This is the essay David Owen wrote for THE PRESIDENTS in 2021. I thought it should have a wider audience after his death was announced at the age of 100.
On 3 November 1976 Jimmy Carter beat President Gerald Ford in the electoral college by 57 votes and in the popular vote by only 50.1%. If there had been a combined change of a mere 18,000 votes in the states of Ohio and Hawaii he would have lost. It was the closest margin of victory since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. By contrast, Joe Biden beat President Trump by slightly bigger margins in the electoral college by 64 votes and in the popular vote by 51.3% with nearly double the number of overall voters, the largest turnout in America’s history.
Carter was the first President to be elected from the deep South since Zachary Taylor in 1848. The first Governor elected President since Franklin Roosevelt. Carter started as Governor of Georgia in January 1971 yet his wife, who he describes as his “best friend and chief adviser”, quietly called around in the summer of 1972 to see if her husband might be considered by McGovern when Senator Eagleton stepped down as his Vice Presidential candidate. On 17 October 1972 Carter discussed running as President with close advisers in Georgia and the planning began that evening. He never had any intention of staying as Governor for a second term. He undertook trade trips and joined the Trilateral Commission to extend his personal and international contacts. It was an astonishing personal gamble since most people in America knew nothing about him or vaguely talked about ‘Jimmy who?’ Yet on the Democratic campaign trail he was surprisingly effective. He destroyed Teddy Kennedy, he beat two other prominent Democrat candidates, Senator ‘Scoop’ Jackson in Florida by a margin of 10 points and Governor George Wallace of Alabama by 4 points. Governor Wallace had been a candidate in 1964, 1968 and 1972. Belatedly Wallace endorsed Carter’s candidacy saying, “It’s alright to be a conservative Democrat and vote for Jimmy Carter.”
Amazingly the first independent full-length biography of Carter only came out in 2020. Fortunately it was worth waiting for. Jonathan Alter, who has also written on FDR and Obama, has created an excellent book worthy of the man. Yet more than half the book is on winning the Presidency. The reason for this unconventional weighting lies in his biographer’s words: “Carter was a historical anomaly – an aberration caused by Watergate and a speed bump in the South’s historic transition from solid Democratic to solid Republican.” He was “a pioneer of centre-left “New Democrat” thinking that would be adopted by Clinton and Obama, though neither would credit him.”
I first met Carter as President when as Foreign Secretary I accompanied Prime Minister Jim Callaghan to Washington on 10-12 March 1977. After that visit Callaghan wrote to his friend Helmut Schmidt, the German Chancellor, that Carter had an “ordered, well stocked mind” … “quite a formidable person to deal with” … “straightforward and not too much artifice.” Callaghan was “the foreign leader Carter got along with best after Sadat.” Conversely, there was mutual dislike between Schmidt and Carter, who saw Schmidt as “foul-tempered” and who treated him with “arrogant disdain.” The reason for the disdain was Carter’s wish to ban fast breeder nuclear reactors and his change of mind over the neutron bomb. Alter reverses Wendell Holmes’s famous description of Franklin Roosevelt and describes Carter as “a first-class intellect and a second-class temperament.” David McCullough, the historian of many Presidents, including most importantly of Truman, saw the naval engineer Carter at his best advocating the Panama Canal treaties and recalls more generally that, “He didn’t seem to have the political adrenaline that one responds favourably to.”
For my part I liked Jimmy Carter and the more I saw of him at NATO and G7 meetings and in the White House the more complex his personality appeared to be. I wrote in retrospect, “He combines a fundamental decency and good Baptist values with a mean, competitive streak. His ‘born again’ religious views give him a moral certainty which could be unattractive but his interest in facts and his scientific approach to problems counter the fundamentalism, so that there is a greater strength to his decisions than is often at first apparent.” It is noteworthy that Joe Biden, aged 33 at the time, was the first Senator to endorse Carter in 1976.
In many ways Carter’s most formidable achievement was the Panama Canal Treaty. All previous Presidents had ducked out of this huge challenge because of the strength of the political opposition. Just before his election forty-eight Senators had signed a resolution saying they would “never give away the Canal.” Carter seized the moment of his maximum political clout and as he admitted himself, “I put my whole life on the line on the Panama Canal treaty.” It was not primarily even a foreign policy issue. Most Americans simply considered the Canal Zone as American territory and it was that attitude which was so resented in Latin America. During the transition period Ford had told Carter it was the most important single issue he would face. When people told him it was a second term issue he said “suppose there is no second term?” The Joint Chiefs influenced him when they said that it would take at least 100,000 troops to defend the Canal if it was sabotaged, which they considered likely. An international treaty needs a two-thirds majority in the Senate and handling the Panamanians meant it was best to have two treaties. On 18 April 1978 the Senate passed the second Treaty by 68 votes to 32, the same margin as on the earlier neutrality treaty. Among the twenty politicians who faced re-election in 1978, who had supported him, only seven returned to the Senate. Sixteen Republican Senators backed him, ten Democrats defied him. The newcomer to Washington had managed a cross party effort for the national good which was a stunning achievement. His biographer highlights as an example the wooing of Senator Sam Heyakawa from California whose initial view of the Canal was, “We stole it fair and square.” Carter lobbied him hard and won him over for the first treaty. On the second treaty he was withholding support. He asked Carter to commit to meeting him for a chat every two weeks. “Sam”, Carter said, “I couldn’t possibly limit our visits to every two weeks. I might want to hear your advice more often!” Heyakawa voted yes, and that was the last time Jimmy Carter ever spoke to him. Politics is a blood sport and few understood that better than Carter.
After that vote Carter was told by the Republican leaders and Henry Kissinger that they could not and would not give the same level of support for any SALT II treaty. One of the reasons for this stance was they had been very upset by the way Carter had chosen to handle President Ford and Kissinger’s Vladivostok agreement with Brezhnev and Gromyko. Instead of going for a quick cross party ratification of Vladivostok Carter sent Vance to Moscow in the spring of 1977 to say that Carter wanted ‘deep cuts’ in the number of strategic weapons which Gromyko later called a “cheap and shady manoeuvre” and when Vance explained the alternative approach of proceeding with Vladivostok Gromyko angrily switched off, cancelled further meetings and the Russians were still nursing their grievance when I saw Brezhnev and Gromyko in Moscow in October and tried to convince them he genuinely wanted a deal. Negotiations over SALT II did resume but after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 further progress in Washington was impossible.
Meanwhile Carter launched his Human Rights policies worldwide and carried conviction because he extended rights to his own citizens by selecting more women and blacks as federal judges than all of his predecessors. He was also way ahead of his time on environmental issues dealing with pollution controls, toxic waste and advanced solar power. In his own admission, “I put in more time on energy by far than any other issue that I addressed while I was President, domestic or foreign.”
Early on Mondale as Vice-President was sent to confront the South African Government over apartheid. For the first time the US were in the lead over ending the worst abuse of human rights in the world. When Steve Biko, the young black conscious leader, was brutally beaten to death in the autumn of 1977, the UN led by the US agreed that the situation in South Africa was a threat to peace and a resolution was passed allowing the application of mandatory sanctions on arms sales. This opened up for the first time the leverage of sanctions on South Africa to make negotiations meaningful in Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa itself. However, it was not until the US Congress overturned President Reagan’s veto on the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986 that the harshest economic sanctions of international bank loans drying up forced South Africa to start to contemplate releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and in 1990 President de Klerk agreed to negotiate with him over free elections and the ending of apartheid. If President Carter had not set the pattern of standing firmly against apartheid the opportunity of Mandela being still young enough to be the great conciliator might never have happened. Carter’s involvement with Vance and Andy Young helped Rhodesia become independent in 1980 after the Lancaster House constitutional conference chaired by Peter Carrington and that settlement, though barely admitted, was on the basis of the Anglo-American plan established by Callaghan and Carter at their first meeting in 1977.
Andrew Young, charismatic and a strong influence on Carter because he had been a huge help in getting him elected, was appointed Ambassador to the UN in 1977 and I enjoyed working closely with him over finding a settlement in Rhodesia. But we had one big difference over Mugabe. I had become convinced by 1978 that Mugabe was a zealot. A self-proclaimed Marxist who clandestinely attended Catholic mass in Maputo was a man deeply conflicted. I felt nothing would stop Mugabe introducing one party rule in Zimbabwe. Alter has virtually nothing on Africa but that gap has been very well filled by a book Jimmy Carter in Africa. Race and the Cold War which does justice to the man and his principled policies. But it stops when Carter leaves office so there is no mention of when in 1982 Mugabe was responsible for a genocide in Matabeleland killing 20,000 people at the hands of Mugabe’s 5 Brigade “special unit” trained and equipped by North Koreans. The world, including the US and the UK, chose to virtually ignore this as did many human rights supporters.
Carter’s other great achievement was the Camp David Accords for which he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize which was only given to Sadat and Begin. Fortunately, he was given the honour in 2002 for all his many efforts, some successful, some unsuccessful, to promote peace in the world as part of the best record of achievement of any US President out of office during which he contributed greatly to many humanitarian projects. I will never forget watching him in Ghana in the 1980s on his knees with a big wooden board in front of him with six round holes showing a farmworker how to put one seed in each hole as the best way of ensuring a good crop.
From the start of his Presidency Carter identified the Middle East as the place to become personally involved. In April, Carter met with President Sadat of Egypt, who he described in his own memoirs as “A shining light burst on the Middle East scene for me.” The two religious men bonded and there was mutual respect followed by a real friendship. Carter asked Vance to travel to the region and invite Sadat and Begin, who was now Prime Minister, to come later in the year to Camp David. Progress looked blocked until Sadat made his dramatic and very personal move and flew into Jerusalem on 19 November 1977. Ritually denounced by all the key Arab leaders, Sadat’s visit made Begin emotionally engaged. He knew he had to respond but visiting London soon after in discussions with Callaghan he was still very unsure how he would do so.
The Camp David Summit lasted from 5-17 September 1978 and involved twenty-three drafts. Very few Presidents would have devoted so much effort and patience to a single foreign policy issue as Carter did during those two weeks. Carter wrote in his diary the essence of the deal. “Begin showed courage in Sinai. He did it to keep the West Bank.” For Carter its success was because “we all shared faith in the same God – we all considered ourselves the sons of Abraham.”
Carter’s substantial achievement won him recognition that month in US opinion polls with 58% approval ratings. However, the best lasting recognition is that under the Treaty that followed between Israel and Egypt there has never been any breach and they have never fought each other again.
It is too early, writing in February 2021, to be sure but Carter’s use of the words “sons of Abraham” was brought to mind when Israel, UAE, Bahrain and the US signed the Abraham Accords on 15 September 2020 involving a wide range of economic and security cooperation. These Accords, under President Trump, would not have been conceivable had it not been for Camp David over 40 years earlier. Yet Egypt and Saudi Arabia have still to be involved.
The biggest crisis Carter faced during his Presidency was that of Iran and the hostage taking was the single most important issue which led to Carter’s trouncing by Ronald Reagan in the presidential election of 1980.
President Carter first encountered the Shah of Iran on 15 November 1977 on his visit to the White House. During a 21-gun salute and as Carter made his welcoming speech Iranians supporting the Shah and Iranians against the Shah began to fight each other outside the White House perimeter. Police had to use tear gas to break up the disturbance making the audience listening a few hundred yards away cough and splutter. It was a warning that Iran was not a country at peace with itself. The Shah’s excessive extravagance, particularly the party at Persepolis in 1971 to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy and in 1976 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Pahlavi dynasty was becoming deeply resented by many Iranians. The Shah had long had a reputation for being indecisive but unbeknown to either the Americans or the British since 1974 the Shah had been secretly treated by French doctors for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia which progressed to a lymphosarcoma. Had Cyrus Vance and myself known of this in May 1977 when both visiting Tehran for the last CENTO military alliance meeting we would have stressed the need then to move urgently towards a constitutional monarchy.
By the summer of 1978 the political unrest in Iran led to a popular revolution. Strikes were paralysing the country including the all-important oilfields. That was the time for the Shah to either use his large army to crush the revolution or to stand down on health grounds and appoint a regency until his son became of age.
The Shah did not fall because of the indecision of President Carter. That is a carefully fostered myth by prominent people who have always known the truth. He fell because of his own chronic indecision which had become acute by late 1978 almost certainly exacerbated by his progressive blood condition that eventually caused him to die. The White House became dramatically involved on 2 November 1978 when the US Ambassador to Tehran, Sullivan, sent a telegram to Washington seeking instructions within 48 hours as the Shah wanted to know from the President “what he should do.”
An account of subsequent events inside the White House has Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser, saying he did not believe that a civilian coalition government under the Shah would help and said the Iranian Ambassador in Washington, Ardeshir Zahedi, agreed. Harold Brown, Secretary of Defense, said if the Shah opted for a military government the US should encourage him to form such a government under himself and not without him. On 3 November Vance, in a press conference, indicated further political liberalisation was just as important as restoration of order. On 6 November the Shah appointed a military government although half of its members were civilians. It did reduce the levels of violence and corrupt officials were arrested, including the head of Savak, the secret police. At this time Carter’s views were closer to those of Vance than agreeing with Brzezinski who wanted a military clampdown.
On 9 November Ambassador Sullivan sent a telegram entitled ‘Thinking the Unthinkable’ – since made famous for describing a parliamentary system with ‘Khomeini as spiritual leader in a Gandhi-like role’. In the previous month the Shah had granted an amnesty to dissidents living abroad including Ayatollah Khomeini. Sullivan suggested the debate should change from thinking about what the US could do to help the Shah to what the US could do if the Shah fell. Vance disagreed with Sullivan and he, Brzezinski, Mondale and Brown all agreed with Carter that the US should not undermine the Shah’s rule. This was also the position of the British government and remained so throughout. We deliberately never made any contact with Khomeini in France as the US did. Ever since September we had felt only the Iranian military could save Iran. Controversially, I warned publicly on TV that any Khomeini government would be far worse on human rights than the Shah.
On 7 December Carter was asked at a press breakfast whether the Shah could survive. He replied, “I don’t know. I hope so. It is in the hands of the Iranian people. The US has no intention to intercede in the internal affairs of Iran. … We primarily want an absence of violence and bloodshed. We personally prefer the Shah maintain a major role in the government, but that is a decision for the Iranian people to make.” This was a very important statement. Carter was ruling out, quite rightly, any US military involvement on the ground.
The American Embassy in Paris was instructed to start talks with Khomeini on 28 December and a telegram was sent to the Shah to end the uncertainty and ‘choose without delay an interim military government’.
On 3 January 1979, at a White House meeting, crucial decisions were taken. Vance left the room to arrange a safe haven for the Shah at the Palm Springs home of Walter Annenburg. Vance would not have offered a US residence to the Shah without Carter’s agreement and at that time it would not have been so provocative. One of the few things by then on which the demonstrators in Iran agreed on was that the Shah should leave. This was the moment for US firmness insisting the Shah should fly out immediately. In Paris Khomeini’s people would have seen it as an act paving their way to return. In Iran the military would have had then an opportunity to use force. General Robert ‘Dutch’ Huyser, a US Air Force General and Deputy Commander of Allied Forces in Europe was sent to Tehran. He discovered the Iranian Generals were not ready to move. Huyser said, “I got stern and noisy with the military” but to no effect. The top Generals, he said, were “gutless”. Huyser met the Shah who was still in Tehran on 11 January to ask him how with 400,000 troops did he lose control? The Shah turned the question around, asking Huyser, “Could you, as commander in chief, give the orders to kill your own people?” Huyser replied, “Your Majesty, we are not talking about me, we are talking about you.” The Shah sat silently.
On 16 January the Shah flew out of Tehran first for Egypt and then sought temporary residence in other countries. In September 1979 the Shah sought medical treatment in the US. He had previously been denied entry to the US for the same fear of hostage taking as Callaghan and I had refused entry to the UK. Unfortunately, Vance and Brzezinski were persuaded by Kissinger and David Rockefeller to let the Shah in even though Carter had always been against this. He now relented. Why Vance and Brzezinski switched their view I will never understand. Meanwhile, Callaghan and I were being attacked publicly for refusing the Shah entry by Margaret Thatcher, the leader of the Opposition. The Shah’s prolonged stay in New York due to complications led to demonstrations outside his hospital with students shouting “Death to the Shah” and the revolutionary movement in Iran were demanding his return. Street protesters invaded and overran the US Embassy taking US diplomats hostage. Subsequent events are well dealt with by Stuart Eizenstat in his insider biography. The attempt to rescue them by US helicopters was aborted after the first staging post in the Iranian desert due to operational failures and one helicopter crashing. This failure sealed the President’s electoral fate.