National Review‘s institutional attitude toward this son of Plains, Ga., was a saga unto itself: from confusion to frustration and ending in extended condemnation.
National Review's institutional attitude toward this son of Plains, Ga., was a saga unto itself: from confusion to frustration and ending in extended condemnation.
‘J immy Carter: went to Georgia Tech and Annapolis, did graduate work in nuclear physics; served as a submarine commander; made lots of money in peanuts; went to the Georgia legislature in 1962; was elected Governor in 1970.” So read the earliest comprehensive appraisal of the now-deceased former president in the pages of National Review. (He had received scattered mentions earlier, one of them claiming that Carter and Texas Democratic senator Lloyd Bentsen were considered “reactionaries” by their party’s Left.) National Review’s institutional attitude toward this son of Plains, Ga., was a saga unto itself: from confusion to frustration and ending in extended condemnation.
At first, Carter was mostly incomprehensible to NR. John R. Coyne Jr., a Nixon and Agnew speechwriter, did his best to make sense of the enigma in two reports on Carter’s campaign in 1976 while the Democratic primary was ongoing. “Carter’s support is strange, however, shapeless and difficult to diagram,” Coyne noted, adding a critique that many other conservatives would soon echo: “His position on the issues is still essentially unknown.” (William F. Buckley Jr. noted around the same time: “Jimmy Carter is not only less than concrete, he seems to take the position that it is somehow vulgar to be concrete.”) Coyne admitted, “I don’t pretend to understand the Carter phenomenon,” yet had to confess that “it is a phenomenon, and even if Carter doesn’t make it to the White House, I believe he may significantly alter the shape of American politics.”
After Carter triumphed in the Democratic primary, National Review began to understand him a little better — as a threat. “Jimmy Carter is going to be the opposition, and a formidable opposition,” one unsigned editorial asserted in the summer of 1976. And while in the heat of that year’s general election campaign, William F. Buckley held out hope that “the American people are proving capable of awakening from the daze of Carter,” it was not to be.
In another unsigned editorial in the first post-election issue, the editors took stock of Carter’s victory in a sober yet prescient fashion. The general case was that, while Carter may have kept his party together just enough to get into the White House, he would soon face more challenges; whether he would prove equal to them seemed dubious. “Carter managed to solve the problem of Democratic contradictions in his campaign for election, solved it just barely — but his problems are only beginning.”
National Review didn’t wait long to assess Carter in action. Indeed, one of the first such assessments, by founding editor James Burnham, was likely not based on anything Carter had yet done as president, given that it was published in the issue marked the day after his inauguration in 1977. But give the perspicacious Burnham some credit for his observation that “it won’t take long to figure out whether Carter, in foreign policy, is going to drift along, merely reacting, from episode to episode.” Going off slightly more a few weeks later, William F. Buckley Jr. was actually pleasantly surprised. As Carter seemed to him to be “competent,” the country would have to “wait and see,” but it seems likely that “with a little luck, the Republic will survive a term in office by President Carter.”
Yet by the end of the year, an unsigned editorial had things looking grim: “Some vital signs persist, recovery may be possible, but the general prognosis seems distinctly negative.” A month later, the same body pronounced him “in deep trouble.” Marking Carter’s first year in office in February 1978, economist and American Enterprise Institute scholar Yale Brozen aligned with this growing pessimism. “The Administration’s actions add up to repeated violations of the overriding themes of the Carter campaign,” he wrote. However, Brozen found one positive note with the “White House move to loosen the regulation of airlines and trucking.”
Carter’s image soon weakened considerably, especially as the 1980 general election neared. A National Review editorial in April 1978 had already declared that “there are those, and their number is increasing, who are beginning to think that Jimmy Carter may be the most inadequate President in U.S. history.” And Buckley, with a charity that in hindsight reads almost as mockery, rejected calls for Carter to step down.
In 1980, our own Rick Brookhiser noted that Carter’s overall spirit was unpopular even within his own party. Describing what was already then known as Carter’s “malaise” speech, he observed that Senator Ted Kennedy (Mass.), who put up a spirited challenge to Carter in that year’s Democratic primary, disputed the speech’s deprecation of America. “It’s the political leadership that is in a political malaise,” Kennedy thundered with almost Reaganesque fervor. “This country is not prepared to sound retreat. It is ready to advance.” Carter and Kennedy weren’t all that different, but on this question of “attitude,” Brookhiser argued, they diverged dramatically.
Sensing a likely victory as their champion Ronald Reagan advanced that fall, some conservatives began licking their chops. So much so that longtime National Review publisher Bill Rusher felt the need to push back on one of the narratives about Carter’s loss that was already forming: It would be a major defeat for liberalism. Not so fast, said Rusher: Carter had campaigned on conservative themes in a generally conservative country; if National Review chalked up his defeat solely to his leftism, “it will wind up in the absurd position of claiming a victory that conservatism did not really achieve in a war it has already won.”
Rusher’s was a counterintuitive argument for “The Disputed Question,” a section of NR dedicated to areas where editorial staff members differed. Whether Rusher was right in his judgment, he was correct in his prediction that Carter would soon be defeated. In an unsigned editorial, the editors explained why. “Carter had inertia on his side. Reagan had hope.” Reagan “told America it could be great again, and it responded” because “America likes that kind of talk.” Whereas “in Washington and Manhattan, where the media people dwell and commune together, they don’t seem to understand that.”
In Federalist No. 72, Alexander Hamilton (as Publius) argued against limiting the number of terms a president could serve. “Would it promote the peace of the community, or the stability of the government to have half a dozen men who had had credit enough to be raised to the seat of the supreme magistracy, wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess?”
As we have since imposed a two-term limit on presidencies, the specific conditions of Hamilton’s argument no longer apply. But what better way to describe post-presidential Jimmy Carter than as a “discontented” ghost, “sighing for a place” he was destined never more to possess? Because Carter did not quit public life after his presidency, National Review could not entirely quit commenting on him. In 1990, a decade after the ignominious end of the Carter presidency, Jack Fowler, once (and, when we are lucky, still) of this publication, lamented Carter’s role as an observer of Nicaragua’s contested presidential election that year.
After results that forced the country’s then-ruling leftist Sandinistas from power, Carter argued that the defeated party nonetheless deserved to have one of its demands met: disarming the anti-Marxist Contra rebels. “Carter’s move both undercut” the election’s victors “and refocused media attention on a favorite target: the Contras.” Par for the course for Carter, however: “It’s not the first time this defeated U.S. President has shown that he is out of touch with a nation’s electorate.”
The ghost of Carter continued to haunt National Review in other ways as well. In 1993, after another charismatic, heretofore obscure Southern Democrat performed the unlikely feat of winning the presidency, Andrew Ferguson could not resist feelings of déjà vu. “For all the JFK mannerisms — the jabbing finger, the soaring cadences, the roving eye — the ties that bind Bill Clinton to the man from Plains are far more portentous,” Ferguson wrote. The Miracle of Jimmy Carter, written by Howard Norton and Bob Slosser during the campaign of 1976, was Ferguson’s memory muse. Ferguson ended his own extended comparison by quoting it, mordantly: “If Jimmy Carter makes it to the White House . . . the country is in for some surprises.” Ferguson concluded: “And so we were. Surprise us twice, shame on us.”
By 2002, Carter’s post-presidential record was extensive — and wanting, according to our own Jay Nordlinger. “If there’s one thing everyone ‘knows’ about Jimmy Carter, it’s that he’s been an excellent ex-president — a ‘model ex-president,’ everyone says,” Jay wrote. “But some of us have to wonder, sometimes.” Jay runs through Carter’s record as an “irritant” to his successors in the White House: “He exasperated Clinton on North Korea and Haiti, and he appalled the first Bush. In the run-up to the Gulf War, as the administration was trying to assemble a coalition against Iraq, Carter sent a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council, urging them to thwart the administration’s effort. Some around Washington were heard to mutter ‘treason.’” Jay ended by wondering, “How much more damage will he do, our ‘model ex-president’”? One can certainly wish the best to Carter’s friends and family, and for his immortal soul, while at the same time being relieved that we can now answer: none, anymore.
When Barack Obama burst onto the political scene, the Carter comparison proved useful once more. So argued Rich Lowry, who likened the then-senator from Illinois to the former peanut farmer. In this instance, however, Rich thought the comparison might point to political benefit for Obama. “There has been a lively competition among analysts to identify the year —1948? 1968? etc. — to which current circumstances in the War on Terror and in our politics are most analogous. Barack Obama should hope it’s 1976, when the country turned to a hope-hawking political neophyte to soothe away memories of an unpopular war and fundamental doubts about the capacities and intentions of the United States government.”
However useful the Carter comparisons may be, in the conservative mind (no, not that one), Carter will probably never escape the shadow of Reagan, his electoral vanquisher and political superior. Remarking on the 40th anniversary of the election that ended Carter’s career in elected office, Reagan historian Craig Shirley found that contest to have underrated significance. “The election of 1980 didn’t lead to civil war, but it did free millions from Soviet bondage,” Shirley wrote. “Four years of Jimmy Carter, thought by some to be a good man who was sadly unequal to the presidency, had crippled the nation in more ways than one.” Carter’s defeat was a victory for the American spirit. “Carter believed that the great days of America were behind it and that the sooner the nation accepted this, the better off it would be. Reagan, conversely, promoted a vision of America emerging from victory in the Cold War into a second golden age.” We needn’t dwell on the counterfactual, inhabiting, as we do, the world Reagan left us.
This is not a complete record of National Review’s experience of the man from Plains. But it captures the spirit of that history. Carter outlived many (though not all) of his critics from this magazine. But the judgment of history is harder to escape. So long to the one-time president, and longtime ghost.