Yet another in a long line of puff pieces designed to rehabilitate the image of the man who was, in no uncertain terms, the WORST president the US ever had the misfortune to elect.

Carter hits all the wrong boxes. Completely clueless on foreign policy? Check. The return of the Panama Canal shouldn't have happened. "Normalization" of relations with China caused the UN to get away with booting a founding member (the LEGITIMATE government of China) out in favor of the illegitimate, pseudocommunist dictatorship that took over the mainland on the backing of the Soviets. The Camp David accords? Right place, right time, and they did little to nothing for the larger Middle East problem that is the political, totalitarian fake-religion known as Islam.

Economically? Let's look at the China debacle again. What do we have as a result? Yep, massive job loss and trade imbalance.

Energy policy? Carter is the reason we have a "nuclear waste policy" - it's his executive directives, upheld ever since by the looney left and envirowackjob crowds that hold the Democrat Party hostage, that prevent us from taking our nuclear waste and recycling it back into fuel in breeder reactors, which would be the responsible thing to do. What was his justification for this? That if the US "set an example" and didn't "refine" weapon-grade material (which can come from breeder reactors, albeit in very small amounts) then other nations of the world would "follow our lead." How'd that work for India? China? North Korea? Iran?

Carter was a clueless rube. In foreign policy, in economic policy, in domestic policy. The saddest part of this is that Carter's devotees are also Obama's devotees, and the effort to rehab Jimmah Cardigan's image is part-and-parcel of trying to prevent people from realizing exactly how bad Obama, who has precisely the same moronic policies (and seems even to support Carteresque anti-semitism), really is.

The real reason some people hate Carter is that he was the first modern president to tell us that even though we were a super power we had limits. People who tell the truth are often unpopular. We elected Reagan so we didn't have to face reality.

The comments in "Dishonest at Best "are nonsense. How has returning the Panama Canal hurt the US in any way? Should Britain and France have kept the Suez Canal. Colonialism is over.

The current government of mainland China is the legitimate government of China, face reality. It was Richard Nixon who opened China not Carter and Carter had nothing to do with our trade policies that shipped much of our industrial capacity to China and made China our defacto banker.

Really the only long lasting success in Middle East is that Israel and Egypt have remained at peace. How was Carter an anti-Semite? Not having to fight another war with Egypt has greatly benifited Israel.

I personally didn't agree with Carter's nuclear policy but it doesn't explain why other countries, including France, have abandoned the development of commercial Breeder Reactors . Why didn't Reagan or the Bushes reverse the policy? Bush 2 could count on support of both houses of Congress.

You proved your point all too well. France shutdown both Phenix and Super Phenix as of 1996. Guess they didn't have a lot of fuel to recycle. There are no operating commercial breeders.

Regarding China, you don't have to approve of a government to recognize it exists. I'm sure China's government would have collapsed by now if they didn't get a seat on the UN. Good luck with removing the current mainland government.

Egypt and Israel are at war? Maybe you should be telling Israel not me.

Stop wasting people's time with your idiocy.

Dr. Glad writes very well. She describes historical events in such a way that it would be easy to investigate her descriptions against objective facts. Her writing stands in marked contrast to the responses we see above. Here are a few examples. One of the critics describe Jimmy Carter as "the WORST president the US ever had the misfortune to elect". Notice that the upper case "WORST" is aimply an emotional ploy. And then there is "Completely clueless on foreign policy." This extreme statement couldn't possibly be defended in a court of law. Then we see "Normalization". The quotes around that word suggest a scornful tone of voice, but nothing of any substance. A word for this is "innuendo". How about the description of the Muslim religion: "totalitarian fake-religion known as Islam"? All of these are examples of extremely negative statements with no objectively confirming information, rich with vague innuendo, and designed to arouse anger among people who have been influenced by similar rhetoric and belong to a particular political persuasion. When I see this kind of writing I just skip it. None of the responses to Dr. Glad's article so far submitted contain any really competent criticism.

The achievements of Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David should not be underestimated. Camp David was a beginning, it was an overture, and with the 'spirit' of Camp David, the world waits for bold measures of peace to be taken by a new generation of leaders.

Sincerely,

Bruce Craig Roter
Composer of "A Camp David Overture (Prayer for Peace)"
on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2au5SOYhO-8

Carter did not do the work to open up China, or create peace between Egypt and Israel, he happened to be there to sign papers. The fact that the Iranian government could toy with him about when they traded over the hostages clearly demonstrates what kind of esteem he was held in. And if he didn't want the "block" vote, he wouldn't seem like such a weenie (but still a biggot) if he just clearly said it.

He wanted to create peace by not standing up to the causes of war? That's cowardice. What is the point of negotiating with the Soviet Union if you are too incompetent to make any kind of progress?

One does not have to put Carter as a direct opposite of W - they may have been of different purposes and beliefs, but they both could never actually carry through with anything that made this country (or the world for that matter) a better place. We also need to quit getting our panties in a bunch about wether someone is a "cowboy" or a "tree hugger" - the president has to be both really, and what matters more than your persona is your competence. The real conclusion of this article is that Carter was clumsy even more so than weak. He continues his legacy now by getting on his soapbox and still making very little difference in this world. I am not one to criticize someone for their personality, but when it comes to the president, we can't afford incompetence.

While Bush the First happened to be POTUS when the Soviet Union expired and diehard Reaganistas like to give Ronnie the credit for that speech when he told Gorby to "tear that wall down" (BTW, history shows that Reagan read that famous speech off of a teleprompter), the seeds of the Soviet destruction were planted by Carter sending the CIA into Afghanistan and the ensuing cost that the Soviet army bore while being bogged down there. For extra credit, answer this:
who misses the old Soviet Union more, Putin or Kissinger? LOL.

Carter was certainly a failed president, but he failed to reelected mostly because of the weak economy (which the writer doesn't mention). There is no doubt that Carter's persona allowed for disastrous PR gaffes to be blown out of proportion: the failed hostage rescue (and otherwise impotent response to the taking of hostages by the Iranians), the famous "I consulted my daughter Amy on foreign policy" comment in his debate with Ronald Reagan, getting attacked by a rabbit while fishing, and an economy with a both high unemployment and high inflation. Still, his flailing responses and lack of charisma reinforced the image of a loser. As Fareed Zakaria points out in his recent article, the POTUS is mostly a leader, and if people don't want to follow you, you have failed.

On the positive side, Carter picked (or was forced to pick) Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. He embarked on the inflation fighting course that enventually resulted in the great goldilocks economy that prevailed from 1984-2004, and for which Carter gets some indirect credit (although more credit goes to Reagan and his successors for staying the course).

It is certainly untrue for the writer to claim, as she does, the Carter followed a 'deeply unpopular' Republican president. My recollection is that Carter won the election with 50.1% of the vote. Hardly a landslide.

More importantly for the legacy of the strange man from Plains, Carter is currently unpopular, and will remain so, for two reasons: his clearly failed presidency, and the negative influence he has had on the US and on the office of the presidency in the years since he left office. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the weak-but-hardly-pacifist President Carter morphed into a wooly uber-Wilsonian once out of office, consistently hindering and criticizing the actions of his sucessors -- be they Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Bush II, Carter (which what it takes only a little imagination to put down to sour grapes) did all they could to hinder any 'strong' foreign policy actions by any American president. He has never had any real policy alternatives of his own, but he cannot fail, a la Jesse Jackson, to find a negation to get in the middle of and disrupt. His univited foray into North Korea in 1996 is probably the best example, but he has been doing similar things for the past 30 years. Hardly presidential. It is for this reason that most thinking people, right and left wing, believe that Carter is a rather despicable man, a man with an attention-seeking agenda and a generally malign presence.

So, yes, by all means, let some balance show on the record. But the lack of respect Carter holds is as much due to his post-Presidential failures as to his failures when he actually held the office.

For anyone who has read Betty Glad’s An Outsider in the white House it is clear that she is providing neither an apologia nor a damnation as some of her critics have assumed. Clearly as she argues in this article for Foreign Policy, he was not weak in dealing with the Soviet Union. Nor did he simply sign his name to the Camp David Accords and the normalization agreements with China.

She comes up with a portrait that is much more nuanced than that. Only suggested here are some of the questions she deals with at greater length in her book. How did a man who wanted nuclear reduction wind up with a renewal of the old war? How did his hawkish stands relative to the Soviet union jibe with the detailed hands on work that was requisite to his successes at the Camp David talks. Why did the opening to China go beyond a mere normalization of relationships to a promote a joint anti Soviet partnership?
And how did a man with a commitment to human rights seek the aid of Pope John Paul II to undercut the El Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero in his critiques of a regime loosely affiliated with a band or murderers who killed all government opponents? How did a man who entered the White House with a desire for a collegial staff wind up with a “team of rivals” who contended for influence and who fought over most major moves?

Perhaps Obama could learn from the Carter example that one needs an overall strategy, that talk must jibe with policy, that advisers can misguide him.

I would like to ask some of the comment writers to check their basic facts before they start to criticize a well-researched and well-written scholarly work.
On the China issue, first, it was not during Carter’s administration that the People’s Republic of China? was admitted to the UN (thus the Security Council as well). It happened in 1971, when Richard Nixon was the president. So the comment that seems to attribute the replacement of the Republic of China (ROC) by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the UN to Jimmy Carter simply got the facts wrong.
Second, some of the comments seem to suggest the PRC as “illegitimate” because it was an authoritative regime. Well, Let me tell you, the so-called “legit” government of China (the ROC government) was just as bad. It did not undergo any “democratic” transition until the 1980s. To recognized the PRC, which is in actual control of all China’s mainland area, was inevitable. Carter was smart enough to see it, recognize it, and act smartly on it.
Third, the soviets was in no ways backing up the Chinese when Carter moved in the White House. Sino-Soviet relation was at its worst at that time. Carter used the Chinese to counterbalance the Soviets in the Far East. Signing the Shanghai communiqué with Beijing was a diplomatic maneuver that required extensive negotiations by the Carter team. IT was a smart card played in the Cold War realpolitik games.

Reagan often gets credit for the release of the hostages while Carter is characterized as ineffectual and weak in his response. But in reality, Carter's negotiating team reached an agreement with the Iranians securing the release of the hostages during Carter's final days in office. Glad clearly states this in her article and in her book.