Jefferson Cowie
Appearances
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
That's exactly right. When we think about decades, I think it can be a little misleading, especially when it comes to something like the 70s, because I see the 70s less as a period of 10 years than I do a break between epochs.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
You have a sort of post-war era of relative affluence, a shared affluence, and rising expectations, and then the 70s are a period of rupture, and then we have sort of the birth of the Reagan era, free market, neoliberal kind of new consensus.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Right, so I think that's a really powerful way to think about it, that the 1970s are sort of half post-60s and half pre-80s. And Carter is that sort of hinge right there in the center of that. And when Carter runs for the presidency, you know, his tagline is, I'm not going to lie to you.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
You know, that's the kind of salve that the American people are looking for at that particular juncture after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and the failures in Vietnam and the Church Committee in the mid-70s, which revealed all the shenanigans that the Americans had been up to abroad.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
So you have this earnest guy coming from the rural South, and the South is sort of on the rise as a Sunbelt creation. And I think he becomes a sort of repository of a certain kind of political virtue.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
He's a complete outsider, and that's what's refreshing about him. It's not just that he's from the South. He's just completely outside the beltway, right? He just has no connections, which ends up becoming one of his failures, is that he doesn't really know how to run Washington.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Carter runs just when George Wallace, who is this kind of, you know, this segregationist, snarling governor of Alabama, getting tremendous traction in 68 and 72. And so the South becomes really important. There's this sort of political churn there, and Carter emerges as somebody who could win the South as a racial progressive.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
That's a really important dimension of who he was, because a lot of people were really worried about the direction of the South, which was a core part of the Democratic Party at that time. And we forget that. You know, it's lost to the Democratic Party now. But at the time, the Democratic Party completely depended upon the South and was losing it after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
To say he's an insider, I think, I mean, we're talking about who he is as a candidate, right? He shows up in Iowa. Nobody really knows. You know, the famous line is Jimmy who? The Atlanta paper, I think, said, Jimmy who is running for president of what? He's not Muskie. He's not Humphrey. He's not any of these people who had absolute complete name recognition.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
He was doing full-on retail politics in the primaries. So he was just out there at the plant gates and in the neighborhoods.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Right, and he was facing off an attack from the right from Ronald Reagan, and a lot of people at the 76th Republican Convention kind of felt the wrong guy won the convention. Like, Reagan's star was rising, but Ford inherited the mantle. So they're in a transition from a sort of traditional liberal Republican position to a much more conservative politics.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yeah. And Borden Bernstein, after the stories on Watergate and All the President's Men, kind of create a template for a lot of hungry journalists. If you want to make it, those are the guys to emulate. Find the nasty, dark secret in the American state and reveal it. That's really central to sort of that kind of investigation. There's a lot of hope. You know, we see it as a dark decade.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
But the first half, it's cynical about the federal government, but I think there's a lot of political hope for what might come next, that the whole idealism of the 60s might find some sort of institutional presence in the 70s. You're talking about the Bee Gees, of course. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Right. So I presume you're leading us up to the crisis of confidence speech, which was supposed to be an energy speech. The energy crisis is defining the decade. We're literally running out of gas, right, which is a great metaphor and a reality. And it's causing stagflation, both high unemployment and high inflation, which are not supposed to go up at the same time. So nothing's working right.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And he's given speech after speech on the energy crisis. And then he disappears for 10 days and nobody knows where he is. People are worried about his health. But he's been at Camp David and he's been traveling and talking to regular people and community leaders and religious leaders and scholars and stuff about what's wrong with America.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And he comes out and gives this speech in 1979 where he basically says, the problem is us. The problem is we're too materialistic. We're too self-absorbed. We've lost our way. It was very much a sermon, like you're saying. It was very much a kind of come to Jesus sort of moment. And it was a very risky political move.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yes. And there were a couple of contradictions. One is you were just talking about the post-World War II boom. Essentially, the promise was you work hard and we're going to give you lots of stuff. Right. And he now suddenly... Jimmy Carter's, you know, in the Oval Office saying, you like stuff too much and you need to stop buying stuff because that's bad for our spirit.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
That's a really interesting question. I mean, counterfactuals are so dangerous. He basically spent his entire presidency fighting first inflation and the oil crisis, and then the hostage crisis. And so all of that is tied up with Middle East and energy policy. And it would have been a completely different game. You also have to see Carter moving away from traditional Democratic norms.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
He's not a new dealer. He's not a great society guy. He has a few things he wants to do, like national health insurance and things like that, that he's not going to be able to do because of inflation. So maybe that would have gone in a positive direction. It's very hard to tell.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
It's hard to imagine somebody else doing the Camp David Accords. I mean, he so profoundly believed in peace. You know, he's coming off this realpolitik of Henry Kissinger and Nixon or trying to rebuild a world order and moving chess pieces around the global board.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And this guy sits down with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat and says, let's talk, let's figure this out together and let's reason together. And he does it. Now, the Sinai Peninsula at that particular moment was a huge bargaining chip and he was able to use that to get Egypt in there and stuff. So there's actually pretty important exogenous issues. But I think Carter's the guy for that.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And it is because of his core moral principle was this sense that peace could work.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
But he also comes to power, Carter comes to power saying that human rights are going to be the center of the core principle, which is a very risky move because that means you got to punish your allies because a lot of our allies were really nasty people. But this is one place where that kind of formula came together pretty effectively.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Quickly overshadowed by the hostage crisis. So that was his big win, but his big loss and essentially the loss of any hope of re-election came with the storming of the embassy.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
He did. There were some people who thought that the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 was because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Some people thought, oh, here's a moral sort of position. He's using the sort of cultural weapons, soft power he can use. Others were like, this is kind of milquetoast.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
American athletes aren't going to get to compete, and the Russians are going to basically get to do their business. adventures in Afghanistan. So the reception, especially on the right, was quite mixed.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yeah, but I don't think that was because of Carter, though. No, I agree. The Mujahideen had a little more to do with that. That's true. Where we planted our own seeds of problems. Exactly. Yes, we did. Yes, we did.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yeah, it is absolutely unprecedented. But he also went into that weak. He was kind of a new kind of Democrat. He wasn't firmly rooted in the civil rights groups. He wasn't firmly rooted in labor. He wasn't in the urban groups. You know, he's weak going in. This just brings him down. And he is suddenly...
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
The United States, which had lost in Vietnam, and Saigon had fallen, and Cambodia was becoming a killing field, and everything's going terrible. This becomes the last blow of the image of the sort of pitiless giant that can't defend itself, and Carter takes on the sort of symbol of that kind of waffling, what can we do as the hostages are being held in the embassy? But he did try.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
On day 100 and some odd, he launched this attempted rescue operation with all the helicopters and the planes in the desert, and ended in a sort of absolute everything went wrong. And it became a kind of metaphor for the whole thing. There were no tools at Carter's disposal for this besides seizing assets and things like that.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And the hostage's family didn't want any violence or invasion because they were afraid they'd be killed. So he was really hamstrung, and the greatest irony probably of his presidency is he spent that last 444 days just worrying about hostages, and then on the day that Ronald Reagan's inaugurated in January 1981 is the same day that the hostages are released.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Talk about pulling the rug out from under you.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
And it was also kind of the end of the Democratic Party as we had known it as well. As deeply moral and thoughtful and intelligent as he was, he was not able to keep the party glued together. And they went into the 1980 election weekend. And sadly, that's his legacy.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Well, most ex-presidents disappear, right? And he becomes, as you say, a great humanitarian, a great principled leader. And probably the only analogy would be John Quincy Adams, another one-term president who becomes a great abolitionist. But other than that, most of them kind of fade away.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Yeah, and I think he was more driven by interest in power than maybe some of us want to believe. But ultimately, I don't think that's why he did what he did. I actually think he thought he could bring a sort of moral core back to the leadership of the United States of America. And he did outside the presidency.
American History Hit
Remembering Jimmy Carter: Life & Legacy
Thanks very much, and it was great talking to you.