Quote of the Day (Jimmy Carter, on Criticism and Scrutiny of Government Officials)

“Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society. Now, as in the past, only the understanding and involvement of the people through full and open debate can help to avoid serious mistakes and assure the continued dignity and safety of the Nation.”—Jimmy Carter, 39^th President of the United States (1924-2024), “Farewell Address to the Nation,” Jan. 14, 1981

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of Jimmy Carter, ‘Dasher’ From Plains)

Oct. 1, 1924— Jimmy Carter, who rose improbably from a humble speck on a map to the highest office in the land, was born in a hospital in Plains, Ga.—the first Oval Office occupant who came into the world in this formal medical institution.

Plains left its imprint on Carter in all kinds of ways. Indeed, it lies at the heart of one of the paradoxes of his life: a leader of fierce ambition who nevertheless kept coming back to a community and way of life where he could be of service.

Not that he never had the opportunity to leave for good, or that others didn’t want him to move. For instance, wife Rosalynn (a fellow Plains native) regarded it as a “monumental step backward” when he announced he was resigning from the U.S. Navy in 1953 to return to the town where his father Earl had made a difference in the life of other residents as a successful businessman who continually aided others.

When Carter’s Presidency ended after a single term in 1981, he didn’t go on the lecture circuit where he could charge exorbitant fees to business and industry groups, or hobnob on Martha’s Vineyard with fashionable culturati, but went back to Plains, where, finding the family peanut business $1 million in the red when placed in a blind trust during his President, they began to pare down their debt as they started a new life.

Trust me: It can be difficult blogging about a person or event in such a way that readers come away having learned anything new. No matter how often one may return to someone as consequential as a President, no single post, no matter how intrinsically interesting (as I believe was the case with Carter’s energy policy, recounted here), can do justice to a career.

For that reason, when I can, I try to write about something I’ve experienced directly relating to that. Fortunately, there were two such events relating to Carter.

The first involved not President Carter, but candidate Carter. Back in 1976, when he first ran for President, he had devoted much of his early resources to the Iowa Presidential caucus, effectively putting that state on the political map by placing first among the Democratic contenders. 

The code name that the Secret Service initially used for him, “Dasher,” testified to the tireless marathon campaign he subsequently conducted until his victory that fall.

The New Jersey Democratic primary, though held in June, was nothing like the afterthought it’s become in recent quadrennial cycles.

As a high school sophomore then in the first week of June, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see a potential President once I learned Carter was coming to my hometown of Englewood, NJ.

(I felt the same way in 1984, when Gary Hart came to Bergen County. I’m afraid that the candidate subsequently got into hot water when he took literally the musician warming up the crowd for him, Stephen Stills, when he performed “Love the One You’re With.”)

The 1976 Carter appearance in Englewood occurred at Galilee United Methodist Church, whose primarily African-American congregation was emblematic of one of a major component of the base he was cobbling together in a campaign that took the Democratic establishment by surprise.

Carter was introduced to the crowd by civil rights icon Andrew Young, eloquently vouching for him as an exemplar of a “New South” shedding its segregationist past at long last—a characterization all the more helpful for any in the audience who recalled the candidate’s remarks only two months before in which he used the phrase “ethnic purity” to defend the purity of white neighborhoods in cities.

(After his election, Carter appointed Young U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—then forced his resignation two years later in the fallout over an unauthorized meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization.)

I don’t recall any policy positions that Carter enunciated that afternoon—he had carefully blurred many of them throughout the primary season—but I vividly remember, as he vigorously shook one hand after another, that grin so toothy that it became the fallback feature for cartoonists during his Presidency.

And I recollect the circumstances he faced then: Major rivals on the right (George Wallace, Henry Jackson) and the left (Morris Udall) had lost losing key primaries, leaving only Sen. Frank Church, Gov. Jerry Brown, and aging party lion Sen. Hubert Humphrey in a last-ditch “Anybody But Carter” movement.

The key takeaway of Carter’s address, then, in between his usual stump speech that he would be offering “a government as good as its people” to a country sick of Washington, was that the Democratic powers that be were united against him.

If this moment in time has any significance at all now, it’s as a foreshadowing of what happened with the Republicans 40 years later, when alarmed party leaders mounted their own effort against a candidate they feared would not make it that fall: Donald Trump.

In both campaigns, the leading candidate had built up too high a delegate candidate—and there were still too many candidates dividing the opposition to him—for the “Stop” movement to work.

The second event related to Carter that I was involved with, indirectly, came after he left office. Not only, like most 20^th century Presidents, did he want to write a memoir giving his side of the story, but, with so much debt hanging over his head from the decline of the peanut business, he wanted to do so quickly.

Still, he wanted to do a good job of it—so, as he had done before he delivered his disastrous “crisis of confidence” speech in 1979, he called together the best minds he could think of for their advice. One such expert was the college professor I had for a year-long seminar on the American Presidency.

So my professor polled his experts—his students—on the single subject they wanted the President to cover.

I don’t think my topic was unusual. As much as anything else, the protracted Iranian hostage crisis had conveyed an image of American impotence, and had probably crystallized for the public a growing sense of Carter as incompetent. The Iranian militants had already given signs of growing radicalism. Why, then, had Carter agreed to admit the Shah of Iran for cancer treatment?

Carter insisted that he’d been told that the Shah was so close to death that the treatment he required was only available in the U.S. (It turned out, as Robin Young and Samantha Raphelson reported for Boston’s NPR affiliate WBUR in January 2020, that David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and former shah attorney John J. McCloy exaggerated the lack of medical options available to the Shah.)

The group gathered to meet Carter in 1981 included among its luminaries Edmund Morris. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt urged the ex-President to concentrate on creating a narrative, stressing that Carter’s was a great story that demonstrated the possibilities of America.

Published a year later, Carter’s Keeping Faith turned out to be in much the same vein as nearly all Presidential memoirs: stodgy and self-justifying, not one that most readers would enjoy reading. Maybe he just needed time to find his voice and best subject matter, though: An Hour Before Midnight, his memoir of growing up in Plains, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002.

What struck me about Carter’s meeting with these historians was less what he (or they) said or did but how he appeared—or, rather, how he and Rosalynn appeared. The sofa where the two sat was quite large, my professor recalled, but the former First Couple sat so close together that it represented a casual, maybe even unconscious, indication of their comfort in each other’s company, the product of a marriage that lasted 77 years—the longest in Presidential history.

With so much of Carter’s career turning on improbabilities, maybe the greatest of all might be the final chapter going on now. The former President has been in hospice care for 19 months, a far cry from the six months that 90% of such patients undergo.

He has defied the medical odds, just as he defied the low expectations of those who met him for the first time years ago. He has outlived some of his detractors and earned the surprised respect of others (including me) who regard him as a model for a modern ex-President.

Surely, Carter regards his longevity as a blessing—but even many Americans who thought of him as ultimately a failed President are likely to see what he has served as an active private citizen as a blessing to his country

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Jimmy Carter, on the Unseen ‘Guiding Lights of Life’)

“One of the most interesting verses that I know in the Bible, for instance, is when the Romans ask Paul, ‘St. Paul, what are the important things in life? What are the things that never change?’ And Paul said, interestingly, ‘they're the things that you cannot see.’ What are the things that you can't see that are important? I would say justice, truth, humility, service, compassion, love. You can't see any of those. You can't prove they're there, but they're the guiding lights of life.” —Former American President Jimmy Carter, remarks from a 1996 appearance on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer quoted in Tom Bearden’s report on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Carter, The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, Oct. 11, 2002

TV Quote of the Day (‘SNL,’ With Rodney Dangerfield on ‘The Pepsi Syndrome’ at Three Mile Island)

Rosalyn Carter [played by Laraine Newman]: “Where is Jimmy? I have a right to see him!”

Ross Denton, head of public relations [played by guest host Richard Benjamin]: “Mrs. Carter, the president is receiving special treatment right now.”

Mrs. Carter: “What kind of special treatment? Why can’t I see him?”

Denton: “Mrs. Carter, this is Dr. Edna Casey. Perhaps she can explain better than I what has happened to the president.”

Dr. Edna Casey [played by Jane Curtin]: “Mrs. Carter, your husband was exposed to massive doses of radiation. Now this has affected the entire cell structure of his body and greatly accelerated the growth process.”

Mrs. Carter: “Well, what does that mean?”

Dr. Casey: “It means, Mrs. Carter, your husband, President Carter, has become [camera zooms in on Dr. Casey] the amazing colossal president.”

Mrs. Carter: “Well, how big is he?”

Dr. Casey: “Well, Mrs. Carter, it’s difficult to comprehend just how big he is but to give you some idea, we’ve asked comedian Rodney Dangerfield to come along today to help explain it to you. Rodney?

”

[Rodney Dangerfield enters]

Rodney: “How do you do, how are you?”

Denton: “Rodney, can you please tell us, how big is the president?”

Rodney: “Oh, he’s a big guy, I’ll tell you that, he’s a big guy. I tell you, he’s so big, I saw him sitting in the George Washington Bridge dangling his feet in the water! He’s a big guy!”

Mrs. Carter: “Oh my God! Jimmy! Oh God!”

Rodney: “Oh, he’s big, I’ll tell you that, boy. He’s so big that when two girls make love to him at the same time, they never meet each other! He’s a big guy, I’ll tell you!”

Mrs. Carter: “Oh no! Oh Jimmy! My Jimmy!”

Rodney: “I don’t want to upset you, lady, he’s big, you know what I mean? Why, he could have an affair with the Lincoln Tunnel! I mean, he’s really high! He’s big, I’ll tell you! He’s a big guy!”

Mrs. Carter: “No! No! No!”

Denton: “Rodney, thank you very much. You can go.”

Rodney: “It’s my pleasure. He’s way up there, lady! You know what I mean?”—Saturday Night Live, Season 4: Episode 16, “The Pepsi Syndrome” skit, Apr. 7, 1979

The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania may have occurred 40 years ago today, but we live in its shadow even now. The techno-utopia pushed by the nuclear power industry to that point proved, as utopias invariably do, a chimera. An industry that took wing through Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program received a decisive check in the early spring of 1979, and subsequent incidents at Russia’s Chernobyl and Japan’s Fukushima plants proved far more damaging, both to the environment and to public trust in institutions.

Only two nuclear power plants are currently under construction in the U.S., and the average age of existing ones is 40 years old, according to an Andrew Maykuth article in the Philadelphia Inquirer last month. The industry has been forced into expensive safety and security measures, with its representatives increasingly compelled to explain themselves.

Speaking of explaining themselves, Saturday Night Live gave a hilarious preview of the parlous future in the week for industry mouthpieces in the week following the accident. The skit title, “The Pepsi Syndrome,” was a send-up of The China Syndrome, the Jane Fonda-Michael Douglas-Jack Lemmon thriller that was still only in its second week when Three Mile Island gave it the kind of unexpected boost that film flacks can only dream of.

“The Pepsi Syndrome,” cited by ex-Senator Al Franken as one of his 10 favorite SNL political sketches, kicked off with Bill Murray spilling the soft drink over the plant’s control board, leading to a meltdown in the plant’s core. Two unconventional people come either to clean up or inspect the damage: a female maintenance worker (Garrett Morris, in drag) and President Jimmy Carter, who, as a former self-advertised “nuclear engineer,” walks in to inspect the core, wearing yellow boots that prove inadequate to the danger he faces. 

I had not seen (or read a transcript of) this scene until now, but I have always recalled my surprise and delight when Rodney Dangerfield came out of nowhere to describe the President’s medical “condition.”

If you want to know more about the scientific and political fallout from Three Mile Island, there are plenty of background sources. (For instance, this past weekend, C-Span re-ran a 2004 interview with J. Samuel Walker, author of Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective.) But comedy forms part of the historical record, too, in telling later generations how contemporary society reacted to events—and in this case, it was just plain fun to see.

Quote of the Day (Zbigniew Brzezinski, on History, Chaos and Conspiracy)

“History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.” —Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, quoted in Hedrick Smith, “Brzezinski Says Critics Are Irked by His Accuracy,” The New York Times, January 18, 1981

As winter turned into spring in 1976, various relatives and friends mentioned to me a parishioner at my local Roman Catholic church, St. Cecilia’s of Englewood, NJ. Nobody I knew had remarked on him during his 16 prior years as a professor at Columbia University. 

But proximity to potential power, as foreign policy adviser to the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, now made him an object of curiosity. “That’s Brzezinski,” they whispered, pointing at a figure near the back of the church while trying not to draw undue attention to themselves in the process.

That was my remote introduction to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died yesterday at age 89. I would learn shortly that he had raised his family (including daughter Minka, now a morning-show fixture on MSNBC) in a Victorian house only several blocks from my home. 

But the psychic distance from that white-collar area to my blue-collar neighborhood might as well have put him on the other side of the moon.

By the time I entered Columbia myself two years later as a freshman, my interest in him had strengthened. The campus—particularly the school newspaper that I wrote for, filled with political science majors and/or liberals—was now avidly following his adventures in Washington, where he had gone, on extended sabbatical from the university, to serve as National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter. 

Soon, that service had taken on all the aspects of an intramural mudfight, as Brzezinski’s hawkish views clashed with the more dovish perspective of another university academic now in the State Department, the Sovietologist Marshal Shulman.

In Washington, Brzezinski became more familiar than he might have liked with the notions of “conspiracy” and “chaos” that he discussed in the above quote. 

Right-wingers (and a few left-wingers) charged in the late Seventies and Eighties that a group that he had helped establish, the Trilateral Commission (formed, in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, of prominent academics and politicians from North America, the European Union and Japan with a strong orientation toward global economics), was a secretive cabal out to rule the world.

At the same time, Carter Administration foreign policy was increasingly regarded by large parts of the American public as being rocked by chaos. Brzezinski battled internally not just against Shulman but also against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. 

By the third year of Carter’s Presidency, that internal sense of coming apart was being mirrored almost nightly on the evening news, with OPEC generating a second American oil shortage in less than a decade and American hostages being seized in Iran.

When he spoke to the New York Times Hedrick Smith, then, Brzezinski was being as defensive as he was philosophical in leaving office. 

He said what had annoyed his critics was how often his vision of policy had been borne out. He derided “any grand schemes regarding a new international world order,” noting that policymakers were simply liable to be “overwhelmed by events and information.”

No policymaker, even the best, gets it right all of the time, and Brzezinski didn’t either. He correctly predicted that the strain of dealing with so many different nationalities would lead the U.S.S.R. to collapse. 

But in his eagerness to hasten that day, he backed the ill-fate attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages and supported financing the mujahideen in Afghanistan in response to the Soviet deployment of forces there, unknowingly encouraging the forces of radical Islam that have bedeviled the U.S. in the Mideast these last two decades.

(It must also be said that, long before it became universally truth even in Democratic circles, this onetime "hardliner" warned that George W. Bush's Gulf War would turn out to be a "historic, strategic and moral calamity.")

Himself the annoyed target of political paranoids, Brzezinski in 1981 couldn’t imagine a President who promoted both chaos and conspiracy. But that is what life is like in the U.S. today. 

The thoughtless blusterer once derided memorably by Jeb Bush as the “chaos candidate” is now the Chaos Commander in Chief, an executive who sows doubt in the efficacy and value of the government he leads by screaming about nonexistent plots (e.g., about President Obama wiretapping him).

To his credit, unlike other Cold Warriors who sought to undermine Soviet Communism only to make their peace with Vladimir Putin, Brzezinski before his death criticized both the Russian dictator and the American President who has uttered nary a word of criticism of him. 

He castigated the Russian President's "thuggish tactics" and "thinly camouflaged invasion" of the Ukraine in 2014, while this year scathingly dismissed Trumplomacy: The president, he said, “has not given even one serious speech about the world and foreign affairs.”

Ike’s Leadership Lesson Lost on New Administration

“Character in many ways is everything in leadership. It is made up of many things, but I would say character is really integrity. When you delegate something to a subordinate, for example, it is absolutely your responsibility, and he must understand this. You as a leader must take complete responsibility for what the subordinate does. I once said, as a sort of wisecrack, that leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”—Dwight D. Eisenhower quoted in Edgar F. Puryear Jr., Nineteen Stars: A Study in Military Character and Leadership (1971)

It would have been easy for Dwight Eisenhower to accept all the credit and shrug off the blame for operations he directed. For several years in the 1930s, he noted acidly later, he had “studied theatrics” for seven years under his boss, vainglorious Douglas MacArthur. Maybe the daily annoyance of watching MacArthur at close quarters as his aide inoculated him against similar conduct, or maybe it was the sober recognition that, if he were to send men into life-or-death situations, he needed to bind them to him through emotional loyalty, not just the obedience expected by his superior rank.

In the anxious hours before the D-Day invasion, Eisenhower was every bit as good as his word. Had the mass assault at Normandy failed, he was ready with a statement about how the public should judge the event. “The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do,” it concluded. “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

While critical as a candidate of many Eisenhower policies as President, John F. Kennedy must have come to understand that one source of his predecessor’s considerable appeal was this willingness to step up. The new young President had inherited planning done by the CIA for an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. But when the Bay of Pigs turned into a fiasco only three months into the administration, JFK realized that he could not blame someone else. “Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan,” he said mordantly if ironically, concluding, “I am the responsible officer of the government.”

Kennedy could not get over the fact that his approval rating actually rose after his first major failure. To be sure, diplomatic and military debacles have not been similarly rewarded since then. (After the botched hostage rescue mission in Iran in 1980, American voters did not recall that Jimmy Carter had taken to the air afterward to accept full responsibility, but that military officers had died in the desert because of an operation he ordered.)

But by and large, Americans—many with abundant experience as parents—would rather see a leader who, like a responsible child, steps up and admits that he was responsible for wrecking the family car, not a kid sibling.

Except for the Republican newcomer to the Oval Office, who seems never to have absorbed Eisenhower’s pungent lesson on credit and blame as a part of leadership. I refuse to accord that newcomer the dignity of naming him, as he has so very rarely displayed any dignity in the job he should never have attained in the first place. But a few words are in order on both his dereliction of duty as commander in chief and dereliction of character.

Two and a half weeks ago, at a press conference, the new President launched into his usual bragging mode about his famous victory this past November. He could not resist taking it even further, extending his ridiculous trope that he’d won in a “landslide.”

“I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan,” he concluded.

The normal untruth of the new President (let’s call him Agent Orange, in honor of his unusual hair color and of his possible status as a government employee in the service of a foreign power, ok?) is something so outrageous that it can’t be readily disproven. But this time, he went too far. He offered the kind of fact that can be verified or struck down by using virtually any almanac at hand. (Unless, like our new President, you show no signs of ever even opening any almanac to begin with.)

It fell to NBC news correspondent Peter Alexander to tell Agent Orange that Barack Obama, for one, had a higher Electoral College count. Well, okay—Republicans—the new incumbent said, almost comically unsure that most onlookers (never, of course, those “enemies of the people”) would give him a pass.  But even this didn’t work. After all, George H.W. Bush (yes, the father of “low-energy” Jeb) even had a higher Electoral College tally as a first-time nominee. And among Democrats, not only Barack Obama but Bill Clinton had higher electoral counts.

“Well, no I was told — I was given that information,” Agent Orange claimed.

Look at the construction of that last clause. It’s passive. More to the point, there’s no actor or cause of action involved. We don’t know who fed him that tidbit—indeed, if anyone did give him any. There’s every reason to think that nobody did.

But that wasn’t the last—or more serious—time that Agent Orange tried to shift blame. After questions began to be raised about the loss of life during a covert mission he authorized in Yemen against ISIS—one approved so soon after his inauguration that there was every reason to wonder how fully he absorbed his briefing on it—he said, in a Fox News interview, that the mission was started “before I got here.” It was, he said, something his generals “wanted to do”—and, he couldn’t resist adding, “they lost [US Navy SEAL William] Ryan [Owens].”

This was right after he had claimed the mission was “a highly successful raid that generated large amounts of vital intelligence that will lead to many more victories in the future against our enemies.” In other words, he was happy to claim credit for the part of the raid that (he said, offering no proof) “worked,” but ran as far away as he could from the part that didn’t.

There’s a word that Agent Orange uses every chance he gets in his overnight tweets, and it applies here to his attempt to grab the glory associated with leadership but run away from the blame that accrues to it: pathetic.