Jefferson Cowie
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Jefferson Cowie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And this guy sits down with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat and says, let's talk, let's figure this out together and let's reason together. And he does it. Now, the Sinai Peninsula at that particular moment was a huge bargaining chip and he was able to use that to get Egypt in there and stuff. So there's actually pretty important exogenous issues. But I think Carter's the guy for that.
And it is because of his core moral principle was this sense that peace could work.
But he also comes to power, Carter comes to power saying that human rights are going to be the center of the core principle, which is a very risky move because that means you got to punish your allies because a lot of our allies were really nasty people. But this is one place where that kind of formula came together pretty effectively.
Quickly overshadowed by the hostage crisis. So that was his big win, but his big loss and essentially the loss of any hope of re-election came with the storming of the embassy.
He did. There were some people who thought that the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 was because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Some people thought, oh, here's a moral sort of position. He's using the sort of cultural weapons, soft power he can use. Others were like, this is kind of milquetoast.
American athletes aren't going to get to compete, and the Russians are going to basically get to do their business. adventures in Afghanistan. So the reception, especially on the right, was quite mixed.
Yeah, but I don't think that was because of Carter, though. No, I agree. The Mujahideen had a little more to do with that. That's true. Where we planted our own seeds of problems. Exactly. Yes, we did. Yes, we did.
Yeah, it is absolutely unprecedented. But he also went into that weak. He was kind of a new kind of Democrat. He wasn't firmly rooted in the civil rights groups. He wasn't firmly rooted in labor. He wasn't in the urban groups. You know, he's weak going in. This just brings him down. And he is suddenly...
The United States, which had lost in Vietnam, and Saigon had fallen, and Cambodia was becoming a killing field, and everything's going terrible. This becomes the last blow of the image of the sort of pitiless giant that can't defend itself, and Carter takes on the sort of symbol of that kind of waffling, what can we do as the hostages are being held in the embassy? But he did try.
On day 100 and some odd, he launched this attempted rescue operation with all the helicopters and the planes in the desert, and ended in a sort of absolute everything went wrong. And it became a kind of metaphor for the whole thing. There were no tools at Carter's disposal for this besides seizing assets and things like that.
And the hostage's family didn't want any violence or invasion because they were afraid they'd be killed. So he was really hamstrung, and the greatest irony probably of his presidency is he spent that last 444 days just worrying about hostages, and then on the day that Ronald Reagan's inaugurated in January 1981 is the same day that the hostages are released.
Talk about pulling the rug out from under you.
And it was also kind of the end of the Democratic Party as we had known it as well. As deeply moral and thoughtful and intelligent as he was, he was not able to keep the party glued together. And they went into the 1980 election weekend. And sadly, that's his legacy.
Well, most ex-presidents disappear, right? And he becomes, as you say, a great humanitarian, a great principled leader. And probably the only analogy would be John Quincy Adams, another one-term president who becomes a great abolitionist. But other than that, most of them kind of fade away.
Yeah, and I think he was more driven by interest in power than maybe some of us want to believe. But ultimately, I don't think that's why he did what he did. I actually think he thought he could bring a sort of moral core back to the leadership of the United States of America. And he did outside the presidency.
Thanks very much, and it was great talking to you.
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