Teaching US history, I ranked Jimmy Carter in the top 4 presidents. Washington because he United us; Lincoln because he changed the focus to the individual and preserved the Union: F. D. Roosevelt for keeping us afloat through the Great Depression, WWII, and restoring the focus on the dignity of all people; and Carter for exemplifying true democracy and not formulating policies only to stay in power. His was a true "first among equals" leadership.
You will probaby be aware that the Presidential Greatness Project ranked Carter 22nd amongst US presidents (up from 33rd). Trump is ranked 45th, rock-bottom.
I remember the election between Ford and Carter. Being a child I couldn't vote and I remember my parents were backing Ford but I hoped Carter would win bc I thought he was a nice and good person and tried to get along with others. The things adults expected from and said to me everyday. He role modeled that. I'm very happy to hear that you put him at the top of your list.
Jimmy Carter wasn't a billionaire or even a multimillionaire, yet he might have been one of the wealthiest presidents we ever had as he gave so much more than many of our self anointed leaders.
I really appreciate all the lesser-known but meaningful details you included in your piece on Jimmy Carter. One example is that he pointed out to the country the increasing single-issue individualism that seems to plague many voters now. It strikes me that Carter was the humanitarian president of our time, and I’m glad we have the conversation focused on his noble life and work as we now face the inauguration of a president so utterly deficient. Thanks so much for your explications, Heather— I’m so glad I found you and have recommended your newsletter to many friends and family. From Alison- a listener and reader just up the coast!
Mark, you listed the same Presidents I count as the best thus far. I am near tears when I read or listen to people speak of Carter. So meaningful were his attempts to promote peace & justice. He was a great example of humility that I can only hope for in a person who ends up becoming part of our future politics. I agree that Jimmy was a very wealthy person with all he set examples for & the millions of friends he gained by his living by example. I wish I could be on the streets of DC when his funeral is held. I believe the crowds will be immense.
I always think that Carter's attitudes and politics saved the lives of at least three people I had to do with earlier in life: two from Latin America and another from Ethiopia, all three young, passionate and progressive. None of my interactions had to do with politics and they had little of what you might call "politics" in them - though they got here because one secret police unit or another had winkled them out as "activists". I think that their saved lives is a measure of success few politicians can meet.
He probably saved more lives than any other US president. No US soldier was killed in combat during his presidency, apart from the accidental loss of 8 servicemen in the failed mission to rescue the hostages held in Iran in 1979, Operation Eagle Claw - the first president since Jefferson to do this. Some had opined that had he bombed Tehran he might have been re-elected.
Thank you for setting forth the case that his presidency was not the dissapointment characterized by so many. Like Biden, but perhaps more so, he made significant achievements on many fronts for which he gets little credit. Some have labeled him, "impolitic," as if that were a flaw. He was not motivated by political gain; he cared more about doing what, according to his lights, was right. The Iran hostage issue is a perfect example. He negotiated behind the scenes to secure their release and suffered the political consequences for his diplomatic discretion. Reagan cynically capitalized on this, and his presidency continued the slide into the swamp Movement Conservatism has mired us.
Jimmy was the right person for that time. His goodness was the poultice America needed to mend from the scourge of Nixon’s Republican crookedness and deceit. We now need to work to block the Nomination Abominations. A letter to your senators is in this. https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/nomination-abominations?r=3m1bs
He was a man of integrity and of compassion. What a legacy he has. And a man who loved his wife and valued what’s truly important. May he rest in peace.
I remember that time, in stark contrast to what we are facing now.
Carter invented the post-presidency and he made it a thing like no other president has done since and he won the Nobel peace prize for his relentless charitable work. In his eulogy at Gerald Ford's funeral he noted how both he and Ford had been amused by a New Yorker cartoon. He described it thus: "This little boy is looking up at his father. And he says, "Daddy, when I grow up, I want to be a former president."
On target! Rather than embarking on a money-making campaign of high-priced speaking engagements, President Carter continued to focus on civil and human rights issues, which arguably, had a greater impact than his presidential years. I was inspired by his commitments to begin volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, and completed working on my 5th home. I have a long way to go to come anywhere close to Jimmy's accomplishments!
Loved Jimmy Carter. I was in second grade when he lost the gubernatorial race to lecherous Lester Maddox. My very progressive father helped me look across the railroad tracks from his church he pastored and explained what I was seeing when LM passed out his ax handles. That is a vivid image and thought that resides in my mind and psyche even today. We were in a tiny, south GA town and the establishment across the railroad tracks was a white building where white people entered the cafe upstairs and were seated. People of color went to the back and ordered at a window to eat outside. There were no tables. Gov. Jimmy signed my first driver’s license. While some things have changed, we need a Jimmy Carter again because we have a long way to go. The orange mussolini and his disgusting ilk definitely will drag us way back. Happy new year.
I like and admire Jimmy Carter, but here is another view of his presidency. He did a deal of good domestically, but his foreign policies had some flaws, perhaps because he was a novice at foreign affairs, but also, surely, because even a president can't change the imperial direction of the U.S.
Don't Deify Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter may have done good works out of office, but in power he fomented a series of domestic and foreign policy disasters.
CHRIS HEDGES
DEC 30
Carter may have done good works out of office, but in power he fomented a series of domestic and foreign policy disasters.
Jimmy Carter, out of office, had the courage to call out the “abominable oppression and persecution” and “strict segregation” of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” He dedicated himself to monitoring elections, including his controversial defenseof the 2006 election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and championed human rights around the globe. He lambasted the American political process as an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
But Carter’s years as an ex-president should not mask his dogged service to the empire, penchant for fomenting disastrous proxy wars, betrayal of the Palestinians, embrace of punishing neoliberal policies and his subservience to big business when he was in office.
Carter played a significant role in dismantling New Deal legislation with the deregulation of major industries including airlines, banking, trucking, telecommunications, natural gas and railways. He appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve, who, in an effort to combat inflation, drove up interest rates and pushed the U.S. into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, a move that saw the start of punishing austerity cuts. Carter is the godfather of the pillage known as neoliberalism, a pillage fellow Democrat Bill Clinton would turbo charge.
Carter fell under the disastrous influence of his Svengali-like national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish exile, who rejected the Nixon-Kissinger reliance on détente with the Soviet Union. Brzezinski’s life’s mission, one that meant he saw the world in black and white, was to confront and destroy the Soviet Union along with any government or movement he deemed to be under communist influence or sympathetic to it.
Carter, under Brzezinski’s influence, walked away from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union, which sought to curb nuclear weapons deployment. He increased military spending. He sent military aid to the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesianinvasion and occupation of East Timor, which many have characterized as a genocide. He supported, along with the apartheid state of South Africa, the murderous counter revolutionary group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. He provided aid to the brutal Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. He supported the Khmer Rouge.
He instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to back opposition groups and political parties to bring down the Sandinista government in Nicaragua once it took power in 1979, leading under the Reagan administration to the formation of the Contras and a bloody and senseless U.S.-backed insurgency. He provided military aid to the dictatorship in El Salvador, ignoring an appealfrom Archbishop Oscar Romero — later assassinated — to cease U.S. arms shipments.
He poisoned U.S. relations with Iran by backing the repressive regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi until the last minute and then allowing the deposed Shah to seek medical treatment in New York, triggering the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a 444-day hostage crisis. Carter’s belligerence — he froze Iranian assets, stopped importing oil from Iran and expelled 183 Iranian diplomats from the U.S. — played into Ayatollah Khomeini’s demonization of the U.S. and calls for Islamic rule. He obliterated the credibility of Iran’s secular opposition.
Carter gave Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, although he ruled under martial law, billions in military aid. He armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan after the Soviet intervention in 1979, a decision that cost the U.S. $3 billion, saw the deaths of 1.5 million Afghans and led to the creation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The blowback from this Carter policy alone is catastrophic.
He backed the South Korean military in 1980 when it laid siege to the city of Gwangju, where protestors had formed a militia, which led to the massacre of some 2,000 people.
Finally, he sold out the Palestinians when he negotiated a separate peace deal, known as the Camp David Accords, in 1979 between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The agreement excluded the Palestine Liberation Organization from the talks. Israel never, as promised to Carter, attempted to resolve the Palestine question with Jordan and Egypt’s involvement. It never permitted Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza within five years. It did not end Israeli settlements — a refusal that led Carter to later claim Begin had lied to him. But since there was no mechanism in the agreement for enforcement, and since Carter was unwilling to defy the Israel lobby to impose sanctions on Israel, the Palestinians found themselves, once again, powerless and abandoned.
Carter, to his credit, did appoint the civil rights activist Patricia Derian as his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, leading to the blocking of loans and reduction in military aid to the military junta in Argentina during the Dirty War, restrictions the Reagan administration removed. Derian’s commitment to human rights was genuine. She supportedPhilippines leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. and the South Korean dissident and former president Kim Dae-jung. Carter allowed her to anger a few of our most repressive allies. But his human rights policy was primarily designed to back democratic dissidents and worker movements in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland, in an effort to weaken the Soviet Union.
Carter had a decency most politicians lack, but his moral crusades, which came once he was out of power, seem like a form of penance. His record as president is bloody and dismal, although not as bloody and dismal as the presidents who followed. That’s the best we can say of him.
Perhaps it was a penance he placed on himself? I don't know Jimmy Carter or what it's like to be a President. I don't know what people were saying to him behind closed doors or how they were guiding him in matters of foreign policy? I do know that president's don't get to do alot of what they personally want to get done as their hands are tied in most cases by Congress and there are many players involved in situations like you described.
Thanks so much for this deep dive into Carter's presidential accomplishments. He was in office slightly before my time on this planet began, so the only impression I ever had of his presidency was what my parents thought, which wasn't much. My personal opinion of him as a kind and compassionate humanitarian developed after he left office and took up his many "world improvement" projects.
Teaching US history, I ranked Jimmy Carter in the top 4 presidents. Washington because he United us; Lincoln because he changed the focus to the individual and preserved the Union: F. D. Roosevelt for keeping us afloat through the Great Depression, WWII, and restoring the focus on the dignity of all people; and Carter for exemplifying true democracy and not formulating policies only to stay in power. His was a true "first among equals" leadership.
A perfect example of the Greatest Generation 🙏
You will probaby be aware that the Presidential Greatness Project ranked Carter 22nd amongst US presidents (up from 33rd). Trump is ranked 45th, rock-bottom.
So much for that project....
I remember the election between Ford and Carter. Being a child I couldn't vote and I remember my parents were backing Ford but I hoped Carter would win bc I thought he was a nice and good person and tried to get along with others. The things adults expected from and said to me everyday. He role modeled that. I'm very happy to hear that you put him at the top of your list.
Jimmy Carter wasn't a billionaire or even a multimillionaire, yet he might have been one of the wealthiest presidents we ever had as he gave so much more than many of our self anointed leaders.
I really appreciate all the lesser-known but meaningful details you included in your piece on Jimmy Carter. One example is that he pointed out to the country the increasing single-issue individualism that seems to plague many voters now. It strikes me that Carter was the humanitarian president of our time, and I’m glad we have the conversation focused on his noble life and work as we now face the inauguration of a president so utterly deficient. Thanks so much for your explications, Heather— I’m so glad I found you and have recommended your newsletter to many friends and family. From Alison- a listener and reader just up the coast!
Mark, you listed the same Presidents I count as the best thus far. I am near tears when I read or listen to people speak of Carter. So meaningful were his attempts to promote peace & justice. He was a great example of humility that I can only hope for in a person who ends up becoming part of our future politics. I agree that Jimmy was a very wealthy person with all he set examples for & the millions of friends he gained by his living by example. I wish I could be on the streets of DC when his funeral is held. I believe the crowds will be immense.
I always think that Carter's attitudes and politics saved the lives of at least three people I had to do with earlier in life: two from Latin America and another from Ethiopia, all three young, passionate and progressive. None of my interactions had to do with politics and they had little of what you might call "politics" in them - though they got here because one secret police unit or another had winkled them out as "activists". I think that their saved lives is a measure of success few politicians can meet.
He probably saved more lives than any other US president. No US soldier was killed in combat during his presidency, apart from the accidental loss of 8 servicemen in the failed mission to rescue the hostages held in Iran in 1979, Operation Eagle Claw - the first president since Jefferson to do this. Some had opined that had he bombed Tehran he might have been re-elected.
Thank you for setting forth the case that his presidency was not the dissapointment characterized by so many. Like Biden, but perhaps more so, he made significant achievements on many fronts for which he gets little credit. Some have labeled him, "impolitic," as if that were a flaw. He was not motivated by political gain; he cared more about doing what, according to his lights, was right. The Iran hostage issue is a perfect example. He negotiated behind the scenes to secure their release and suffered the political consequences for his diplomatic discretion. Reagan cynically capitalized on this, and his presidency continued the slide into the swamp Movement Conservatism has mired us.
I still imagine what our country would be like if Carter had won a second term.
I was a long time republican (note was). Jimmy Carter was the first Democrat I ever voted for.
Jimmy was the right person for that time. His goodness was the poultice America needed to mend from the scourge of Nixon’s Republican crookedness and deceit. We now need to work to block the Nomination Abominations. A letter to your senators is in this. https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/nomination-abominations?r=3m1bs
Thank you. I downloaded your letter and will edit and send it.
That is great news. We can also call them. Their staff will log the nays. Speed dial. Call often.
I plan to. Sadly, my senators will be Bernie Moreno, not in office yet, and whoever replaces JD Vance.
He deserves a monument in DC with a list of these achievements.
He was a man of integrity and of compassion. What a legacy he has. And a man who loved his wife and valued what’s truly important. May he rest in peace.
I remember that time, in stark contrast to what we are facing now.
Carter invented the post-presidency and he made it a thing like no other president has done since and he won the Nobel peace prize for his relentless charitable work. In his eulogy at Gerald Ford's funeral he noted how both he and Ford had been amused by a New Yorker cartoon. He described it thus: "This little boy is looking up at his father. And he says, "Daddy, when I grow up, I want to be a former president."
On target! Rather than embarking on a money-making campaign of high-priced speaking engagements, President Carter continued to focus on civil and human rights issues, which arguably, had a greater impact than his presidential years. I was inspired by his commitments to begin volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, and completed working on my 5th home. I have a long way to go to come anywhere close to Jimmy's accomplishments!
Loved Jimmy Carter. I was in second grade when he lost the gubernatorial race to lecherous Lester Maddox. My very progressive father helped me look across the railroad tracks from his church he pastored and explained what I was seeing when LM passed out his ax handles. That is a vivid image and thought that resides in my mind and psyche even today. We were in a tiny, south GA town and the establishment across the railroad tracks was a white building where white people entered the cafe upstairs and were seated. People of color went to the back and ordered at a window to eat outside. There were no tables. Gov. Jimmy signed my first driver’s license. While some things have changed, we need a Jimmy Carter again because we have a long way to go. The orange mussolini and his disgusting ilk definitely will drag us way back. Happy new year.
Well said, Marie
Damn. I knew I loved this guy, thanks for helping me see I loved him even more. Anti-segregationist IN GEORGIA, in 1970!!
I like and admire Jimmy Carter, but here is another view of his presidency. He did a deal of good domestically, but his foreign policies had some flaws, perhaps because he was a novice at foreign affairs, but also, surely, because even a president can't change the imperial direction of the U.S.
Don't Deify Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter may have done good works out of office, but in power he fomented a series of domestic and foreign policy disasters.
CHRIS HEDGES
DEC 30
Carter may have done good works out of office, but in power he fomented a series of domestic and foreign policy disasters.
Jimmy Carter, out of office, had the courage to call out the “abominable oppression and persecution” and “strict segregation” of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” He dedicated himself to monitoring elections, including his controversial defenseof the 2006 election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and championed human rights around the globe. He lambasted the American political process as an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
But Carter’s years as an ex-president should not mask his dogged service to the empire, penchant for fomenting disastrous proxy wars, betrayal of the Palestinians, embrace of punishing neoliberal policies and his subservience to big business when he was in office.
Carter played a significant role in dismantling New Deal legislation with the deregulation of major industries including airlines, banking, trucking, telecommunications, natural gas and railways. He appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve, who, in an effort to combat inflation, drove up interest rates and pushed the U.S. into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, a move that saw the start of punishing austerity cuts. Carter is the godfather of the pillage known as neoliberalism, a pillage fellow Democrat Bill Clinton would turbo charge.
Carter fell under the disastrous influence of his Svengali-like national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish exile, who rejected the Nixon-Kissinger reliance on détente with the Soviet Union. Brzezinski’s life’s mission, one that meant he saw the world in black and white, was to confront and destroy the Soviet Union along with any government or movement he deemed to be under communist influence or sympathetic to it.
Carter, under Brzezinski’s influence, walked away from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union, which sought to curb nuclear weapons deployment. He increased military spending. He sent military aid to the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesianinvasion and occupation of East Timor, which many have characterized as a genocide. He supported, along with the apartheid state of South Africa, the murderous counter revolutionary group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. He provided aid to the brutal Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. He supported the Khmer Rouge.
He instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to back opposition groups and political parties to bring down the Sandinista government in Nicaragua once it took power in 1979, leading under the Reagan administration to the formation of the Contras and a bloody and senseless U.S.-backed insurgency. He provided military aid to the dictatorship in El Salvador, ignoring an appealfrom Archbishop Oscar Romero — later assassinated — to cease U.S. arms shipments.
He poisoned U.S. relations with Iran by backing the repressive regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi until the last minute and then allowing the deposed Shah to seek medical treatment in New York, triggering the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a 444-day hostage crisis. Carter’s belligerence — he froze Iranian assets, stopped importing oil from Iran and expelled 183 Iranian diplomats from the U.S. — played into Ayatollah Khomeini’s demonization of the U.S. and calls for Islamic rule. He obliterated the credibility of Iran’s secular opposition.
Carter gave Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, although he ruled under martial law, billions in military aid. He armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan after the Soviet intervention in 1979, a decision that cost the U.S. $3 billion, saw the deaths of 1.5 million Afghans and led to the creation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The blowback from this Carter policy alone is catastrophic.
He backed the South Korean military in 1980 when it laid siege to the city of Gwangju, where protestors had formed a militia, which led to the massacre of some 2,000 people.
Finally, he sold out the Palestinians when he negotiated a separate peace deal, known as the Camp David Accords, in 1979 between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The agreement excluded the Palestine Liberation Organization from the talks. Israel never, as promised to Carter, attempted to resolve the Palestine question with Jordan and Egypt’s involvement. It never permitted Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza within five years. It did not end Israeli settlements — a refusal that led Carter to later claim Begin had lied to him. But since there was no mechanism in the agreement for enforcement, and since Carter was unwilling to defy the Israel lobby to impose sanctions on Israel, the Palestinians found themselves, once again, powerless and abandoned.
Carter, to his credit, did appoint the civil rights activist Patricia Derian as his Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, leading to the blocking of loans and reduction in military aid to the military junta in Argentina during the Dirty War, restrictions the Reagan administration removed. Derian’s commitment to human rights was genuine. She supportedPhilippines leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. and the South Korean dissident and former president Kim Dae-jung. Carter allowed her to anger a few of our most repressive allies. But his human rights policy was primarily designed to back democratic dissidents and worker movements in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland, in an effort to weaken the Soviet Union.
Carter had a decency most politicians lack, but his moral crusades, which came once he was out of power, seem like a form of penance. His record as president is bloody and dismal, although not as bloody and dismal as the presidents who followed. That’s the best we can say of him.
Perhaps it was a penance he placed on himself? I don't know Jimmy Carter or what it's like to be a President. I don't know what people were saying to him behind closed doors or how they were guiding him in matters of foreign policy? I do know that president's don't get to do alot of what they personally want to get done as their hands are tied in most cases by Congress and there are many players involved in situations like you described.
Jimmy Carter was my first vote, and then my second. Favorite line from this podcast we are all Americans together.!!
Thanks so much for this deep dive into Carter's presidential accomplishments. He was in office slightly before my time on this planet began, so the only impression I ever had of his presidency was what my parents thought, which wasn't much. My personal opinion of him as a kind and compassionate humanitarian developed after he left office and took up his many "world improvement" projects.