The misunderstood consequences of Jimmy Carter’s presidency

The question for the history books to decide is whether he made the problems worse through indecision and vacillation, or whether his tumultuous presidency was simply trapped in a period of inescapable turmoil, the seeds of which had been sown years earlier.

In any case, Carter, who died Sunday, should be remembered as a president of great consequence—indeed, of greater consequence in retrospect than it might have seemed when voters denied him a second term. The tendency in the years since he left Washington in 1980 has been to associate him and his presidency with the crises that piled in upon him: an energy shortage, gasoline lines, debilitating inflation, soaring interest rates, leftists taking over in Nicaragua, Soviet troops marching into Afghanistan, Iranian students seizing diplomatic hostages at the embassy in Tehran.

In stereotype, Jimmy Carter came to be seen as a decent, hardworking man who was simply in over his head. Yet that is a woefully incomplete picture of the impact James Earl Carter Jr. had on our politics and on the world.

Carter had been running a Georgia peanut farm just a few years before his improbable victory in 1976. At a time that the presidency had long been passed from one insider to another, he showed that an outsider could break through. In a sense, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both walked in his footsteps.

Though the phenomenon now is associated with Republicans, Carter actually brought evangelical Christians into the political arena as an organized force. By openly presenting himself as a born-again Christian—indeed, one who continued to teach Sunday school while president—he saw a moral calculus in the decisions of governance and brought discussion of religion out of the political shadows. That won him, temporarily, the support of many Americans of similar belief.

It is little remembered now, but Carter, a Democrat, improbably introduced an era of deregulation of the U.S. economy. At least to some extent, he deregulated the airline, trucking and railroad industries, and lifted price controls on oil. He never quite got the benefits hoped for, but his actions marked an inflection point for the government’s relationship with the economy.

He embedded the idea that morality had a place in America’s foreign policy by declaring that respect for human rights—until then, a term rarely identified with national-security decisions—should be at the center of U.S. policy overseas. He was mocked as naive by some, but his policy marked an end to the more bloodless and coldly calculating period of realpolitik that previously had dominated U.S. national-security calculations.

He pushed through Congress a plan previous presidents had considered, but dropped, to turn over ownership of the Panama Canal to the country of Panama. For doing so he was roundly attacked by his domestic foes, particularly by Reagan, the Republican who would defeat him in his re-election bid.

“He paid a very high price," recalls Jack Watson, who served as Carter’s White House chief of staff. But, Watson asserts, his willingness to ignore the political risks showed that “Carter brought a genuine—not a rhetorical or a theoretical but a genuine—integrity to his presidency."

At home, first as governor of Georgia and then as president, he went some distance to erase the image of the South as a bastion of racism, and to integrate minorities deeper into the machinery of government. Abroad, his signature achievement on the global stage was the historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, won through long and arduous personal diplomacy at the Camp David presidential retreat. The deal opened the door to a new period of prosperity in Israel and for new diplomatic efforts that bore fruit as recently as Trump’s own Arab-Israeli diplomatic breakthroughs during his first term.

In the end, none of those achievements could save him from defeat in 1980. But in the four-plus decades since, Carter became the most successful former president in modern times, through his work on housing for the poor at home and democracy abroad, and by never seeking to capitalize financially on the fame he had won in public service.

Ultimately, Carter’s presidency was defined by forces he couldn’t control—and that, perhaps, no one could have controlled. He took office when the nation’s growing addiction to cheap imported oil had finally reached its unsustainable peak. Oil producers in the Middle East had America over a barrel, and they discovered in the 1970s that they could essentially dictate oil prices to the U.S. rather than the other way around.

The end of cheap oil, in turn, helped force a historic but painful transition in the U.S. economy, from one driven by bountiful energy and heavy manufacturing into one that would come to be dominated by technology and services. But starting that transition was difficult, and Carter bore the brunt of the pain.

The powerful forces bubbling just below the surface burst out in 1979, the third year of Carter’s presidency. Inflation ran at an astonishing 10.4% for the year, and mortgage interest rates were nearing 13%. Though nobody knew it at the time, manufacturing employment hit a peak that year, and then began to decline.

When Iran’s Islamic revolution struck in 1979, taking a relatively small amount of oil off the market for a time, prices soared, and Carter decided to give a speech presenting a new energy policy to the U.S. But in considering how to do that, he came to the conclusion that America’s problems ran deeper than high gas prices.

So he did a remarkable thing. He postponed the speech, relocated to the Camp David presidential retreat, and spent 10 days huddled with an array of prominent Americans to discuss how to get the country out of its funk. He emerged in mid-July to deliver what came to be known as “the malaise speech," in which he never actually used the term malaise but said the country was suffering from a crisis of confidence as deep as its energy crisis.

The speech went over well initially, but over time came to be seen as an attempt by the president to blame American citizens for his problems. Carter’s woes continued when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and Iranian students took dozens of American diplomats hostage later that year, setting the stage for his defeat and the conservative turn ushered in by Reagan.

Carter closed out his presidency with the kind of selfless good deed that would come to mark his post-presidency: He worked for days, often sleeplessly, on a deal to free the diplomats being held hostage in Iran, winning their release just as his successor was taking office.