The Highest Calling, page 33
DR: Jimmy Carter grows up on a farm. He goes to the Naval Academy. When his father dies, he comes back to run the family business. Why did he feel compelled, after being a naval officer and hoping to rise to admiral, to come back to Plains and run the family business? What was his wife Rosalynn’s attitude about that?
KB: The story is that Rosie, as he called her, hated the idea of leaving the Navy and was shocked at the idea of going back to Plains, Georgia. She refused to talk to him on the long drive back from their base in Connecticut down to Plains. She didn’t want to go back to this small town where she too had grown up. She had loved the Navy life and living in Hawaii and in other parts of America, and she thought going back to Plains was a step backwards. Carter loves Plains. He loves South Georgia, he loves the people, it’s his roots. He’s very proud of where he came from. And when his father died, rather early in Carter’s life, he felt compelled to save the family business.
But there’s also another answer that I discovered that surprised me. Carter, in his Navy career, was on a successful route to maybe becoming an admiral someday, but he disliked the notion of spending the rest of his life on weapons of war armed with nuclear missiles that could have killed tens of thousands of people. He was not a military man at heart.
DR: With the help of a lawsuit filed by Charlie Kirbo, Carter overcomes what would have been a fraud-induced election loss and wins a state Senate seat in’62, and then he later decides to run for governor in 1966 against Lester Maddox. What happens in that race?
KB: He lost. He thought for sure that he was going to win that race against this archsegregationist. It was, for him, a personal humiliation. He spent the next four years relentlessly campaigning to get that governorship.
DR: He runs again in 1970. Does he run as a civil rights advocate, somebody on the left side of the Democratic Party?
KB: Not at all. He realized, in’66, that he had failed to connect with white, rural Southern voters in Georgia, and he made sure that this time he navigated that minefield. His opponents accused him of making all the dog whistles, edging right up to the line of appealing to white supremacists, but not quite crossing the line. He was pragmatic and ruthless in his campaigning, and determined to win.
DR: He wins. It is said that every senator who looks in the mirror sees a potential president, and I suspect that’s probably true of most governors. Why did Jimmy Carter, though, think that a one-term governor of Georgia, not that popular, could become president of the United States in 1976? Where did that idea come from?
KB: He knew that he couldn’t run again for governor. It was a one-term office. In the course of being governor, he met some of the other potential presidential candidates, including, for instance, Ted Kennedy, who came to give a speech at the University of Georgia, and Carter had a chance to size him up. Kennedy was clearly the front-runner, and Carter thought that he was shallow, not full of substance, didn’t have the gravitas that was necessary for the office. That gave him a belief that he could take it. Then Kennedy dropped out before the race really got going, and Carter was left as the sort of dark-horse liberal Southerner from the new South.
He had a talented political strategist named Hamilton Jordan, a young man in his early 30s, who wrote a brilliant memo on how to campaign for and win the Democratic nomination. And, against all odds, Carter did it. Oddly enough, when Carter met with Ted Kennedy, gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson was there; he was blown away by Carter’s speech at the time and thought that Carter had, in an arrogant and brilliant way, dismissed Kennedy. Thompson wrote that he had just seen the meanest politician in America.
Now, this is not the public perception, the liberal perception we have of the humanitarian Jimmy Carter, but there is a side to him that was politically ambitious and ruthless and pragmatic and determined. Hunter Thompson saw that in this encounter between Carter and Ted Kennedy. And I think it explains the’76 campaign and how he won.
DR: Carter wins the nomination in 1976 and he runs against the incumbent, Gerald Ford. They have three debates. Carter’s not that experienced in foreign policy or federal matters at the time. How did he do against Ford?
KB: The first debate, he didn’t do very well. The second one, he did a lot better. Ford made a mistake that really helped Carter, who had positioned himself as the new face, in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War and the scandals associated with the Nixon presidency. He won that race narrowly. It came down to the wire in the end, but he was successful. It was an amazing race.
DR: When Carter wins, does he say, “I really don’t know Washington that well, so I’m going to bring a lot of experienced people to help me run the government”?
KB: Yes and no. He surrounded himself with Georgia boys, his own Georgia mafia, people like Hamilton Jordan and Jerry Rafshoon (his public relations/advertising advisor) and Jody Powell, his press secretary. But he did, in fact, recruit a bunch of people from the outside like Joe Califano, people considered to be part of the establishment. He made Cy Vance his secretary of state; and he appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski, a New York–based foreign policy insider, to be his national security advisor. But he governed as an outsider.
DR: The Congress of the United States, at that time, is overwhelmingly Democratic. You have a Democratic president for the first time in eight years. Was it easy for a Democratic president to get his agenda through this Democratic Congress?
KB: Partly, but it was more difficult than you would have thought. The Democrats had a substantial majority in both the House and Senate, yet Carter had a lot of trouble because he was trying to pass a great deal of liberal social legislation and regulatory initiatives, like auto safety, mandatory safety belts, and airbags. He was trying to deregulate natural gas and the airlines. He was trying to expand food stamps for the working poor. But he got pushback from conservative, largely Southern Democrats, and he got pushback from liberal Democrats who thought he wasn’t going far enough.
DR: Let’s talk about one of the problems that he had: inflation. It seemed to be out of control, rising to double digits. Did he not have a solution for it? Where did the inflation come from?
KB: Inflation came about, I think most economists would agree, before Carter even walked into the White House. It was brewing because of expenditures on the Vietnam War that hadn’t been paid for, but largely because of the explosion in energy prices from the 1971 energy crisis and the 1973 Arab oil embargo. This ratcheted up the price of gasoline and oil, and it trickled down throughout the economy, and led to double-digit, 13, 14, 16 percent inflation rates.
Carter was really concerned about this. He campaigned as a sort of traditional liberal in’76. Once he got into office, he looked at the figures and was concerned about the federal deficit. He wanted to balance the budget. He was a small-town fiscal conservative on economic policy and a liberal on social issues. But he really wanted to do something about inflation, and he found it very difficult.
Finally, in 1979, out of great frustration, he appointed Paul Volcker to be head of the Fed. He’d been warned by his aides that Volcker was going to do drastic things to interest rates and that this was going to harm Carter politically, just as he was running for reelection, but he did it anyway. Carter doesn’t get the credit he should for appointing Volcker, who by the early’80s had killed inflation.
DR: It’s amazing, when you think about it, that a one-term governor gets elected president the first time he runs. He must be very skilled politically. Yet you point out in your book that if you told Carter something was good politically for him, he would almost do the opposite, a good example being Volcker. Is that what his aides would tell you—that if you wanted to convince Carter, don’t tell him it was a good thing for him to do politically?
KB: Yes. I had people from the White House, who worked with him repeatedly, tell me exactly that—that he hated to be told the right thing to do politically. He wanted to know what the right thing to do was, period. This explains a lot about Carter’s presidency. I talked earlier about how ruthless he could be campaigning and in trying to win power. But he had this philosophy that he got from Reinhold Niebuhr, the elite East Coast Protestant theologian, who argued that the world was full of sin but that politicians, leaders, had to use power to be able to do good.
Carter used the philosophy of Niebuhr to justify his own political ambitions, and then rationalize that once he was in the Oval Office. Then he could forget about politics and simply use his intelligence to figure out what was the right policy and do it, regardless of the politics. This explains his success, in many ways, but it also explains his political failure.
DR: Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, there had been war between Israel and its neighbors. There had been two hot wars, between Egypt and Israel, in 1967 and 1973. Why did Jimmy Carter, a relatively inexperienced foreign policy person, think that he could bring peace to the Middle East, at least between Israel and Egypt, and why did he think bringing them to Camp David was a good idea? And why did it work out?
KB: That’s a mystery too, because as you say, Carter had no foreign policy experience. He’d made one trip to Israel as governor, where he toured around in a station wagon for a week with Jody Powell. But he was a Southern Baptist. He’d read the Bible. He’d read about Palestine and the Holy Land all his life. And when he got into the Oval Office, really from day one, in January of’77, he’s telling Brzezinski—over Brzezinski’s objections, by the way—that he wanted to make peace in the Middle East a priority.
Brzezinski had briefed Carter from his days on the Trilateral Commission, where they first met, about the Middle East, and Brzezinski knew how thorny the Israeli-Palestinian issue was. But Carter thought that this was an area where he could achieve some real good, and he made it a priority. It was difficult and it got him into a lot of trouble, but in the end, he decided that the best way to get the two major adversaries, Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel, together was to bring them to a rural setting like Camp David, which he loved, and to then isolate them and engage in the most personal of diplomacy.
Strangely, it wasn’t, in many ways, a political triumph for Jimmy Carter. While Camp David took Egypt off the battlefield, it gave him no political brownie points with the Jewish American community. It got him into more trouble, in fact.
DR: You point out that Jimmy Carter loved Camp David. He went there almost every weekend. Why did he like it so much?
KB: He loved the countryside, the rural setting, being outdoors, going fishing. He loved just going on long walks with Rosie. He hated the Washington cocktail party scene. He hated socializing, making small talk, and Camp David was a way to escape from Washington. So he spent a lot of time up there.
DR: The biggest problem with getting reelected that Jimmy Carter had, in my view, occurred when the Iranian hostages were taken. Did President Carter have a good relationship with the Shah before the Shah was forced off his throne?
KB: He had met him once. In November of’77, the Shah visits Washington and is famously greeted by protesters, including anti-Shah Iranian students, making a lot of noise and throwing beer cans and whatnot outside the White House fence. Tear gas is released. It was that serious a protest. It got a little violent, and the tear gas wafted over the White House grounds and interrupted the press conference they were having on the South Lawn, and the Shah and Jimmy Carter had to wipe their eyes.
But Carter had no personal relationship with the Shah. He inherited this political alliance, over objections from his own aides who were pushing human rights and saying, “This Shah is not exactly an exemplar, and we ought to distance ourselves from him.” Carter had no real reason to back off. But as it happens, the Shah, in 1977, was beginning to face real dissent inside Iran, and it snowballed, and by 1978, there was a revolution going on.
DR: The Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters force the Shah to leave what is called the Peacock Throne. The Shah is then trying to find a place to live. Does Carter help him?
KB: Many of his aides, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, argued that the Shah should be given political asylum. Carter rejected that. His secretary of state, Cy Vance, said, “You shouldn’t allow the Shah to come, because that’s going to provoke the revolutionary regime in Iran.” Carter had serious qualms about the symbolic notion of the Shah getting asylum in America. He worried that maybe the embassy will be taken over. So he pushes back. He refuses to give the Shah political asylum.
And in response, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and John J. McCloy form a lobbying effort. They even give it a code name, Project Alpha, they allocate money from Chase Manhattan Bank and the powerful law firm that McCloy was running, and they set up a program where, every week, some major official in the Carter administration from the president on down was lobbied vociferously to give the Shah asylum. This went on for six months. Finally, Carter reluctantly gives in when he’s told that the Shah has cancer and needs medical treatment in New York. So on humanitarian grounds, he agrees to let the Shah in.
DR: But as you point out, the truth is that the medical procedures and help that he needed could have been provided elsewhere, right?
KB: Exactly. But Carter wasn’t told that.
DR: So the hostages are taken from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Jimmy Carter and others think that this is going to be a couple-day episode. Why did it last so long? Were Iranian government or the Ayatollah in favor of keeping the hostages that long?
KB: Yes. There was good reason for Carter to think it would be a few days or a week, because the embassy, in fact, had been stormed and taken over right after the revolution in February of 1979. Then the embassy was shortly given back to the Americans. So they thought it would be a two- or three-day affair.
But when this happened on November 4th, 1979, Khomeini was trying to consolidate the revolution and turn it into a hard-line Islamic Republic, and he wanted to get rid of the moderate political allies that had supported the revolution initially. The hostage crisis, he saw, was an excuse to purge his government of the moderates. So it went on for 444 days.
DR: Why didn’t Carter just send in troops and rescue as many hostages as possible?
KB: That was discussed, but he was very concerned about the lives of the hostages. He didn’t want to lose a single American life. Cy Vance was telling him, “This is going to be solved with diplomacy. It’s a political crisis. The Ayatollah Khomeini is using this to consolidate his revolution. But in a few weeks or a few months, it’ll be over and we’ll bring all the hostages home alive.” Carter had a real aversion to the use of military force. Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested that he should mine the harbors off the coast of Iran, but Carter rejected that. He believed in diplomacy, and he was determined to bring home every hostage alive.
DR: At some point, Carter agrees to have a rescue mission, not a military confrontation. Why does that not work?
KB: In my view, and I think in the view of anyone who looks at the plan, it was ridiculous. It had so many moving parts. It was so complicated that if it had succeeded in landing military troops to rescue the hostages, probably many of them and many of the rescuers would have been killed.
Two of the helicopters failed when they got to the landing zone, or had to turn back, and the whole mission was aborted. Even then, when they left, one of the helicopters ran into one of the airplanes on the ground and U.S. servicemen lost their lives as a result. The mission was put together in a hasty way. It was so complicated that it’s hard to imagine why anyone thought it would succeed.
DR: While this was going on, Jimmy Carter is running in a primary campaign for the Democratic nomination against his old nemesis, Ted Kennedy. Initially that goes well. Carter is pretty popular in the Democratic Party because he’s trying to get the hostages back, but eventually that fades and his popularity goes down. How close was it for Kennedy to get the nomination?
KB: Early on, Carter defeated him pretty handily, but it was a major challenge, and Kennedy refused to drop out even after losing many early primaries. He stuck it out into the late spring and then won a few primaries, like in New York, and gave Carter a real race and weakened him. Carter and Kennedy had one big issue that they disagreed about. They were both liberals on most issues, but Ted Kennedy had made national health insurance his major issue. That was the thing he really ran on, saying Carter wasn’t liberal enough because he had not favored Kennedy’s health care bill.
Carter himself had run in favor of national health insurance in 1976; but once in office, he pragmatically looked at the cost, and he didn’t think Kennedy’s bill had the votes to even get out of Kennedy’s own committee. So he proposed a compromise for national health insurance to cover just catastrophic events. Kennedy wouldn’t go for it; neither would compromise, and this gave the excuse for Kennedy to run.
A strong faction of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party thought that Carter wasn’t liberal enough. Even though he had appointed all sorts of Ralph Nader acolytes to office, and even though he had passed a lot of liberal legislation, they came to loggerheads. Labor unions and others fell away from Carter, and Kennedy gave him a real run for the nomination.
DR: Carter gets the nomination, but he’s running against Ronald Reagan. Is Carter or his administration worried about running against Reagan?
KB: Initially not so much. He looked at him and thought, “This man is a former B-movie star, a right-wing idealogue from California, who’s very old.” He thought that would be an easy Republican to defeat. But by the late summer of 1980, his advisors were telling him that this was going to be a serious race, and the polls were showing that too. Carter had been weakened by Ayatollah Khomeini and the hostage crisis and inflation rates and long gas lines and Ted Kennedy running against him. And it was a tough race.
