Preet Bharara:

From Cafe in the Vox Media Podcast network, this is Stay Tuned in brief, I’m Preet Bharara. Today we’re going to talk about Jimmy Carter, the former president who is 98 years old, announced last month that he will forego further medical treatment, instead opting to receive hospice care at his home in Georgia. Like millions of Americans, I’m thinking about and praying for Carter and his family. It is also a moment to reflect on his life and legacy and an opportunity to look back on his presidency. There is perhaps no one better to do that with me than my guest this week, Jonathan Alter. Jonathan is a contributing correspondent to NBC News and a former senior editor of Newsweek. He’s written books on presidents including FDR and Obama. And in 2020 he published a biography of Carter called His Very Best, Jimmy Carter, A Life. Jonathan Alter, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Alter:

Thanks Preet.

Preet Bharara:

So as we were discussing, given the news about the former president, you are in great demand as an expert and I think someone who’s been very insightful years after the presidency ended about Jimmy Carter’s, obviously, time in office and his post-residency. My first question to you though is, do you have some sense about how his family is doing? I should note that we’re recording this on Wednesday, March 1st. This episode won’t drop for a few days and I don’t know what will transpire between now and then, but what, what’s going on now with the family?

Jonathan Alter:

Well, I am in a pretty close touch and his death is not imminent, but having said that, he could die any day. So there’s an uncertainty here that I think those of us who, like me, who’ve lost our parents, we’re familiar with, at the end, it can go in a couple different directions. So he does not have underlying cancer or heart failure, but he is very old and you know, you can get organ failure very fast. And he’s been hospitalized a few times in recent months for dehydration and just being sick. So it’s very, very hard to say.

Preet Bharara:

Let me ask then, I don’t have enough time to do full justice to The Life and Times of Jimmy Carter, but let me start with some basic things. Remind people who were of a younger age, how in the hell did a peanut farmer from Georgia get elected President of the United States? How unlikely and improbable was that?

Jonathan Alter:

Very, very improbable. So Jimmy Carter grew up in the Jim Crow South. His father was a white supremacist and his mother was a nurse who took care of black patients for free, but it might as well have been in the 19th century when he was a boy because they had no running water, no electricity, and he was the first person in his family to go to college. And he went to the US Naval Academy. He’d always dreamed of that. And when he got there, a whole new world opened up to him. He is a brilliant man. And after the Naval Academy, he joined Hyman Rickover’s nuclear navy, which was the most exciting technology project of the middle part of the 20th century. They actually put a nuclear power plant on a submarine before they had one on land. And he, in that period in 1952, he helps rescue a melted down nuclear reactor at great personal risk, which is just another story in this epic American life.

But then his father dies and he returns to Plains, Georgia, population 650 where he was born, and assumes his father’s peanut warehouse business, farmland and other businesses, and most important, his civic responsibilities. So he becomes Chairman of the Sumter County School Board right after Brown vs Board of Education and does nothing to implement the Brown vs Board of Education decision in large part because, under Georgia State law, to give you some idea of how horrible things were, if you integrated schools at all, those schools immediately closed.

And so really, as he’s starting to make it in Georgia politics, and he runs for the Georgia State Senate and wins in 1962, although they try to stuff the ballot box and prevent him from winning, he has to duck the Civil Rights Movement. And eventually he’s elected governor of Georgia in 1970 and kind of betrays all of the segregationist whose votes he had sought to get to become governor and integrates Georgia State government and goes on the map nationally as, because he says in his inaugural address, which is on the front page of the New York Times, “The time for racial discrimination is over.”

Now, nowadays, you go, “Well, of course it’s over.” But in…

Preet Bharara:

That does not sound like a controversial statement.

Jonathan Alter:

In 1971, in Georgia, it was very controversial. His white supporters walked out of his inauguration. But he becomes the face of the new South. And then under Georgia State law, he’s not allowed to run for reelection. So after he leaves in late 1974, he’s running for president and he’s unemployed. So he has plenty of time…

Preet Bharara:

Lot of time.

Jonathan Alter:

To go out to go to Iowa. And even though he’s 0% in the polls, his timing is perfect because he’s this moral, religious outsider, very bright, very gifted at retail politics. And it’s right after Nixon’s resignation, just two years after Nixon’s resignation. And so everybody is ready for this breath of fresh air and he’s improbably nominated over much better known senators he was running against. And then he wins a very close election against Gerald Ford who had succeeded Nixon.

Preet Bharara:

The pendulum swung. And we’ll talk about his presidency for a few minutes and then we’ll talk about how the pendulum swung again against Jimmy Carter. So he becomes President improbably. Do you agree with the conclusion that had Ford not pardoned Nixon, Carter would’ve lost and Ford would’ve become the president?

Jonathan Alter:

Yeah, I think the election was so close that I think that’s a fair assumption, although it’s hard to know for sure. Carter was in many ways a more attractive candidate than Ford. So it’s possible he could have won, but the country was moving in a rightward direction in the late 1970s.

Preet Bharara:

So he becomes president. And there has been a lot of talk about how calamitous that presidency was. He became president right around the time I began to be aware of politics in government. I was born in 1968 and I remember there being a lot of people upset at Carter. I remember the Iran hostage crisis very, very well. In fact, when I was in school at the time, a lot of people thought that my family were Iranian and you can guess what people said about us and our family. You have said that the conventional wisdom about Jimmy Carter is wrong. What do you mean by that? What’s the conventional wisdom and how is it wrong?

Jonathan Alter:

Well, the conventional wisdom is weak president, saintly former president. And what I try to do in his very best, is explain that his presidency is badly underrated. Not that he belongs on Mount Rushmore or in the top rank of presidents, but it’s badly underrated. And his post presidency, while inspiring and redefining of the whole role that a former president can have, is a little bit overrated because he didn’t have as much power to change people’s lives when he was out of office. And he also was irritating to his successors because he was kind of a freelance Secretary of State as a former president. But in terms of his presidency, so yes, clearly he was crushed by Ronald Reagan. So he was a political failure, but a substantive and in many ways, farsighted success. And we can talk about those successes in a number of different areas. It might be, Preet, that you want to talk a little bit about the judiciary since that’s one of your specialties.

Preet Bharara:

I was going to ask you first about the environment and how you view his presidency through the lens of the last number of decades. What was he about with relation to the environment back between ’77 and ’81?

Jonathan Alter:

So, first of all, he signed 15 major pieces of environmental and energy legislation. He had the first fuel economy standards, the first toxic waste cleanup with the protection of 150 million acres in Alaska. He doubled the size of the National Park system. It was the first time that public utilities were ever incentivized to use clean energy. Now, I think a lot of people know that he put solar panels up on the roof of the White House, which Ronald Reagan took down, but that gives you some idea of his ability to appear over the horizon. And at the end of his presidency, he issued a report about global warming indicating that he would tackle the problem in a second term, which adds a more tragic dimension to that 1980 election.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I mean, he was so ahead of his time that he put solar panels on the White House and was mocked for it and Reagan removed them. Isn’t that right?

Jonathan Alter:

Yes. Reagan removed them many years later. Obama put up different kind. He was mocked for it in part because, and this gives you some idea of what happened to his presidency. After the Iranian revolution, OPEC had another burst of steam. There had been the Arab boil embargo in 1973, but OPEC started acting up again. They had us over a barrel and fuel prices went through the roof in 1979, and we had these gas shortages.

Preet Bharara:

I remember.

Jonathan Alter:

And this people had to line up for hours to get their tanks filled. And at that time, people’s attitude toward their car was a little bit like it is now toward their phones. Americans were in love with their cars, and this sent Carter’s numbers down below 30% for a time. But he was determined to look to the future anyway, and that was the period where he put those solar panels on the roof and signed a number of other bills that had long-lasting impacts. Created the Department of Energy, created the Department of Education, FEMA, reformed the Civil Service for the first time in 100 years. A lot happened under Carter that was entirely forgotten about after he was swamped by events in the second half of his term.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I mean, you have written that the Carter won approval of more major legislation than any post-war president except Lyndon Johnson, and he did it in only four years.

Jonathan Alter:

That is correct, yeah. And there were 40 major pieces of legislation than he signed. And this was a president who actually didn’t do a very good job of getting along with Congress, and he failed on some big things too. He couldn’t manage his relationship with Ted Kennedy well enough to get any healthcare legislation passed. And his fraught relationship with Ted Kennedy, which eventually led to Kennedy running against him in the primaries in 1980 was very harmful, although somebody that you likely know, Steve Breyer came out of it because Carter did important deregulation, particularly of the airline and trucking industry. And Breyer was working for Kennedy and worked on that with the Carter White House. And so after he left, he lost the presidency when he was a lame duck, Carter agreed to appoint Steve Breyer to the bench. And amazingly, the Republicans, even though they were about to take power, this is an example of how different things were. They confirmed him.

Preet Bharara:

You’ve written about Carter’s core decency and his modesty and his character, and that’s what has been lionized about him for the last number of decades in his post presidency period. Do you connect his decency in any way with his political failure as a president? Is success at the highest level in the world incompatible with modesty and core decency or not?

Jonathan Alter:

No, I don’t think it is incompatible with modesty and core decency. And I think we’re seeing some of that with Joe Biden right now. He’s a decent person and he’s succeeding in the presidency. Clearly Abraham Lincoln was a decent person and he succeeded. But having said that, if Jimmy Carter had bombed Iran as his mother was urging him to do, he would’ve been reelected. But the hostages would’ve all been killed. So the choices that you make can be conditioned if you have Carter’s view toward peace. So Jimmy Carter was and is passionate about peace, and he puts it above even human rights. And one of his top people, Hamilton Jordan, who was brilliant campaign strategist, and then later a unsuccessful White House Chief of Staff, but a terrific guy who I got to know not long before he died 10 years ago, he described his old boss as a near pacifist. And I do think it’s tough to be president and a near pacifist. That’s going to get you labeled as weak, even if you are anything but.

Preet Bharara:

One of the things that I remember from that time, and there was recently a documentary about it that I thought was quite good, was during the hostage crisis in Iran, which I don’t know if people who were young appreciate how much it fully seized the nation. I think Nightline was a TV show that was either born in that time period or reached the heights of popularity during that time period.

Jonathan Alter:

It was born in that time period.

Preet Bharara:

It was born during that time. And news really came into its own as something that you focused on around the clock rather than sort of at 6:30 PM every night. And he authorizes this rescue attempt, which maybe some people have forgotten, and it fails. Can you talk about how that decision that he had to make affected him, how he thought about it, how you think his presidency and the political outcome might have been different had that rescue attempt succeeded? Talk about that a little bit.

Jonathan Alter:

Yeah, I assume you’re talking about the documentary on HBO, Hostages that aired recently. Yeah, I was a consultant on that, and I appear in it.

Preet Bharara:

That’s why it was so good.

Jonathan Alter:

But…

Preet Bharara:

I knew, I was like, this has Alter’s fingers on it.

Jonathan Alter:

But the Iran Hostage Rescue Mission takes place in April of 1980, and by that time, the hostages have been there for five months, and Americans are getting very frustrated that Carter’s diplomacy is not bringing them back. And so they stage this very risky operation. First, two helicopters malfunction, in part because of the sand and the desert. So they’re two short of helicopters, and then they abort the mission, which was very disappointing for Carter and the Americans. But before the public learns that the mission has been aborted when they’re leaving Desert One, which was the desert rendezvous point outside Tehran, the staging area to come in and try to rescue the hostages. As they’re leaving to go back to the US military base, a third helicopter crashes into a C-130 transport that had brought in the troops who are going to special operations, special forces who were going to undertake this very risky operation killing eight crewmen.

So what had been just an aborted mission becomes a complete fiasco and a tragic one. And so I have a scene in my book where they tell Carter and he just puts his head in his hands and he realizes that this fiasco is his responsibility and he takes full responsibility for it, which was something that the people who survived the mission and came back were greatly appreciative of. He didn’t try to say if they had done it differently, it would’ve worked. He didn’t throw anybody under the bus. Now, when I talked about this with Carter, he said, “If we’d had two more helicopters, I would’ve won.” I don’t actually believe that’s true, because there were so many other problems. He was facing double-digit interest rates and double-digit inflation. Imagine running for reelection when you have interest rates as high as 19%.

Preet Bharara:

Well now in the United States are very, very, very unaccustomed to inflation. That’s why you’re hearing all the political chattering now. I mean, it’s almost unimaginable to a young person to think about inflation that high.

Jonathan Alter:

15%? I mean and when interest rates are also that high, and then there was actually a little recession at the beginning of the election year.

Preet Bharara:

What was that phrase? The misery index.

Jonathan Alter:

The misery index, right. Unemployment and inflation. And then he was challenged by Ted Kennedy. So he didn’t have a United Democratic Party behind him.

Preet Bharara:

Yes. I want to get to Ted Kennedy in a second, but could you also unpack another myth in politics? He very famously is described to have given a speech, which is given the label, The Malaise Speech in which he never uses the word malaise. Could you just take us through what that speech was, why he gave it and why it backfired?

Jonathan Alter:

I mentioned the long gas line. So right in that period, he scheduled to give another speech on energy. I think it would’ve been his fourth address to the nation on energy. And those speeches weren’t really working. And he realized, partly on the advice of his pollster, Pat Caddell, who had done some research on this, that there was what he and his speech described as a crisis of confidence in the United States, almost a spiritual crisis, and that he was not responding properly to it.

So he assembled a wide array of Americans, some famous, some ministers, a whole bunch of different people, members of Congress, and they all went up to Camp David, and they told him what he was doing wrong and how to get the country back on track. And then he gave what came to be known as the Malaise Speech, and it is an extraordinary speech that I would really recommend people watch some, I devote a whole chapter to it in my book, because it starts out with him admitting his shortcomings. He reads from some of what people told him, and this is just unimaginable now. So at one point he says, “A governor told me, Mr. President, you are not leading. You are just managing the government.” Imagine a president saying that about himself, right to a national television audience. And he goes…

Preet Bharara:

It’s a little different now.

Jonathan Alter:

He goes through all of this and he diagnoses the, okay, Malaise, that’s what the critics called it, that had enveloped the United States in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, the first war Americans had ever lost. And he thought there was a spiritual crisis because Americans were too materialistic and consumerist. And so he told people, “Think about your country, and if you do, we’ll apply this energy strategy,” that he outlined in the second half of the speech. So the immediate reaction to the speech was actually very positive. And by coincidence, I was in the speech writing office the day after the speech because the summer before, when I was in college, I had been an intern in Carter’s speech writing office. And I went back, I was visiting after graduating from college, and I saw Rick Hertzberg, later wrote for the New Yorker, who was Carter’s chief speech writer.

And he was really happy because Carter had just gotten this big boost in the polls. He was up like seven or eight points. He was still only into the low 40s, but it seemed like it had all gone really well. Then he made one of the worst decisions of his presidency. He fired his cabinet and he asked for the resignation of everybody in his cabinet, and he accepted five of them. And this was seen as a real sign of instability. Other nations reacted really badly. They thought that maybe the government had fallen. Americans reacted badly, and he was back in political trouble, which he didn’t come out of until the hostages were seized later in the year. And the first reaction to the hostage was a rally around the flag. The Russians invaded Afghanistan, rally around the flag. So that’s how he beat Ted Kennedy in the primaries. But then at a certain point, people got really tired of the hostage crisis and the economy stayed bad and he went on to lose to Reagan.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I mean, it seems like almost an impossible situation with the economy, terrible, the energy crisis, terrible, a foreign power humiliating us for 400 plus days. Do you think that if Kennedy hadn’t run against Carter and weakened him, that Carter had a shot against Reagan or it wouldn’t have mattered given everything else?

Jonathan Alter:

So he definitely had a shot. The polls were very close until the last few days. The final Gallup poll actually had Carter winning. But…

Preet Bharara:

So polls were terrible back then too.

Jonathan Alter:

There were some really bad polls. But I think the best way to answer that question comes from the interview that I did with Paul Volcker, who was the one who jacked up interest rates. I mean, he got Ronald Reagan elected and reelected because his harsh medicine at the Federal Reserve eventually worked.

Preet Bharara:

Eventually.

Jonathan Alter:

Eventually inflation ended, and you had growth in the early ’80s that Reagan benefited from. So a couple of years after Carter left the presidency, he and Volcker saw each other at a fishing lodge and Volcker said, “Look, I’m, I’m sorry if I cost you the presidency.” And as Volcker recounted it to me, Carter smiled one of his genuine smiles, and he did also have a fake smile. But this was a genuine smile. And he said to him, “Paul, there were many factors.” And I think that’s the best way to look at it, is that all of these things combined to lead to his defeat and the conclusion that he was a political failure as president and that conclusion is accurate. But I try to say that he was a political failure, but a substantive and farsighted success. And I think that’s what his epitaph as president should reflect.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think, in retrospect, that Edward Kennedy was out of his mind to challenge an incumbent president? And second, if the experience of Ted Kennedy tells us anything about the reluctance of people to challenge other sitting presidents, including hypothetically, Joe Biden.

Jonathan Alter:

Out of his mind would be too strong, but his brother-in-law, Steven Smith, who was his campaign manager, advised him after he lost Iowa and New Hampshire to Carter, to drop out. And his campaign had been floundering, and he very much should have. And when I interviewed Walter Mondale, he was bitter about it. Carter was trying to be a little magnanimous toward Kennedy after Kennedy’s death, but they had a fraught and almost toxic relationship that I talk about a lot in the book. And so I think it was just wrong of Kennedy to do that. He should have known that he was softening him up. It wasn’t wrong for him to run against him. Because at that time, in 1979, Kennedy was up 30 points over Carter in the polls. So even Hamilton Jordan, even Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s top aide said, “well, it was fine for Ted Kennedy to run. It looked like he was going to win.”

It’s when he lost those primaries and should have recognized that taking it all the way to the convention would be very destructive. That’s when he should have dropped out. And I think that example probably will dissuade anybody from challenging Biden in the primaries because it did go so badly for the Democrats. I’m not sure that it should, I mean, don’t think any president is entitled to the nomination just because they happen to be the incumbent. So I think it would be fine. And I don’t even think it would be that destructive for a Democrat to try to run against Joe Biden, especially since…

Preet Bharara:

Just as long as you don’t overstay your welcome and you make up in your party.

Jonathan Alter:

Exactly, exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Although in that race, the thing that I remember most, and I was young, and I’ve seen it since on YouTube, Kennedy gave a hell of a speech at the convention, did he not?

Jonathan Alter:

Yes, he did. I was on the floor of that convention, and even the Carter people recognized that he gave one of the best speeches of his life and Carter’s acceptance speech the next day was not nearly as good. And then Kennedy takes his own sweet time to come over from the Waldorf Hotel to the convention center, to Madison Square Garden, for the famous clasp of his hands for the news magazine cover, right? The victory shot, the money shot. And when he gets there, he doesn’t actually raise his hand, he just gives him a curt little handshake and it doesn’t really seem to be uniting the party. I asked Carter, “What was going through your head when Ted Kennedy came on the podium and kind of snubbed you,” and Carter’s answer was four words, “That he was drunk.”

Preet Bharara:

Oh no.

Jonathan Alter:

So, a lot of times…

Preet Bharara:

Oh boy.

Jonathan Alter:

A lot of times there’s other things going on that you have to read, history to learn about.

Preet Bharara:

Like Johnny Walker. We are at risk of not keeping this in the brief category, but I want to ask you just a couple more things. I didn’t look this up before the interview with you, but there is, I don’t know if it’s on an annual basis or more or less frequently, but there’s this ranking that historians do of presidents, and it’s interesting to see over time, which presidents climb up the list in retrospect in which presidents fall down in the list. First of all, are you familiar with those lists? Do you put any stock in them? Are they silly? Where was Carter and where is he now and where should he be?

Jonathan Alter:

They are kind of silly, but it’s a fun game to play and there’s no harm in playing it. So Carter never fell below Nixon. In part because he always had a lot of respect on a personal basis, even when he was crushed by Reagan, people admired him personally. They just thought he had been overwhelmed by the job. So he was down in the bottom quintile…

Preet Bharara:

The bottom quintile?

Jonathan Alter:

But then…

Preet Bharara:

Who else was there?

Jonathan Alter:

Well, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce and Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon. And now he’s moved up considerably. And he’s obviously not in the top quintile, but I think he’s pretty comfortably in the second quintile at this point and maybe moving up some more. And I hope that my book contributes to that because historians should look at presidents differently than journalists do. So as a journalist, it’s my job to look at how a president does politically. As a historian, it’s my job to look at how a president changes the country and the world.

And on that score, there are all kinds of things that we haven’t talked about, whether it’s curbing redlining, or preventing a major war in Central America with the Panama Canal treaties, or what Carter thinks is most long-lasting accomplishment, which is normalizing relations with China, which is the foundation of the global economy and would not have been possible without normalization. So there’s a lot to unpack in his presidency. It’s been badly misunderstood and underestimated. And while he is already way higher than Donald Trump, I think he should pass Reagan for all kinds of reasons we can discuss. And I think that it’s conceivable that before long he will.

Preet Bharara:

We all are very obviously thinking about Jimmy Carter and his family. When he passes, it will be sad, certainly, but what a full life he led. What do you think the tribute to Carter will be like in Washington and around the country, and what should it be like?

Jonathan Alter:

Well, in Washington, Reagan’s death, George H W Bush’s death was a bigger deal. For the world, Jimmy Carter’s death will be a much bigger deal. He’s a global icon. There are families in Africa that named their children after him. He took Guinea worm disease from 3.5 million cases to under 25 cases. This was a disease that had ravaged several African countries. River blindness made huge progress on that. Prevented wars in Haiti and North Korea after he left office. And of course, everybody knows built all these houses with Habitat for Humanity. So I think there will be an enormous outpouring and that he’s gone from being derided to being beloved.

And I’m reminded of what George Orwell wrote after Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, and Orwell had been a critic of Gandhi for being too righteous. And as we know, a lot of people criticized Carter for that. And he was in bad odor in American politics, even inside the Democratic Party for decades. But what Orwell said of Gandhi was how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind for all the rest of us. That’s Carter, the decency and the core goodness, and the willingness to devote much of his life, not only to his personal ambition, which he freely admits, but to making lives better for other people. And that’s a legacy not just for other former presidents to emulate, but for all of us.

Preet Bharara:

I didn’t know that George Orwell quote about Gandhi. There’s another quote about Gandhi that I remember and I’ll mangle it, ’cause I don’t have it in front of me, and I haven’t seen it in a while, but I think it was Einstein who said about Gandhi “Centuries hence, we will scarce believe that a man like this in flesh and blood walk the earth.” And maybe a little bit of that is true about Jimmy Carter also.

Jonathan Alter:

I think that’s fair.

Preet Bharara:

Jonathan Alter, thank you so much for coming on the show and spending your time with us. Really appreciate it.

Jonathan Alter:

Thanks Preet.

Preet Bharara:

For more analysis of legal and political issues, making the headlines become a member of the Cafe Insider. Members get access to exclusive content including the weekly podcast I co-host with former US attorney, Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up for a trial. That’s cafe.com/insider.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag askpreet or you can call and leave me a message at 6-6-9-2-4-7-7-3-3-8. That’s 6-6-9-2-4-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay tuned, as presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producer is Adam Waller. The editorial producers are Sam Ozer-Staton and Noa Azulai. The audio producer is Nat Weiner, and the cafe team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.