An appraisal of Carter’s presidency

Stuart E. Eizenstat’s has written a fascinating new history of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The former peanut farmer from Georgia was a president who, according to conventional wisdom, didn’t care much for party politics; nonetheless, in Eizenstat’s view, Carter’s legacy on domestic and foreign policy has been vastly underappreciated. The author paints Carter as a “bold and determined” leader who bravely attacked the challenges of his time. Eizenstat goes so far as to argue that Carter might very well be the most successful one-term president in American history.

The author is well positioned to provide an insider’s account of the period between the election of 1976, when Carter defeated President Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in November 1980. Eizenstat arrived in Washington as part of Carter’s Southern cabal and saw what happened in the Oval Office as Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser and executive director of the White House domestic policy staff.

The book offers convincing case studies of Carter’s progress on environmental policy, where the president’s aversion to politics did not prevent him from achieving pathbreaking victories such as the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which protected more than 100 million acres of land in that state from development.

Eizenstat makes a convincing case that in foreign affairs, Carter possessed the kind of acumen and love for give-and-take that was lacking in politics at home. A provocative claim in the book is Eizenstat’s assertion that Carter’s innovative human rights agenda, combined with what the author sees as a forgotten record of robust defense spending, was as central to the end of the Cold War as Reagan’s negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Eizenstat is at his best when we get the inside story of the president’s rough-and-tumble relations with Congress. He offers fly-onthe-wall accounts of how the big battles of these years unfolded. While he has a tendency to explain Carter’s failures as a result of the president doing the right thing rather than making the politically attractive decision, we also watch as Carter moves his ideas forward in a surprisingly ruthless fashion.

For all his political failures and controversial decisions, one thing is clear: Carter immersed himself in the policy challenges of the period, he worked extraordinarily hard to find solutions to problems that seemed intractable, and he gave everything he had to restore Americans’ faith in the potential for government to do good.