The Unfinished Presidency

The Unfinished Presidency
Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House

By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
Viking

Election Day 1980

On November 4, 1980, at 9:01 P.M. Eastern time, President Jimmy Carter telephoned former governor Ronald Reagan at the Republican's imposing home in southern California; he added to the courtesy with a short telegram congratulating the president-elect on his decisive victory. An hour later at the Sheraton Washington Hotel ballroom--only an hour and a half after the first network projections of Reagan's victory--Carter announced the verdict officially. It was the earliest concession by a presidential candidate since 1904, when Alton B. Parker had bowed before Theodore Roosevelt. "I promised you four years ago that I would never lie to you," Carter told his weeping supporters, echoing the best-known line from his 1976 campaign. "So I can't stand here tonight and say it doesn't hurt."

White House press secretary Jody Powell had tried to get the soon-to-be ex-president to delay his speech until eleven o'clock Eastern time, when the California polls would close, but Carter didn't want anyone to think he was sulking in the White House and insisted, "It's ridiculous. Let's go and get it over with." Many in the Democratic establishment were furious with Carter for conceding more than an hour before the polls closed on the West Coast, thus hurting other Democratic candidates in the Pacific time zone. "What in God's name is wrong with you people?" Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill fumed by phone from Boston to Carter's congressional liaison, Frank Moore. When Moore told O'Neill that Carter just wanted to "get it over with," damn the western Democrats, the speaker exploded with rage, yelling, "You guys came in like a bunch of jerks, and I see you're going out the same way." Representative Tom Foley of Washington State put it more succinctly: "It was vintage Carter at its dead worst."

To some, such as Democratic congressmen Al Ullman of Oregon and James Corman of California, Carter's unconscionable act seemed an apt metaphor for everything that had been askew with his presidency, from bad public relations to political fatuity. Both Ullman and Corman blamed Carter's early concession for their own narrow defeats, and they were hardly alone in their disgust; even those who had come to expect such slights from the "partyless president" were appalled.

Of course, robust cheer was in short supply anywhere Democrats were assembled. A profound numbness had settled over the White House even before 8:15 P.M., when John Chancellor of NBC News first announced to the nation that Carter had become the only elected president to lose his bid to stay in the White House since Republican Herbert Hoover in 1932. An office on the second floor of the West Wing contained the loyal but exhausted foot soldiers who had moaned when their greatest fear became inescapable fact: the swashbuckling, government-hating Reagan had been chosen in place of their boss. "I had been convinced for at least six months that we were going to lose," then thirty-seven-year-old White House staffer Stuart Eizenstat recalled. "But it was like preparing yourself for the death of a family member: when it comes, it's still devastating." The grim mood caused former White House counsel Robert Lipshutz to dub the mournful occasion "The Wake in the White House," as evidenced by the funeral mien of everyone in the official photographs. "A part of my soul died that night," campaign manager Hamilton Jordan confessed later. Despite a coast-to-coast campaign to muster last-minute support, the light at the end of the tunnel, as poet Robert Lowell once put it, was the light of an oncoming train. Carter had come to power four years earlier with an expansionary economic platform and a fresh face full of political promise; now he was about to exit Washington as perhaps the most conservative Democratic commander in chief since Grover Cleveland, who was also done in by a recessionary economy.

During the frenetic last days of Carter's desperate quest for reelection, he pleaded with the throngs out to glimpse a real live president at rallies and town hall meetings, repeating "I need you! I need you!" But Americans turned a deaf ear. With inflation in the double digits, oil prices triple what they had been, unemployment above 7 percent, interest rates topping 20 percent, fifty-two American hostages still held captive in Iran, and unsettling memories of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lingering, it's hardly surprising that there was no election day surge to the Jimmy Carter-Walter Mondale ticket. Having gone four years without projecting a unifying vision or instituting a sweeping program like FDR's New Deal, Truman's Fair Deal, JFK's New Frontier, or LBJ's Great Society, Carter was judged inept and uninspiring, and voters rejected him in no uncertain terms.

Jody Powell, all of thirty-six years old, tried to take a stoic view of the imminent debacle. Nonplussed by the idea of losing, like the last Confederate soldier he spent election day spinning visions of victory to skeptical newsmen. Until he got home, that is--then he had to inform his thirteen-year-old daughter, Emily, that Jimmy Carter was going to lose. "She was just devastated," Powell sighed much later. "I had a hard time telling her the game was over."

Apathy characterized the 1980 election--only 52.4 percent of eligible voters participated, the lowest turnout since 1948 (and the beginning of a downward trend)--but those who did vote clearly shifted to the right. When all was said and done, Reagan--the sixty-nine-year-old conservative Carter had pronounced "untruthful" and "dangerous"--had won a commanding 51 percent (43,899,248) of the popular vote to Carter's sorry 41 percent (35,481,435). Dark-horse alternative John Anderson, a liberal Republican congressman from Illinois who had run as an Independent, managed to pull in 7 percent (5,719,437), primarily from upper-middle-class libertarians and disgruntled liberals. The electoral vote looked even better for Reagan: 489 votes to Carter's 49, with none for Anderson. The Sun Belt and Rocky Mountain regions came in so overwhelmingly Republican that billboards were erected overnight in Oklahoma and Wyoming: WELCOME TO THE REAGAN REVOLUTION. Far worse for Carter, the ex-Confederate states, with the exception of Georgia, also went Republican.

Carter had entered the White House believing that the failures of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had been moral ones, and that he had been elected to reestablish a government "as good and honest and decent and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people." So it stung all the more that be had lost to a man he thought immoral to the core: an unprincipled but telegenic B-grade Hollywood cowboy who had ridden into the White House on such "patriotic" themes as abhorrence of government, xenophobia, and massive tax cuts. "Reagan is different from me in almost every basic element of commitment and experience and promise to the American people," Carter had said at a town hall meeting in Independence, Missouri, two months earlier. Years later he would go further and state that "allowing Ronald Reagan to become president was by far my biggest failure in office."

Almost immediately, commentators began comparing Carter's clobbering with what Richard Nixon had done to George McGovern in 1972. Some even raised the specter of Herbert Hoover, who had failed to provide the forward-looking leadership the nation craved during the Great Depression. Of course, Carter was used to that charge; throughout the campaign Republicans had mocked him as "Jimmy Hoover," another well-intentioned engineer-president who deserved to be ousted from office for a lack of vision. History, as usual, would repeat itself: just as the Democrats made meat of Hoover's "prosperity is just around the comer" well into the 1950s, the Republicans would campaign against the ghost of Carter's "malaise" for the next decade and beyond.

As bad as the rest were, the worst moment for Carter that election day was when he broke the bad news to his wife. "Don't say anything yet to Rosalynn," Carter had instructed his staff. "Let me tell her." First Lady Rosalynn Carter, whose soft-edged toughness had earned her the nickname "Steel Magnolia," simply refused to believe the lopsided verdict. "I was in such denial," she admitted years later. "It was impossible for me to believe that anybody could have looked at the facts and voted for Reagan."

When voters were asked why they chose Reagan, most said it was "time for a change." The 1980 election indeed marked a true sea change in American history. Reagan was FDR in reverse, and made it clear that as president he intended to dismantle the welfare state created under the New Deal. Like his Republican predecessors Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, Reagan planned to lower taxes on the rich in order to stimulate America's productive energies. But where Harding and Coolidge pressed for disarmament, Reagan vocally wanted to accelerate the arms race enough to beat the Soviet Union in the cold war.

Apparently that's what Americans wanted too. Riding Reagan's coattails and a surging tide of conservatism, the Republicans also captured the Senate for the first time since 1952 and managed to reduce the Democratic majority in the House by 33 votes. Leading liberal senators including Frank Church of Idaho, George McGovern of South Dakota, John Culver of Iowa, and Birch Bayh of Indiana suffered upsets largely because they were associated with Carter's policies. Even reelected Democrats such as Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts were jeered in the press for a 1960s-style "sideburn liberalism" as passe as Woodstock and the lava lamp. "If I had realized more fully what would follow us in Washington, I would have listened more carefully to your good political advice concerning how to deal with the Democratic liberals, the grain embargo, draft registration, and an overload[ed] agenda," Carter later confessed to Walter Mondale. "Perhaps we could have spared the country a lot of suffering and embarrassment."

Carter's drubbing extended even into the left wing of the Democratic party. One postelection poll reported that fewer than a third of those who described themselves as liberal voted for him; the rest opted for Independent candidate John Anderson or stayed home. This came as no surprise to Carter, who had confided in his White House diary on January 19, 1978, "In many cases I feel more at home with the conservative Democratic and Republican members of Congress than I do with the others." In fact, the penny-pincher in Carter had always considered the so-called liberal coalition little more than a smug coterie of money-hungry interest groups. He saw himself, by contrast, as a New South populist morally above party allegiance who had been elected to serve "the people directly." He prided himself on having little to do with the Wall Street, Washington, or Hollywood Democratic establishments, which he regarded as elitist private clubs for the rich. "I do not condemn the cocktail circuit," Carter noted "It's just not natural for me to be a part of it."

But in the end, being the consummate outsider proved fatal. Carter never fought in the trenches alongside his fellow Washington Democrats in the great battles of the era--over the Vietnam War, Medicaid and Medicare, civil rights legislation, Nixon's Supreme Court appointments, or Watergate--and therefore he could only be viewed as a political fluke by his own party. Carter mistakenly assumed that he could compensate for lacking the requisite battle scars by devising rational policies to show his presidential leadership. On top of that naivete he failed to understand that making policies was just the beginning--then he had to sell them to the American people, and "selling" seemed such dirty business.

Tales of Carter's contempt for and ineptitude at politicking were legion on Capitol Hill throughout his term in office. "When it came to the politics of Washington, D.C., he never really understood how the system worked," Tip O'Neill wrote in his memoirs. "And although this was out of character for Jimmy Carter, he didn't want to learn about it either." In fact, O'Neill couldn't escape the feeling that Carter was working against fellow Democrats--including the Speaker himself. "Once, when the city of Boston applied for a government grant for some roads, I called the Carter people to try to speed it along," O'Neill wrote. "Instead of assisting me, however, they did everything possible to block my way."

Other perceived slights were more subtle. Indiana congressman John Brademas, the Democratic whip who said he had to spell his name to the receptionist every time he called the Carter White House, got an even sharper slap in the face when Carter visited his district and made his landmark human rights speech at Notre Dame University. Brademas felt exultant that Carter had come to South Bend as he and Senator Birch Bayh introduced the chief executive to Notre Dame's distinguished president, Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh. The thrill didn't last long; later that afternoon, Carter delivered his speech without either recognizing or thanking the two leading Democratic politicians of Indiana, both of whom were sitting right behind him on the platform. Brademas felt snubbed and humiliated. "When a president comes to your district, addresses your constituency, and doesn't even mention your name when you're standing right beside him ... something is wrong," Brademas declared later. "I was on Nixon's enemies list, but he never treated me that way." When Brademas lost his congressional seat in 1980--after having won eleven straight terms--he didn't hesitate to pin part of the blame on Carter.

But to Carter, many Democratic senators were at best little more than celebrity lobbyists. Oregon senator Mark Hatfield, a Rockefeller Republican who had befriended Carter in the early 1970s, was startled by the president's inability to connect with other Democratic politicians. "Carter was so much smarter than most of the Democrats in Congress--and he let them know it," Hatfield explained: Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington State and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts in particular were known to "grind their teeth" as they walked out of White House meetings, livid that Carter had "talked down to them."

More than any other president in memory, Carter had turned his back on money lenders and influence peddlers. He believed that even private conversations with senators, for example, might cause him to compromise--or look as though he were compromising--his principles. "Carter invited my husband and me to the White House for a private dinner only once," remembered Bethine Church, widow of the former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Frank Church, "and he just refused to talk politics. It was so odd. He really believed his 1976 outsider campaign." In a December 1980 postmortem on Carter's presidency, Newsweek commented that he had "shown Reagan how not to do business in an insider's city" by acting "standoffish" toward "the lords and ladies of Washington society."

Carter never fit in the capital because his leadership style was essentially religious in nature, more preacher than politician. Among American presidents only Carter peppered his speeches with the word "love" and earnest Christian entreaties for "tenderness" and "healing." As commentator Eric Severeid once quipped, Carter was a "wheeler-healer" who simply refused to become a "wheeler-dealer." As president he spoke openly of his Christian faith and all it entailed: daily prayers, abhorrence of violence, the belief that the meek shall inherit the earth, the courage to champion the underdog. Most of all, his faith taught him that a clear conscience was always preferable to Machiavellian expediency--a pretty healthy attitude that proved both Carter's greatest strength and his bane.

Shortly after the 1980 presidential election Kenneth Kline, a politics buff from Mogadore, Ohio, took it upon himself to send two hundred notable personages a questionnaire asking why Jimmy Carter had lost so overwhelmingly to Ronald Reagan. Kline's cover letter pointed out that it had been only four years since Carter had been anointed the perfect elixir to as suage the political ills during the 1970s, when Americans still raw from the trauma of Vietnam sat transfixed before their television sets watching the Nixon administration unravel. By 1976, America's bicentennial year, a nation disheartened by political corruption capped by a suspicious presidential pardon wanted to believe in something--and there was Jimmy Carter, a devout evangelical Christian who promised "to make government as good as its people." So what happened?

Nearly every U.S. senator Kline polled, from William Proxmire on the left to Barry Goldwater on the right, attributed the Carter presidency's implosion to the prolonged Iran hostage crisis and the stagnant U.S. economy. Republican senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina put it in grander terms, boasting that Carter's defeat was part of a paradigm shift that "marked the decline and fall of the public's faith in statist liberalism ... the idea that the solution to all our problems as a nation and as individuals is to be found in some sort of intervention by [the] federal government."

Even those who were not overtly hostile were melancholy over what might have been. Responding to Kline's survey, Father Hesburgh wrote, "I have always had the feeling that [Carter] is a good man, but somehow was not able to bring his vision to reality. That is not unusual on this earth." This benign assessment was shared by many, including Jesse Jackson and Billy Graham. Veteran NBC News commentator David Brinkley summed the matter up crisply in 1981:

* He had no base in the Democratic party and few friends in the federal government, making it difficult for him to achieve his purposes.

* Despite his intelligence, he had a vindictive streak, a mean streak, that surfaced frequently and antagonized people,

* He became so absorbed in detail he never was able to articulate a coherent public policy, foreign or domestic.

* Several failures during his term were not his fault, but nevertheless hurt him politically: inflation, the hostages, the blundered rescue attempt....

* The extravagant promises in his campaign generally were not kept. Many could not have been kept and he should never have made them.

* And [he exhibited some] examples of excruciatingly bad taste, such as telling an insulting and unfunny joke [about Montezuma's revenge] at a dinner in Mexico City.

To Brinkleys corrosive litany the political historian might add that the public's repudiation of Carter was in line with a broader post-Vietnam tendency: faced with myriad domestic and international quagmires, the people simply evicted their president--again. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and now "outsider" Jimmy Carter had all been either forced out by public outrage or rejected by the voters. Polls in 1980 may have rated Carter as the least popular president since Truman, but they also showed that Ronald Reagan was the least popular candidate to win the White House since Truman. After Vietnam and Watergate, the power of Congress grew while that of the White House dwindled. The presidency had become the "fire hydrant of the nation," as Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, had phrased it, if indelicately, during the 1980 campaign.

The appeal of king-making-and-breaking fueled this next round of media reassessments. The same reporters who had helped propel peanut farmer "Jimmy Who?" from political obscurity to the Oval Office just because it was a good story turned on him only days after his arrival in the nation's capital. When Carter actually assumed the role of citizen-president and acted on his disdain for artifice--selling the presidential yacht Sequoia, carrying his own luggage, abolishing limousine service for top White House staff, banning "Hail to the Chief"--the Washington press corps lit into him as a sanctimonious hick. It was too easy, what with the Christian moralizing, beatific grin, and treacly Georgia drawl, and journalists took to brutalizing the president's Calvinistic quirks largely for the fun of it. But Carter ignored their mockery and stuck to his moral certitude that a people's president had no call to be putting on airs. If the Protestant Reformation had taught Carter anything it was that pomp and circumstance were not smiled upon favorably by God. "By 1980 the press was very much against me," Carter maintained. "But I still thought I could beat Reagan."

There were good reasons why Carter was confident Ronald Reagan could be whipped as easily as Senator Edward Kennedy in the Democratic primaries. Once described as "an amiable dunce" by Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, Reagan seemed an easy target. His daily rhetorical gaffes on the campaign trail on matters from the national security to the cost of bread neatly offset Carter's piety as something for the press to have fun with. It seemed impossible for Carter's team to believe that Americans would really elect a president who blamed trees for smog, who expressed doubts about evolution and favored teaching "creationism" in the public schools. It wasn't much of a stretch to assume that the idea of Hollywood's "Gipper," whom Carter portrayed as a kind of "mad bomber," with his finger on the nuclear button would give the public pause. On August 11 Reagan had a commanding lead of 27 percentage points in the polls, but just a week later "Comeback Carter" had trimmed it to 7 points. "If Reagan keeps putting his foot in his mouth for another week or so, we can close down campaign headquarters," a cocky Pat Caddell snickered in a memo to the president.

What the Carterites underestimated was the advantage Reagan gained by operating from a strict ideological framework. His positions were always clear: if it was a tax, he was against it; if it was a new weapons system, he was for it. Carter, on the other hand, was always mired in specifics, trying to explain why he was against the B-1 bomber but for the Stealth fighters, and it confused people.

And Carter had problems beyond Reagan: he had secured only a small portion of the organized-labor support that had backed Ted Kennedy, and he could not stanch the steady flow of liberals to John Anderson's third-party candidacy. Millions of anti-Reagan liberals lashed out at Carter for his "vapidity," as novelist E. L. Doctorow later put it, which was allowing "the electorate to bring in the wolves on the right who had all the time been pacing back and forth fitfully, baying in the darkness beyond the campsite." As poet Allen Ginsberg noted, "Any soul with even a mild streak of progressivism in their bones felt betrayed by Carter." The litany continued. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who ended up voting for Carter, concluded that it was his economic advisers who doomed his hopes of reelection. "Carter was an admirable man," Galbraith maintained, "subject to far from admirable advice on how to control inflation." To historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. the born-again president was a "narcissistic loner" who should never have been elected in 1976 and whose performance in the Oval Office certainly didn't merit a second term. "It was the only time in my life that I voted for anyone but a Democrat for president," Schlesinger admitted. "Carter's handling of the Iran hostage crisis and the economy had been disastrous."

Even the Democrat's most stalwart constituency--women--felt by and large betrayed that Carter had given only lukewarm support to the Equal Rights Amendment, opposed a constitutional amendment to legalize abortion, fired the popular Midge Costanza as presidential assistant, clashed with the indomitable Bella Abzug, and failed to mention women at all in his plan to stimulate the economy. Carter's cultural retardation certainly didn't help matters: feminists found it hard to believe that a born-again Southern Baptist known to address women as "honey" and "beautiful" could be on their side. In fact Carter had appointed more women, including a handful of genuine feminists, to federal agencies and the White House staff than any president in history. But in 1980 nobody--particularly liberals--felt like giving Jimmy Carter a break.

Looking back at the 1980 election, it does seem possible that the Democrats could have ironed out their interparty squabbles had the crisis in Iran been resolved. But fifty-two of the Americans who had been taken hostage when Iranian militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran exactly a year before the election remained in captivity. And Walter Cronkite of the CBS Evening News and Ted Koppel of ABC's Nightline reminded their viewers of the sad fact daily.

The crisis had erupted after Iran's exiled shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi arrived in New York on October 22, 1979, and was admitted to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center to be treated for cancer and gallstones. Under the influence of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini--an aged fundamentalist fanatic who had returned to Iran from Parisian exile in February 1979, hoping to launch an Islamic revolution throughout the Middle East--the militants had seized the embassy to demand the shah's return to stand trial. Carter refused to extradite him, making for a long stalemate--and every day those fifty-two Americans remained hostage, the Carter administration looked more confused and ineffective. "To the public, Iran became a metaphor for everything," as media adviser Gerald Rafshoon remarked years later. For nearly a year the crisis handcuffed the administration, which tried everything it could think of to end the standoff: suspending oil imports, freezing Iranian assets, expelling Iranian diplomats, imposing economic sanctions, even conducting clandestine negotiations. Iran was looking more and more like an Achilles' heel that would cripple the Democratic ticket on election day if a face-saving remedy were not found--and soon. Carter had made a fatal error to state at the outset that his primary concern was bringing the hostages home alive. The Iranians used this to blackmail the Carter administration.

Angry and desperate, Carter finally made the most unfortunate decision of his presidency: on April 24 he sent a team of commandos to attempt to rescue the hostages. Six C-130 transport planes carrying ninety commandos landed on a remote airstrip in Iran's Dasht-e Kavir desert. Eight helicopters were sent for the assault on the embassy, but only six made it to the rendezvous site and one of those developed hydraulic problems. The ground commander said the rescue could not be effective with only the remaining helicopters. Carter agreed to recall the rescue team. As they were departing, however, one of the helicopters struck a transport plane that was refueling on the ground, setting off a series of mishaps that would have been comic had the outcome not been so tragic: eight American servicemen died, and four others were badly burned in the fire and explosions that ensued. The surviving commandos did get out of Iran in the remaining planes, but the militants later put the charred bodies of the other eight commandos on display in the square of the occupied U.S. embassy. Carter went on TV to disclose the attempted rescue and its failure, taking full responsibility for the debacle, which the New Republic dubbed "The Jimmy Carter Desert Classic."

After the aborted rescue attempt, many believed that Carter had not only tarnished the nation's honor but lost control of his own administration in the process. Critics condemned him for failing to mount a rescue operation sooner, for not putting enough military hardware into it once he did act, and then for retreating at the first sign of hazard. "Let's face it," foreign policy sage Paul Nitze remarked years later, "Carter's rescue mission was a flop before it was even conceptualized."

In June 1980 the shah, then in Cairo, died, prompting speculation that the crisis might end. Khomeini, however, had other ideas, demanding the return of the shah's assets, the release of Iranian assets in the United States, and a U.S. pledge not to interfere in Iranian affairs. When that wasn't forthcoming, on September 9 the Iranian government informed Carter through the West German foreign minister, who was in Tehran, that Khomeini was ready to discuss a resolution of the hostage situation. A breakthrough finally occurred on September 22, 1980, when Iraq and Iran went to war; suddenly Khomeini realized his nation could not take on two powerful enemies at once.

Diplomatic headway toward resolving the crisis began inching forward hour by hour. Newspaper editorials and television commentaries insisted that Carter and his chief crisis negotiator, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, had an "October Surprise" up their sleeves. Other media reports intimated that the Reagan team was so worried the Carter administration would procure the release of the American captives before election day that Republican campaign manager William Casey had made a secret deal with Iran to hold on to the hostages until after November 4. Speculation aside, it was plain that a Carter failure to bring the hostages home alive would hand Reagan the White House. "Unless the hostage yo-yo suddenly stops, the 1980 campaign is over," a New York Times editorial declared the Sunday before the election.

Fifteen years after the fact, Carter said he still believed he could have been reelected if he had bombed Tehran until the hostages were released or incinerated along with the entire Iranian government. But that kind of ground-zero solution, favored by some Republicans, was too morally repugnant for Carter even to consider at the time. So was selling arms to the ayatollah, as Khomeini wanted, so Carter held his ground. "There were a lot of grumbles about my handling of the hostage crisis," he said looking back, "but not a single responsible politician offered a more realistic alternative."

The Carter administration's strategy toward Iran had revolved around two fundamental objectives: protecting America's vital petroleum interests and finding the quickest possible route to the hostages' safe release. But when asked by a college student in 1987 what one thing he would have done differently as president, Carter only half-jokingly replied, "I would have ordered one more helicopter."

In the end, of course, it's not campaign cliches or hostage situations or nuclear arms control that get presidents elected and reelected; it is, in James Carville's famous dictum, "the economy, stupid"--and that was where Carter was most vulnerable. Ronald Reagan made sure everyone knew it, too; the Great Communicator made an art of attacking the administration's economic weaknesses, painting Carter as a spendthrift liberal responsible for sending America into a "depression." When economists criticized Reagan's upgrading of the actual recession, he began telling audiences, "I'm told I can't use the word depression. Well, I'll tell you the definition. A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; depression is when you lose your job. Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."

Writer John Updike captured the mood of the Carter years perfectly in his 1981 novel Rabbit Is Rich, set in 1979: "The people are out there getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending. Gas lines at ninety-nine cents a gallon and ninety percent of the stations to be closed for the weekend. People are going wild, their dollars are going rotten." Just days before the election Reagan played to Rabbit Angstrom's economic anxieties in a speech in Des Plaines, Illinois: "Jimmy Carter's persistent double-digit inflation has made it almost impossible for many families to properly feed and clothe their children. High unemployment has brought fear of job loss as the silent visitor at the dinner table each evening. And his near-record interest rates have all but ended the dream of buying a decent home for millions of American families."

Carter's promises that his second term would bring greater productivity and higher employment through tax cuts gave voters scant hope. Carter tried to showcase on the campaign trail his success at deregulating transportation industries, but few working-class voters were impressed. Shortly before election day, a poll including such traditional Democratic constituencies as blue-collar workers and inner-city residents showed that 31 percent of Americans had concluded that the economy would be irretrievably damaged if Carter remained in the White House. "The reason for Carter's horrible failure in economic policy is plain enough," Schlesinger wrote during the 1980 campaign. "He is not a Democrat--at least in anything more than the Grover Cleveland sense of the word."

When it was all over, pundits reviewing Carter's White House tenure applauded him most for what he didn't do. In a January 10, 1981, article entitled "Not to Worry, Jimmy," New York Times humorist Russell Baker imagined high-school students in the year 2081 preparing for a test on twentieth-century U.S. presidents by asking their teacher to tell them what Jimmy Carter had accomplished in the White House. "I fancy the teacher will have to reflect a minute before saying something like, `Well, he really didn't do anything dreadful at all,'" Baker wrote. "For the era of 1961-1981 that is not a bad notice from the history critics."

This sentiment was articulated even more succinctly by Carter speech-writer Hendrik Hertzberg, who used to tell his liberal friends that "Jimmy Carter is the first president of my adult life who is not criminally insane." Both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had continued the war in Vietnam even though they knew it could not be won, just to save political face with the electorate. These presidents also taped associates' telephone conversations, sponsored covert assassinations by the CIA abroad, and harassed any number of citizens, including great civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy. Even the relatively benign Gerald Ford had sent eighteen U.S. servicemen to their deaths in the Mayaguez incident, all in the name of patriotism. "It is wrong to kill people for no reason other than political gain or political fear," Hertzberg explained. "Jimmy Carter never did anything like that."

Presidential scholar James David Barber made a similar assessment of Carter's tenure: "It was four years without war or social unrest. Considering our recent record, that is no small achievement." In other words, at best Carter was damned with faint praise by East Coast opinion makers and students of presidential politics.

Public opinion paralleled that of the experts. In the final Gallup Poll on Carter's performance as president, only 3 percent of respondents thought history would regard him as an outstanding" president, while 46 percent expected him to be rated "below average" or "poor." Where Carter's immediate predecessor, Gerald Ford, had left office with an approval rating of 53 percent, Carter could muster only an anemic 34 percent. Dismissing the zeitgeist problem, Lyndon Johnson's White House counsel Harry McPherson lay the blame squarely on the man: Carter "never displayed that `fire in the belly' quality that people want in a political leader.... This is not the stuff of history."

Throughout the campaign, whenever Reagan asked the powerful question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" most Americans answered with a resounding no. As McPherson pointed out, Carter ignored the blue-collar, populist resentment that had sprung up toward big government, affirmative action, the welfare state, and Keynesian economics, which advocated government spending to create jobs. A master at reading the pulse of the nation, Reagan--who on the campaign trail had once referred to Carter as "a little schmuck"--understood, embodied, and benefited from the post-Vietnam hunger for a renewed sense of America's greatness and global mission. "Reaganomics was a fraud," Carter would tell Time magazine in October 1982, "but [Reagan] is a persuasive speaker, and the American people bought it."

The day after the election, Carter held a meeting with reporters to assert that he wanted a "good, positive relationship" with Reagan--but the president-elect turned out to have other ideas. In contemporary memory only the celebrated animosity between Truman and Eisenhower after the 1952 election reached the level of bitterness between Carter and Reagan.

This was hardly surprising--Reagan had won the White House in part by pounding on Carter's approach to foreign affairs, such as his human rights advocacy, his decidedly strict Soviet grain embargo, and his boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow--the latter two levied against Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev for ordering the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. All in all, Reagan considered Carter "too soft." While Carter spoke of controlling the cold war proliferation of nuclear weapons as "the most important single issue in this campaign," Reagan scarcely mentioned it. And where Carter championed the Panama Canal Treaties that would relinquish U.S. control of the passageway to the Panamanians in December 1999, no influential American politician was as vehemently against the notion as Reagan. Even surprising pleas from Reagan's right-wing friend John Wayne to support the legislation for the sake of hemispheric harmony had no effect on the president-elect's opposition.

In the same vein, Reagan also ridiculed the Camp David accords, which Carter considered his greatest presidential legacy. In September 1978 Carter had brought together Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat to renew the stalled Middle East peace talks at Camp David, where the two leaders hammered out two documents--a Framework for Peace in the Middle East and a Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty. In March 1979 Begin and Sadat formally signed the unprecedented peace treaty; Reagan, with the Jewish vote in mind, claimed Carter had gotten too cozy with the Arabs.

On the campaign trail, Reagan also chastised Carter for developing the SALT II treaty, which would have limited the number of offensive nuclear weapons stockpiled in both the United States and the Soviet Union. Met with stark opposition by conservatives in Congress, the treaty was never sent to the full Senate for ratification after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The criticisms didn't end there: disgusted that Carter had continued Richard Nixon's work and normalized relations with China, Reagan made a series of campaign statements about the need to restore "official" dealings with Taiwan--the implied message being that if elected president, he would repudiate recognition of China. (In fact, he promised to turn the People's Republic into "a land of laundromats.")

The irony of Reagan's attacks on Carter's foreign policy was that so much of it were just continuing ideas and efforts that had been initiated by Carter's Republican predecessors. The SALT process, for example, picked up where Gerald Ford had left off in Vladivostok. The Panama Canal Treaties grew out of a negotiating framework begun by Lyndon Johnson and resumed by Richard Nixon in 1973. The dramatic transformation in Washington's relations with Beijing, symbolized by the official recognition and exchange of ambassadors that took place under Carter, had been set in motion by President Nixon's trip to China in 1972. Carter's human rights program built on the "Final Act" of the Helsinki Accords. And even in the Middle East, after having failed to organize a general peace conference in Geneva, the Carter administration had returned to Kissinger's step-by-step approach, including some very productive shuttle diplomacy in the form of Carter's walks back and forth between the Camp David cabins occupied by Menachem Begin and Anwar al-Sadat.

If one had to sum up Carter's leadership style in a phrase, it would be "handson engineering." Among Carter's greatest flaws as president--and one the Republicans exploited without mercy--was his excessive micromanagerial style. For better or worse, Carter was a control freak who wanted to know exactly what was happening around him at all times. The Panama Canal Treaties, for example, probably would never have been executed without the president's direct involvement in everything from seeing that CBS anchor Walter Cronkite pronounced Panamanian names correctly on the evening news to making sure that dictator Omar Torrijos was treated as a political equal. Carter may have wanted to be a great chief executive, Republicans argued, but he was blind to the fact that great presidents are so because they build great teams. The charge was valid: Americans had put an obsessive micromanager in the White House. Uninterested in assembling a dynamic squad of surrogates, Carter wanted to do it all himself from beginning to end. He would be a one-man band; there would be none of Eisenhower's "hidden-hand" advisers, FDR's "brain trust," or JFK's "best and brightest."

Instead, Carter approached the presidency like a family farmer: plow the fields, spread the fertilizer, harvest the crop--and keep an eye on every detail the whole way. You hire help, of course, but sharecroppers, migrants, or day-wagers just don't have the same stake in the work as the farmer; a good harvest depends on his devotion and God's will. But while that philosophy may work down on the farm, it is hardly sensible for governing the world's strongest nation. For proof one need only compare the results achieved by hands-on farmer Carter with those of "show me my mark" actor Ronald Reagan.

The "Gipper" from Hollywood recognized the importance of star power to box office success, but he also understood that there would be no movie without a director, producer, cinematographer, makeup artist, sound engineer, and scores of other experts. Still, there was a certain advantage in being the leading man in the White House: you could stay above the fray while Cabinet staff and members scurried about to make you look good. The motto of Carter's Oval Office had been Truman's The Buck Stops Here; Reagan's was Ignorance Is Bliss, as the Iran-Contra affair demonstrated. Where Carter stood at the podium dryly preaching austerity, Reagan bounded onstage waving the American flag, delighted to be starring in his greatest role. Carter may have known all the nitty-gritty details of every policy, but Reagan understood intuitively what the modern American presidency demanded, and it wasn't facts and figures. Image mattered even more than outcomes: Reagan ran on slashing government, but the presidential transition that ushered him into office was one of the biggest and priciest in American history--because the public preferred a little pomp to the sight of a president toting his own luggage down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Given the vigorous policy disagreements between the outgoing and incoming presidents, it was no surprise that Carter decided to devote much of the eleven-week interim to making sure Reagan could not undo his administration's accomplishments. Nevertheless, out of a sense of obligation Carter invited Reagan to the Oval Office on November 20 for a detailed briefing on twenty top-secret subjects, chiefly national security and nuclear policy. Carter discussed the hostage crisis, Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the war between Iran and Iraq. "Reagan listened without comment while I covered each point," Carter recalled years later. "Some of [the issues] were very sensitive, involving such matters as the management of our nuclear forces in time of attack on our nation." Much of the ninety-minute briefing focused on Poland, where the Solidarity movement was making the Soviets uneasy. Both men agreed that stern U.S. warnings should be issued constantly, and that any Soviet invasion of Poland would have to be met head-on by a U.S. military counteroffensive. Richard V. Allen, soon to be Reagan's national security adviser, used the opportunity to ask Carter to postpone selling AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia until Reagan and his team had time to consider the ramifications of the deal. The president agreed.

According to Republican transition director Ed Meese, who would soon become attorney general, Reagan left the meeting impressed by Carter's "graciousness" and "mastery of detail." Although he took few notes, Reagan came away concerned about a possible Soviet invasion of Poland and convinced that it would be best to let the Carter administration extract America from the Iran hostage crisis by themselves before his inauguration. After the briefing Reagan, Meese, and Allen reviewed the essence of what Carter had said in a private, forty-five-minute meeting. "Reagan recalled verbatim everything Carter had told us," Meese remembered, defending his old boss against accusations from the Carter camp that the president-elect had been inattentive. "He didn't take notes because he didn't need to." Meese believed that Reagan had felt sorry for Carter at the White House that day--that the Gipper was just not a good hater. "Though he profoundly disagreed with Carter on policy issues, Reagan harbored no mean-spiritedness toward Carter," Meese insisted. "It's usually the loser that is full of sour grapes."

GOP adviser Richard Darman, who later became President George Bush's director of the Office of Management and Budget, later laughed about the awkwardness of the Carter-Reagan transition meeting. "We've both been governors," Darman remembered Carter telling Reagan, like a concerned Sunday school teacher. "But let me tell you--it's different in the White House. The day begins early. A CIA officer briefs you at 7:00 A.M." According to Darman, at that moment Reagan smiled and interrupted, "Well, he's sure going to have to wait a long while for me." Carter just stared at the president-elect, unamused.

Personal styles aside, there was one issue that cropped up during the transition on which Carter and Reagan did see eye to eye: a pressing human rights violation in South Korea. Carter's personal devotion to individual human rights matters had always made him a rarity among politicians, but the case of Kim Dae Jung, a political opposition leader who had been sentenced to death on charges of sedition, caught the attention of the president-elect as well. At Carter's request, Reagan ordered Allen to send word to South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan that relations between Washington and Seoul would be "strained" should Kim be executed. The tactic worked: Kim's life was spared, and in the bargain Carter finally found something positive to say about Reagan. When Kim Dae Jung visited America in December 1982, he contacted Carter personally to thank him.

Apart from that moment of cooperation, however, the transition was marked by an exchange of barbs between the Carter and Reagan camps, much to the delight of the media, In addition to all the policy disagreements, a stir was created over Nancy Reagan's "gentle hint," reported to Rosalynn Carter by seasoned UPI White House correspondent Helen Thomas, that the Carters move into Blair House a few weeks before inauguration day so Mrs. Reagan could redecorate the executive mansion. With her swank California tastes for red dresses and David Hockney paintings, Nancy Reagan looked down her nose at Rosalynn Carter, such a drab bumpkin whose White House was so, well, beige. One tabloid reported that the Reagans' interior designer from Los Angeles couldn't wait to "get the smell of catfish out of the White House." Nancy Reagan quickly called the First Lady with assurances that these remarks had been taken out of context. But the very next day the president-elect's son Ronald, a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, told reporters that he would refuse to shake President Carter's hand at his father's inauguration because the Georgian had "the morals of a snake" and "would have sold his mother to get reelected."

To attack Carter's morals was mean-spirited and ridiculous. A deeply ethical man full of good intentions, Carter could have bombed Tehran to stay in the White House, but his Christian belief in the sanctity of life wouldn't let him. In fact, although his critics saw him as self-righteous, Carter was the most principled American president since Harry Truman--and nowhere was his morality on clearer display than in his insistence that human rights be a cardinal principle of global governance. "Because we are all free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere.... Our commitment to human rights must be absolute," Carter declared in his inaugural address. And these weren't just pretty words; human rights became the hallmark of his administration, or as he put it, "the soul of our foreign policy." As he prepared to leave office, it was little wonder that Carter wanted his work for human rights to be remembered above all else.

As president, Carter had been realistic enough to recognize that human rights policy could never be completely pure and good, and thus could not be "based on a blind adherence to consistency." But at the same time he believed that the United States should denounce, with varying degrees of vehemence, authoritarianism wherever it held sway, particularly in the form of government-sanctioned kidnappings, torture, and murder. Thus Carter became the first American president since Woodrow Wilson to try actively to reform repressive regimes in other nations. "This does not mean that we can conduct our foreign policy by rigid moral maxims," Carter stated in May 1977. "We live in a world that is imperfect, and which will always be imperfect; a world that is complex and confused. I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily."

Presidential moralizing during the cold war was often written off as just a variation on the usual hard-nosed anti-Soviet rhetoric. But for Carter--whose soul still sang "We Shall Overcome" in spiritual sympathy with the civil rights movement that had inspired the Supreme Court to smash the nation's shameful Jim Crow laws--it was a guiding principle. Although it's true that as president he pressed harder for human rights on the Soviet Union, Argentina, and Chile than he did on such stalwart American allies as South Korea, the Philippines, and the shah's Iran, Carter's approach to world affairs did focus across the board on international human rights and the importance of building democracy. Under Carter's direct orders the Agency for International Development and the United States Information Agency began making human rights a priority in every project. Carter cemented this thrust in early 1977 by establishing a State Department bureau of human rights headed by Assistant Secretary Patricia Derian, a well-known Mississippi civil rights activist.

Under Carter, human rights considerations became the litmus test for deciding which governments--left- or right-wing--received American aid and political support. The State Department was ordered to document the human rights standards of all governments receiving American foreign aid and to make its annual assessments public. This meant that some of the rightist regimes that had grown used to getting substantial economic and military assistance from the United States, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia, suffered major cutbacks. The Carter administration's human rights policy hit hardest in Latin America, where U.S. military assistance was slashed from $210 million in 1977 to only $54 million in 1979.

If Carter's new emphasis on human rights bolstered America's credibility in criticizing the Soviet bloc countries, it also undermined such traditional anti-communist allies as Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza, a West Point graduate and longtime friend of conservative Americans, who imprisoned those who dared disagree with his authoritarian policies. In 1979 Somoza was overthrown in a popular revolt led by the left-wing Sandinistas. "The virtue of the Carter [administration] so far as liberal democratic internationalism was concerned," political scientist Tony Smith wrote in America's Mission, "was its unambiguous conviction that authoritative governments were poor custodians of American security interests abroad."

In essence, the Carter administration had championed a post-cold-war foreign policy before the cold war was over. Predictably, this policy--dubbed "resurgent Wilsonianism" by Smith--met with staunch resistance from many of the more hawkish Washington establishment types. In 1979 Georgetown University professor and Reagan's future ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick derided the Carter administration's human rights policy as not only too soft on the Soviet Union but too hard on what she termed "moderately repressive regimes" on the right. But then her first act as UN ambassador was to meet with the Argentine military junta that had been responsible for the disappearance of 9,000 citizens, children and adults alike; she followed up by calling on Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Kirkpatrick wasn't an anti-human-rights loose cannon: the first foreign leaders invited to the Reagan White House were Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and South Korea's Chun Doo Hwan. "This was a deliberate signal sent out by the Reagan administration that the so-called Carter human rights era was over," Carter complained.

Not everyone mourned its passing. In fact, some foreign leaders thought Carter's focus on human rights had been naive all along; West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, for example, said the American president had acted like an evangelist formulating "policy from the pulpit." Carter's relationships with other First World European leaders such as Valery Giscard d'Estaing of France and Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom were equally frosty. It is telling that his closest leader-to-leader friendships developed with such non-Europeans as Egypt's Anwar al-Sadat, China's Deng Xiaoping, Japan's Masayoshi Ohira, and Panama's Omar Torrijos. Unlike the Europeans, all these leaders flattered Carter, stressing the importance of personalities. In any case, Carter's human rights agenda never quite worked as a coherent strategy, largely because he failed to comprehend that it was impossible to "combine support for our more authoritative allies and friends with the effective promotion of human rights within their countries."

By the end of Carter's term and in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, human rights were eclipsing on the American foreign policy screen. Ronald Reagan had promised that if elected he would usher back in the traditional cold war trinity that dated to Harry Truman: containment, realpolitik, and anti-communism under the banner of "peace through strength." Yet no matter what Reagan said on the campaign trail, Carter's human rights policy had given the United States moral credibility around the world--no small feat after Vietnam--while putting the Soviet Union on the defensive by exposing the Kremlin as "evil," just like Reagan said. Due to his Christian belief in redemption--and the power of positive thinking--Carter was prodemocracy, not anti-communist. He wanted to wean Russians away from communism and toward the Bible.

In sharp contrast to the general public's perception, human rights champion Jimmy Carter was no pacifist. It should not be forgotten that the only twentieth-century American president who had a longer military career than Carter's in the U.S. Navy--from 1943 to 1954--was four-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme Allied commander in World War II. Carter abhorred only the unnecessary use of military force, and as president he worked to modernize the armed forces, not weaken them. "I'm a military man by training and background, and the statistics are there," he pointed out years later to rebut Reagan's claim that his predecessor had left America's armed forces in shambles. After all, it was the hard-line Carter administration defense policies Reagan inherited and built on that led to the end of the cold war. "I believe historians and political observers alike have failed to appreciate the importance of Jimmy Carter's contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War," Bush administration CIA director Robert M. Gates has maintained. "He was the first president during the Cold War to challenge publicly and consistently the legitimacy of Soviet rule at home. Carter's human rights policy ... by the testimony of countless Soviet and East European dissidents and future democratic leaders challenged the moral authority of the Soviet government and gave American sanction and support to those resisting that government." Martin Walker, U.S. bureau chief of Britain's Guardian, in his book The Cold War (1994) laments the fact that a mythology has been created that "Reagan arrived to find a West half-disarmed and thoroughly demoralized, and wrought a great transformation." As Walker made clear, this Tory view of America's later cold war history was nonsense, as the facts bore out. Carter strengthened and modernized the U.S. military during a very difficult post-Vietnam War period, when the Pentagon was unpopular.

Just months after he became president, Carter began badgering the NATO allies to rearm; in fact he demanded solid commitment from every member to increase their defense budgets by 3 percent a year. When the Soviets started deploying SS-20 missiles, it was Carter who countered by proposing that NATO cruise and Pershing missiles be based in Western Europe. And far from slashing American armed forces in Europe, Carter deployed an additional 35,000 troops to boost the American NATO contingent above 300,000, which more than compensated for the cuts the Nixon and Ford administrations had made under detente. Besides modernizing NATO, Carter approved deployment of both nuclear cruise missiles and the Pershing II IRBMs--intermediate range nuclear forces--in Europe.

Carter had no intention of appeasing the Soviets; in fact his very concentration on human rights was in part intended to weaken the Kremlin. Where Gerald Ford had refused to welcome exiled Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the White House, Carter had embraced political dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and Andrei Sakharov with open arms. Perhaps the most moving document on display at the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta is the February 5, 1977, note he sent to Sakharov: "Human rights is the central concern of my administration," Carter wrote. "You may rest assured that the American people and our government will continue our firm commitment to promote respect for human rights not only in our country, but also abroad." This epistle, which the Nobel Prize--winning physicist proudly waved in President Leonid Brezhnev's face, prompted the Soviet leader to pronounce Sakharov an enemy of the state. As Robert Gates noted, "Whether isolated and little-known Soviet dissident or world-famous Soviet scientist, Carter's policy encouraged them to press on."

More to the point, it was Carter--not Reagan--who first exploited the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords in order to allow movements such as Czechoslovakia's Charter 77, Poland's Solidarity, and the Helsinki Watch groups in East Germany and the Soviet Union to flourish. Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel went so far as to claim that Carter's human rights agenda so undermined the legitimacy and self-confidence of the Warsaw Pacts chieftains that dissidents across Eastern Europe regained the hope that carried them on to democracy. Lech Walesa claimed that it was Carter's tough December 3, 1980, statement--which warned the Soviets about the consequences of their military building on the Polish border--that sent a signal that, unlike Czechoslovakia in 1968, the United States would not abandon "anti-Socialist" forces in Poland. And that wasn't all: Carter's human rights policy also created an environment that allowed 118,591 Soviet Jews to emigrate during his presidency, and encouraged Indonesia alone to release some 30,000 political prisoners from jail. Under Carter's direct order, the CIA began covertly smuggling into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe literature about democracy and books like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Perhaps even more inspired, Carter had the CIA infiltrate the Soviet Union with thousands of books promoting the heritage of ethnic minorities, All in all, the Carter administration's insistence on human rights, no matter how inconsistent in practice, saved thousands of lives and put the Soviets on the defensive to boot. And, before long, Soviet-style communism collapsed more or less peacefully within and without, thanks in part to Carter's promotion of human rights.

Few would argue that Carter had not made a sincere effort to coexist with the Soviets--and Reagan claimed that this pusillanimity made it possible for the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. Yet that brutal incursion proved a fatal miscalculation on Brezhnev's part and the final turning point in the cold war. The Soviet Union's actions in Afghanistan revealed what it had been all along: truly expansionistic and utterly unconcerned with human rights. After that, whoever took the harder line against the Soviets was bound to look better to the American people, and during the 1980 presidential campaign Carter had pledged to increase defense spending by a full 5 percent, compared with Reagan's proposed 7 percent hike. This difference hardly qualified Carter as a dove. Meanwhile, it was Carter who first imposed economic sanctions on the Soviets, outraging U.S. farmers and businessmen; Reagan would continue punishing Moscow with economic measures.

Thus as Reagan prepared to take office, it was far easier for him--thanks to Carter--to rally a consensus behind his strident policies for winning the cold war. Carter tried peaceful coexistence with the Kremlin and had been betrayed. The stupidity of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan turned Carter into a hawk. As journalist Martin Walker later wrote, "Americans should recall the steel beneath the gentleness; the real historical legacy of Jimmy Carter is [as] one of the men who won the Cold War." Yet it was the compassion of the human rights program that had freed political prisoners across Latin America and the Soviet Union that Carter wanted to be his lasting legacy--and that is what he set his mind to upon leaving the White House.