Jimmy Carter

While no serious critic of America's presidents ranks him alongside Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan, Jimmy Carter is generally considered a below-average president. His presidency and historians' view of it have been proverbially tarred and feathered by the crises with which it overlapped: The economic stagflation of the 1970s, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The very mention of Jimmy Carter and his years in the White House conjures up terrible images of sky-high prices, unbearable levels of unemployment, Americans being tragically kept as hostages by Islamic extremists, and Soviet aggression eating away at the Afghan nation. However, Carter's presidency was much more successful than is commonly depicted. Carter was a brilliant leader who enacted great reforms and, whether it was obvious or not, resolved many of the issues tainting his presidency.

Like Gerald Ford, Carter assumed office in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate Scandal. With the public's confidence in the executive branch having been smashed to bits by Richard Nixon's efforts to crush investigations into his reelection campaign's corruption, Carter's promise to restore honesty to the White House allowed him to win the 1976 presidential election. He then replaced Ford as president on January 20, 1977. The very next day, he pardoned every single American who had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, cementing the first of his many accomplishments in office.

Aside from pardoning Vietnam War draft dodgers, Carter also did a lot of great things for civil rights and civil liberties. For example, prior to entering office, Americans of color were often victimized by a discriminatory housing practice known as redlining. In simple terms. redlining is the act of literally drawing red lines around communities considered financially irresponsible or dangerous, which was usually a codeword for areas that were mainly black, Asian, Latino, etc. From there, they would deny mortgages and similar assets to people from these communities.

On September 19, 1977, Carter, in an effort to fight against redlining, signed the Community Reinvestment Act. This financial regulation requires banks to help meet the monetary and economic needs of the areas they're located in. The logic was simple: If banks were obligated to help all local clients satisfy their needs, they wouldn't be able to deny mortgages to people from redlined communities. It worked, and the Community Reinvestment Act confined redlining to the past. Another significant civil liberties bill Carter signed was the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which repealed all remaining restrictions on indigenous faiths.

While not as crucial a victory as the Community Reinvestment Act or American Indian Religious Freedom Act, another step Carter made to expand civil liberties was his 1978 legalization of the homebrewing of alcohol. This was actually one of several economic reforms and deregulation policies Carter implemented to help resolve one of the main points of criticism for his administration: A supposed failure to address the stagflation crisis of the 1970s.

From 1978 to 1980, Carter signed several laws that reduced regulations on industries such as air travel in pursuit of resolving the economic issues his country faced. Aside from the aforementioned legalization of homebrewed alcohol, Carter, on October 24, 1978, signed the Airline Deregulation Act. This law blocked the federal government from mandating when airplanes could begin flights, where those planes could fly to, and what routes they could take to their destinations. He also signed the Motor Carrier Act, a similar statute that prohibited the state from mandating when and where trucks traveled. Nixon, in an attempt to quell a similar economic crisis in 1971, also instituted several price controls. The Motor Carrier Act allowed truckers to disregard these price controls so long as the prices they wanted to conduct business at were no lower or higher than 15% of what the original price controls were. Lastly, Carter signed the Regulatory Flexibility Act, which required regulatory agencies to analyze proposed restrictions to make sure they wouldn't unfairly and disproportionately harm small businesses.

It should be noted that, unlike Ronald Reagan, Carter wasn't dismantling necessary regulations. Reagan abolished important regulations that protected the health of the economy, environment, and working class. Carter legitimately just got rid of restrictions that didn't need to exist and that truly was unnecessary government overreach. Regardless, Carter's reforms worked, and they contributed to the eventual resolution of the stagflation issue in 1981 and 1982. Reagan was just lucky enough to run against Carter before his policies took effect and to actually assume office just before they began to help the American economy. So, it seemed like he was the reason for the recovery. Yes, Carter deserves criticism for failing to improve the economy sooner. However, he also deserves credit for eventually contributing to its revival.

Carter also managed to simultaneously discard unimportant regulations that functioned as nothing more than pathetic burdens weighing down the economy and institute regulations that actually did improve life. More specifically, Carter was a dedicated environmentalist. Not only did Carter spend much of his presidency promoting renewable energy, but he also signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. This law requires open-pit mines - mining companies that dig large holes in the ground to search for resources, rather than clearing tunnels and looking there - to restore the land they had dug out once they finished working on said land. Carter also created the Department of Energy.

Foreign policy was another point of strength for Carter. On September 7, 1977, Carter met with Omar Torrijos, the president of Panama, and signed the Carter-Torrijos Treaties, a pair of agreements regarding the Panama Canal. The first treaties launched a transfer of the Panama Canal from the control of Washington DC to Panama City, scheduled to be completed by January 1, 2000. The second treaty clarified that the US military would continue to help defend the Panama Canal from external threats even after the transfer finished.

In the late summer of 1978, Carter made his most impressive diplomatic and geopolitical achievement: The Camp David Accords. Signed on September 17, 1978, the Camp David Accords drastically reduced tensions in the Middle East by requiring the Israeli and Egyptian governments to recognize one another. The agreement also required Israeli forces to evacuate the Sinai Peninsula. Most impressively, it established autonomous Palestinian local governments across Israel. The Camp David Accords were a wonderful set of provisions. Really, my only criticism of the document is that it forced Israeli citizens to leave the land Israel obtained during the Six-Day War in 1967. But overall, it was great.

One other issue I have with Carter's foreign policy is that in 1979, he opted to begin recognizing Beijing over Taipei as the legitimate government of mainland China. In doing this, he, whether intentionally or not, showed support for an authoritarian, imperialist state. Although, there are two factors that bring more nuance to this decision and that should be brought up: One, Deng Xiaoping, who became the leader of the People's Republic of China around the time that Carter made this decision, was much more liberal than Mao Zedong and Hua Guofeng. Deng was actively reforming the Chinese government to be less totalitarian and hawkish. Hence, it was better to begin recognizing China during this period than in, say, 1972 when it was still controlled by Mao. Two, Carter signed the Taiwan Relations Act, which at least managed to maintain Taiwanese-American relations as he made this admittedly-poor choice.

About six months after beginning official American recognition of Beijing, Carter, on June 21, 1979, signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT II agreement.

While Carter continued to make strides in foreign policy, two crises were brewing. On January 6, 1978, amidst rising criticism of the Iranian monarch's authoritarianism and economic incompetence, a newspaper in Tehran published an article accusing Ruhollah Khomeini, one of the shah's most prominent critics, of being a British spy. This article sparked riots in Tehran, beginning the Iranian Revolution. Fearing for his life, the shah fled Iran on February 11, 1979. This allowed the government to be easily taken over, and on April 1, 1979, Islamic fundamentalists seized state power in a coup.

Soon after, the shah, a hugely unpopular figure, was diagnosed with cancer. He then asked Carter if he could receive treatment in the US. Carter allowed him to do so, sparking a second series of riots in Tehran on November 4, 1979. During the riots, revolutionary students stormed the city's US embassy and began holding all the people inside as hostages. With this, the Iran Hostage Crisis commenced.

Yet another reason Carter is viewed as such an inadequate president is that he allegedly failed to liberate the hostages. It is true that Carter didn't free the hostages as soon as he should have, and it is true that Carter deserves criticism for that fact. However, Carter's response to the Iran Hostage Crisis wasn't as ineffective or counterproductive as people tend to portray it. In fact, one of the reasons Carter lost to Reagan in 1980, albeit only a minor one, is that he spent so much time focusing on the hostages and how he could free them that it significantly subtracted from the amount of time he worked on his reelection campaign.

For example, in April of 1980, Carter initiated Operation Eagle Claw. This was a project to send a group of expert rescuers to Iran with the goal of reaching the US embassy in Tehran and emancipating the hostages. Now, Operation Eagle Claw did fail, but through no fault of Carter's. The day the rescuers embarked on their helicopter flight to Tehran, a severe sandstorm broke out, destroying their vehicle. While the mission obviously failed, I included it to demonstrate how dedicated Carter was and that he wasn't as incompetent in his efforts as many say.

Ultimately, Carter did fail to free the hostages before election day of 1980. However, during his lame-duck period, he did succeed in resolving the crisis. On January 19, 1981, Carter's last full day in office, American and Iranian officials reached the Algiers Accords. Under this agreement, the Iranian government would free the people kept hostage in the embassy. In exchange, the American government would stop intervening in Iran's internal affairs and terminate all sanctions against the country, similar to Barack Obama's Iran Nuclear Deal. The document also established the US-Iran Claims Tribunal, a legal organization to hear cases filed by Americans against Iranian citizens and institutions and vice versa.

The Algiers Accords was great in every sense of the word. Not only did it lead to the liberation of the American hostages in Iran, but it also prevented the US government from engaging in imperialism in Iran. Furthermore, it improved living conditions in Iran by terminating American-imposed sanctions on the nation. I also consider the US-Iran Claims Tribunal a good thing. Having an entire independent organization to manage cases between Americans and Iranians means that said organization will only be required to handle cases that fit that description. This allows them to focus solely on those cases, hence reducing the number of cases they need to work on. So, they can dedicate more time and resources to these cases, hence improving the ultimate verdicts.

Around the time of the 1980 presidential election and the signing of the Algiers Accords, Carter signed the Paperwork Reduction Act. As the name implies, the goal of this bill was to reduce the amount of bureaucratic red tape and obligations government employees had to stumble through. However, the means by which it pursued that goal also improved the privacy of the American people. The law required government agencies to present a reason to gather information on American citizens and a plan for what to do with that information to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which the bill established, in order to procure such information. Even then, the OIRA needed to actively approve the reasoning and plan in order for them to gather said information.

Just under two months after the Iran Hostage Crisis began, the second major foreign policy crisis faced by the Carter Administration broke out. On December 24, 1979, the Soviet military, under the orders of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, invaded Afghanistan in order to remove its then-current leader, Hafizullah Amin. Amin was then killed by Soviet troops on December 27, 1979. However, during the three-day interim, a group of Islamic extremist groups merged to create the Mujahideen, a militia of sorts created to fight against the invasion. Because of this, the Soviet military remained in Afghanistan in order to defeat the Mujahideen, which they never ended up doing.

Carter was obviously appalled by the invasion. So, he took a number of measures to try and coerce Moscow out of Afghanistan. Firstly, he said that if Brezhnev didn't withdraw from the country by February of 1980, Carter would have American athletes boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The threat didn't work, and by February 29, 1980, Soviet troops were still fighting in the country. Carter then lived up to his promise, and no Americans played at the Olympics in Moscow.

While this measure was quite timid, Carter did take more decisive actions against the Soviet attack on Afghanistan throughout the remainder of his presidency: He routinely called on the UN to send supplies to South Asia that it could use to counter further instances of Soviet aggression. He also prohibited the shipment of grain and information technology to the Soviet Union, as well as Soviet fishing in waters owned by the US government. Although, I do disagree with the sanctions. On a similar note, I also believe Carter deserves criticism for instituting sanctions against several Latin American countries.

Life during Jimmy Carter's presidency was not pleasant by any stretch of the imagination. However, the troubles of Carter's tenure were not his fault, but rather a product of that era in American history. The world's demons had attacked the American economy and geopolitical stability, resulting in a period of persistent crisis. Yet, Carter managed to be a good leader in horrible times. He was a strong environmentalist, brokered various beneficial international agreements, increased the American people's privacy, founded the Department of Energy, and was an advocate of racial equality. His sanctions and support of Beijing prevent him from being higher, but his brilliant responses to the crises of his day prevent him from being lower.