he asked not just “What would Jesus do?” but “Have I done my best?” After cantankerous Admiral Hyman Rickover sternly asked the nervous young lieutenant in a job interview if he had done his best at Annapolis—and he confessed that he had not—Carter disciplined himself to make the maximum effort in every single thing he did for the rest of his life. When bestowing the Nobel Peace Prize on Carter in 2002, the chairman of the Nobel committee said. “Carter himself has taken [from Ecclesiastes 11:4]  as his motto: ‘The worst thing that you can do is not to try.’ Few people, if any, have tried harder.”

Whether sprinting as a naval officer through the core of a melted-down nuclear reactor, laboring to save tens of millions of acres of wilderness, driving 100 miles out of his way on rutted roads to talk to a single African farmer, or turkey-hunting at age 95—Carter was all-in, all the time. Calling him the least-lazy American president is not to damn him with faint praise; the story of his long life should endure as a master class in making every minute count.

I interviewed him more than a dozen times in his home, office, over meals, in transit, and by email. I saw him teach Sunday school and helped build a Habitat for Humanity house with him in Memphis. I also interviewed Rosalynn Carter—who was kind enough to share Jimmy’s tender love letters from the Navy and portions of her unpublished diaries for the first time. My most memorable interviews took place in Plains, the tiny town in Southwest Georgia that Jimmy and Rosalynn—married for 77 years—always called home. They met there as infants more than nine decades ago. Jimmy’s mother, a nurse, delivered Rosalynn and brought her nearly three-year-old son over to see the new baby. Plains is a friendly place, but I learned of its harsh past, with a county sheriff Martin Luther King Jr., described as “the meanest man in the world.” I concluded that Carter’s historic focus on human rights abroad has been at least partial atonement for too often ducking brutal abuses of civil rights at home—the white terrorism in his own backyard.

Carter’s storied 1976 presidential campaign transformed American politics, but his presidency bogged down for reasons often beyond his control. In his last two years, he was often flailing, buffeted by events, and stripped of the mystery and elan he needed to perform in the theater of the presidency.

One day, I asked him to identify the biggest myth about his time in office. He answered: “That I was weak. I made many bold decisions, almost all of which were difficult to implement and not especially popular.” This is true. Carter was not fundamentally weak, though he allowed perceptions of weakness to harden. They have warped our impression of him, obscuring the enduring truth that contemporary unpopularity is often unrelated to larger significance. One of my challenges was to untangle the two and lift Carter from the muck of his times for inspection in the sunshine of historical context.

He was the first American president since Thomas Jefferson who could reasonably claim to be a Renaissance Man or at least a world-class autodidact. At various times in his life, he acquired the skills of a farmer, naval officer, electrician, sonar technologist, nuclear engineer, businessman, equipment designer, agronomist, master woodworker, Sunday School teacher, land-use planner, legislator, door-to-door missionary, governor, long-shot presidential candidate, U.S. president, diplomat, fly-fisherman, bird dog trainer, arrowhead collector, home builder, painter, professor, memoirist, poet, novelist, and children’s book author—an incomplete list, as he would be happy to point out.

Midway through my research, it struck me that Carter was the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: His early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the 19th; he was connected—before, during and after his presidency—to many of the significant events and transformative social movements of the 20th; and the Carter Center he founded is focused on conflict resolution, global health, and strengthening democracy—major challenges of the 21st.

Throughout Jimmy Carter’s long life, classmates, colleagues, friends—even members of his own family—found him hard to read. The enigma deepened in the presidency. From my own observations and the people who worked for and with him in Atlanta and Washington, a complicated picture emerges: I concluded that Carter was a driven engineer laboring to free the artist within. He once told me that he could only express his true feelings in his poetry, which he wrote after leaving the presidency. Some of it is quite good.

I enjoyed trying to peel back the layers of his complex personality. Carter was a disciplined, driven and incorruptible president equipped with a sharp, omnivorous mind; a calm and adult president—dependable in a crisis—whose religious faith helped keep him focused on saving lives; a friendless president, who in the 1976 primaries had defeated or alienated a good chunk of the Democratic Party; a stubborn and acerbic president, never demeaning but sometimes an SOB; a non-ideological and logic-driven president who worshipped science along with God and saw governing as a series of problem sets; an austere, even spartan president out of sync with profligate American culture; a sometimes-obsessive president whose diamond-cutter attention to detail brought ridicule but also historic results; a charming and formidable president in small groups and when speaking off-the-cuff but often underwhelming—even off-putting—on television, especially when reading prepared texts; an insular, all-business president, allergic to schmoozing, with few devotees beyond his intimate circle of Georgians, in part because— like his father and Admiral Rickover, two of his greatest influences—he rarely spared time for small talk and often had trouble saying “Thank You”; and an unlucky president— hamstrung in Iran by his own humanity—who was committed first to doing what he thought was right in the long-term, with the politics that often imperiled him distinctly secondary to his larger aims.

For some in Carter’s orbit, his impatient and occasionally persnickety style—a few dubbed him “the grammarian-in-chief” for correcting their memos—would mean their respect would only turn to reverence and love in later years. Only then did many of those who served in his administration fully understand that he had accomplished much more in office than they knew and that he had done so with passion and foresight they had not fully appreciated at the time.

Now, the rest of us are learning that, too.

The post Jimmy Carter’s Very Best (1924-2024) appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Jimmy Carter has long been cast as one of America’s least-effective modern presidents—blamed for failing to tame inflation, solve the energy crisis, or free the American hostages in Tehran. His crushing reelection defeat in 1980 sealed the downbeat narrative. 

But that negative assessment is beginning to change. Recently, Washington Monthly contributing editor Timothy Noah hosted a conversation between Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird, two journalists who just published major biographies of America’s 39th president. Each approached Carter from a different angle, but both arrived at a similar conclusion: Jimmy Carter is seriously underrated. 

Alter and Bird both dispute that Carter was weak or lost in the weeds, as he has so often been portrayed. Carter brought more positive change to the Middle East than any president in the decades before or since; signed more legislation than any post–World War II president except LBJ; and warned of the dangers of climate change before the threat even had a name. Carter’s human rights policy played a huge and largely uncredited role in the collapse of the Soviet Union—more so, perhaps, than any policies enacted by his successor Ronald Reagan.

What follows is an edited transcript. We promise an absorbing and informative read about some recent history that you almost certainly don’t know as well as you think you do—assuming you remember it at all.

Timothy Noah: It’s my pleasure today to introduce two old friends, Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird, to reassess the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Alter and Bird are the authors of two recent Carter biographies, His Very Best and The Outlier, in which each of them argues for a reconsideration of the former president’s administration. Carter is now 97 years old, which makes him the oldest ex-president in history. Rosalynn, his wife, is 94.

As it happens, the late 1970s is when I first met Jon and Kai. For the record, Jon and I met my freshman year in college, and Kai and I met when I was a summer intern at The Nation in 1979; Kai was my boss. I later succeeded Jon as an editor of the Washington Monthly, and Kai and I reconnected after he and his wife, Susan, moved to Washington, D.C. 

I’m going to turn this conversation over now to Jon and Kai, asking Jon to begin. 

Jonathan Alter: One of the most pleasurable parts of [this experience] for me was getting to know Kai. We met at the Carter Center Weekend in 2016. To my mind, [we] were engaged in basically the same larger project, which is to get the country to reassess Jimmy Carter, not just as a president but as a person. I think we’ve made some progress on that. 

I think the period of time that has elapsed since he left the presidency 40 years ago is about the same as it took to reassess Harry Truman’s legacy. Truman left office in 1953 as a really unpopular president. When David McCullough’s book came out about him [in 1992], it began a true revisionism. I don’t think it’s going to be quite the same level for Carter that it was for Truman, but the reappraisal is under way, and long overdue. 

The Carter administration prioritized human rights to an extent that no previous president had done, and this was an extraordinarily important thing. It helped lead to the end of the Cold War, as Larry Eagleburger acknowledged, as Colin Powell has acknowledged. When Václav Havel would give interviews, he would describe how important it was for the morale of dissidents to know that they had a friend as president of the United States. There are a lot of human rights organizations that arose, not just in the Soviet Union but in many other countries where when you talk to the people who started those organizations, they mention Carter.

There’s a story about a prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union who Carter gets released in a prisoner swap, and he comes to church with him in Plains, and when they’re in church, he’s sitting next to Rosalynn, and he pulls from the fake sole in his shoe a little picture that he kept in there of Jimmy Carter, the whole time he was
in prison. 

TN: Wow.

JA: So ideas have power. This is important to remember, even in the wake of the war in Afghanistan. You’re hearing some talk of human rights there, but having spent 20 years in Afghanistan, everybody’s now saying, “Well, we can’t, we can’t solve every human rights problem.” Carter would agree with that. It was a very pragmatic policy and situational policy. 

That means he did what he could, which was a lot, particularly in Latin America, which went from mostly authoritarian to mostly democratic in the 10 years after Carter was president. That’s not all attributable to him, but he should get some credit for it. There are still many more democratic countries in the world now than there were in 1980. And it’s because of a lot of hard work by people who, in a surprising number of cases, were inspired by Jimmy Carter.

Kai Bird: I would agree with that. Human rights was a major achievement by Carter. He put human rights, that principle, as a keystone of U.S. foreign policy, and none of his successors have been able to walk back from that or ignore it completely. They’ve talked about some of the hypocrisy and impracticality of the policy, but you can’t ignore it. I make this argument in my biography, that human rights, the talk about human rights, and the focus on dissidents in the Soviet Union, and in Czechoslovakia, and Poland—all of that did much more to weaken the Soviet empire in eastern Europe than anything Ronald Reagan did by increasing the defense budget or threatening Star Wars. The Soviet Union was a weak adversary, not a strong adversary. It was falling apart, and along comes Carter, talking about human rights, and as Jon has said, ideas are powerful, and this idea remains powerful, and it really contributed monumentally to the falling of the Berlin Wall and people seizing power in the streets, and wanting to have personal freedom. That, in part, can be attributed to Jimmy Carter.

TN: The Carters recently celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in their hometown of Plains, Georgia. You were both in attendance. What was it like, and what did you learn?

JA: They’re the longest-married presidential couple in American history. They’ve been married now longer than [were] Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, which everybody thought was some kind of world record. They actually met three days after Rosalynn was born, almost exactly 94 years ago, when Lillian Carter, Jimmy’s mother, brought her nearly three-year-old son around to see the baby that she had just delivered down the street. They didn’t really see each other very much for the next 20 years, though. They started going out when he was at the Naval Academy. 

What really struck me about the delightful wedding anniversary was how small-d democratic it was. It was a real contrast to, say, the Obama 60th birthday party. And not just because, you know, they weren’t cutting close aides from the list. Yes, Garth Brooks went, but it was not that kind of event. It was also a mending of old wounds, because Bill and Hillary Clinton, who hadn’t gotten along at all well with the Carters, came, as did Nancy Pelosi. I have this enduring image in my mind of [Pelosi] going up to Carter in his wheelchair and putting her hands on either side of his face and looking at him long and hard, and you knew that she was thinking, “This is the last time I’m ever going to see Jimmy Carter.” So there was a poignancy to it. 

They split us up into classrooms at the Plains High School, so that the party had an intimacy to it before we joined the larger group in the school auditorium. In my classroom you had everyone from Lucy Johnson and Sam Donaldson to Rosalynn’s hairdresser and a young Georgia researcher that they had befriended because they liked his nature research. It just really gave you a sense of the scope of their interests, and the fact that they—I wouldn’t describe Jimmy Carter as humble; I don’t think any politician is humble—but the modesty of his circumstances and their approach to life was on striking display.

KB: Jon, just to jump in on that theme, in my classroom I was in the presence of a billionaire who had befriended Carter 25 years earlier and helped to fund the Carter Center and fly him around Africa in his efforts to conquer guinea worm disease, but also in the room were his fly-fishing buddies. This family from Pennsylvania that he, during the presidency, he would go up to visit occasionally and go fly-fishing with. And the billionaire explained to me rather sheepishly that the Pennsylvania fly fisherman couple were Trumpists—they voted for Trump!

JA: The fly fishermen run kind of a legendary lodge in Pennsylvania. [Carter went there] right after the 1980 convention. It was also the location of a story that Paul Volcker told me. I interviewed him not long before he died, and he said that he was at the same fishing lodge when Carter was there a few years after the presidency, and Volcker said, “I’m sorry if I cost you the presidency,” because, you know, he jacked up interest rates, they went as high as 19 percent. How was Carter supposed to get reelected when interest rates were so high? When inflation was vanquished, Reagan was in office and got all the credit. Arguably, Volcker elected and reelected Ronald Reagan. But Carter turned to Volcker, and, with a smile, he said, “There were many factors, Paul.”

KB: Volcker was certainly right up there. Another factor was his treatment by the media. One of the reasons Carter is so misunderstood is, alas, the press that he got at the time, and specifically The Washington Post, [which] sort of mocked his southern heritage—his funny accent, his dress, his demeanor, his talking, his staff from Georgia. Sally Quinn, in particular, the queen of the Style section at the time, and married to [the editor] Ben Bradlee—just went after, relentlessly, Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan and [Press Secretary] Jody Powell.

JA: Kai is absolutely right about this, and I was really surprised to see the tone of the coverage, which influenced me at the time. What I concluded [was] that Carter was both made and unmade by Watergate. He never would have been elected president without Watergate. He starts running just a few months after Nixon resigns, and he is the antidote to Nixon. He says, “I’ll never lie to you,” “We need a government as good as its people.” He [later] said he got a better press than he deserved in 1976 because he matched the moment so perfectly. But then when he gets to office, you have a Washington press corps that is determined to prove that he’s just another Nixon, and that anybody who has that job is by definition corrupt.

KB: Remember Peanutgate? That became a sort of mini scandal that was [much] ado about nothing. And yet the Washington press corps pursued it thinking that they [could] prove that Jimmy Carter used funds from this peanut warehouse illegally in his campaign. It was young reporters like us, always trying to be Woodward and Bernstein.

JA: I had been an intern in Jim Fallows’s office in the summer of 1978. He was not yet 30 years old, and he was Carter’s first chief speechwriter, and that was what got me into the whole Washington Monthly circle, and changed my life, getting to know Jim. I left the White House very influenced by the extremely critical article that Jim wrote for The Atlantic later that year, which I think you and I have different takes on, called “The Passionless Presidency,” and—

TN: I’d like to interject here Jim’s great joke—he probably regrets telling it: “Being Jimmy Carter’s chief speech writer was like being tap dance instructor to FDR.”

JA: Yeah, that was a great line. 

TN: Was that a fair comment?

JA: Let’s put it this way. The speechwriters were so downgraded, in terms of their importance in the Carter White House, that I was able to write a later piece, I think for the Monthly, entitled, “I Was a Teenage Presidential Speechwriter.” They would give me speeches to write for Carter, and Carter wouldn’t deliver them, or he would muff the line. I wrote a speech that he gave at a tobacco warehouse in North Carolina, and he ended up saying, “We’re going to make cigarette smoking even safer than it already is today.” He was just really bad at prepared speeches. He didn’t value prepared speeches; he didn’t value rhetoric. Both Kai and I use the diaries of this wonderful guy named Jerry Doolittle, who I got to know that summer, who was the gag writer and a speechwriter. Jerry is very acidic in his contemporaneous diaries about Carter’s speeches. This hurt Carter, especially in contrast to Reagan, who was such a great performer. His delivery was bad. He didn’t have an ear for language. He cut out anything that could possibly be seen as Sorensenian in its rhetoric. 

I remember that summer Jim said to me, “Here’s the line you need to use. ‘We must stop inflation, and we must do it now.’ ” That was Carter’s idea of a speech. 

I was so disenchanted with Carter that I supported Ted Kennedy in [the] 1980 [primaries]. And then later, [I] thought that was a really stupid thing to do, taking this perfectly fine, not-perfect president and subjecting him to this kind of challenge from within his own party. I was ashamed of having done that. 

I didn’t really think about him very much until I was in a book club in 2014 in New York, and we were reading Lawrence Wright’s terrific book, Thirteen Days in September, about Camp David. And somebody knew Carter in our group, knew his grandson Jason, and brought [Carter] to our book group, and this guy was 90 years old [and] delivered this brilliant analysis, not just of Middle East politics, but a tour of the horizon. And in reading that book I realized, this was a virtuoso performance at Camp David. This was one of the great diplomatic achievements in American history. So there has to be more to this guy than “mediocre president, great ex-president.” 

My editor at Simon and Schuster was the late Alice Mayhew, and she was Carter’s editor. So when I mentioned this to her, she said, “You have to do this. Nobody’s written his biography.” I didn’t know Kai, it was a little bit before Kai undertook this, and there was this huge hole in the line of scrimmage. 

[Editor’s note: A third major Carter book (President Carter: The White House Years) would be published in 2018. The author was Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic affairs adviser.]

I was in the Carter Library one day reading documents, in the summer of 2015, and MSNBC texted me, and they said, “Trump is announcing his candidacy. Go over to a studio [and] analyze this guy coming down the escalator.” So I did that. And I knew this was going to be a really hateful turn in our national life. I didn’t know he was going to be president. But I went back to the library, and I just remember having this overpowering feeling of relief, going back and studying Carter. He was a vacation for me for four years from Trump. Anytime the toxicity of Trump got to me, I would just retreat into Carter, and it really helped motivate me because Carter was the un-Trump in so many ways.

TN: I understand that, Kai, you take a harsher line on [Fallows’s influential Atlantic article, “The Passionless Presidency”] in your book than Jon does. Fallows argued that Carter lacked the big, visionary mind-set necessary to lead the country. 

KB: I devote a whole chapter to Jim Fallows. His Atlantic essay, the first essay in what became a long career at that magazine, was regarded by the Carter White House people as sort of a stab in the back. I thought that was an interesting turning point to write about. 

I also thought that the Fallows piece was, well, a little sophomoric. Trying to psychologize Carter. And of course the one thing that people remember from that essay was the tennis court. That the president, in Fallows’s reporting, was paying so much attention to detail that he was [even] micromanaging the schedule of the White House tennis court. When you dig into that, it emerges that there was a misunderstanding, it was a little more complicated, and Carter wasn’t spending time managing the tennis court schedule. But that’s one of the stories most Americans remember about Jimmy Carter.

TN: What about the broader critique that Carter was all trees and no forest? [Fallows] might have even talked about [Isaiah Berlin’s essay] “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” 

[Editor’s note: “The Passionless Presidency” doesn’t mention the Berlin essay, though others later likened Carter to Berlin’s fox, who knows many things, and his successor Ronald Reagan to Berlin’s hedgehog, who knows one big thing.]

JA: That was just wrong, Tim. I revere Jim, but that analysis did not hold up under scrutiny. Carter is very much, in Isaiah Berlin’s formulation, a hedgehog. He had big ideas, mostly about peace, that pulled together so much of his approach to the world. But he also is very focused on detail, so this was used as a slam against him. 

It’s true that sometimes, particularly when he was governor, he would get into a level of detail that wasn’t very productive, and micromanagement that didn’t help. [But] he really didn’t do that very much as president. What he did do is pay enormous attention to legislative and diplomatic detail. [Without that,] he never would have had the Camp David Accords, he never would have had the Panama Canal treaties, which prevented a major war in Central America, he probably wouldn’t have had normalization with China—instead of devoting a chapter to the Fallows episode, I devoted a chapter to normalization with China. Carter was right in there on the details of that negotiation. 

We never would have had the Alaska lands bill, which doubled the size of the National Park Service. Carter was down on his hands and knees with the maps on the floor of the Oval Office, and when Ted Stevens, the senator from Alaska, came in and tried to buffalo him and tell him, “I’ll vote for the bill if you exclude these areas,” Carter said, “No, those are the headwaters of this, and there’s habitat there.” In a limo on the way back to Capitol Hill, Stevens said to an aide, “That son of a bitch knows as much about my state as I do.” If he hadn’t done that, that bill would have been gutted and the developers would have gotten their way.

KB: Jon and I both agree that Carter’s attention to detail was a good thing, particularly in looking at the Trump presidency, where there was no attention to detail. This is what we want in a president. Someone who gets up at 5:30 in the morning, and is in the Oval Office by 6:30, and spends 12 hours reading 200, 300 pages of memos every day, and looking at details, trying to figure out what is the right thing to do.

JA: Where it hurt him, Kai, I think, is when he let that effort to try to get to the right answer crowd out the politics. He didn’t think of himself as a politician, and that really hurt him. I think of him as a political failure because he lost, but a substantive and farsighted success. 

But some of his political failings were a result of that assumption that if he could—and Jim did identify this in that famous Atlantic piece—this assumption that if you could get to the right answer, that everybody else would see that it was the right answer and go along with him. So, for instance, on tax reform, which he had promised during the campaign, he sat down, he studied the tax code, he got up at 5:30 in the morning, he knew everything about the tax code and what was wrong with it. And then he dropped a reform bill. He used to communicate through messages to Congress, and he had many of them because he was interested in many, many different issues, and got more legislation approved than any president since World War II—including in recent years—except Lyndon Johnson. He got more bills than Clinton and Obama did in eight years, and many more bills than any Republicans. So there were bill signings every other week, 14 major pieces of environmental legislation, which the press mostly ignored. 

But on some big ones he lost, and he lost on tax reform, because he just dropped it on them. [Democratic Senator] Russell Long later said, “He didn’t consult me when he was writing this bill, so why should I consult him when I’m gutting it?”

TN: Kai, do you agree that Carter was bad at the politics part of the job?

KB: Well, some of the time—the tax bill is a good example. Another example is dealing with Ted Kennedy on the health insurance bill. It was obvious to Carter, in his view, that Ted was simply looking for an issue to run, to challenge a sitting president for the nomination on, and health care was Kennedy’s big personal issue. Both politicians supported the notion of a national health insurance plan, and Carter was on record supporting Kennedy’s bill. But once he gets into the White House, he’s also a small-town fiscal conservative, and he’s worried about the federal budget deficit. Wrongly, I argued, because he didn’t appreciate Keynes enough. He had the mistaken assumption that the federal budget deficit was fueling inflation, when it was actually commodity prices, the oil increases, the Arab oil boycott, the Iranian revolution. That’s what was fueling inflation. 

As a result of this bias on budget deficits, [Carter] told Kennedy that he couldn’t support his bill until his second term in office, and in the meantime, “How about doing a compromise, and we’ll just agree to pass national universal catastrophic health insurance, so that no American family would spend more than $5,000 on a health incident?” Kennedy rejected that, and Carter refused to compromise. In retrospect, I think, Jon, you’re right—if he was being politically smart, he would have let Kennedy walk the plank, and supported his bill, and when it didn’t get the votes that Carter thought it lacked in the Senate, Kennedy’s bill would go down to defeat, and then he could have gotten the universal catastrophic health bill. 

But he didn’t think that way. He just thought, “This is a foolish bill, and I’m going to present the smart bill,” and the result was we got nothing. We got 40 years’ delay in national health insurance. We didn’t get it until Obama, and only partially.

JA: A couple of things that surprised me. Ted Kennedy’s bill was not single payer. There’s this assumption, with progressives now, “Oh, if only we could have had [the Kennedy bill].” [Kennedy’s] bill didn’t even have the votes—Carter was right about this—to get out of committee, much less win on the floor, and it wasn’t single payer. So there was opposition, and what Carter came back with initially was an incremental bill, and Kennedy was very contemptuous of that incrementalism. That’s what we ended up doing under Clinton, with the child health [care bill] first. 

Toward the end, Carter introduced his own bill that was really quite a good bill, a little bit beyond Obamacare, and he had the support of all of the key committee chairs in both the House and the Senate. It would have gone through, but Kennedy, who had such authority on that issue, was too proud, and he rejected it. 

KB: Kennedy doesn’t come off very well in our books, does he?

JA: Not really. Carter and Kennedy were like oil and water from the time they first met. In Kennedy’s memoirs, he’s very tough on Carter. Carter was trying in recent years to be a little bit more charitable toward Kennedy, and he admitted that he was wrong not to put Archibald Cox on the [appellate bench, which] Kennedy wanted. [It] was very petty of Carter not to do that.

KB: It was a cultural disconnect, the southerner versus the Massachusetts liberal. They just spoke two different languages and they both disdained each other. Kennedy didn’t really understand where Carter was coming from, didn’t believe in his liberal credentials. And Carter thought that Kennedy was a privileged millionaire’s son who thought he was destined to be president. 

JA: Carter has never been popular with other politicians. Even when he was in the National Governors Association, he would want the governors, when they were in some sunny clime for their meetings, he would want them to go out and do community service. And the governors were like, “We want to go to the pool, why is Governor Carter making us do this community service, or making us consider these resolutions that are just going to cause us political problems at home?” 

He was never a pol. He wasn’t as self-righteous and sanctimonious as some people think in retrospect—he was a huge believer in the separation of church and state, and extremely tolerant of bad behavior in his staff, so he didn’t have that stick up his ass that some people think. But he was all business. That photograph of him standing apart, right after Obama was elected, [with] Obama and the Bushes and Clinton yukking it up and Carter standing aside from them—Kai and I both agree that was really accurate. Carter himself admitted that, and two other presidents, I won’t say which ones, confirmed it. Carter was just stand-offish. When you look at the logs of his calls to members of Congress, he would dutifully make the calls to lobby, but the calls would last, like, a minute and 10 seconds. No time for small talk, he just wanted to cut right to the chase.

KB:Jon, that causes me to ask a question, to steer the conversation toward the art and craft of biography. What were the most valuable sources for your book? How valuable were your interviews with Carter himself?

JA: I don’t think they were hugely valuable, to be honest.

KB: Mine were very disappointing, I have to say. I’d get some color, but in my interviews with him he was so focused on his Carter Center work—projects in Africa or whatnot—he would keep looking at his watch. He was concerned about his historical record, but he was bored with familiar questions, and you showed him a document, it wouldn’t spark a memory. He wasn’t a storyteller.

JA: I agree with that. I did have more success when I went to his house in Plains. When I would interview him at his office in Atlanta, his secretary would come in exactly one hour after the interview started, and it was the old naval officer who’s extremely intolerant of tardiness. So I got a lot less out of those interviews. But when I went to his house we could talk longer.

I learned more from him when talking about his current work—his post-presidency. But I think we both agree that in some ways his post-presidency is overrated because he didn’t have anywhere near the power that he had when he was president to change lives.

KB: Right. I also thought that Doug Brinkley had done a whole book on his post-presidency.

JA: Just one other thing, on interviews. I interviewed 260 people, and I did find that pretty much all of them told me one interesting thing. You wouldn’t get much more than one, but there would be something interesting and unusual that I would always have to check, but that took me in a new direction.

And it was clear from my reporting that Jimmy Carter has led an epic American life. This is an extraordinary human story. When he was president, there was this assumption that there was something a little boring about him, in part because of the way he talked, and the technocratic language that he would use sometimes. The energy crisis was hardly as sexy as the civil rights movement, and he was hardly as compelling personally as Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. But when you look at the totality of his life, not just what he achieved but the complexity of him as a human being, the inability, I think, of either of us—I shouldn’t speak for you, Kai, but I don’t think it’s possible to write a definitive biography of him. His personality is so complex. 

We haven’t really talked about him as a person, but this assumption that he was this weak character couldn’t be further from the truth. He was a tough son-of-a-bitch. Not necessarily in a bad way—people didn’t hate working for him. He wasn’t an Andrew Cuomo. But when he bored those steely blue eyes into you, you knew you were in trouble. He was this fascinating combination of his disciplinarian father and his compassionate, although often detached, mother. She was gone so often that he called the desk where she would leave instructions “Mother.” Because she was out of the house, taking care of, often, Black patients, as a nurse.

I also got completely fascinated by the milieu of the South. I had to spend a lot of time stripping off the
sugarcoating that he put on it. He didn’t lie about his early years, but he sugarcoated it. He lived in one of the meanest sections of the whole county. The sheriff, Sheriff [Fred] Chappell, who Carter described as a friend, Martin Luther King described as “the meanest man in the world.” [King spent some time in prison in Chappell’s
jurisdiction.] 

I came to think of Carter as having lived in three centuries. He was born in 1924, but it might as well [have been] the 19th century because they had no running water or electricity, or mechanized farm equipment. He was president in the 20th century. Conflict resolution, democracy promotion, global health—these are the cutting-edge issues of the 21st century. Carter has been intimately involved in them for the first 20 years of the 21st century. So the scope of this life, I think, is under-appreciated.

I think [you] explain a little bit more to the reader than I do how useful Carter’s [published] diaries are, that he kept religiously when he was president. They’re really good.

KB: Absolutely. I relied on the diaries and other archival documents much more than interviews, but my main complaint and disappointment, and I’m sure yours, is we both asked for access to the full diary, and we didn’t get it. We got a little bit, but there are 5,000 pages, and he only published 20 percent of it in his 2010 book.

JA: On three or four occasions I requested things that were not in the diaries. For instance, I wanted his reaction in real time when the shah of Iran died, and they provided me those excerpts from the unpublished diaries. There were a couple of other [instances] where I asked for the full entry from that day, and they gave it to me, and actually, the [published] diaries are not whitewashed. I did not find that he took out embarrassing things from the diaries. I was disappointed that he wouldn’t give me his diaries from his post-presidency. 

TN: Let me introduce a couple of topics I’d love to see you both discuss. The first is economic deregulation. The other is the Iranian revolution. Does [Carter] have any retrospective regrets on either of those subjects?

KB: Well, the Iran revolution, yes, he has regrets. I write a lot about the Iran revolution. I argue that it was really an organic thing, it was going to happen, there was nothing much that Carter could do to save the Pahlavi regime. It was falling apart, and had become very unpopular by the mid-’70s. Just like we’ve witnessed with the Afghanistan situation, things moved very fast. There’s nothing he could have done to save the shah.

I think his one regret about Iran is that he gave political asylum to the shah. He resisted for months and months. David Rockefeller and John McCloy—the subject of my first biography—and [Henry] Kissinger formed this formal lobbying operation that they dubbed “Project Alpha.” They allocated a budget for it, they hired a publicist, they set up a calendar where each of them would contact at least one high-ranking Carter administration official, if not the president, each week, to lobby for the shah to be admitted. And Carter just resisted it, and you can see in his diary he worries that if he does this, perhaps, the passion in the streets of Tehran will be such that the embassy could be attacked and hostages would be taken. And of course he was right. 

He finally gives in late October of ’79, and a few days later the embassy is taken over and we have 444 days of hostages and it’s a body blow to his chances of reelection.

JA: Very quickly on deregulation. He did not engage in deregulating Wall Street in any significant way. This was deregulation of the airline industry, which he did with Ted Kennedy, [and] the trucking industry, which, I argue, set up the just-in-time delivery system that is one of the foundations of today’s economy. And railroad rates—a whole series of industries that his wonkiness led him to do, and he had some really smart people working on it for him, and they did a lot to set up the success of the economy in the ’80s, without really doing any damage. He didn’t do any deregulation on health and safety.

Kai and I both mention a lot of lesser examples. They deregulated the beer industry, allowing microbreweries. But I don’t think that, separate from a few Carter aides, anybody, when they hoist their microbrew, toasts Jimmy Carter. But they should.

TN: The deregulation of the trucking industry was enormously damaging to truckers. 

JA: The Teamsters didn’t like it, but—

KB: The same was true of deregulation of the airline industry. It weakened the labor unions that were servicing Pan Am and TWA and the big airlines, and they all went by the wayside, and the airlines that popped up hired non–labor union workers. It was a reform that allowed middle-class Americans to fly for the first time because there were cheaper fares and more choices, and more airline routes. So people like Ralph Nader thought it was a great boon for consumers. But the downside [was] it actually weakened part of the traditional Democratic constituency, trade unions. And this occurred, not only with the airline industry but, as you point out, with trucking and railroads. 

[Editor’s note: For more on the consequences of airline and railroad deregulation, see “Terminal Sickness,” by Phillip Longman and Lina Khan (in our March/April 2012 issue), and “Amtrak Joe Versus the Modern Robber Barons,” by Phillip Longman (in this issue).]

TN: It was part of the reorientation of liberalism from employees to consumers. Would you agree with that, Jon?

JA: By coincidence, I talked to Ralph [Nader] yesterday for the first time in quite a while. We talked some
about Carter. 

Ralph was pretty disappointed in the Carter presidency, although he agreed with Esther Peterson that Carter was the [most pro-consumer president] he experienced in his adult life. We talked about the failure [to create] a consumer protection agency, which was a big priority for Nader, and to my mind it was The Washington Post, when they editorialized against it, that drove a bunch of liberals away. [Nader] felt Carter could have argued harder
for that.

I don’t think it was deregulation itself, usually on behalf of consumers, that led to this shift [in emphasis from employees to consumers]. I think it was more that Carter never really focused on the problem of deindustrialization, of what would replace the Rust Belt as the engine of the American economy.

The same thing happened with Iran. When the shah started to teeter, Carter failed to apply his normal attention to detail to Iran. He had so much going on. He was planning for Deng Xiaoping’s historic visit. This is in the late fall and winter of 1978, and the beginning of 1979. [The] Camp David Accords fell apart. This is a little-
known fact. After they left Camp David, the whole deal came apart, and in early 1979 Carter had to go to the Middle East, and put the whole thing back together with chewing gum and baling wire and masking tape. 

So he has that, he has China. And then there’s this revolt over Bella Abzug, whom Carter had hired to run this women’s commission, and she had used her perch there to attack the Carter administration. So they decided to fire her. And the week that the shah left power, the minutes of the Cabinet meeting, they’re mostly talking about
Bella Abzug. 

They really didn’t understand. A lot of people thought “Shiite” was pronounced “shit,” and even Walter Mondale didn’t know what an ayatollah was. So there was this tremendous lack of knowledge about what was going on in that part of the world. And then, to pick up on something that Kai mentioned, there’s all this pressure on Carter to let the shah in. And at one point he says, “Fuck the shah.” He’s really resistant to McCloy and Kissinger and all these people pressuring him. I didn’t really believe that he said this, but when I interviewed [Carter Defense Secretary] Harold Brown, I said, “Did he really say ‘Fuck the shah,’ ” and he goes, “Yeah, I was quite surprised to hear those words out of his mouth.” 

But then in October of 1979, [Rockefeller has] a new argument, that the shah has cancer, and must be let in for humanitarian reasons. But this was a con job, and the details of the con job have [only] come out fairly recently. Basically, they pulled the wool over Carter’s eyes and made it seem as if the shah, who was in exile in Mexico, could not be treated for his cancer in Mexico, and could only be treated in the United States. So they let him in. And as Kai said, it was only a few days later that the student militants seized the embassy.

TN: I had always thought that the pressure to let the shah in didn’t happen until after he was a cancer patient. It actually preceded that?

KB: Yeah, from the time he went into exile, from the time that Ayatollah Khomeini came back to Tehran and the shah left, Kissinger and Rockefeller and McCloy were lobbying Carter to give [the shah] political asylum. 

TN: What was their argument?

KB: That we had to stand by this friend. If we were seen to be abandoning him, this would send a message to our allies that we were unreliable. It was the standard sort of Henry Kissinger argument about alliances. Carter saw through it as meaningless right away. He understood that this was not the right thing to do, and he only acceded because of—what Jon is referring to is this medical information, which was completely erroneous. [The shah] could have gotten the same or, in fact, he probably could have gotten better health care in Mexico City than in New York City, because the doctors that David Rockefeller set him up with were not experts in what he needed and made one mistake after another.

JA: The doctor was a tropical disease expert! 

KB: It was just outrageous. 

JA: It’s really a story about [how] celebrities get the worst medical care.

Kai is much harder on [National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski in his book than I am. When I interviewed both Kissinger and Brzezinski, I was really struck by the weakness of their argument: that Carter could have bolstered the shah and gotten him to use his army if he only urged him to shoot his own people. This was such a paternalistic bullshit argument. The shah knew enough about what was going on to tell one visitor, “Look, the difference between a monarch and a tyrant is a monarch doesn’t shoot his own people.” He’d already shot some of them during one rebellion. He said, if I start shooting them on one street one week, they’ll just pop up on the next street the next week.

TN: What is the difference between the two of you about Brzezinski? Because you’re not speaking very highly of [him]. Is it about Brzezinski himself or about Brzezinski’s influence on the White House?

JA:The latter.

KB:No, I’m much harsher on Brzezinski.

During the transition right after the ’76 election, Carter is trying to make his appointments, and Richard Holbrooke calls him. Holbrooke has been giving him advice on his foreign policy change during the campaign, and Carter says, “I’m thinking of appointing Brzezinski as national security adviser and Cy Vance as secretary of state.” And there’s a long pause, and Holbrooke says, “Well, Mr. President-elect, I think you could have one or the other but it would be a mistake to have both,” and he explains that they have two different worldviews. 

Brzezinski is at heart a Polish anticommunist who hates the Russians, and believes that the Soviet Union is an evil empire, and that we’re in a generational battle with the Soviet Union. He sees the whole world and U.S. foreign policy through that prism. Whether it’s Cuba or Africa or India, or the Middle East, he’s thinking, “Well, how can we make this bad for the Russians?” That’s his worldview. Cy Vance is much more subtle and sophisticated. He’s learned the lessons of Vietnam. Carter and Vance were on the same wavelength; Carter, though he was a Navy man, he was very averse to military force or interventions. And he found himself agreeing with Vance’s worldview. But he told Holbrooke in that famous conversation, “Oh, that’s all right, I think I can handle differences of opinion.” I think he had in mind [Franklin D.] Roosevelt’s cabinet, which was filled with people who would argue with each other. 

But Brzezinski, as I relate, played a very poisonous role in the White House. He was leaking all the time, he was undermining, undercutting Cy Vance, and he was giving Carter bad advice all the time, which Carter usually rejected. Until the last year, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Carter was shocked by that, personally, and at that point began giving way to Brzezinski, taking his advice over Vance’s. That’s why Vance left the administration and resigned.

I argue also that Carter was wrong to accept Brzezinski’s advice about the [Soviet invasion of] Afghanistan. Here we are today dealing with the defeat of a 20-year war. [But] it didn’t start in 2001. It actually started in 1978 and ’79, under the Carter administration, when Brzezinski persuaded Carter to allocate $500,000, and then a little more later. Not much money, but to do a covert operation in Afghanistan to fund the mujahideen, and this is six months before the Soviet invasion. 

Brzezinski saw the Soviet invasion as confirmation of an expanding empire, of a Soviet system that was on the move and was aggressive and strong. And this was all wrong. We now know from the Politburo minutes of that meeting, when they decided to invade, that it was a very contentious decision, and that the people in the Politburo who were opposed to invading were appalled to realize that Brezhnev was drunk and senile at the time. 

We now know in retrospect that the Soviet Union was falling apart. It was weak. And what were they invading? They were invading to take down a hard-line Communist and put in power a more moderate Communist Party member who would be less alienating to the Muslim culture that was prevailing. It was ridiculous! Brzezinski’s worldview poisoned everything.

JA: I also have a lot about this in my book, and I agree with most of what Kai just said, but a couple of things. 

I decided to look at this, not with my journalistic cap on, but to try to put on the hat of a historian, and to not look so much at what the big issues were when he was president, which is the way journalists would analyze it politically, in terms of staff squabbling and all that kind of thing, and look at it instead historically. In retrospect, whole forests died for the newsprint chronicling this bureaucratic rivalry between Brzezinski and Vance. And in the end, Carter rejected almost all of Brzezinski’s ideas, and agreed more with Vance, as he told both me and Kai. But he liked having [Brzezinski] around for the intellectual stimulation. Ultimately that turf fight and most of the other staff squabbling and staffing issues, to me, receded in importance, and I did less on them than trying to assess the long-term effects of [Carter’s] decisions. 

Not all those decisions were good. The grain embargo, for instance, which they applied after the Soviet invasion, was disastrous, and Democrats are still paying for that in the Farm Belt, as [Bill Clinton’s agricultural secretary] Dan Glickman told me 40 years later. Because the Soviets quickly started buying grain from other countries, and it was pointless. And obviously the Olympics boycott, which was very popular at first, and a resolution supporting it passed Congress overwhelmingly. That didn’t sit very well with the American people over time. But—

TN: Do you agree that Brzezinski started to break through and have more influence in the last year? 

JA: I guess it’s possible that Brzezinski tipped Carter over the edge into supporting [the failed Iranian hostage rescue mission]. But ultimately I don’t think it was Brzezinski’s advice that was decisive; it was the failure of this negotiating track to release the hostages that [White House Chief of Staff] Hamilton Jordan had been spearheading. After that failed in March of 1980, Carter was so frustrated by the fact that they were back to square one diplomatically that he opted for this idea of a rescue mission, which had been described to him since the week after the hostages were seized. They were already beginning to plan a possible rescue mission as a contingency, but it took many weeks of training and development, and then Carter and Brzezinski told them to add a helicopter, but they should have added two. I still think it wouldn’t have worked. The helicopters crashed in the desert, didn’t even get to Tehran. If they had gotten there, extracting the hostages would have been very difficult. A lot of people would have been killed, possibly including the hostages. 

KB: Jon and I agree about the craziness of the helicopter rescue mission. It could never have succeeded. It was always going to be a disaster. There were too many moving parts, it was too complicated. And if they had gotten into the streets of Tehran, there would have been a shooting battle, and people would have died. 

But I think Jon and I still have fundamentally different assessments about Brzezinski. I’m thinking of the spring of ’77, early in the administration, you can see Carter being pestered by Brzezinski with these memos, saying, “Mr. President, you need to do something tough to show the Russians that you are made of mettle. Something militaristic.” And Carter writes in the margins, “Like Mayaguez?” 

[Editor’s note: In 1975, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge seized a U.S. merchant vessel, named the Mayaguez, and captured its crew. In response, the U.S. launched a bloody and ultimately unnecessary battle to rescue the hostages.(The hostages were not on the island the American military attacked, and they were released when operations began.) Forty-one U.S. soldiers died in the fight.]

JA:Okay, so, Kai, what’s the enduring historical importance of Brzezinski’s advice if Carter told him to get lost? Why does it matter that much?

KB: It matters to readers because it’s really interesting, that there’s this difference of opinion. It’s color—I agree. But it also takes on a historical significance because Brzezinski was relentless. This was his message all the time, and it was debilitating, and it eventually warped Carter’s own response to events. In September ’79, remember the much-ballyhooed Soviet brigade in Cuba? Brzezinski went berserk on this, and tried to tip Carter into a real confrontation over Cuba. Finally [Carter] realizes after a briefing from Mac Bundy and John McCloy that that Soviet brigade—we always knew it was there, we’d agreed that it could be there in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis in ’62. It was all much ado about nothing. That was the one moment when Brzezinski, seriously, according to his own memoirs, threatened to resign.

JA: I agree with all of that, but to me the critical figure in that sorry episode was [Idaho Democratic] Senator Frank Church, who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, facing a tough reelection fight that he would lose. He and a number of other formerly liberal members of Congress also went crazy on this ridiculous Cuban brigade story—

KB: True, true.

JA: —so I don’t think that Brzezinski was decisive. Where I do think he was important—and this is an area where we disagree—is that he wanted to be another Kissinger. He had this rivalry with Kissinger, so he went to China in advance of normalization and he negotiated at least some of the normalization. Leonard Woodcock and another negotiator/diplomat did most of it, but Brzezinski made an important trip. He was acing out Holbrooke—there’s great stuff in George Packer’s [Holbrooke biography] about that particular trip—but he says to the Chinese, “The first one to the top of the wall gets to fight the Russians.”

Why do you think that normalization was inevitable? I believe that’s what you write in your book, and you devote less than a paragraph to it. You say this was going to happen. My feeling is that [if] Gerald Ford, who was so afraid of the right wing that even after he had been defeated and his political career was over, he resisted entreaties from Senator Phil Hart’s widow to pardon draft dodgers—Carter did that in his first week as president—if Ford had been elected [to another term], there’s no way he would have defied Reagan and the right wing and thrown Taiwan under the bus the way Carter did, and normalized relations with China. That normalization is the foundation of the global economy. Carter thinks it’s the single most important, most enduring thing that he accomplished in office. I’m just curious as to why you think it would have happened anyway.

KB: I think you’re right. If Ford had been, he would have been under pressure from the right wing not to, quote, “abandon the Taiwanese.” But there were larger historical economic forces at work. Carter did win that ’76 election, and there was no disagreement among his team. Henry Kissinger was in favor of normalization. Cy Vance was, Brzezinski was in favor. There was no argument about it; there was no internal tussle. Everyone was in favor of it, and so was Carter, and I think it was going to happen.

This is coming back to what I said at the beginning, we come at these issues with different passions and interests, and when I saw that there was no internal argument inside the administration, it became a less interesting story for me to write about. I think I gave more than a paragraph to it. I think it is important, but it was inevitable. Politically, it was going to happen, and it did happen, and Vance was—coming back to the rivalry—he was offended by Brzezinski’s behavior, and [by] being jabbed in the stomach bureaucratically [when] Brzezinski finagled the trip out to China, undermining the secretary of state. Brzezinski was doing this all the time. So that was, I think, something to write about. I just found the story less interesting than you did. But there’s no surprise to that. We’re going to find different things. 

I devoted a whole chapter to the October Surprise. A little cautiously, with some trepidation, because it’s a conspiracy theory and it’s complicated, but I was fascinated by the story, and you decided to give two or three paragraphs to it. I don’t think we basically disagree about what may or may not have happened. But I thought it was worth a short chapter.

[Editor’s note: The October Surprise theory holds that Reagan campaign staffers conspired with Iran to delay the release of the American embassy hostages in order to damage Carter’s reelection chances.]

JA: To be honest about it, my book, with footnotes, was 782 pages, and it was originally 1,100 pages, and my publisher wouldn’t even let me submit it unless I cut 300 pages. So I had to make some hard choices on that.

But, Kai, I agree with you. Tim, I think this was after you left Newsweek, but in 1991 Newsweek did this, in retrospect, terrible cover story trying to debunk the October Surprise theory. Both Kai and I fastened on this now-deceased reporter named Robert Parry, who in 2013 came upon a 1991 White House memo mentioning [that] in the summer of 1980, [Reagan’s campaign manager] Bill Casey was in town for reasons the U.S. ambassador to Spain didn’t know. And the entire Newsweek cover story debunking the October Surprise theory was based on the idea that Casey never went to Madrid. But it turns out he was in Madrid. 

Gary Sick, who was Carter’s top adviser on Iran—he wrote a whole book on the October Surprise—told me the reason that he couldn’t really prove the case [was that] all the hotel records and the other records that would have validated a meeting between Casey and the Iranian regime were destroyed. Casey had been head of the CIA, [and Sick thinks] it was pretty short work for him to destroy all the incriminating evidence. Unfortunately, the Iranians who were at these meetings—their reliability is close to zero. So at the end of the day, as Kai said, we’re left in the same place, which is that it probably happened. But [we’re] never going to prove it.

There are, however, some things we know for sure. There was a guy named Joseph Verner Reed, who became head of protocol under Reagan, and then he was an ambassador under Bush. This Rockefeller-crowd guy, who I have—[Kai,] your venom for Brzezinski, I direct at this guy Joseph Verner Reed. He wrote to his family after the election, “I’m proud of my role in doing anything I could to delay the release of the hostages until after the election.” I mean, here these people are sitting in a dank basement. They’ve been in prison for 444 days, ultimately, and he’s proud of the fact—this pillar of the American banking establishment is proud of his role in keeping them imprisoned in Tehran. It’s disgusting. 

KB: That’s pretty disgusting. But the other guy who’s still around is C. Boyden Gray.

JA: He’s a bad actor in this also. 

KB: He was White House counsel under George H. W. Bush when Congress was investigating this October Surprise. There was a congressional task force led by Lee Hamilton, a very respected [Democratic] congressman from Indiana, and [the committee] had subpoena power, and they subpoenaed any records pertaining to Bill Casey’s travel in the summer of 1980. The subpoena forced the State Department in 1991 to make a search of its records.

Hamilton should have gotten some useful information from that search. The White House memo Parry discovered in 2013 relied on State Department information. It mentioned a cable from the Madrid embassy that reported that “Bill Casey was in town for purposes unknown.” The Madrid embassy cable, however, was never turned over to Lee Hamilton’s congressional task force. He wasn’t even aware of the cable until I told him about the 1991 White House memo in an interview. Hamilton then told me, “I was never given [the cable]. They never showed it to me. We subpoenaed it, and I never got it.” No one has been able to find the actual cable, just the memo noting its existence.

JA: In my conversation with Lee Hamilton—he’s very old, but he was kind of pissed. 

KB: Yeah, he was angry about this. 

JA: He [said], “They made a monkey of me.” He put in all this time in this investigation and they hid the key document from him. 

KB: I asked for an interview with Boyden Gray, who’s alive and well in Washington, D.C. He never responded. I sent him a letter telling him this was appearing in the book; he never commented. He thinks he can get away with this, and he has. 

This brings us to why did Carter lose the 1980 election? And I think one contributing factor was dirty works by Bill Casey. This meeting in Madrid where he allegedly met with a representative of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and assured him that the Iranians would get a better deal from his guy, Reagan. That was one reason [Carter lost]. The other reason was Kennedy’s challenge, which we’ve talked about, and how he weakened Carter going into the national campaign. Carter’s aides often told me that he lost in 1980 because of the three Ks: Khomeini, Kennedy, and [former New York City Mayor] Ed Koch. 

TN: Ed Koch?

KB: Why Ed Koch? We haven’t discussed this, but I write a great deal about this in my narrative. I thought it just fascinating that Carter had this difficult relationship with the Jews. The New York Times had an editorial entitled “The Jews and Jimmy Carter.”

He had a difficult time with the Jewish American establishment, and with people like Ed Koch, who thought that he was anti-Israel. This started even before Camp David, but it went on after Camp David—after he had taken Egypt off the battlefield for Israel, and made this triumphal piece of personal diplomacy that resulted in a real, long-lasting peace treaty—although a cold peace—between Israel and Egypt. 

The reason is that Carter continued to pressure the Israelis on the settlements. And why? Because he believed, ardently, that he had gotten [Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin to promise a five-year freeze on settlements in the West Bank. If that was true, then that makes it not just a separate peace between Egypt and Israel; it turns it into a comprehensive peace settlement that involves the Palestinians. It provides a road map to Palestinian autonomy, self-determination—they weren’t using the [phrase] “two-state solution” at that point, but that’s what everyone understood it to be. If you continue to build the settlements, Carter realized, that was going to close down the option [of] a two-state solution. 

So for the next 40 years, he was very outspoken about this, and he pissed off a lot of Jewish American leaders, who are still angry with him. In Zoom meetings promoting my book this summer, it was astonishing how, in the chat room, you can see questions—they never pose them directly to me, the moderators are too polite to do that—but you can see in the chat room that questioners are saying, “Well, isn’t Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite?” The reason it’s a hot-button issue is that the Jewish American establishment hasn’t spoken out to defend Carter. In fact, they make a point of criticizing him for his pressuring Israel on the settlements: “You shouldn’t do that, this is an Israeli decision that should be done on their own terms.” 

TN: Even retrospectively, looking back over the history of the last 40 years on settlements?

KB: J Street now exists, and J Street recently gave an award to Jimmy Carter, which was an extraordinary thing in the Jewish American community, and very controversial.

TN: I’m asking about your Zoom conversations, though. Did you hear anybody actually deny that the last 40 years of settlements have been catastrophic in the Middle East?

KB: No one argued with me on Zoom, but in the chat box you could see people saying that.

JA: The settlements [are] not what this is about. I deal with it at considerable length, and Kai, just in terms of Ed Koch—he had endorsed Carter and then sniped at him. Jane Byrne, the mayor of Chicago, endorsed Carter and then basically endorsed Kennedy after that. 

KB: Right.

JA: And Hamilton Jordan said if Jane Byrne and Ed Koch had a baby, it would have all the qualities of a dog except loyalty.

We could both write whole books on this subject. I also focus on this misunderstanding at Camp David, which I think was partly the product of intense fatigue.

TN: Do you both agree it was a misunderstanding as opposed to a betrayal by Begin?

JA: Yeah.

KB: No.

JA: You think it was a direct betrayal? You think that [Begin] flat-out promised?

KB: I believe Carter. Carter believes that Begin promised him, and that he deceived him. He either lied or he deceived him.

JA: The promise is not really in the documents. It came down to a distinction—

KB: It was a side letter, and they had agreed to a side letter that said five-year freeze on the settlements. 

JA: No.

KB: Begin had agreed to sign that. Then he substituted the letter.

JA: What the actual language had was a freeze on the settlements for the length of the negotiations before a treaty. The Camp David Accords were not a treaty. They set up a process, and the treaty wasn’t signed until the following March of 1979 after, as I mentioned, Carter had to go back to the region. There was a lot of work done. It had to pass the Knesset. 

Begin’s understanding—which he did, actually, renege on—was that he wouldn’t do anything with the settlements for the five months before a treaty. Carter thought that was until there was a final status agreement, five years later. If Carter believed that Begin was really not going to do anything for five years, he was being naive about that, in an otherwise brilliant performance. 

I think the real hostility from the Jewish community, which, as you said, has existed all along—Carter is the only modern Democratic president who didn’t receive more than 50 percent of the Jewish vote—

TN: Wow.

JA: That was in 1980. 

KB: Yup, only 45 percent. 

[Editor’s note: Reagan captured 39 percent, so Carter still won a plurality of Jewish votes.]

JA: —so all these bad feelings existed then, I think in part because a lot of them rejected Camp David. A lot of American Jews said, “You gave away the Sinai? [The Camp David Accords] hadn’t endured yet.” Now you can look back, and—what I say is that even though Jimmy Carter is the most critical of Israel of any American president, he has been the greatest president for the security of the state of Israel since Harry Truman. Because, as Kai mentioned, by taking the Egyptian army off the battlefield, he secured Israel. When I was growing up as a Jewish kid in Chicago, we would hear all the time, “Israel’s in danger of being driven into the sea.” There was only one army that could drive Israel into the sea: the Egyptian army. You never hear that anymore. It’s just gone from the vocabulary. That’s because of Jimmy Carter.

KB: But the settlements are important even today. This is why Carter’s presidency is still relevant on this foreign policy issue. He has been so prophetic in warning that if you build settlements, you change the whole nature of the conflict, and you change the nature of the Jewish state. It will no longer be a democratic Jewish state. It will become an apartheid state. He actually used the word in the title of his book in 2006 that pissed off
everybody. 

JA: That’s what pissed people off. That’s why you and I both got these questions, “Is Carter an anti-Semite?” Because of the title of that book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. 

I remember at the time, 2006, kind of going, “Wow, that’s pretty harsh.” But it turns out that not only Ehud Barak, a prime minister of Israel, but many members of the Knesset use that word, apartheid, on almost a weekly or monthly basis. 

KB: But Jewish American leaders wouldn’t.

[Editor’s note: After our conversation, Bird elaborated on this topic in a September 15 op-ed in Haaretz titled “Why Are U.S. Jews Still Calling Jimmy Carter an Anti-Semite?”]

JA: At Camp David, when he went to the region in ’79, even though he was much closer to [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat, he was nonetheless an honest broker. But after that, after he left the presidency, he sided almost entirely with the Arabs, and he wasn’t even welcome in Israel; nobody would meet with him when he would go there. And then, when he met with Hamas, that really sealed it. But I think perceptive Israelis understand where this comes from. 

My book is not as focused on the Carter presidency as Kai’s—I have a lot more about his early years. My basic argument is that he spent the second half of his life making up for what he didn’t do in the first half. He didn’t stand up for civil rights when he was running for governor in 1970. He issued dog whistles. He praised George Wallace. 

So as president, he launched his human rights policy. Years later, Karl Deutsch, the great Harvard professor of international relations, ran into Carter—Carter was depressed after he left office—and said, “President Carter, hundreds of years from now you will be remembered because your government was the first in human history that made the way other governments treat their own people an issue for your government.” Carter cried after he heard this. The policy was hypocritical, but it was enormously important. As Andy Young says—America’s embrace of international human rights was a globalization of the civil rights movement. The way Israelis analyze this, smart Israelis, is really accurate. They say that Carter’s attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict grows out of his regret over having lived on land in Georgia that was stolen from the Indians, and having not stood up enough for Black people in the South, and that he sides with the weaker party, the party that’s been persecuted, and in this case, that’s the Palestinians. That provides his motivation, and he is on fire about this. He’s been interviewed about the Middle East so much that I didn’t use much of my time in my interviews to bring up the Middle East, because it would consume the rest of the hour. His biggest regret about not getting reelected is that he couldn’t complete the work of Camp David and have a comprehensive Mideast peace. I think the greatest regret of his post-presidential life is also that he was not able to make any real progress in the Middle East [as an ex-president].

TN: Am I right in concluding that, ironically, where you both agree is that Carter, despite this rap he gets in the Jewish American community, wasn’t tough enough on Israel, because he didn’t secure that five-year hold on
settlements?

JA: There would have been no deal. They packed their bags three or four times, both sides, to leave. 

KB: That’s true, but I still maintain that in Carter’s view, he believes that he had the pledge from Begin to sign this side letter.

TN: Do you think that it’s possible, Kai, that it could have been in [the agreement]?

KB: In 1978 there were probably less than 20,000 settlers, maybe less than 15,000 settlers, in the West Bank. Today there are roughly 700,000. 

TN: Right.

KB: By the time Carter left office in ’81, there were 25,000. So, yeah, it would have been a tough issue, but Begin had agreed to remove the settlements in the Sinai. To put a freeze on settlements in return for the promise of a comprehensive deal with the Palestinians—in 1978, that could have been possible. Now, if Carter had been reelected, he would have, as Jon has just admitted, he would have made this a priority. He would have put enormous pressure on the Israeli establishment to come to terms with the Palestinians.

JA: Yes, I think he would have, but I don’t think he could have done it at Camp David. It would have almost certainly blown up the deal if it had been explicit. There’s a big difference between dismantling a few settlements in Sinai, which has no religious significance—

KB: If he couldn’t get it, he was deceived by Begin, who switched the letters. He agreed to sign one letter, Carter thought he had it, and then in Camp David he says, “Wait a minute, this is a different letter.” And he called the Israeli aide to Begin and said, “Go get the original language.” And then there was a delay, and they had by that time scheduled the press conference [on] the White House lawn, and they were getting on the plane to go back. Carter believed he had a deal that included [a] comprehensive [settlement]. Whether I’m right or not, he believed it. And he believed that he was deceived. Or lied to, outright. And this explains much about his attitude in the last 40 years.

JA: It does. But there were conferences later where other Israelis who Carter got along well with—unlike
Begin—said, “Come on, it’s one thing to relinquish some settlements in the desert in the Sinai, but this is—in the
Bible”—

KB: Judea and Samaria. 

JA: —so there was no way that Begin was committing to do that. And that Carter should have understood that. And that everybody was super tired on day 13. But I agree with you that, if he had been reelected, he would have not only pursued Middle East peace, he would have achieved it. Because, having been reelected, he would have paid any price to knock heads together, threatened to cut off aid to Israel, whatever was required, to get a comprehensive settlement.

KB: Particularly after Sadat was assassinated. He believed Sadat sacrificed his own life because of this. 

JA: But he also said, interestingly, that Israel gave up more at Camp David than Egypt did. And that these were tough concessions for Begin to make. It was a huge amount of acreage.

In the other “What if?” category is climate change. If Carter had been reelected, he would have pursued Middle East peace, and he also would have begun to pursue a climate change agenda. 

At the very end of his presidency, there was this thing called “Global 2000.” The [White House] Council on Environmental Quality, run by a guy named Gus Speth, released a report on what was sometimes called carbon pollution. Carter had started studying the issue in 1971. I found in his files from when he was governor underlinings in the journal Nature about carbon pollution and global warming. Other politicians played golf—Carter played tennis—but he was reading scientific journals. That’s how he got his jollies. So they issue this report. What’s amazing about it is that the reduction in CO2 that they recommend be the policy of the Carter administration is precisely what was in the Paris Climate Accords of 2015. Would we have fully embraced it? Would he have repudiated coal? No, because we needed coal at that time to achieve energy independence. But he would have surfaced global warming as a major issue. He was the first leader anywhere in the world who considered it a problem.

KB: It would have been a different world if he had had a second term, and we hadn’t had Ronald Reagan for two terms. That’s a great historical counterfactual.

TN: That’s a very good point on which to end the conversation unless—let me check in with both of you—do you feel as if you’ve exhausted the topic?

KB: We have not exhausted the topic!

[Laughter.] 

JA: Each of us spent five years on these books!

This piece was originally published in 2021 and appeared both online and in the print edition of the Washington Monthly.

The post The Surprising Greatness of Jimmy Carter appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As the presidential debate approaches, Democrats are once again wringing their hands over a new poll showing the race is a dead heat. Even the polls that continue to have Kamala Harris up by two or three points are cold comfort: That’s still within the margin of error. And in 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump did better than the polls showed.

But in neither of those elections was the Democratic base as fired up as it is now. And no one seems to remember that Barack Obama—whose appeal overlaps with Harris’s—sharply outperformed polls that signaled a dead heat on the eve of the 2012 election.

My anxiety is less about the polls than about how Donald Trump, who has six one-on-one debates under his belt, will perform. The now-historic June 27 debate is remembered for Joe Biden being horrible. Alas, there was more to it than that. Some of the post-debate commentary noted that Trump lied his ass off and got no bump. But he told his lies fluidly and commanded the stage.

Will he do the same tonight in Philadelphia or does Harris so discombobulate him that he’ll lose his connection to the audience amid a torrent of rancid non-sequiturs?

On Saturday alone, as Ron Filipkowski, editor in chief of MeidasTouch.com, reminded us: “Trump wished the Virgin Mary Happy Birthday, pitched Hulk Hogan’s beer, talked about Hannibal Lecter, said he will imprison people he thinks are cheating, called Elon Musk ‘Leon,’ forgot Doug Burgum’s name [even though he’d been on his shortlist for VP], called Keystone ‘Keystown,’ and Tampon ‘Tampom.” 

There’s a school of thought that this act is old. “He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength,” Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic. “Now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.”

Of course, Fat Elvis still sold out his Vegas dates, and it’s hard to mock Trump as a loser—the recommendation of Wehner and others—when he’s furiously mocking “Tampon Tim” Walz, even if he mispronouncing the feminine hygiene product. If the debate descends into a mockathon, Harris loses.

Unfortunately, age has not slowed the water pressure of Trump’s fire hose, which now sprays accusations that Harris is—wait for it—a liar.

My guess is that tonight, he’ll echo his TV ads by saying that Harris is lying when she says she doesn’t want to raise taxes and cut Social Security; lying when she denies wanting to let millions of illegal immigrants receive benefits; lying by saying she never favored making illegal immigration legal; lying by connecting Trump to Project 2025, which Trump insists he’s “never heard of”; flip-flopping on fracking, which Trump wrongly claims employs 500,000 people in Pennsylvania (the real number is 24,000); flip-flopping on Medicare, where he falsely claims she cast the tie-breaking vote to cut $266 billion from “your Medicare.” And on and on…

Obviously, Harris won’t respond to most of this. If it hasn’t stuck in ads, it won’t stick in the debate. Engaging with each lie just increases the odds they will show up in the post-debate clips. Maybe she’ll borrow from Mary McCarthy, the midcentury intellectual who said during her feud with Lillian Hellman, “Every word is a lie including ‘if,’ ‘an’, and ‘but.’” More likely, she’ll say “same old tired playbook,” as she did in Dana Bash’s CNN interview. The problem is that it was in response to Trump’s racial slur, which demanded no reply. A lie about Medicare does. Without swinging at every pitch or seeming defensive, Harris has to cogently respond to at least some of Trump’s lies. If she doesn’t, much of the audience will believe they’re true or at least be distracted by them.

Don’t expect the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News, who have no experience covering politics, to focus on January 6 or otherwise hold Trump accountable for his lying depravity. Trump is trying to intimidate their boss, Bob Iger, CEO of Disney. Iger isn’t easily cowed, but with half the country behind Trump, you can bet the moderators will apply the false equivalence that bedevils so much of the media coverage of this campaign. 

After Harris and her team failed last week to change the rules to unmute the mics so she could cut in on Trump’s bullshit, it leaked that they were “reevaluating” their debate strategy. They know that, at a minimum, the vice president must tell some of her personal story and put a little flesh on the bones of her policy proposals. That’s what the voters, according to polls, want her to do. But she has to execute on the positive side and stay calm and counterpunch. That’s a lot to ask in one debate performance.

On Sunday, Pete Buttigieg admitted on CNN’s State of the Union that Harris faced “an extremely challenging task in the face of all of the distraction.” I don’t think Buttigieg was lowering expectations when he said: “She is a very focused and disciplined leader. But it will take almost superhuman focus and discipline to deal with Donald Trump in a debate… He’s a master of taking any form or format that is on television and turning it into a show that is all about him.”

Buttigieg faced Harris in debates in 2019 and took part in her vice-presidential debate prep in 2020. He says she is skilled at bringing the conversation back to the kitchen table. That’s important, but she must do more than ignore Trump’s noise and re-focus the debate on the future of the middle class. 

The most important skill in any debate is the pivot from quick response to sharp counterattack. Debates are won on offense. One old chestnut is indisputably true: If you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Buttigieg is usually terrific on TV, but Harris will have to do a lot better than his wordy, analytical answer on CNN to the inevitable question of the 13 U.S. servicemen killed at Abbey Gate outside the Kabul airport in 2021, which Trump and House Republicans have thrust back into the news.  After expressing sympathy, Harris should attack Trump for trashing Gold Star families, stupidly inviting the Taliban to Camp David, and cutting a deal with terrorists that General Frank McKenzie, the head of Central Command, called “pernicious.”

Will Harris nail that and everything else she needs to accomplish? Who knows. But before you get too depressed, remember that debates are rarely decided on policy specifics. They are, instead, about broad impressions. I’m confident she can do well on the four most important things voters are looking for in her:

Toughness: Americans don’t vote for candidates who look weak. They need to see that Harris has, well, cajones. That means indicting Trump on TV for at least a few of his many crimes. As a former prosecutor, she knows how to do that.

Presidential bearing: This is like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity in a 1964 Supreme Court case: “I know it when I see it.” Voters make a judgment on whether a newcomer to presidential debates—think Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992, Barack Obama in 2008, or Harris this year—looks as if they belong on stage. Can we picture them in a crisis? Carter, Clinton, and Obama crossed that threshold, and I’m confident Harris will, too.

Happy Warrior: Never underestimate the political importance of grinning. Like FDR, Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Obama, Harris knows how to take the edge off a sharp answer with her high-wattage smile. On paper, the “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please” answer to Dana Bash seemed a little snippy. But on camera, Harris smiled broadly, and it was her best line of the night.

Maturity: This is not usually a factor in presidential debates. But if Trump acts petulantly and childishly and focuses more on his grievances than his ideas for the future, then Harris will be seen as the adult in the room. While that might not be enough to secure a close election, it should be enough to win the debate.

Sentencing in the Trump hush money trial has been postponed until November 26. As I wrote in The New York Times, I think this delay—while disappointing—increases the odds that Trump will face a few months in jail if he loses the election.

As many of you know, I’ve written a new book, American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial — and My Own, which will be published on October 22 by BenBella Books. I worked 24/7 on the book this summer, and it’s more passionate and personal than anything I’ve written before.

American Reckoning is part memoir of my dawning political consciousness, part acerbic trial diary (with new stuff), part cri de coeur for democracy at this national moment of truth. I tell some relevant stories from the nine presidents I’ve interviewed and have some new reporting on Nancy Pelosi’s brilliant inside-outside game in maneuvering Joe Biden off the ticket.

PRAISE FOR “AMERICAN RECKONING”

“I have been deeply indebted to Jonathan Alter for his political wisdom and journalistic experience these last 20 years, and I’m grateful for this gripping guidebook through a bizarre chapter in the life of our strangest president.”—Stephen Colbert

“No cameras in the courtroom but Jonathan Alter’s brilliant book is the next best thing or better. Alter was the best writer there and he delivers the historic drama as no one else could.”—Lawrence O’Donnell

The post Debate Preview: The Adult in the Room appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It has been 40 years since Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican, at the peak of his career, retired from the Senate at the age of 59 after serving three terms, including four years as Minority Leader and four as Majority Leader. Baker reached for the presidency and was defeated; he is not a household name like Ted Kennedy or John McCain, and there are no buildings in Washington. D.C., named for him. He is virtually unknown to those under 50, and even older Americans recall him only for his famous question during the Watergate hearings: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

And yet, Howard Baker may have been the most universally admired political leader of the past 50 years. It was often said that if the senators could vote for president in a secret ballot, Baker would have won. Given the public’s deep and abiding distrust of politicians and anger about the failure of our institutions, Baker’s career teaches lessons in leadership that are more relevant today than ever before

For Howard Baker, politics was the family business. His father, Howard Henry Baker, Sr., was a Tennessee congressman who died in office, and his stepmother, Irene Baker, succeeded him. In 1951, Baker married Joy Dirksen, the daughter of the legendary Republican Everett Dirksen, who would go on to become Senate Minority Leader and the namesake of the Senate office building. Dirksen played an essential part in Baker’s rise after an early stumble. He lost his first bid for the Senate in 1964, as the Republicans led by Barry Goldwater were crushed nationally. But he ran again two years later, won handily, and reached the Senate at 41.

Despite the seniority system and the tradition that freshman senators should be seen rather than heard, Baker was immediately an impactful senator. A lawyer with a penchant for photography and another for engineering, he had a practical intellect. He quickly learned how to work across the partisan aisle to achieve important results, joining Democrats Ted Kennedy on major voting rights legislation and Ed Muskie in crafting the landmark amendments to the Clean Air Act.

What set Baker apart was his extraordinary, even temperament. Although seemingly laid back and folksy, he was intensely ambitious; after Dirksen died in 1969, Baker sought to become Senate Republican leader, trying to do so faster than Republican in Senate history. By a vote of 24-19, his conference colleagues rejected that chutzpah elevating veteran senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania. (Baker challenged Scott two years later, even though the position was not open, and Scott again defeated him, this time by a vote of 24-20.)

Such ambitions might have doomed his aspirations, but Baker was so likable, and his talents so universally recognized that neither his brashness nor his defeats ever seemed to matter to his standing in the Senate. This was also true among the Washington press corps during Baker’s early Senate service; James D. Squires, chief of the Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau, recalled: “We all liked Howard Baker from the first time we met. He was such a likable fellow. You couldn’t know this guy without liking him and respecting him. It didn’t matter what party he was.”

In 1971, President Richard Nixon, smarting from the Senate’s rejection of two of his Supreme Court nominees, offered Baker a seat on the Court, which Baker mulled over before deciding that he was much too young for the cloistered life of a justice. He later told Orrin Hatch, a freshman senator: “Funeral homes are livelier than the Court.”

In 1973, after the revelations of Nixon’s abuses of power first surfaced, Hugh Scott, looking for the most attractive television performer among the Senate Republicans, chose Baker to be Vice Chairman of the Select Watergate Committee. The historic hearings in the summer of 1973 inevitably paved the way for Nixon’s resignation from the presidency a year later. The hearings also made Baker a national celebrity, leading directly to his becoming Senate Republican leader in January 1977 after Scott’s retirement, when the Republicans needed to present an attractive alternative to the Democrats riding high after Nixon’s downfall, a sweeping Congressional victory in 1974, and Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. Baker did not take the Watergate committee position looking to be an enemy of the White House with whom he and his counsel, Fred Thompson, consulted frequently. The famed what-did-he-know question was aimed at former White House Counsel John Dean, who spilled the beans on the Watergate coverup and was meant to undermine Dean’s memory.

But it’s to Baker’s eternal credit that as the evidence mounted against the president and his top aides, the Tennessean aggressively pursued the truth and signed on to the committee’s report. Unlike some GOP members of the panel, he was not a Nixon dead-ender.

In the next eight years, serving as Senate minority leader during the Carter presidency and Senate majority leader during Ronald Reagan’s first term, Baker posted a record of achievement unmatched in Senate history.

What accounted for Baker’s extraordinary success? He demonstrated an unparalleled ability to work with anyone, listened more than he spoke, and benefited from his wry humor. “Being leader of the Senate was like herding cats,” Baker said in 1998. “It is trying to make 99 independent souls act in concert under rules that encourage polite anarchy and embolden people who find majority rule a dubious proposition at best.” Yet Baker had an exceptional ability to bridge seemingly irreconcilable views through a disarming and conciliatory brand of bargaining. Lisa Myers, later of NBC News, would write in the Washington Star: “To hear [senators] talk, Howard Henry Baker could bring together a boll weevil and a cotton planter.”

Baker’s temperament—moderate and fair-minded—was his greatest asset. His stepmother, a distinguished politician in her own right, once said: “Howard is like the Tennessee River. He always runs right down the middle.” A gifted amateur photographer, Baker had an uncanny ability to be at the center of the action while somehow being removed enough to observe the whole picture. However, his success also reflected how he saw his responsibilities as a political leader, based on his deep understanding of American government and history. Baker explained his approach when invited to speak to the Senate in 1998, fourteen years after his retirement when the bonds of Senate bipartisanship were already fraying:

People think our debates are fraudulent if we can put aside our passion so quickly and embrace our adversaries so readily. But we aren’t crazy, and we aren’t frauds. The ritual is as natural as breathing here in the Senate, and it is as important as anything that happens in Washington or in the country that we serve.

It’s what makes us America and not Bosnia. It’s what makes us the most stable government on earth and not another civil war ready to happen.

We are doing the business of the American people. We do it every day. We have to do it with the same people every day. And if we cannot be civil to one another, and if we stop dealing with those with whom we disagree, or that we don’t like, we would soon stop functioning altogether.

Immediately after being chosen to be Senate Minority Leader in 1977, Baker began an unmatched relationship with the new Democratic leader of the Senate, Robert C. Byrd, a much more guarded personality, disarming him with one request: “Don’t ever surprise me.” They built an extraordinary partnership, which sustained a period of Senate accomplishment even when they switched roles after the 1980 election.

Baker also built a remarkable relationship with Jimmy Carter, even though Baker hoped to run against Carter for the presidency. Bakerlike Senate Leaders Mike Mansfield, Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Johnson, and Hugh Scott recognized his responsibility to work with the president and even the other party. Baker contributed to many of Carter’s accomplishments in foreign and domestic policy—energy policy, rescuing New York and Chrysler, arms sales to the Middle East, and saving Alaska lands—while opposing Carter on crucial issues, such as labor law reform and the SALT 2 treaty, where their differences were insurmountable. Decades later, Jimmy Carter would reflect on the obstruction of Barack Obama’s agenda by Senate Republicans: “I had one thing that Obama didn’t have: a Congress I could work with.” By that, he meant a Senate where Howard Baker led the Republicans.

Although Baker is best remembered as one of the heroes in the Watergate drama, his most remarkable work came when Jimmy Carter decided to negotiate two treaties by which the Panama Canal would be returned to Panama. Five presidents before Carter, starting with Eisenhower, had recognized the damage that anger about American control of the Canal was doing to America’s relationship with Panama and Latin America but chose to do nothing about it. With tensions rising in Panama, Carter decided it was imperative to act. Many years later, Baker would remember his reaction to Carter’s call in August 1977 asking for his support. “I wished he hadn’t asked,” Baker said. “It was an unwelcome challenge.” He wondered then: “This has been kicking around for years. Why now, and why me?”

Baker faced an emboldened far-right faction of his party, led by former California Governor Ronald Reagan, who had almost knocked off President Gerald Ford in the 1976 primaries and vehemently opposed any treaty ceding sovereignty over the “path between the seas.” Moreover, Baker planned to run for president in 1980. His staff told Baker what he already knew: supporting the Panama Canal treaties would end his candidacy. “So be it,” Baker responded. He was the Senate leader and had to do what was best for the country. Once he was satisfied that returning the Panama Canal to Panama—with guarantees that he insisted on to protect America’s right to defend the Canal, including against the Panamanians—was the best way to ensure continued access for American ships, Baker supported the treaties, which made Senate’s narrow approval of the treaties possible, despite the fierce opposition of the right-wing Republicans.

Baker sought the Republican nomination in 1980 but was crushed by Reagan, as were other GOP stalwarts like Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush. In 1980, Reagan’s coattails carried in 13 new Republican senators, making Baker the majority leader. Baker described the election as “not just a landslide, but a political earthquake.” Even while celebrating the victory, he commented: “If the New Right leaders think Howard Baker is going to roll over and play dead for them, they are mistaken.” He anticipated the political currents that threatened to dominate his party in 1981, and despite his congeniality, he put down his marker immediately.

It sounds cliché, but Baker’s North Star was his patriotism. Born in 1926, Baker came of age during World War II. One of the youngest members of Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation,” he joined the Navy in the war’s final months. Baker cared deeply about his beloved Tennessee and was a committed Republican. But the national interest came first, and neither partisanship nor his political interests mattered as much as doing what he judged best for America.

Baker had long believed senators should be “citizen-legislators,” serving a limited number of terms before returning home to their states. Baker’s many friends, political allies, and the whole Senate hoped Baker would change his mind. But on January 21, 1983, Baker announced that he would retire at the end of his term. He enthusiastically endorsed Ronald Reagan for re-election and said he might seek the presidency in 1988. Baker had sought power, won it, exercised power, and now walked away. Alan Simpson of Wyoming expressed the general sentiment in the Senate: “There are many able people, but there is only one Howard Baker.”

Baker’s return to private life lasted only two years. In November 1986, just after the off-year elections, there was a bombshell revelation that the Reagan administration had secretly sold weapons to Iran in violation of a congressional embargo and used the proceeds from the sale to fund support of the Nicaraguan contras battling the Sandinista regime. In the weeks that followed, the “Iran-contra” scandal shook the foundation of Reagan’s presidency and triggered the most significant Congressional investigation since Watergate. With the Democrats now in control of both houses of Congress, impeachment seemed possible. At best, Reagan’s presidency looked moribund.

President Reagan asked Baker, his opponent in 1980 and his political ally since then, to come to the White House as chief of staff. Baker systematically weighed the pros and cons and reached out for advice from friends. John Seigenthaler, the legendary editor of the Nashville Tennessean, responded to Baker: “Dear Howard, the country needs you.”

Baker accepted the job, even though it meant giving up his dream of seeking the presidency again. He and the group of advisers that came to the White House reassured Congress and restored public confidence. Against the odds, Reagan finished his second term strongly, including a historic summit with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, which is generally viewed as a crucial first step toward the end of the Cold War. Late in life, Baker would return to public services as U.S. ambassador to Japan and married fellow senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, the Kansas Republican whose father ran against Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.

Baker’s singularly brilliant career illustrates a clear lesson of history: the choices and character of leaders make all the difference. Undoubtedly, if Howard Baker had been the Senate Republican leader during Donald Trump’s presidency, he would have treated Trump’s first impeachment seriously. He would have congratulated Joe Biden on his victory immediately, stifling Trump’s ‘big lie” that the election had been stolen. And we are confident that Baker would have voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment trial, bringing many other Senate Republicans with him. It is perhaps a footnote to history that days after Howard Baker retired from the Senate, Mitch McConnell was sworn in after winning his first term. The Kentuckian who had yet to earn his reputation for partisan ruthlessness never had a chance to learn about leadership from the man from Tennessee.

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The post Lessons in Leadership from Howard Baker appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Joe Biden has announced his intention to pursue term limits for Supreme Court justices, a reform with broad public support across the political spectrum. As the public increasingly loses confidence in the Court as an apolitical institution, it is both timely and prudent for Biden to consider this path.

We have studied the potential impact of instituting Supreme Court term limits, and the findings are compelling. Term limits could address some of the woes plaguing the Court.

Supreme Court nominations have become intensely politicized, partly due to their irregularity. Biden appointed only one justice in his one term, Ketanji Brown Jackson, while Donald Trump appointed three in his single term: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. (One-termer Jimmy Carter appointed none.) Why should one president have the opportunity to appoint three times as many justices as his successor?

Term limits solve this problem. Limiting the justices to staggered 18-year terms (as many court reform proposals do) regularizes appointments. This approach could significantly reduce partisan conflict surrounding nominations; if every president knows he or she will appoint two justices and the Senate knows that the next vacancy is always right around the corner, the process will likely become less contentious and overwrought. The stakes associated with any single appointment will go down. It’s not a panacea in a polarized era, but it can help. Plus, it reduces the role of mortality and retirements, which is an unpredictable way to run a branch of government.

Term limits also limit how long any jurist can exercise vast power. Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1991. Although the president who named him, George H.W. Bush, left office in 1993, Thomas has sat on the court for over three decades and through seven presidential elections. This isn’t about ideology. New Deal official William O. Douglas was tapped for the Court under Franklin Roosevelt and served 36 years until Gerald Ford’s presidency,  the longest of any justice.

Moreover, term limits diminish the incentives for justices to time their retirements strategically. Ruth Bader Ginsburg clung to her seat, hoping Hillary Clinton would prevail in the 2016 election, but her gamble did not pay off. When she died just weeks before the 2020 election, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill her seat. But other justices’ retirement decisions have kept their seats under same-party control. Reagan’s last nominee for the Court, Anthony Kennedy, for instance, retired during Trump’s administration, enabling Republicans to confirm a like-minded successor, his former law clerk Brett Kavanaugh. Similarly, Stephen Breyer, likely chastened by the Ginsburg example, retired during the Biden presidency.

Such “strategic retirements” empower the justices to try to choose their successors, undermining the founders’ vision of a judiciary shaped by the President and the Senate—by electoral forces—and not justices consulting actuarial tables. Imposing term limits would eliminate this incentive for judges to have an outsized role in choosing their successor.

These are theoretical arguments and empirical ones rooted in data-driven simulations in our recent research. Our research demonstrates the potential for term limits to foster a healthier relationship between the Court and the American electorate. For example, historically, roughly 60 percent of the years between 1937 and 2020 saw an ideologically “imbalanced” court—where one party’s appointments controlled seven or more seats.

But term limits change this entirely. When we simulated what the Court would have looked like with term limits, the median number of years where one party’s appointments controlled seven or more seats would have been reduced by as much as half. Why? Under term limits, presidents of both parties get an even shot to make appointments, and without incentives to retire strategically, justices would have to retire under opposing party presidents, so the share of seats “locked in” by either party would go down.

It will not be easy to implement term limits. Beyond the political hurdles to adopting them, questions have also been raised about whether imposing Supreme Court term limits by an ordinary statute would be constitutional. The primary concern is that the constitution stipulates that the Supreme Court justices “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” which is often interpreted to mean that they must have life tenure. However, there is strong academic support for the idea that term limits could be constitutional as long as the justices would continue to have the option of having a meaningful role as a judge after their 18-year term expires. For instance, the justices could be replacements for other judges recusing themselves. Moreover, they could hear cases at the lower court levels, which was common during the 18^th and 19^th centuries and which some retired justices have done in recent years

We leave it to others to fully debate the constitutionality of various term limits proposals, including the one ultimately favored by President Biden. If implemented, term limits could restore balance and integrity to an institution that has lost public trust as it plays an ever-greater role in American life.

The post The Empirical Case for Supreme Court Term Limits appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The elderly incumbent president was heading into a general election against a member of the previous administration. The economy was improving, but many Americans were still hurting.

So, what did Ronald Reagan do? He declared, “It’s morning again in America.”

The famous gauzy 1984 general election ad painted a rosy picture of American life compared to 1980, stretching the economic truth with cherry-picked data yet striking an emotional chord.

Can President Joe Biden do the same? The challenge for the 46^th president is steeper. Reagan dropped his ad in September 1984 when he was already trouncing former Vice President Walter Mondale in the polls, and much of the public already accepted that the economy was superior to the one left behind by Jimmy Carter.

The Biden economy is by nearly every significant measure better than the 1984 Reagan economy: the unemployment rate is lower, earnings are higher, the poverty rate is lower, inflation is lower, and interest rates are lower. Yet public sentiment towards Biden hasn’t caught up to the economic data, the media continues to harp on his age, and Donald Trump is furiously retconning the economic narrative of the last seven years.

The public may come to credit Biden with the improved economy, so long as the improvement continues, in time for Election Day. But with counterwinds, Biden can’t assume credit will organically materialize. Because his challenge is steeper than Reagan’s, he should not wait until September to marshal his best arguments.

Granted, an inherent risk with bragging about economic data is that it can go south. A good number in an ad today may turn sour by November, humiliating the candidate. But a review of the original Morning in America spot reminds us that emotion, not data, made it resonate.

Norman Rockwell-esque scenes grace the screen while a gentle narrator (the ad’s creator, Hal Riney) tells a tale of a revitalized America:

It’s morning again in America. Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon, 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future.

It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?

A lot was left out.

While “more men and women will go to work than ever before” was nominally true in terms of raw numbers, thanks to population growth, it was wholly untrue in terms of share of the population. The unemployment rate in August 1984 was 7.5 percent, down from 10.8 percent at the nadir of the 1981-1982 recession, but identical to the unemployment rate on Election Day 1980.

Regarding the Federal Reserve’s key interest rate, it’s true that between June 1981 and August 1984, it was cut by “nearly half”—from 19.10 to 11.64 percent—if we generously round up the amount of the cut from 39 percent. But by the end of August, the average 30-year mortgage rate had only dropped 21 percent from an October 1981 peak. And that still left the rate at a heart-stopping 14.36 percent, a tick higher than the Election Day 1980 rate.

Furthermore, new single-family home sales in August 1984 (expressed as an annualized rate) was 567,000. (On a daily basis, that comes out to 1553, not exactly 2000, though the preceding spring and summer months were better). That wasn’t much different from the 561,000 in October 1980 and lower than the August 1980 figure of 659,000. The ad makers claimed the home sale rate was “more than at any time in the past four years,” but that’s because home sales tanked during the recession that began in Reagan’s first year in office before rebounding.

Completely unmentioned was the 1983 poverty rate (a figure released by the Census Bureau in August 1984, a month before the ad’s release) of 15.2 percent. That was higher than under Carter, and the highest since 1965, before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society anti-poverty programs kicked in.

None of those fact-checks mattered because the ad told a reassuring story that felt right about a nation of people working more, buying homes, getting married, and living the traditional American Dream. Besides, the economy was better following the recession. Inflation was dramatically lower than in the Carter years (thanks to high-interest rates imposed by Carter’s appointee as Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker). Why get hung up on details?

This doesn’t mean Biden and his ad makers should cherry-pick as disingenuously as the Reagan team. On the contrary, the fact-checking industry is tougher these days. Trump will disparage any such ad false regardless of the facts, but his attacks will hit harder if the media backs him up.

It means the story comes first, and the data, lightly sprinkled, second.

A Biden version of Morning in America could sound like this:

It’s morning in America. Today, more Americans will go to work than ever in our country’s history.

Why not lift directly from the original’s first line? It’s technically accurate as a matter of raw numbers: in every month of 2023, for the first time, over 160 million Americans were employed. But the unemployment rate has been at 4 percent or below for the last two years, which hasn’t happened in over 50 years. Even if the unemployment rate ticks up some, the line will almost surely remain technically true.

And we’re building things in America again. Nearly one in ten of those workers has a job in manufacturing.

As of January 2024, we have 13 million manufacturing workers (about 8 percent of the workforce), the most in 15 years.

We’re enjoying the fruits of our labor, living in safer neighborhoods, and taking more vacations.

The 2023 murder rate is down 12 percent from the prior year, according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher, and all violent crime (through the third quarter of 2023) is down 8 percent.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey from December 2023 found that 32.8 percent of households made a “large” purchase of vacation in the past four months, the highest percentage since 2015 when the bank began collecting such survey data. A Deloitte survey in the spring of 2023 found that 50 percent planned to take a summer vacation that involved paid lodging, the highest percentage since at least 2019, when 42 percent planned getaways.

And all of us are benefiting, with the difference in employment between whites, African-Americans, and Latinos near the smallest ever.

In January 2024, the gap between the white and Black unemployment rates was 1.9 percentage points, and between the white and Hispanic rates, 1.6. For African Americans, that gap rose from 3.1 just before the pandemic in February 2020 to 5.4 in August 2020, then gradually narrowed since. The February 2020 gap for Hispanics was 1.3, which rose to 5.3 in May 2020 but has been mostly below two since the middle of 2021.

Then, to close the ad, why change a word?

It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Biden, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?

Reagan’s advertising team decided to push extreme optimism, according to an account from ad director Doug Watts, because in 1984, “it was the beginning of the 24-7 news cycle. That started to have an impact on the American psyche. So, it was important to find the optimism that was still in most people, but they were starting to lose a grip on it.”

The constant gloom-and-doom in our social media-driven discourse is greater now, requiring a more robust optimism operation—not just a few ads near the end of the campaign, but a months-long effort enlisting an army of surrogates.

Ideally, the Biden campaign would tap people from all walks of life—small business owners, PTA presidents, first responders, community bankers, blue-collar workers, stay-at-home parents, community college students, and retirees—from every state or even every county, to echo similar messages in local media about how the economy has turned around. Such a communications effort would till the soil for a national Morning in America campaign, which would not have to consist of just one ad but several versions tailored to different demographics.

And a hyper-positive advertising effort does not preclude a parallel negative blitz, which Reagan also used. How that could look will be the subject of a future column.

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