#WTH James Earl Carter Jr.

A terrible president. A terrible ex-president

Yes, it’s true that the first two WTH posts of 2025 have been slams on two Democratic presidents. Coincidence, I assure you. Next week, we’re back to foreign policy, and after that, we’re back to the fun-fest that will be the Donald Trump administration, part deux. But today is Jimmy Carter’s state funeral, and we are releasing not just a pod, but also an accompanying Substack… It’s a Carter-palooza!

Check out our conversation with Steve Hayward, who wrote the book, literally, on one of our less favorite ex-presidents. Or take a glance at the highlights below. Or follow the bouncing ball with me here 🎾🎾🎾

I was in high school in the Carter years, and like a number of people in our community, his presidency was memorable to me for all the wrong reasons. My beloved Dad kept the house at 68 degrees (Nixon had counseled that frosty sacrifice in the wake of the Arab oil embargo); it was still a rebellion against Jimmy’s recommended 65 degrees, because of the “energy crisis.” I was always cold. Always. We had to line up for gas on even days (based on our license plates) to fill up the tank thanks to that self-same energy crisis.

As I grew older, I began to recognize the other elements of the Carter years — the soaring costs, the obsessive fear of American global leadership, the uninterest in the threat of Soviet Communism, the weakness everywhere. America’s enemies were flourishing, and Carter seemed fine with it. Then there was the betrayal of the Shah of Iran, the subsequent hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the disaster of Desert One, and the rescue of Americans held in Iran — collapse was the norm abroad, and at home, Carter was presiding over economic misery and frigid thermostats.

But, you say, Camp David was incredible! Sure, let’s not take Camp David away from Carter; peace between Israel and Egypt — then the most important Arab state — was a genuine accomplishment. That it happened against the backdrop of Carter’s loathing of Israel’s leaders, and Jews in general, became ever more obvious in the years after Carter lost in 1980.

Is it any wonder, as Jimmy Carter presided over those formative years, that I became a conservative?

My libertarian friends will insist, largely correctly, that Carter era economic deregulation was critical to the American economic recovery, and my defense-oriented friends will add that the post-Soviet-invasion-of-Afghanistan, post-Iran Carter defense build-up laid the groundwork for the Reagan defense revolution that ultimately helped defeat the Soviet Union. But that’s it. That’s the good, dwarfed, nay drowned, by the bad.

Turns out that Carter’s decision to dump the Shah ushered in the Ayatollah who would reshape the Middle East for the next half-century plus. Post-White House, Carter’s affection for Middle Eastern dictators knew few bounds: He was a big Assad fan, his interest in “human rights” limited by his tolerance of Middle Eastern (and sundry other) tyrants. Indeed, Carter and his “Carter Center’s” definition of human rights laid a critical foundation stone in the current perverted “human rights” industry that seeks above all to undermine American global leadership and American allies.

“Human rights” in Iran? China? The Soviet Empire? South America? Meh. Carter’s priorities lay inevitably with America’s adversaries. And the bugaboo at the heart of Carter’s worldview was the evil of the State of Israel and its Zionist/Jewish supporters. Carter rarely had a word of criticism for the Palestinians or the terrorism that characterized their “liberation” movement. Rather, his interest always lay with the “apartheid” state of Israel. It must have been a point of pride with the ex-president that he brought the apartheid trope to prominence with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, a lie and distortion-filled screed that could easily serve as the Bible for the antisemitic squads that now people call the Democratic Party.

Miserable inflation, illogical energy policy, weakness abroad, contempt for American values, and a hostility to the Jews… if that sounds familiar, and reminds you not just of the Biden administration, but of the Democratic Party in general in 2025, thank Jimmy Carter. Sure, his successors of both parties disliked him, his sanctimony, and his interfering. But more, perhaps, than any other president in recent years, he has shaped the future of his party. Mazal tov.

HIGHLIGHTS

Why do you think Carter acted the way he did during his post presidency?

SH: Look, the guy, I think he resented being turfed out of office in a landslide by Ronald Reagan, and he made sure he was going to get his revenge against all of us for doing it to him. And unlike any other ex-president, even Obama or even any of the others you can name who carried on a while, like you know Richard Nixon went to the Soviet Union a couple of times, but Carter decided that the old rule that we only have one president at a time didn't apply to him.

So for 20 years at least, he actively interfered with the foreign policy of three presidents in a row, from both parties, driving them crazy, and intervening in ways that were unhelpful to American interest and American purposes. And put it this way, if he had been a private citizen, a purely private citizen and not an ex-president, I think he would've been arrested and tried under the seldom used Logan Act of interfering with American foreign policy by a private citizen.

What are some of the ways Carter interfered in American foreign policy in his post presidency?

SH: Well, maybe do it in chronological order. He wanted to have the Carter Library as all presidents want to do, but he set up the Carter Center there at Emory University and all right, is this going to be a research or academic institution? No, it was going to be his own private United Nations where in the early '80s he was carrying on essentially his own parallel arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union. He'd invite Soviet arms control people down to Georgia, they'd grind out statements. And all the statements were directly aimed at undermining Ronald Reagan's strategy on arms control, which was of course a very difficult problem in the '80s.

From there, he went on to just appoint himself as this international election monitor traveling around the world with a delegation of UN people. Some of those, actually, I think he did a good job. I won't say they were all terrible, but he would often, as he put it in his own words, he would inject himself into situations around the world because he felt entitled to do it. In fact, he even said once to, I think one of his biographers, Doug Brinkley, that, "The rules don't apply to me." Well, when you have an ex-president starting to say that, you're in for trouble.

I think his most egregious act as a former president came during the first Gulf War in 1990 and 1991. Listeners will recall, if they're old enough or know the history, that President George H.W. Bush assembled an impressive coalition of allies in the Middle East and from Europe to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. And Carter, unbeknownst to President Bush or any of his people, was writing to and contacting Middle Eastern leaders and saying, "You should drop out of the coalition. You shouldn't go along with these warmongering plans of President Bush." And Bush and his people were astonished that this was going on. And that's an amazing thing to think about. And I think it was Lance Morrow at Time Magazine, who passed away recently, he said that is dangerously close to what would once upon a time have been considered treason. We can go on from there.

How did Carter treat Jews and the State of Israel after losing office?

SH: I think he's a closet antisemite. I don't know whether that's part of his Southern Baptist heritage, because you do find a lot of that in the Old South. But yeah, that book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, it was absolutely outrageous. And again, in the '80s, he would cozy up to Hafez Assad. At the same time Assad was saying that, "Israel's not our problem, the United States is our problem." I mean, Assad made it clear who his main enemy was. He loved Yasser Arafat. I mean, even Bill Clinton I think pretty much publicly admitted what a rotten person, and that's putting it nicely, Arafat was and how Arafat had no interest in actually reaching any kind of serious peace agreement with Israel. And so, yeah, I think you're right, Dany, he used or abused his moral authority to give sanctification to exactly that strain of anti-Israel, antisemitic strains that are so powerful in the Democratic Party today.

Did Carter ever have any second thoughts or regrets about how he allowed Iran and the Shah to fall?

SH: I've never seen any that you can find anywhere. And by the way, don't forget the pair that is abandoning the Shah over human rights with the same actions taken in Nicaragua. By the way, I think the Shah's human rights record is much better than Somoza's was in Nicaragua. But the same problem, it seems to be the modern liberal Democratic Party is incapable of asking a simple question compared to what? What's going to replace the Shah if you knock him over? What's going to replace Somoza in Nicaragua when you have a pro-Marxist, pro-Soviet insurgency that is primed to take power? And the Soviet Union collapsed. And so Nicaragua became a sideshow. But as you'll remember in the eighties, it was a real problem for American politics and American foreign policy as well as Iran. Iran sadly, is still with us, and you can't do counterfactuals.

But had there been either the Shah survived or a decent regime survived, it's not hard to imagine a much better last 40 years in the Middle East. Not would've been great. But clearly the revolution in Iran has been one of the dividing or decisive episodes in recent decades that is still plaguing the world.

How did Carter interfere with Clinton’s plans in North Korea? And what was his relationship like with President Clinton?

SH: In 1980, you might remember Castro decided to empty his jails and send a whole bunch of his refugees and criminals to America. A lot of them got housed in Arkansas where they rioted. And that contributed to the young Governor Clinton being defeated for re-election in 1980. When I thought, by the way, we're done with Clinton. Shows you what I know. And Clinton always blamed Carter for his defeat. So there are a lot of bad blood between the two of them. And Carter richly reciprocated, I think this young whippersnapper who criticized him to his face and so forth. So we decided to confront North Korea, I think it's 1994 over their growing nuclear program.

Kim Jong-il, he invites Carter to come over. Carter had wanted to come over, had said lots of things publicly, and Carter simply informs Vice President Gore that I'm going to accept their invitation. And his words, by the way to Gore were, "I'm running out of patience with this situation." He's running out of patience? I mean, he's acting like he's still president, so he goes off to North Korea. The Clinton people reluctantly decided they couldn't stop him, really, and they get his agreement of what his negotiating instructions were to be, which he did not follow.

Instead, Carter came out with the CNN cameras he brought along and said, "The crisis is over. We've reached a deal. It's a very soft-headed deal. No UN sanctions. America will actually help you develop light water reactor technology so you can have nuclear energy for your country." And it was ridiculous. Clinton was reported to be furious. There's still stories, and maybe Dany, you may know better than I do, that a possible attack on North Korea was on the table for the Clinton administration. And Carter's intervention made that impossible.

What were the origins of Carter’s so called “Malaise Speech”?

SH: Energy policy was one of his big priorities coming into office, and he made these big speeches and he passed this 4,000 page bill that gave us all the windmills and solar panels we love today, some of them anyway. And he decided, oh, I can't just give another energy speech. People are tired of it. I need to think about this. He canceled the plan broadcast and then disappeared to Camp David for 10 days, whereupon he had a steady stream of, I don't know, maybe 200 American leaders, mostly liberals. Governor Bill Clinton was one of them. And they're sitting around, he's sitting around the floor, the little hall there in Camp David cross-legged on the floor, having these sort of college dorm style bull sessions about what's wrong with America.

And that's when he gives the speech influenced partly by Pat Cadell and Christopher Lasch, the late author of The Culture of Narcissism, which was a popular book in the Carter White House. And it was all about how "Oh, never mind energy, never mind where we're going to get oil and gas or whatever." It was all about how America suffered a crisis of confidence. I remember watching it, and it was a very different Carter. He had these very forced gestures and it was just weird. And he never used the word "malaise" in the speech, by the way. And that's one of those sort of fair consequences. Someone asked his press secretary the next day, Jody Powell. "So, is the president saying, America's suffering from some kind of malaise?" And Jody Powell says, "Yeah, I think that's a pretty good summary." And so that word stuck to it by his own press secretary.

You’ve mentioned how poorly Carter has handled American allies, was he at least feared by our adversaries?

SH: Kissinger said that Carter had managed the trifecta of having the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries. And I forget what the third part of that was.

The amazing thing about Carter is that he managed to come across as weak to the Soviet Union and offend them at the same time. So, he did come into office writing a public letter to the dissident, Andrei Sakharov. I thought that was actually one of his good deeds. But then he starts conducting arms control negotiations in public saying, "Here's what we want in arms control ..." The Soviet Union didn't like that. They were much more comfortable with sitting down Americans and going on for days and making no progress. So they thought Carter was kind of a clown, but an annoying one at the same time. And so they didn't like him much. And their hope, by the way, was that Reagan would be like Nixon. He would come around to detente and they were shocked when Reagan didn't. But yeah, Carter just showed his naivety and shallowness and the entire way he conducted foreign policy, especially with the Soviet Union.

What is something good Carter did?

SH: Carter really gets the ball rolling on deregulation. Although that was a bipartisan initiative. I mean, Ted Kennedy led the way on deregulating trucking in the legislation in the Senate, for example. But Carter and his team pushed very hard to deregulate airlines so they can compete in the way we know that they operate now. So fares are much lower. My favorite is ... I shouldn't laugh because it's serious. He deregulated beer brewing. The whole craft beer revolution really starts under Carter.

Was Carter a fiscal hawk?

SH: I think the other thing is that Carter was something of a fiscal hawk. Now, inflation kept making our budget deficits bigger and bigger. But one of the things that got him in trouble, especially with Ted Kennedy, is that he wouldn't spend more money. That contrasts think with Biden. And then they also, although he came late to the cause, he did appoint Paul Volcker with the mandate to bring inflation down that was so far out of control, much higher even than it was under Biden. And Biden showed no interest in even recognizing the problem, let alone showing any restraint in spending or having the Federal Reserve Act more vigorously about it.

How did Carter react to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?

SH: It was a few days after the invasion of Afghanistan, and Carter had apparently talked to Brezhnev on the hotline and was very unsatisfied with their conversation. And Carter told an interviewer, might've been 60 Minutes, I don't recall now, but he said, "I have learned more about the Soviet Union in the last three days than I thought in the prior years of my adult life," which made somebody ask the question, not to him, but aloud as "What did he think before the last three days?"

But after Afghanistan he also started to take defense spending seriously right?

SH: But you're right, he did then say, we're going to start building up defense. He announced the Carter doctrine, which really wasn't some ways the predicate of the Gulf War 10 years later that any attack on a Middle Eastern ally is an attack on vital American interest and will respond accordingly. But then he sent off a squadron F-15 fighters to Saudi Arabia without any missiles or bombs on them just as a show of airplanes. So typical Carter move.

Why has the Democratic Party moved away from Carter’s embrace of nuclear power?

SH: I think the biggest reason was is that the environmental movement became more and more powerful from the Democratic Party, and he was a victim of circumstances. You remember that you had the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, which harmed nobody in 1979. It's now forgotten. But Carter appointed a commission to review the episode, the Kemeny Commission it was called. And their report, which came out months later when all the fuss had died down, said this was overblown, there was never any risk of a catastrophe here. They said everything's fine, but we should have confidence in our nuclear industry. But that didn't do any good. It didn't get a lot of press because it didn't fit the narrative. And then I think being anti-nuclear became a de rigueur to Democratic Party.

Why do Americans now view both Carter’s presidency and post presidency with rose-colored glasses?

SH: Americans tend to be generous people, and we remember the good and tune out the bad, and so reputations of just about everybody rise over time. Even Nixon has a better reputation 10, 15, 20 and 50 years later than he did when he left office. George W. Bush's ratings are up. It's happened... Truman, right? Truman left office with an approval rating of 25%, and historians said, "Actually, it was better than we thought." Okay, that's one reason.

Second, Carter was very good at PR. So what people mostly think about with Carter is, "Well, he started Habitat for Humanity," which he actually didn't start it, but he helped build it up. He gets credit for good deeds like that. He also did work assiduously to eradicate Guinea worm disease in Africa, a rare but really nasty disease that afflicts a lot of children, and he gets a lot of credit for that. If he had done only those kinds of things, he would deserve the reputation of this sort of elder statesman and humanitarian and American Gandhi, so to speak.

Read the transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

What Carter and Biden Have in Common (Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2025)

The Untold Story of Jimmy Carter’s Hawkish Stand on Iran (Ray Takeyh, Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2025)

Conservatism’s Debts to Jimmy Carter (Dan McLaughlin, National Review, December 30, 2024)

Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President (Philip Klein, National Review, December 29, 2024)

The Real Jimmy Carter [Dershowitz on Harvard and the Zayed Foundation] (Alan Dershowitz, Middle East Forum, April 27, 2007)

The Under- and Over-Estimated Jimmy Carter, RIP (Steven Heyward, December 29, 2024)

Make Mine Malaise (Steven Hayward, Washington Times, July 20, 2009)

The Other J.C. (Steven Hayward, AEI, July 1, 2007)

Summary of The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry (CELA)

Malaise Forever (Jonathan Last, Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2005)