I watched the Jimmy Carter documentary on PBS the other night. I voted for Carter in 1976 so I’m not hostile to him or insensitive to the challenges he faced during his presidency, but I had problems with a documentary that looked too much like a hagiography at times. (A hagiography is a biography of a saint, especially in the Catholic Church, but also done in totalitarian societies for political leaders.)
“Carter’s journey from poor, rural peanut farmer to the presidency of the United States is an inspiring story of faith and determination,” reads a PBS promo. Also, “While some initially considered his presidency a failure, Carter is now revered as a statesman and man of integrity who fought for — and won — major advances in equal rights, environmental conservation and global peace.”
First, the good in it: We learned that Carter had a successful Navy career before leaving the service to take over the family peanut farm in Georgia; that he was inspired by an elderly African American woman who was a kind of second mother to him while growing up; that he was indeed an anti-racist once Governor in Georgia (but that he sometimes tempered his rhetoric while campaigning so as not to antagonize too many voters); and that he considered public service a way of implementing his Christian faith to do good (but not to proselytize).
Now the bad news: The documentary credited Carter with great successes in implementing his domestic agenda in the first years of his single-term presidency yet underplayed the fact that both the Senate and House were controlled by Democrats at the time, which made his successes much easier to achieve. He had a supermajority during his first two years.
The documentary also made out Carter to be a stronger Democratic candidate for president in 1976 than he ever was. While he was a surprise nominee, the fact was that the recent end of the Vietnam War and the lingering fallout from Richard Nixon’s “Watergate” scandal would have given almost any Democrat the 30-point lead in the polls over Gerald Ford going into the 1976 elections that he briefly enjoyed. (The fact that he defeated a largely discredited and physically crippled George Wallace in the 1976 Florida primary was overplayed by the media at the time as somehow heroic, and by the recent documentary as well.) Poll leads do tend to narrow as election day nears, but it’s clear Carter squandered most of that lead on his own. Yet the documentary too strongly argued that this was due to Carter’s candor in admitting during a Playboy Magazine interview that he’d had “lust in his heart” at times in his life. This struck me as a bald-faced attempt to put down fundamentalist Christians (but not Carter himself) as they are often the “whipping boy” for lots of issues in America, from vaccine hesitation to anti-abortion stances and even at times to white supremacy. It could be argued that Carter won as many points for his candor as he may have lost; the fact that TV comedians made fun of him at the time, which the documentary emphasized, is not nearly as significant as the documentary made it out to be. In those days Gerald Ford’s clumsiness also was much lampooned, yet political satire in the 1970s was not nearly as vicious or devastating as it’s become in recent years.
The documentary lauded Carter for the Israel-Egypt peace treaty (which also led to an Israel-Jordan treaty soon after) but in fact that was a mixed blessing. Many political scientists at the time said any deal that didn’t include the full participation of the Palestinians (who then were led by the Yasser Arafat-led Palestine Liberation Organization) was doomed to fail. To be fair, the PLO seemed as unwilling to deal with Israel as Israel was unwilling to deal with it, but more than 40 years on the Arab-Israeli conflict simply is not resolved.
Worst of all, the documentary largely left Carter off the hook for his handling of the Iran hostage crisis. First of all, his state department didn’t know the Shah was in trouble long before the revolution came to fruition? What? Read former CBS correspondent Tom Fenton’s book, “Bad News,” or other sources - some people knew the Shah was doomed without instituting major reforms but almost no one in government or mainstream media would listen.
The documentary noted that Carter was fearful the Iranians would kill the American hostages if we intervened militarily (he’s said this publicly in the years since) but we had overwhelming military superiority at the time and this was years before “asymmetrical warfare” was perfected by our weaker adversaries. Egging on more violence is never a good thing, but the regular armed forces in Iran were largely Western-trained and Western-oriented (this is why the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp was quickly established and so many career armed forces members were sacked, or worse, by Khomeini). So, we likely would have had allies in country, though I don’t think a full-on invasion would have been advisable.
Absent a strong military response, Carter could have issued credible threats to wipe out a lot of revolutionaries and assets if they were to kill any Americans, then see what they’d do. Put the ball in the other team’s court, that’s all. In general, you never want to negotiate over the other side’s terms, whether in diplomacy, labor relations (I’m a former union president) or in pretty much anything. Make the other side worry more about you than you’re worried about them. This is not hard to understand, but apparently it was for Carter, as well as for the documentary.
Nonetheless, under pressure to “do something” there was the ill-fated helicopter “rescue” operation, but that was almost a charade – we were going to land special forces in the desert, then insert them into Tehran to rescue the hostages and have trucks drive everyone out? Huh? I’m simplifying the strategy here, and eight American service members died during the effort, but the documentary merely called this a kind of long-shot gamble. Folks, this was never a credible plan.
Carter also presided over a period of very high inflation and stagnant growth, but I’ll leave that aside. Presidents get too much credit for the economy when it’s doing well and too much blame when there’s a downturn.
My report card for the documentary? C minus.
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