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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And the book was called Presidential Power, and it said that the president only has one power. That's the power to persuade. And if the president can't persuade, he can't govern effectively.
Carter defied that in some ways because he had an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, and he was good at winning Republican votes on important bills like the Panama Canal Treaties and a number of other important laws that he got approved. So he wasn't by any means a failure on Capitol Hill, but he was more broadly a political failure.
When he got at odds with the American people and his support started slipping away, even when there was a rally around the flag quality in his last year when the hostages were seized in Iran, he had lost his deeper connection to the American people pretty early in the presidency.
It was some combination. He had visited Israel when he was governor and he had always been interested in the issues there. And then when he was running for president, he went on something called the Trilateral Commission and really educated himself on foreign policy and became deeply steeped in it.
But then there were these opportunities that really came out of Anwar Sadat's decision to visit Jerusalem, which was historic and transformed things, but by itself was not enough to bring peace between those two countries. And that took Jimmy Carter as both Sadat, who became a very close friend of Carter, and Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel.
They both readily attested that deal would never have happened without Jimmy Carter's just almost obsessive interest and his attention to detail, which he was much criticized for. But
In this case, and in the Alaska lands bill, which doubled the size of the national park system in the United States, and the Panama Canal treaties that prevented a long war in Central America, and on other issues, normalization with China, which became the foundation of the global economy, these huge foreign policy wins were partly the product of Carter's obsession with
getting the details right, which I think comes out of his engineering background and his faith.
Yeah, there's a play. Richard Thomas played Jimmy Carter. And I think Ben Kingsley was in one of the stage productions as Sadat. So, you know, there's a play about Camp David. But you're right that it would make a great movie.
And to be totally honest with you, I've been trying a little bit to get Carter's life covered more by Hollywood, because I think it's very dramatic and has been underappreciated over the years.
Yeah, and some of them you'd put in the column of mistakes, like boycotting the Olympics and the grain embargo that Carter imposed. It was very popular before it was very unpopular. So, you know, it won overwhelmingly in Congress, and then pretty much everybody agreed that it didn't really do much to alter Soviet behavior and took it out on the athletes and was probably not such a great idea.
But you're right that there were these major events, and then these were all playing out against the backdrop of a terrible economy.
Correct. And actually, the improvement of the economy should go on Carter's record. Because what happened was, so I think your listeners know, the president doesn't really determine the economy. It's the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Now we've had some chairwomen.
So in 1979, Jimmy Carter was facing this horrible inflation, which, as you correctly say, mostly came out of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. which was not on Carter's watch, and then was worsened by the Iranian revolution, which, contrary to what Henry Kissinger and some others maintain, and I argued with Kissinger about this, I think, fairly successfully.
There really is not any evidence that Jimmy Carter could have prevented the Iranian revolution. But these things, these external events, cause this ruinous inflation, double-digit inflation. And Carter appoints Volcker to be chair of the Federal Reserve. Volcker jacks up interest rates. At one point, they go as high as 19%. Try getting reelected. when you have 19% interest rates.
And this is very, very harsh medicine that Volcker, who told me at the end of his life that he was a big admirer of Jimmy Carter, So he applies this really harsh medicine. It doesn't start working until Reagan is president. So what do we have?
We have, because of these interest rates and other policies at the Fed, you have a short, extremely steep recession in 1982 when Reagan is in the second year of his presidency. And then after that recession ends, no inflation until 2020. It had been completely wrung out of the economy. And Reagan goes on to get reelected thanks to Volcker's policy.
I asked Volcker, you know, people say that you cost Jimmy Carter the presidency and you elected Reagan twice. And he said, you know, I've heard that. And he said, I met Carter at a fishing lodge after his presidency. We were both into fly fishing. And I went up to him and I said, President Carter, you know, I'm sorry if some of my policies cost you the presidency.
And he looked at me and he smiled. And I could tell that it was actually one of Carter's genuine smiles, not one of his fake ones. And he said, Paul, there were many factors. And I think Carter was right about that.
Well, first, it was a decision that Carter made, which was arguably the worst of his presidency, that precipitated the seizing of the hostages. Just days before, Carter had agreed to let the Shah of Iran, who had left the peacock throne and was being treated for cancer in Mexico, to come into the United States. And what happened was
Showing 61–80 of 108 · page 4 of 6
← Previous
Next →