For more than five decades, Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat was Jimmy Carter’s closest friend and tireless advocate, and he has written a book of over a thousand pages (“President Carter: The White House Years,” 2018) to defend the legacy of the 39th president of the United States. Today, the former White House domestic affairs adviser and senior counsel at Covington & Burling talks to Kathimerini about the events that marked Carter’s tenure, diplomatic successes in the Middle East, his stance on the Soviet Union, and the Iran hostage crisis that cost him his re-election.
Your friendship and professional relationship with former president Carter spanned over five decades. What do you single out as the dominant features of his presidency?
One of the most important points is that many of the seeds he planted, both in domestic and foreign policy, blossomed fully after he left office, and that his legacy, therefore, is more lasting than people realize. For example, he had a terrible problem, like his predecessors Nixon and Ford, with inflation. And that problem was particularly spiked going into the election because of the Iranian revolution and the cutting off of the supply of 5 million barrels of Iranian oil in July 1979.
President Carter – after trying so many other avenues to fight inflation, such as voluntary wage and price guidelines and tough budget credit controls – what he did to deal with the problem was to appoint Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve, and he did so over the objections of almost all of his advisers.
When he met Volcker in the Oval Office, Volcker told him, “Mr President, if you appoint me, I am going to really choke inflation out of the system in a painful way with high interest rates, and that is going to contribute to a difficult economy going into your 1980 election.” And the president replied, “Paul, I do not want my legacy to the American people to be high inflation, you take care of the economy and I will take care of the politics.” And he never – during the campaign – blamed Volcker for the interest rates, which were over 20 percent. However, it worked and inflation came down.
How crucial was Carter’s personal involvement in the negotiations between Israel and Egypt at Camp David? Could peace have been achieved without his mediation?
Absolutely not. President Sadat [of Egypt] made his historic trip to Jerusalem and pledged no more wars, but converting that into a real peace framework and ultimately a treaty was exceedingly difficult. So, President Carter made a really bold and courageous decision over the objection to inviting the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, and Anwar Sadat to the presidential retreat Camp David. And he did this in the belief that if we could get away from the “hothouse” atmosphere of negotiations in Cairo, Jerusalem or Washington, and have a secluded place without the press, this would give the best chance for peace.
However, on the 13th day of the negotiations, on Sunday morning, the negotiators came to his cabin and said: “Mr President, I am sorry we could not reach an agreement. We made progress, but we have not reached an agreement.” “I cannot and will not make any more compromises. I want you to get a limousine to take me from Camp David to Andrews Air Force Base, where an allied plane is waiting to take me home,” Begin said.
Well, President Carter – realizing that this would undermine the truly courageous journey Sadat had made and would be a blow to his own administration – recalled reading CIA profiles of Sadat and Begin and that Begin had a special affection for his eight grandchildren. So, the president had his secretary make eight copies of the original photo of the three leaders when they first met at Camp David, and then took the names of each of his grandchildren and wrote a personal inscription for each: “With hopes for peace.”
Jimmy Carter went to Begin’s cabin and handed him these photos and Begin read aloud the names of each of his grandchildren. President Carter saw Begin’s eyes tear up and his lips quiver. He put down his bag and said, “Mr President, for my grandchildren, I will make one last effort.” So, he was intimately involved.
We know that Carter did not admire the realpolitik school of thought, while the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) agreement with Brezhnev redefined US-USSR relations. How did he perceive the Soviet Union and the so-called “communist threat”?
First, he said in a major speech a phrase that was criticized by many on the right – “We should not have an ordinate fear of communism.” That did nοt mean he did nοt take it seriously; on the contrary, what he meant was that if we stand up for our own values through human rights and if we rearm, then we can dominate and end up winning the Cold War.
So what he did is he combined soft power with hard power, where he reversed the post-Vietnam decline in defense spending and also all the weapons systems that are credited to Reagan, like the cruise missile, the stealth bomber, and the intermediate nuclear weapons in Europe, were begun by President Carter. Then after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he increased defense spending by 5% per year, imposed a grain embargo on shipments to the Soviet Union, imposed sanctions on “high technology” and boycotted the Olympics, which was very painful.
In addition, the president announced the so-called “Carter Doctrine,” which was that if the Soviet Union goes further into the Persian Gulf, the US would act with military force. So, according to Gorbachev himself, the Carter moves were one of the main reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
One of the incidents that marked the Carter presidency was the hostage crisis in Iran. In your opinion, what other reasons ultimately led to his defeat by Reagan?
He lost re-election for three reasons, first, because of the interparty warfare, where Senator Kennedy challenged him for the nomination and divided the party. Second was inflation, which was in double digits, where he finally made it, but not before his election, and third was Iran.
On Iran, there is a perception, particularly among some members of the Iranian diaspora, that Carter somehow pulled the rug out from under the shah’s feet and that is why the revolution happened. However, this is not the case. We gave him – as the previous six presidents had done – an open shopping list to get weapons, and the president privately urged him to reach out to moderate democratic forces to try to bring them into his government, but never publicly accused him of human rights violations.
Moreover, just six weeks before the shah was forced to abandon the radical Islamic revolution, the CIA sent him a report saying that Iran was neither a revolutionary nor a pre-revolutionary state. It was one of the worst intelligence reports in modern American history.
In the recent election, Carter declared himself a Kamala Harris voter. In your opinion, was he afraid of President Donald Trump’s return and his protectionist policies?
Jimmy Carter was an advocate of free trade as he believed that free trade linked countries into a mutually beneficial coalition. Still, he believed that free trade provided American consumers with cheaper products from abroad and would lead to opening their markets to our exports. Thus, he was very much opposed to protectionism.
Who was Carter after the White House?
In some respects, his post-presidency was over 10 times longer than his presidency, and he created the Carter Center to follow through a lot of the things he had tried to do as president. Also – and it should be mentioned – he took a great interest in the Cyprus issue, as he was part of a group called the “Elders” along with Archbishop Tutu and others, and in 2008 he visited Cyprus with Desmond Tutu and Lakhdar Brahimi, hoping to see if there was an effort to deal with the long-standing dispute. And he said in the trip report, “I was involved in this challenging diplomatic task even before becoming president in 1977,” and you should know that he was very much opposed to the Turkish invasion.