Born James Earl Carter, Jr. on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter was raised in a peanut farming, Baptist family. In 1946 he graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland and soon thereafter married Rosalynn Smith, with whom he would father three sons and a daughter. Carter served seven years as a naval officer and then returned to Plains. In 1962 he entered state politics, and in 1970 was elected Governor of Georgia. Six years later he was elected President of the United States, serving one term before losing his 1980 re-election bid to a Ronald Reagan landslide; the electoral vote margin was 489 to 49.
While Carter's administration brought the U.S. some of its worst economic conditions in living memory - with soaring interest and inflation rates - his worst failing as President was in the realm of foreign policy. His human rights policy led to human rights disasters in Nicaragua and Iran, where he facilitated the rise to power of Marxists and Islamist despots, respectively. Both of those new tyrannies far surpassed the brutality of their predecessors. The fruits of the Iran disaster are still very much with the United States today. If the U.S. would have supported the Shah or his successors, the history of the past 25 years in the Middle East would have been very different, and the Iranian people would have fared much better. Moreover, the Soviet Union would have hesitated greatly over invading Afghanistan in 1979. Carter's timid approach to international conflicts emboldened the USSR to extend its reach further into the Third World. By letting the Soviets know he would not respond if they invaded Afghanistan, Carter spawned a war that ultimately saw one million dead Afghans, five million displaced, and a situation of evil that nurtured the Islamic hatred and militancy that ultimately turned on the West and brought about 9/11.
During his Presidency and the years since then, Carter has demonstrated a refusal to acknowledge the hard reality that evil must sometimes be met with overwhelming force; that negotiation cannot always win the day when one is dealing with an enemy that has no interest in mutual respect or peaceful coexistence. Even Neville Chamberlain, the arch-appeaser of England in the 1930s, eventually came to understand the dark truth about the Nazis, but Carter and similarly minded leftists cannot be shaken from their sentimental view of the world, even by something as stark as 9/11.
Carter is a mixture of neo-Kantianism—that is, the philosophical view that one's good intentions outweigh the practical consequences of one's actions and words—and leftwing Christian pacifism that believes the use of force is always wrong. Although Carter, like most leftists, says that the use of force is always to be available as "the last resort," in practice Carter would never reach "the last resort." There is always one more negotiation to be held, one more appeal to the United Nations, one more "last-ditch effort" to try. Whereas Ronald Reagan believed in "peace through strength," Carter believes in "peace through talk"; this was the hallmark of his Presidency.
According to Steven Hayward (the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, who authored the 2004 book The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry), Carter's worldview is consistent with what Malcom Muggeridge called "the great liberal death wish." Says Hayward, "I recently reread James Burnham's classic 1964 book, Suicide of the West, and it reads like a perfect description of the Carter . . . worldview that holds our own national interests in great suspicion and sympathizes with our enemies out of guilt. Burnham wrote the following: 'If he [the liberal] thinks that his country's weapons or strategy menace peace, then Peace, he feels, [and] not his country's military plans, should take precedence.' This certainly explains . . . Carter's own policy about arms during his Presidency."
In the years following his Presidency, Carter aggressively pursued the Nobel Peace Prize, seeing it as a means of gaining official redemption for his 1980 humiliation at the hands of American voters. He lobbied quietly behind the scenes for years to get the prize, and finally met with success in 2002 when the leftwing Nobel Prize committee saw an opportunity to use Carter as a way of attacking President Bush and embarrassing the United States. The head of the Nobel Prize committee openly admitted that this was the panel's motivation in selecting Carter. Any other ex-President would have refused to be a part of such an obvious anti-American intrigue, but not Carter, who views himself much more as a citizen of the world than as a citizen of the United States. It is highly revealing that Carter is most popular overseas in those nations that hate America the most, such as Syria, where throngs of people lined the streets cheering him when he visited.
Steven Hayward was asked, "Let us suppose that you were invited to a political history conference in which the top scholars were asked to rate Carter as a President on a scale of 1-10 (10 being a superb President, 0 being an absolute disaster) and then to give a short verdict on his Presidency and legacy, what would you say?" Hayward replied, "He would get a zero. He has already been identified as such. Nathan Miller, author of The Star-Spangled Men: America's Ten Worst Presidents, ranks Carter number one among the worst. Miller wrote that 'Electing Jimmy Carter President was as close as the American people have ever come to picking a name out of the phone book and giving him the job.' I concur. Everyone old enough recalls the high inflation under Carter, and his foreign record was just as bad. Henry Kissinger summarized it this way: 'The Carter administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.'"
In May 2006, Carter penned an article for the International Herald Tribune, in which he condemned the United States for being "the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the [Palestinian] general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life." At issue was the U.S. government's decision, in the wake of Hamas's electoral victory earlier in the year, to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority. "Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime." Praising Hamas (which refuses to recognize Israel's existence and has sworn itself to destroying the Jewish state) for having "continued to honor a temporary cease-fire, or hudna, during the past 18 months," Carter stated: "There is no doubt that Israelis and Palestinians both want a durable two-state solution."
