The Real Jimmy Carter

With Venezuela's recall election hanging in the balance Sunday, he will resurface again.

But author Steven F. Hayward, F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order,” thinks Carter is far from the benign Zelig character of Woody Allen’s film.

In fact, he argues that history has been too kind to the former president.

Setting the record straight, the author culls through Carter’s life before, during and after his presidency, serving up a frightening reprise of his blunders, damage and deceit – and erasing the image of a benign, smiling “St. Jimmy” pounding nails at a Habitat for Humanity building site.

In his new book, “

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Hayward’s mission: “To bring to a new generation of readers many aspects of the Carter story that are well known to journalists and authors who pondered him when he was president, but whose works are now long out of print …”

A noble enough cause, but the reader’s unsettling journey is much like watching a car wreck in slow motion – you want to turn away from the more grisly sights but are compelled to fix your gaze.

After a tantalizing opening where Carter, the “overlooked meddler,” is working to sabotage George H.W. Bush’s assembly of an international coalition to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, Hayward tracks the life of the man from Plains in an attempt to fathom the roots of what the author perceives as Carter’s “deeply flawed character and ideology – a smugly pious arrogance matched with a profound distrust of America.”

After seeing Carter through his Huck Finn boyhood, the Naval Academy, the death of his father and his return to Plains, Ga., the author gets right into the myth-busting – recounting some of the Carter chicanery while serving on the Sumter County school board, his first political foray.

In 1956, recounts Hayward, Carter offered a motion to delay construction of a school for blacks after white parents complained that black and white pupils would taking the same roads to their respective schools. All those touted halcyon afternoons skylarking with his black playmates are not enough to lift Carter above political expediency.

After a tour as a state senator, Carter gets defeated in a premature bid for governor in 1966, a letdown that forges his steel and commitment to never lose again. Hardly had the ballots been counted when the indomitable Carter starts a monumental, driven four-year campaign to revenge his loss.

This time there are no holds barred - including a ruthless campaign mailer that depicts his opponent for the Democrat nomination, Carl Sanders, part owner of the Atlanta Hawks NBA team, at an after-game celebration with two black players pouring champagne over his head. The flyers were even passed out at a Ku Klux Klan rally.

The cynical use of the “race card” continues with the campaign paying for radio ads for a fringe black candidate.

(Lest you think Carter has changed, just this year he tried to keep Denise Majette from becoming the first black candidate ever nominated for the U.S. Senate in Georgia. On Tuesday, however,

After Carter wins the primary and general election, he quickly shows his famous flair for micromanagement, successfully pushing a plan as governor to consolidate 278 state agencies into just 22. (In 1976 while campaigning for the White House, Carter would promise to slash the number of federal agencies from 1,900 to 200.)

Although always cultivating an image of being a purist, above politics, the stubborn governor used the standard grab bag of tricks to wrangle his way: patronage appointments, dispersal of discretionary funds, etc. Carter’s friends in the legislature, for instance, received more highway money for their districts than Carter’s opponents.

When Carter decides to make his audacious run for the White House, his drive is in fast forward. As the author points out, his extraordinary stamina led political reporters to call him “the first bionic candidate.”

Making the most of Vietnam and Watergate, candidate Carter portrays himself as the ultimate outsider: “I am not a lawyer, I am not a member of Congress, and I’ve never served in Washington.”

“Washington has become a huge, bloated bureaucratic mess,” preached Carter to receptive ears. But his gauzy conservative-sounding views and his fuzziness on the issues generated massive distrust among the Democratic Party's liberals, says Hayward.

Marks Shields cleverly opined that Carter exhibited more positions than the “Kama Sutra.” A popular joke was that the presidential candidate's favorite color was plaid.

As the campaign moved forward, the slippery Carter was alternatively for defense cuts, but also for military strength; for detente, but for being tougher on the Soviets; against abortion, but against any effective restrictions on abortion; for more social spending, but also for a balanced budget and against tax increases; against “socialized medicine,” but for mandatory comprehensive federal health insurance.

But it was Carter’s overall strangeness that raised the most eyebrows, records the author:

“It’s not that Carter’s a Southerner,” says one Democrat, “it’s him; and he’s a strange guy.”

When Carter barely squeaks into office, the steamroller momentum of the campaign doesn’t slow. He immediately floods Congress with his programs for tax changes, health care, welfare reform, changes in campaign finance, and urban aid. Even activist Teddy Kennedy marveled, “Carter’s reforms are lined up bumper-to-bumper.”

Typical of Carter’s insular style was his energy package, which the author describes as being hatched by technicians behind closed doors with the secrecy of the Manhattan Project.

But if Carter treated Congress like an unwelcome impediment, it was his foreign relations that highlighted the dismal side of his administration. Kissinger perhaps puts it best, says the author:

“The Carter administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one time and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.”

Simultaneously, Carter began hacking away at defense. In his first moth in office, he cut an already-lean defense budget by an additional $6 billion. Then in a rampage he cancels the B-1 bomber - giving congressional leaders all of one hour’s notice - defers the development of the neutron bomb, and even talks up scrapping the Trident nuclear submarine.

It’s in the White House phase that the author’s theme of a “profound distrust of America” begins to emerge. When Carter moved to divest the country of the Panama Canal, his rhetoric was, to say the least, unflattering:

American ownership and control of the canal, Carter said, “exemplified those morally questionable aspects of past American foreign policy which the United States as a nation should humbly acknowledge in its striving for higher moral ground.”

It’s one thing to harangue the country as morally bankrupt, but Carter was to push that “morally questionable” theme onto the heads of the American people during the energy crisis that dogged his administration.

Against the advice of confidants such as Hamilton Jordan, Carter lambasted the citizenry during a national address:

“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

This somber appraisal of his fellow Americans came swiftly on the heels of heartfelt revelations unleashed at Camp David when Carter made his infamous retreat, inviting 134 eminent Americans from various walks of life to participate in heart-to-heart conversations with the troubled chief executive.

“President Malaise” expressed deep pessimism at Camp David: “I think it’s inevitable that there will be a lower standard of living than what everybody had always anticipated… The only trend is downhill.”

Ironically, Carter had run for office on the promise of “a government as good as the people.” He was now saying that the people were no good, opines Hayward.

In the midst of his personal crisis, Carter demanded the resignation of his entire Cabinet and 23 other senior White House officials. In the end, the flailing president accepted the resignations of Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal, Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, Transportation Secretary Brock Adams, Attorney General Griffin Bell, and Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano.

But it is the post-presidency career of Carter that most unsettles the author and perhaps the reader of “The Real Jimmy Carter”

Highlighting a host of trespasses, Carter made history in the spring of 2002 by becoming the first American ex-president to visit Cuba. The ground had been paved earlier by Carter in a series of unapproved, unauthorized phone calls with communist dictator Fidel Castro – the first in 1995, a step that enraged the Clinton administration.

This foreign interloping without portfolio was a typical, if exasperating, quality of the former president.

During Clinton’s Somalia mess, when he was not named as an official U.S. negotiator, Carter just unilaterally invited a Somalian delegation representing the wanted warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid to his Carter Center in Georgia.

In 1994 alone, Carter interjected himself into the civil war in Haiti, the genocide in Bosnia and the appeasement of North Korea.

Carter certainly hasn’t left the war administration of George W. Bush out of his personal loop. Just months into his presidency, Carter was giving up quotes such as: “I’ve been disappointed in almost everything he has done.” And: “I don’t think George W. Bush has any particular commitment to preservation of the principles of human rights.”

Chronically breaking the Golden Rule that former presidents don’t criticize sitting presidents, Carter has found it irresistible to interfere.

A case in point: President Bush’s missile defense plans. Carter was quick to label them “technologically ridiculous,” adding that the program “will re-escalate the nuclear arms race.”

With such statements, the former president continued in the vein that characterized his public attitude during the Reagan years when he repeatedly attacked the Gipper’s “peace through strength” orientation.

“If the American people get the idea, which is mistaken, that a nuclear arms race on our side is going to cause the Soviets to quit building nuclear weapons on their side, they are silly.”

Of course, history has proven Carter dead wrong.

Even with the Camp David Accords under his belt, Carter has gone out of way to condemn any subsequent administrations efforts in that volatile arena of the Middle East: “Had I been elected to a second term, with all the prestige and authority and influence and reputation I had in the region, we could have moved to a

But it was Carter who turned his back on the Shah of Iran, giving Islamic fundamentalist radicalism an enormous state sponsor and inspiration and made being an American ally in the Middle East seem more dangerous than being a foe of the U.S. Is this not the stuff of “reputation”?

The author sums up the phenomenon: “Carter bears a deep and abiding wound from the electorate’s humiliating rejection in 1980. The combination of his restless energy, ambition, idealism, and overweening pride makes it impossible for him to settle into comfortable ex-presidential retirement.”

A columnist for Time magazine once wrote that some of Carter’s “One Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason.”

The reader can file his or her own indictments after sitting in judgment on “The Real Jimmy Carter.”

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