Jimmy Carter: 'We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war'

[alp227]

Where does Jimmy Carter live? Well, close your eyes and imagine the kind of house an ex-president of the United States might live in. The sort of residence befitting the former leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Got it? Right, now scrub that clean from your mind and instead imagine the sort of house where a moderately successful junior accountant and his family might live.

(...)

If you're under 40, you may not even remember Jimmy Carter. But you might recall President Bartlet. From The West Wing. When I chat to Phil Wise, vice-president of the Carter Center – the foundation Carter set up after leaving office – he reminds me that Martin Sheen partly based his character on Carter. Wise grew up next door to the Carter family, and as a college student he volunteered for the governor's campaign alongside Chip, the middle son. He worked for the presidential campaign "as the youngest gopher", and ended up in the White House as Carter's appointment secretary. (His character in The West Wing? "The African-American man who sits outside the president's office.")

(...)

But his name is being increasingly linked with Obama's in other contexts too. In the heavyweight journal Foreign Policy, Walter Russell Mead coined a phrase to characterise what he suggested was hampering President Obama's presidency: the Carter Syndrome. The "conflicting impulses influencing how this young leader thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart. And in the worst scenario turn him into a new Jimmy Carter."

Or, as Nicholas Dawidoff put it in a major profile Rolling Stone published of Jimmy Carter this spring, it's because of Obama's "scattered ambitions, his lack of a grand vision, his outsider's discomfort with the ways of Washington, his fumbling economic policies… and above all his supposed lack of toughness, the man he is increasingly compared with is Carter".

But as Dawidoff points out, Jimmy Carter is to Republicans what George W Bush is to Democrats: their very names make their enemies foam at the mouth. And the reassessment is working both ways. For years Carter was considered a failure because he was a single-term president, because he was perceived as weak, and because he refused to take action against America's newly minted enemy, Iran. But, at this distance, the three great achievements of that single term seem even more of an achievement today: he forced through the Camp David Accords, one of only two peace treaties that Israel has ever signed, isolating Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David for 13 days until he gradually wore them down; he also forced through the Panama Canal Treaty, a deeply unpopular move that returned the canal to Panama, but which prevented, many believe, a difficult and nasty war in Latin America; and he brought in an energy policy that saw him reduce America's dependency on imported oil by half. He was mocked – three decades before global warming became a fashionable concern – for walking around the White House, turning down the thermostats.

What he's most proud of, though, is that he didn't fire a single shot. Didn't kill a single person. Didn't lead his country into a war – legal or illegal. "We kept our country at peace. We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. But still we achieved our international goals. We brought peace to other people, including Egypt and Israel. We normalised relations with China, which had been non-existent for 30-something years. We brought peace between US and most of the countries in Latin America because of the Panama Canal Treaty. We formed a working relationship with the Soviet Union."

full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/11/president-jimmy-carter-interview

(this is a super lengthy profile of Carter for The Observer, the Sunday edition of The Guardian.)

[sethgrogen]

1. the carter syndrome might explain it. time to fight it!

[OwnedByFerrets]

2. I didnt like President Carter at the time because he

seemed to carry his religion on his sleeve. I have come to admire and even love the man for walking the talk. We need more leaders like him in high places. I would defend him against ANY comers.

[zalinda]

4. I loved Carter and voted for him twice.

I never found him to be religious. I found him to be more of a hippie type person, without the drugs. I felt safe with him as the President. I can't say I've ever felt that safe feeling from any other President. All that came after him filled me with doom and gloom.

zalinda

[sabrina 1]

3. John Adams was a one term president too. His unwillingness

to go war was used against him also. But in retrospect he is seen as one of the great Presidents and his war decision later viewed as the correct one.

I think history will view 'tough guy' Bush as one of the worst presidents ever, while Carter will be seen as one of the good ones.

[Hawkowl]

5. Obama is nowhere near Carter

Obama really has no comparable accomplishments to Carter. Unless you consider both's inability to work with members of their own party.