Jonathan Alter
speaker
108 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Jonathan Alter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And by beating Wallace and driving George Wallace out of politics in that 1976 Florida Democratic primary, Jimmy Carter eliminated what had been the segregationist, racist wing of the Democratic Party, which went back to the founding of the American Republic. Remember that the South was solidly Democratic.
Until the 1970s, the Democrats were the party of segregation and secession and the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. By the way, Jimmy Carter's mother was the only person in the county who ever had anything nice to say about Abraham Lincoln when he was growing up.
So by ending the racist wing of the Democratic Party, Carter, before he became president, had done something very historic. And today, if you have those views, you're not a Democrat. There's no room in the party for that. And that's been true since Jimmy Carter.
He was only governor for one term. He was not allowed to run for reelection by state law. But he changed so much and offended so many of the segregationists. As he told me in one of our many interviews, if he had been allowed to run for governor again, he would have lost.
I think some people considered him arrogant. He could be a little bit intellectually arrogant, showing that he was the smartest guy in the room, which he usually was, but that can be politically unhelpful. He didn't have an arrogant demeanor when you met him. And certainly in public, he was far from arrogant. There was none of that from the podium.
In fact, you could argue that he wasn't commanding enough and that his de-pomping of the presidency was very harmful to him politically. But in private, he could be snappish and prickly. And so he often had trouble getting along with other politicians. He got along with the average people that he met extraordinarily well. And he was a brilliant retail politician.
And that was why he succeeded so well in Iowa and New Hampshire in those caucuses and primaries where meeting voters is what really counts. It wasn't great on TV, but I think where a number of analysts and historians and journalists have gone wrong is they thought that his prickly qualities, which were unappealing on Capitol Hill, that that meant that he didn't get much done.
And actually, that's at odds with the historical record. He got a tremendous amount done as president. So he was a political failure, but a substantive success in many ways.
Yes, but those were instruments for his personal ambition. He was already running for president at that point. And he actually did not do very much to remake the Democratic Party in his image, in a more moderate image. And that was why he was challenged by Ted Kennedy for the nomination in 1980.
And when I asked him at one point what his great regrets were, the first one was that his failure to win a second term meant that he couldn't provide a two-state solution in the Middle East, which he was deeply concerned about, what he called the Holy Land. You know, he had completed the Camp David Accords, bringing peace between Israel and Egypt, which we can talk about.
But he really regretted that he didn't get the Palestinian state that he was the first to advocate. But his second biggest regret was that by his description, he mishandled his relationships inside the Democratic Party. And he was not able to have a unified Democratic Party behind him when he ran for reelection.
Yes. And I don't think he could have been president without Watergate. So he was the perfect antidote to Watergate, this honest, moral politician from the outside without any of the stench of Washington, hadn't served in Congress. And he promised that he would never lie and that he would bring a government as good as its people, is the way he put it.
And it was a very fresh, different kind of message. And he understood from the get-go that without even having to mention Watergate, he could be a figure of healing for the country. And he was.
But in the same way that he was made by Watergate, he was also unmade by Watergate, because when he became president, Watergate had been turned into, or the gate part of Watergate had been turned into a suffix on any little flap that happened. Any little, you know, story of the week would be called something gate. So he had an aide
His budget director and friend from Georgia had some banking problems well before the presidency. His name was Burt Lance, and a New York Times columnist won a Pulitzer Prize for what was called Lancegate. And Carter's brother, Billy, ran into some problems that are a little bit like Hunter Biden's, except not as bad. And that was called Billy Gate.
You multiply that by 20 and you get a sense of how besieged he was by the media, which assumed before any honeymoon, like in the first few days of his presidency. They just assumed he would be another corrupt president like Nixon. And that was the way people in my business, and I'm a journalist, that's the way we rolled. I was a little young for it.
I wasn't out of college yet, but I could sense then that the whole game in Washington was let's rip down the president. And he was subjected to that after Watergate.
Exactly. So I described Jimmy Carter as a visionary who wasn't really a leader. So, you know, a guy who would go charging up the right hills, But turn around and there was nobody behind him. And part of this was that he wasn't a very good politician. He was a very good candidate. And even in 1980, he wasn't a bad candidate. He knew how to run for office.
But he wasn't an especially skillful politician. His wife, Rosalyn, was much shrewder when it came to the politics of the presidency. And a successful president has to be a good politician. Carter thought that if he could get to the right solution, which he usually did, that the American people would recognize that and they would go along with him.
He sometimes failed to understand that the president, when you boil it all down, only has one power. This was described by one of my mentors when I was at Harvard, a great political scientist and historian named Richard Neustadt. And he wrote a book that was very influential with JFK, who made Neustadt his transition director.
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