Opinion: History gets Jimmy Carter wrong, both underrated and overrated

In the lives of public figures a tale often takes hold and that narrative becomes their story.

In the case of Jimmy Carter, it goes like this: A humble peanut farmer and former Georgia governor defies extraordinary odds and wins the White House, through a combination of virtue, decency and a post-Watergate political cleansing.

Over the next four years he is overwhelmed and over-matched by inflation and Iran’s ayatollah. He scolds his countrymen and wears a sweater like a hairshirt. He’s attacked by a “killer rabbit” and loses reelection — in an electoral college landslide — to the buoyant and swaggering Ronald Reagan.

But, then, in a great and noble second act, the former president travels the world spreading goodness, peace and light while helping build safe and affordable housing for the needy and fighting the twin scourges of poverty and disease.

There is much that is accurate about that account. But it also overlooks a good deal, and distorts some of the rest.

“There’s been this easy shorthand about him that is actually a real disservice to the complex truth,” said Jonathan Alter, a political journalist and author of the 2020 biography “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life.”

In Alter’s considered judgment, Carter, who died Sunday at 100, “was an underrated and under-appreciated president and an appropriately appreciated but slightly overrated former president.”

[Jimmy Carter shaped modern Alaska in profound, lasting ways]

Politics is a zero-sum profession, its score-keeping writ in black and white. Either you win or you lose.

“If you’re president and you’re defeated for a second term — that, in our system, is the definition of failure,” said Les Francis, a California Democratic strategist who worked in the Carter White House and both his presidential campaigns.

Francis, now retired in the Sierra foothills, is quite mindful of the Carter narrative— lousy president, sainted ex-president — and reacted to its mention in a tone that mixed weariness with resignation.

“It rankles those of us who worked for him,” Francis said, “and I know it rankled him because it ignores the substantial accomplishments of his presidency.”

Those include a doubling of the national park system; the first national legislation funding green energy; major civil service and government ethics reforms; creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency; the Middle East peace accord between Egypt and Israel; normalization of relations with China; and moves that helped bring about the end of the Soviet Union.

In their most recent survey, released in February, presidential historians ranked Carter’s performance 22nd among the nation’s 46 presidencies. To give some perspective, Abraham Lincoln was first and Donald Trump came in dead last.

Of course, there were plenty of reasons that Carter lost his 1980 reelection bid.

A stiff primary challenge from the liberal leviathan, Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

The toxic mix of high inflation and high unemployment, dubbed “stagflation.”

Gas lines.

The Iranian hostage crisis and, in particular, a failed rescue attempt that ended in wreckage and humiliation in the country’s Great Salt Desert.

Carter also had a self-righteousness that could present as starchy and sanctimonious, a trait he exhibited even in his good works once he left the White House.

“Sometimes, as a former president, he operated as a kind of freelance secretary of State and he did some things to complicate the lives of his successors that don’t look so great in retrospect,” Alter said. “I think he sometimes let his own ego get in the way a little bit.”

The body language on those occasions Carter gathered alongside presidents past and present was telling. He stood among them but always seemed somehow apart.

At bottom, Carter was a fundamentally good and caring man, who lived his Christian faith and whose uprightness and personal probity offer a model for those who’ve followed him into the Oval Office.

His more than yearlong survival after entering hospice and refusing further medical treatment was both stirring and surprising. Carter’s last public appearance came in late November last year, at the funeral of his wife, Rosalyn, who died two days after entering hospice at age 96.

In 1976, during the presidential campaign, there was a flap when Carter told Playboy magazine he “looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

The controversy seems quaint now, compared to the criminally convicted Trump’s 2016 boast of grabbing women “by the pussy” and getting away with it. It’s just one example of how low our politics have sunk, and it casts some of the criticisms of Carter in a fresh light.

Maybe being a micromanager and a little uptight weren’t such horrible things after all.

After news broke that Carter had entered hospice, writer and GOP political consultant Stuart Stevens was one of many offering public reappraisals of the former president.

“The first article I published in a national magazine was a snarky piece ... calling Jimmy Carter a failure,” Stevens said on Twitter, as the site was then known. “Looking back on it, my smugness was disgusting. I can’t imagine he read it & if he did, I’m sure he didn’t care but still, I wish I had found a way to apologize.”

In a follow-up email, Stevens said his original piece came “from the perspective of a Southerner who felt that Carter was an embarrassment. Not in a policy sense but just his manner and approach.

“There was no appreciation,” Stevens said, “for the basic decency of a man trying to do what he felt was right.”

In the summer of 1984, after his forced exit from the White House, Carter paid a return visit to Washington.

It was a rarity. The former president was never much liked inside the Beltway, and the feeling was mutual.

But Carter, as dutiful Democratic soldier, headlined a reception and chicken dinner to raise money for his former vice president, Walter Mondale, while Mondale prepared to accept the party’s presidential nomination. And, it turned out, the opportunity to be buried a few months later in yet another Reagan landslide.

With the leadership mantle passing from the former president to his understudy, Mondale offered a laudatory summation of the Carter administration. “We told the truth,” he said. “We obeyed the law and we kept the peace. And that’s not bad.”

Not bad at all.

Mark Z. Barabak is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, which this column first appeared.

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