"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 83

In this episode: How Do You End An Endless War?

December 31, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 83

Episode 83: Was Jimmy Carter’s Foreign Policy Actually a Success?

The 39th president is remembered today with great affection. That hasn’t changed the popular perception of him as a failure while in office, weak and overwhelmed by events, and forever defined by the 444 day long debacle of the Iran hostage crisis. But is it time for another look — especially when it comes to the late president’s foreign policy record? Because with the passage of time, Jimmy Carter’s key initiatives abroad — from Central America to the Middle East, and with human rights at the center — are now looking more visionary by the day.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Just a few days after Christmas in 1977, the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, landed in then-Communist Poland aboard Air Force One. Under portable lights, as a stinging snowstorm swirled around him, Carter walked towards a bank of microphones and an expectant crowd. Among the officials looking on was the President’s chief speechwriter, 28-year-old James Fallows.

James Fallows: I was along on the trip. And I remember writing out, whatever, the sort of boilerplate, 'it's great to be in Poland' remarks that one would do.

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: I have come not only to express our own views to the people of Poland, but also to learn your opinions and to understand your desires for the future.

James Fallows: It seemed fine at the time, and then a day or two later, there started to be reports that there had been some gaffes in this translation, rendering Carter's boilerplate, “I have left the United States to come join you” as “I have abandoned the United States” and saying that he wanted to understand the desires of the Polish people as something like, “I want to have sex with the Polish people.”

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: The only really unhappy man in Warsaw tonight is an American government translator named Stephen Seymour. He seems to have had a bit of trouble. He had President Carter leaving Washington permanently, not briefly. And when he spoke of desire for better relations, the word he used for desire had more to do with affairs of the heart than with affairs of state. At least, that's what some outraged Poles told us.

James Fallows: I thought of it as both an indication of just the haywiredness that attends a lot of what a president can do and also the way in which an image gets set in the press's mind and becomes the meme. And this was a very early meme of Jimmy Carter as being ‘snake bit’ or Jimmy Carter as a person things happen to.

[THEME MUSIC PICKS UP]

All presidents undergo a reevaluation with time, but Jimmy Carter is in a class of his own. Long derided as a failure in office, weak and overwhelmed by events, many of his initiatives — especially in the foreign policy realm — are now looking more visionary by the day. In 1976, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, a traumatized country was looking for a new direction. And Jimmy Carter — a born-again Christian, who rose from almost total obscurity as a peanut farmer in Georgia to win the White House — promised to deliver that change. Jim Fallows and Rick Inderfurth, another young White House staffer, were there. Today, you’ll hear them tell the story of how the late President was, in many ways, a transformational chief executive when it came to foreign policy.

How he was the first president to foreground human rights… how — because he thought it was the right thing to do — Carter took a huge political risk in agreeing to give up control of the Panama Canal, long a flashpoint in U.S. Latin American relations… how, through sheer force of will, he brought mortal enemies to the negotiating table at Camp David, where they hammered out a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel… and how secret maneuvering behind the scenes of the Iran hostage crisis helped to destroy the early promise of his presidency.

I’m Peter Bergen, and this is In The Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, FADES]

Peter Bergen: Paint a picture of yourself at the time just before you met President Jimmy Carter.

James Fallows: I was an unemployed mid-twenties person then. I was doing freelance pieces for some national magazines. So I was just cobbling together a life. And as Carter began to get momentum in his campaign, they were rustling up people. And since most presidential primary campaigns fail, most people working in them have nothing to lose. And so there, a lot of them are people in their twenties like me. So I signed on, moved to Atlanta, began writing speeches, began writing op-eds and all that.

Peter Bergen: What was it about him and his program that you found inspiring?

James Fallows: The closest comparison is how Barack Obama seemed at the very start of his presidency, where there was something magic and shiny about him, making you think, okay, we have a chance to start over.

ARCHIVAL Carter Campaign Ad Singer: We need Jimmy Carter. We can't afford to settle for less. America… once and for all, why not the best?

James Fallows: As a Naval Academy graduate and a Navy veteran himself, he had been very direct in denouncing the Vietnam War and calling it a cruel and racist war. In denouncing the tawdry things Nixon had done. In embracing also, young culture of that time. He was an early rock and roll president. He was actual friends with the Allman Brothers band in Georgia.

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: I want to introduce to you, my friends and your friends, the ones that are going to help me get elected along with you, the great Allman Brothers. [CHEERS]

James Fallows: His motto was, ‘a government as good as its people.’

ARCHIVAL Carter Campaign Ad: An America that lives up to the majesty of its constitution and the simple decency of its people.

Peter Bergen: Tell us about that first meeting with Carter.

James Fallows: I had already started working as part of his boiler room in Atlanta, but I had not actually seen him until early August of 1976. His campaign base was the same modest home in Plains, Georgia, that's been in the news ever since then. And there was a surreal, in retrospect, weekend there where Mr. and Mrs. Carter, then Governor and Mrs. Carter, invited Ralph Nader and me.

Ralph Nader was a national figure in the 1960s and ‘70s, a lawyer and activist famous for his involvement in consumer protection, environmentalism, and government reform causes. Jim Fallows worked for him after college, as one of “Nader’s Raiders,” a group of idealistic young reformers.

James Fallows: I was there accompanying Ralph Nader, mainly just as the young guy sitting over on the side, taking notes. It was an August day in South Georgia, so it was plenty warm. I remember Rosalynn Carter bringing out a tray of lemonade for everybody to have as we were sitting out on their patio. Nader was wearing a suit. I was wearing, probably, uh, a shirt and tie. The Carters were addressed much more informally. There's a kind of cowboy-wear that he often had in those days. What impressed almost everybody when they met him was a different version of what impressed people about Bill Clinton, that you were entirely enveloped in all senses by Bill Clinton's presence and eyes and stare and aura. Jimmy Carter was in many ways different from Bill Clinton, including physically different. Clinton is big and imposing. Carter is almost slight. Several inches under six feet. But his eyes had that same Clinton-like laser, uh, focus. He could do every range of emotion, like a great stage dramatist, just by slight changes in his look, from, from interest, to fury, to whatever else.

[MUSIC FADES]

James Fallows: In that same weekend, there was a softball game between the Carter staff, with gigantic Secret Service agents who played on the Carter staff and the press, some of whom were good athletes and some not. And in this, Ralph Nader was the umpire, [PETER LAUGHS] wearing a suit behind home plate, calling balls and strikes on Jimmy Carter. So we were all playing softball and kaboom! This gas station owned by Billy Carter, Jimmy's sort of ne’er-do-well brother, exploded. [PETER LAUGHS] And this was, you know, 50 feet away or it was just, you know, Plains is a tiny place. Nothing is more than 50 feet away from anything else. There was some, uh, soft drink machine that had an errant spark or something like that. So that was how we first met Jimmy Carter.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Peter Bergen: Your first day at the White House, what was that like?

James Fallows: It was fully surreal. Every third or fourth presidential inauguration is arctically cold. The National Guard had blowtorches and flamethrowers out there on the sidewalks to try to melt the ice. So it was really cold, which is worth putting in context because Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter got out of the presidential limousine, and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue as part of the administration's inaugural procession.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 1: Now, whether this is an intention to walk the mile and a half, we have no idea. This was not planned. It was not scheduled. Twenty-nine degrees out there, with a fifteen-mile-an-hour wind. So it's not warm. By golly, Bob. How about that?

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 2: And he's enjoying it too, isn't he, Walter? It's really his moment.

James Fallows: I was standing out in the crowd with everybody else bundled up with like 10 jackets trying to stay warm. Carter gave a speech, which I had exactly one line's worth of influence in. It was the first line he used…

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.

James Fallows: That was after Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. It was objectively a big help to the Carter presidential campaign because it tied Gerald Ford to Watergate. And Carter was thanking Ford for the hit he had taken for what Ford believed to be the right thing. Then there were inaugural balls that evening. Ours was at the D.C. National Armory, where it was the music of the mid-seventies and the attire of the mid-seventies, which I'll leave at that. [PETER LAUGHS] And I think it was the next day that we actually went into the Old Executive Office Building where the speech writing empire was then, where I had what will always be the largest office I ever have in my entire life. This huge office I had, and a huge desk, and I began assembling the little speechwriting team and we set to work on executive orders and proclamations and all the other things.

Peter Bergen: You were President Carter’s chief speechwriter for about two years. What was it like working for him?

James Fallows: When it came to speeches, there were a couple of things that were sort of the elephant in the room for anybody who was working on speeches for him. One was that, like many intelligent presidents, he resented the idea of speechwriters just from the get go, because it was sort of insulting to think that he needed people to help him with this. Carter was a superb extemporaneous speaker. Put him in front of an audience of 100 people in a union hall or a church or a high school auditorium and he would leave them spellbound.

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: Nobody in my father's family ever finished high school before I did. I know what it means to work. I know what it means to have a chance in life that my father and grandfathers didn't have. I know what it means to have a good government.

James Fallows: And that is how we won the Iowa caucuses. Because he did that all around the state and people loved him. There's a quite different skill of giving a formal speech, especially with a teleprompter, especially from a script, and that's a skill that has to be learned, because it's different. George W. Bush learned that skill. Bill Clinton learned it sort of. Donald Trump has never learned it. Obama mastered it early on. Carter resisted learning that skill.

Peter Bergen: Publicly, I think people think of Jimmy Carter as a super easygoing guy, nice guy. But privately, it seems that he was kind of a different person.

James Fallows: Um, I don't think I ever got a compliment from him. on anything that I or my counterparts wrote. And you would hear instead notations back saying “very poor” or “this must be better.” We know the old homily about “no man is a hero to his valet.” I think there was a different version of that with Jimmy Carter, which is that, uh, [FALLOWS LAUGHS] no president of that administration was a hero to his speech-writing team.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Peter Bergen: Uh, you showed me this great picture of you [INDERFURTH LAUGHS] on Air Force One. It's you, Zbig Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter, and then somebody described as “young staffer works amid papers.”

Karl Inderfurth: Yes, that was me, the young staffer. [PETER LAUGHS] It was a, a ringside seat to see the Carter administration launch itself.

Rick Inderfurth’s ringside seat was a staff job with the president’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Karl Inderfurth: I asked Brzezinski what it was that a special assistant did. He said, I have no idea, but I'm told that I need one. So we were both learning the job. The job of special assistant is not a policy maker, but basically a paper manager.

Peter Bergen: As I understand it, your official title then was Special Assistant to the Assistant to the President for National Security, which is a perfect D.C. title. [BOTH LAUGH]

Karl Inderfurth: It is.

Peter Bergen: Isn’t there an inverse relationship between the length of the title and the importance of the gig?

Karl Inderfurth: [BOTH LAUGH] Yes.

Peter Bergen: Was that the first time you'd been in the West Wing when you started the gig?

Karl Inderfurth: It was the first time. It is nothing like the TV show West Wing. It is much more compact, much quieter. Brzezinski, the national security advisor, as Jake Sullivan is today, had the corner office, down the hall: Vice President Mondale. Turn the corner: chief of staff, and go down that hall, the Oval Office. On the other side, coming back: the press secretary, who was Jody Powell, the Reception Room, and the national security advisor's suite, which had a small office for the deputy national security advisor, and what I affectionately call the closet, which is where the special assistant would sit. I had spoken to my predecessor who had that job. He looked like he was steps away from, from exhaustion, heart attack, whatever. And I, I thought to myself, am I going to look that way in, after this job is, is over?

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

James Fallows: What was hardest for me to recognize as a kid speechwriter then was that no major world power can ever have a policy that is purely cynical and self-interested, nor purely idealistic. And the question will always be where the United States sets the balance between those two basic realities. The fact that it is a real power that has real influence that it will have to use, has, has real interest, it must protect. But also that it stands for something more than simply being a power. That its vision of itself involves a vision for other people. So Carter's argument was, I think, best spelled out in his commencement address in Notre Dame.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF APPLAUSE]

In May 1977, President Carter traveled to Notre Dame university to make a major foreign policy address — laying out a new, strikingly original approach to America's role in the world.

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: I believe we can have a foreign policy that is democratic, that is based on fundamental values, and that uses power and influence, which we have, for humane purposes.

In the speech, he outlined an ambitious foreign policy agenda that would move beyond the Cold War and what he called an “inordinate fear of communism.” His administration would work for Middle East peace and build ties with developing nations on a more equal basis. But the most important element of his plan was to declare human rights a “fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.”

James Fallows: Carter was saying, recognizing these imperfections, recognizing these compromises, recognizing the path will never be entirely in one direction or pure, on balance, and in the long run, it clearly makes a difference to bear human rights in mind as something that you always want to try to guide your policy by.

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: Words are action. Much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted.

James Fallows: You won't always succeed. You will inevitably compromise, but the words we use in talking about human rights matter…

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: Now, the leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.

James Fallows: And I personally have heard testimony from people in Chile or Argentina in those days or in the old Eastern Bloc or in parts of East Asia who said that the words Carter used in those days mattered.

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: Our policy is designed to serve mankind. And it is a policy that I hope will make you proud to be Americans. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Karl Inderfurth: Human rights was an issue that President Carter felt very strongly about. And he wanted to elevate its importance in our foreign policy. We needed to take into account the human rights dimension and those principles that we stood for as a country. In fact, it was only two weeks into his presidency that he did something that no president had done before.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Prize winner who is the leader of dissidents in the Soviet Union, has received a personal letter from President Carter.

Karl Inderfurth: Sakharov, the conscience of the Soviet Union, was then in an internal exile.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: Carter told Sakharov, we shall use our good offices to seek the release of prisoners of conscience.

Karl Inderfurth: The Soviets didn't particularly appreciate, I'm saying that diplomatically, that outreach by Carter to Sakharov, but it was a opening shot in trying to infuse human rights into the fabric of U.S. foreign policy.

The president was charged with naivete by his opponents. But it put oppressive regimes across the world on the back foot. And there’s an argument to be made that Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy helped to internally destabilize many of those regimes, even playing an essential but overlooked role in the eventual fall of the Soviet Union.

Karl Inderfurth: Do remember that this is coming after the Kissinger years. I mean, Kissinger was the ultimate realist in foreign policy. Henry Kissinger — now no longer with us and so I'll be very respectful — had great achievements. He was a titan, especially as it related to power relationships with the Soviet Union, with the breakthrough to China, et cetera. But the human dimension and the costs entailed, including extending the Vietnam War, including what happened in Chile and the rest — the realist school of international affairs says power is important, stability is important. It means that you're not paying so much attention to the human dimension of foreign policy as you are to the power dimension. The idealist interpretation of foreign policy is you must also take into account issues such as human rights, which Jimmy Carter felt strongly about.

Peter Bergen: Is Henry Kissinger the anti-Carter, or, is Carter the anti-Kissinger?

James Fallows: [FALLOWS PAUSES, SIGHS] There's a category of people who look better and better as they are assessed by time, which I believe Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter are both in that category. There's a category of people on whom I think history's judgment will be worse and worse as time goes on. I personally believe that Henry Kissinger will be in that category.

Peter Bergen: Why is that the case?

James Fallows: If American foreign policy needs to be a combination of the idealistic and the purely practical, he placed too little emphasis, approaching zero, to the idealistic. I think historians will be increasingly tough.

President Carter’s Notre Dame speech set out the visionary ideas behind his new American foreign policy. Panama is where he would put them into practice.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newcaster: The United States and Panama will sit down once more to talk about a very tough issue between the two countries, the Panama Canal. The two countries have been talking about the future of the canal and who's to control it, on and off, for the last 13 years. The Canal is 63 years old. The United States built it. Panama wants it.

The Panama Canal was a vestige of President Teddy Roosevelt’s “speak softly and carry a big stick” foreign policy. Panama itself was an American creation. Roosevelt had essentially used bullying and military might to wrest the land away from Colombia so that the U.S. could build a Canal there. Since then, the 550 square mile Canal Zone had been an American colonial outpost. But times were changing and a populist Panamanian government was demanding that the United States pull out.

James Fallows: Jimmy Carter felt he had an affinity for Latin America. He had studied Spanish to a certain degree and he often would give speeches in Spanish either when overseas or with Latino audiences in the U.S. [ARCHIVAL SOUND OF CARTER SPEAKING SPANISH] He was not very good in Spanish, but still he liked to do that. And he thought that the Panama Canal treaty was, both strategically and ethically, the right thing to do. Strategically, he thought this was the way to head off what was going to become just more and more a source of trouble. Carter knew that there were sore spots within not just Panama, but Latin America as a whole because of this colonial outpost the U.S. had. So that was the strategic change to make. The ethical thing was he thought it was the right thing to do, the way to be a partner within the Americas.

Panama had become a tinderbox. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that 100,000 American troops could be needed to defend the Canal. In other words, a potential new Vietnam, right in America’s backyard. But most Americans were against handing the Canal over to Panama. And the issue was as galvanizing as abortion or school prayer for the right wing of the time.

James Fallows: The gamble was all the American and world shipping that depended on this canal. Could you trust the Panamanians? [FALLOWS SIGHS] You know, there was no really polite way this was put, so it was put impolitely in the right-wing press. Could you trust them to actually manage the Canal? Could you trust them to be not corrupt? Could you trust them not to become Soviet agents? So, on strategic grounds and on economic grounds, could this possibly work? There also was what you could think of as proto-Trump-ite sentiments of, this is our territory. We're not giving it back. Why would we ever give it back?

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: It's been a long time since conservatives in America have had a real issue to make people turn out and work. But this time they think they've got one. Public opinion is running heavily against the Panama Canal Treaty.

Karl Inderfurth: There was some resistance among the more establishment types in the White House, ‘Why start off with such a red button issue, hot issue? Why don't you just sort of work your way into these priorities?’ But President Carter was determined. The problem was it had become such a political litmus test. Are you for or against giving away our canal?And some very vocal opponents, including Ronald Reagan, saying, ‘Don't give away our Canal. How can you do this?’ Uh, the communists will come in and take it over. I mean, it was, it was a lot of Cold War rhetoric.

ARCHIVAL Ronald Reagan: The Panamanian Guardia Nacional will be chanting the words that they use in their present training. “Death to the gringo, down with the gringo, gringo to the wall.” Now that should reassure us gringos about the kind of cooperation we might have under the new treaties.

Karl Inderfurth: It had become a very, very political issue. But Carter was determined that he was going to place that at the top of his list of presidential to-dos.

Peter Bergen: It seems that a theme with Jimmy Carter was, if it's going to be electorally unhelpful to me, I'll probably do that.

James Fallows: [FALLOWS LAUGHS] Yes. He didn't like to be told that he couldn't or shouldn't. Yeah, somebody tells you you can't do it. That's all the more reason to say, ‘oh, yeah, I can.’

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: And a big day for the president. Today's vote was 68 for the treaty, 32 against it. 67 votes were needed for approval, and the outcome of this long debate is a distinct victory for the Carter administration. He has prevailed in one of the most difficult political battles of his career.

Peter Bergen: It's hard to imagine anything getting two-thirds of the Senate vote today.

Karl Inderfurth: I don't think in today's climate, you could get virtually any treaty through the two-thirds necessary.

Peter Bergen: How was Carter able to manage it?

Karl Inderfurth: That was a time when there was still a bipartisan block of senators that, that worked together, that spent time together. The partisanship that we see today had not taken hold. And so it was a time when a treaty could be passed if you made the case, which Carter spent the time with senators to make the case. And Carter got the votes. And, and, and by the way, it is still operating. It has been expanded, it has been maintained, it hasn't gone communist. [INDERFURTH LAUGHS]

Peter Bergen: I mean, it's a non-issue today, which is kind of a sign of success.

Karl Inderfurth: It is a non-issue today, which is exactly what Jimmy Carter wanted.

President Carter’s success with the Panama Canal Treaty spurred him on to try to personally unravel the most complex diplomatic challenge of them all: peace in the Middle East. Most of his advisors were against taking this risk. They feared it was likely to end in defeat, and maybe even humiliation, for the president. But this was Jimmy Carter at his best. He was determined to take a chance for peace, whatever the potential political cost.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: So tonight a somber president awaits a meeting of three national leaders on a Maryland mountaintop. A meeting nobody expects to produce immediate success in the form of a full settlement. But if the meeting fails, nobody knows when there will be any serious negotiating again.

Peter Bergen: So, Camp David, obviously you have, uh, Jimmy Carter, you have, um, Menachem Begin, the Israeli leader, and also Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader, and they all are taking various degrees of risk. But for Carter, again, he was sort of volunteering to do this…

Karl Inderfurth: Yeah! I mean, if it had not succeeded, he would have been heavily criticized for taking, I mean, it was 13 days at Camp David.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: Several senators said if this initiative by the president doesn’t produce anything, it’ll all be seen as a tremendous failure.

Peter Bergen: Most of us are never going to get inside Camp David. Tell us that was like.

James Fallows: It's, it's no accident that so many presidents have chosen Camp David as a venue to try to get deals done because it is physically removed from D.C. enough that you do feel as if you're someplace special. In those days, there was essentially no communication with the outside world. And at least it was then surprisingly rustic. These were little modest wooden cabins, where the staff would stay — if you think of rural Georgia, some roadside motel, you might see — quite austere inside: just, a little bed and uh, nothing fancy. The president's main cabin was different. Of course, this was the president's house. There was a sort of patio behind the main presidential house and then beyond that was the woods and then the Catoctin mountains in the distance.

Peter Bergen: You were there. What did you witness during this negotiation?

James Fallows: The vision that is strongest to me is the three of them on the patio with iced tea or lemonade looking out on the expanse of the American wilderness in front of them. Talking about these little tiny tracts of territory in the Middle East and with maps around them, and Carter and Sadat having a kind of obvious chemistry between them and a kind of obvious frostiness with Begin. And their aides would be coming back and forth. So there was a very closely held group of the principals, as we say. I was the guy going in and out with a paper. I was just sort of sitting there in a, in a cabin waiting to hear what I should put through the speech-writing machine.

Peter Bergen: What was Carter's role? Why was it such a big deal?

James Fallows: So this was an enormous deal because of course it's the only peace deal in the Middle East that, the only one that has lasted. From 1978 until the present Egypt and Israel, which had been at actual war, have not been at war. And it could not possibly have happened without Jimmy Carter and his mixture of traits. One of those traits was an attention to detail that in his presidency sometimes became a handicap, but was very important here because anybody who was part of the negotiations remember seeing three men, three leaders of countries around the table — Carter and Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat — with maps of the Sinai and little tiny detailed maps of here's a settlement and here's this or that. And Carter drawing lines and saying what about this? And does the road go here? And what about the water supply? So he was able to out-detail anybody.

Karl Inderfurth: And this is the one thing that, I think, defined President Carter, he really knew the subject. The briefing books that he received, his own studies, his own interests. He could talk to Begin and Sadat about the history of that land. Part of it is biblical. Begin kept talking about the West Bank as, uh, Judea and Samaria, which is the, the Jewish view of the history of that land. And that's still with us today in what's taking place on the West Bank. Carter knew these things. I mean, he studied them. This wasn't a photo op. This was serious diplomacy to see if there was anything that could be done to close this gaping wound in the Middle East.

James Fallows: A second element that I think was distinctive to Carter was his vision that this could happen. It was possible to make peace in an area that had been racked by war. It was obvious to everybody that Carter felt a sort of simpatico with Anwar Sadat, that he did not at all feel with Begin. That the version of faith that Sadat radiated was more like what Carter thought of, of his personal faith of universalism and all of that. Whereas Begin's version of faith, of course, was this very Old Testament conviction to reclaim what he viewed as ancestral Israeli land. But he took their religion seriously because he took his religion seriously. And then there was his personal force of will. He was going to wear anybody down. He'd stay there as long as it took and finally he got them to agree.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: Good evening. The summit at Camp David is over, and Israel and Egypt have agreed to two documents taking a giant step toward achieving peace in their troubled corner of the world.

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: One of the agreements that President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin are signing tonight is entitled “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East” [APPLAUSE]

Peter Bergen: But what's interesting is that if you look back at the Camp David Accords there’s this thing I, I didn't know, which was basically that Carter believed that Begin had accepted the idea of stopping the settlements in the West Bank, and that Begin then tricked him.

James Fallows: So yes, I can tell you firsthand, that is what Carter believed. That is what everybody on the U.S. team believed. That was the deal the U.S. thought it had set. And I mentioned that Carter loved Anwar Sadat and did not like Begin, but he thought he could trust Begin. And he thought that Begin was the tough guy who could deliver a deal. And so Carter believed that Begin did not deliver. And that is part of Carter's so long tangled history with Israeli politics ever since then.

Peter Bergen: Are there lessons for today?

James Fallows: Carter was then, and ever since, resolute on the idea that the two-state solution was the only way out. What he was hardest on Begin about was expansion of settlements. And I think if, um, Begin had countenanced anything like the current extent of settlements through the West Bank. Carter would have said, this is ridiculous. You can never have a lasting peace with this kind of expansion.

Peter Bergen: So Camp David, would it have succeeded without President Carter?

Karl Inderfurth: No, because he listened. He listened to what they had to say. And by the way, for a great majority of that time, Begin and Sadat would not speak to each other. They were in separate cabins. Carter would go to one cabin, hear out Sadat. Then he would go to Begin's cabin, and talk with him, and then he'd go back and forth. I mean, he truly was trying to serve the role of mediator. But I do know that there was one issue and this is so relevant for today — what's happening today in Gaza and on the West Bank. It continues.

Karl Inderfurth: Netanyahu basically opened the doors. There are now 450,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. And more are coming. Even before this terrible, horrific tragedy of October 7th, there was talk that Netanyahu and his ultra, very right-wing coalition, uh, would be looking to formally annex the West Bank. So what Jimmy Carter couldn't do then, despite his mediation efforts, has continued to this day and directly to the tragedy that's taking place in Gaza for the Palestinian people. And Sadat, of course, paid with his life. I mean, his assassination was a direct consequence of this treaty with Israel and Camp David. Sadat paid the ultimate price.

Peter Bergen: So, as a diplomatic achievement, how would you score it?

Karl Inderfurth: Well, Nobel Prize. I mean, Sadat and Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize. Many felt that Jimmy Carter should have received it then, but he received it later. In part because the Nobel Committee recognized that Carter's peace-oriented post-presidency missions were deserving of a Nobel Prize. And I think the Nobel Committee also realized that, you know, he should have received it earlier for Camp David. 'Cause Camp David would not have happened without him. So, uh, I mean, stratospheric, uh, in terms of an accomplishment.

But Jimmy Carter didn’t surf the stratosphere for long. If foreign policy victories in Panama and the Middle East — not to mention the normalization of relations with China — marked the first half of his presidency, Carter’s last two years soon turned into a disaster. And that was largely thanks to a crisis he didn’t see coming: the fall of America’s long-term ally — Iran’s ruler, the Shah — and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to the 444 bitter days of the Iran hostage crisis.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: Iran — because of the great leadership of the Shah — is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.

Jimmy Carter raised his glass to salute the Shah in Tehran on New Year’s Eve 1977. It was a message of gratitude for one of America’s key allies in the Middle East.

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.

Just days later, thousands of Islamist students and other young Iranians took to the streets to protest the Shah’s authoritarian regime. Over the following months, a cycle of mass demonstrations answered by government crackdowns tore the country apart.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CHANTING, GUNSHOTS, CHAOS]

Just a year after President Carter had toasted the Shah and his island of stability, it was all over.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 1: A tearful Shah of Iran left his country today on a vacation from which he may never return. He piloted an Iranian Air Force jet on a flight to Aswan, Egypt, the first stop toward his ultimate destination, the United States.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 2: The Iranian ambassador insisted to us today that the Shah is only on vacation and will return to Iran.

But the U.S. was in no rush to take in the man the Iranians had forced out. So the Shah's "vacation" became a long, meandering trip toward the United States.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 3: The Shah, now something of a homeless wanderer, left Morocco today and flew to Paradise Island in the Bahamas. He was not forbidden to come to the U.S., but he was urged not to.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 4: The Shah of Iran has now arrived in Mexico, his fourth port of call since the downfall of his regime last January.

From his new perch as Deputy Staff Director for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rick Inderfurth was watching his former White House colleagues struggle with the fallout from the revolution in Iran. The exiled, ailing Shah was asking for asylum in the United States.

Karl Inderfurth: Jimmy Carter was under tremendous pressure not only on the medical side, but the view that we don't turn our back on our friends. Despite the fact that it was very clear, the intelligence was very clear that this would provoke a very strong reaction from the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers.

In the end, Carter gave in.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 1: The Shah of Iran is in a New York City hospital tonight. An American government source in Washington says the deposed Iranian monarch is suffering from cancer and a blocked bile duct.

Iranian outrage was immediate, and not limited to the streets of Tehran:

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 2: Outside the hospital, Iranian students demonstrated against the Shah, shouting long live Khomeini. [INDISTINCT SOUNDS OF CHANTING] They called the Shah a murderer and said they wanted him to recover so that he could be returned to Iran and tried.

Karl Inderfurth: The decision that President Carter made, to allow the Shah of Iran into the United States for medical treatment, triggered the break-in to the embassy, the taking of hostages. Days later, the embassy was breached and the hostages were taken.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster: The U.S. Embassy in Tehran has been invaded and occupied by Iranian students. The Americans inside have been taken prisoner, and according to a student spokesman, will be held as hostages until the deposed Shah is returned from the United States, where he's receiving medical treatment for cancer.

Peter Bergen: Once the hostages were taken, there were some options on the table, including mining Iranian harbors and…

Karl Inderfurth: I mean, that had been discussed, throughout this whole period. Clearly it was on the table. They tried every trick in the book. Every diplomatic approach you could. But with each diplomatic initiative failing the pressure grew for the military to be tasked with finding a way to get them out.

The country was demanding to know what the President was going to do. On April 24, 1980, came his answer. U.S. Special Forces operators flew to a staging area in the Iranian desert on a mission to rescue the hostages.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 1: The plan was to converge on Iran under cover of darkness.

It was a disaster from beginning to end.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 1: With the stage set, the choppers moved in. One was forced down with engine problems. Another, lost in a sandstorm, forced to return to the Nimitz. Six made it to the staging area, but there was a hydraulic failure, leaving five. President Carter ordered the mission scrubbed: not enough choppers to get everyone out with the margin of safety.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 2: While the helicopters were being refueled for the return trip, one of them exploded. Eight men died, four more were burned, and a huge fireball illuminated the darkness of the night.

ARCHIVAL Jimmy Carter: It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation. It was my decision to cancel it. The responsibility is fully my own.

Peter Bergen: I think you say that Carter would often say, I would have been reelected were it not for these broken helicopters in the Iran hostage rescue. To me, that seems actually fairly ridiculous because the plan on its face made no sense. You're going to land in the middle of the desert. You're going to drive into Tehran, a giant city. You're going to get 52 hostages out of the U.S. Embassy, all of whom are being detained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Then you're going to go back to the desert. Then you're going to get out. The whole plan seemed to be on its face highly unlikely to succeed. And Jim, I sat next to Walter Mondale at lunch one day, and he said, the big problem with the plan is that it was so secret that no one really understood the full details. And, you know, as you probably remember, there were no rehearsals of the plan. And then everything that could go wrong did go wrong. But even before we get to the helicopters crashing into each other, it just seemed like a fairly harebrained scheme. Why did he do it? What effect did it have on his presidency?

James Fallows: It was one of several things that doomed his presidency. I think that Carter probably felt he had to do it just because the news media had just made this the central fact of American life uh, in the year before the election, starting with Ted Koppel's Nightline.

ARCHIVAL Ted Koppel: But for the moment, there is an even more pressing issue. The hostages. How are they? Where are they?

James Fallows: The hostages were taken just a year before Election Day.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 1: Some 60 Americans, including our fellow citizen whom you just saw bound and blindfolded.

James Fallows: It was something that Carter could not avoid,

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 2: Both patience and time are running out…

James Fallows: because it was just the center of news and political attention.

ARCHIVAL 1970s Newscaster 1: Well, the pressure is increasing, and so is support for any military action the President might order.

James Fallows: The genesis of the plan, everything you say about it is correct. And since then, it's used as a case study of everything you should never do when trying to undertake military operations. And so, yes, it was a complete disaster.

But maybe it didn’t have to happen. Not just the failed rescue mission, but the embassy hostage crisis itself. Because there’s a little-known but shocking behind the scenes story that tells us how history might have taken a quite different turn.

Peter Bergen: My understanding is Carter was against bringing the Shah in at first?

Karl Inderfurth: I think that's the case.

Peter Bergen: Now, as we look back on it, Carter was snowed by some of his advisers. The Shah wasn't really dying. He was obviously somebody in poor health, but there wasn't like an imminent medical collapse that was going to happen.

Karl Inderfurth: Well, you use the term “snowed by some of his advisors.” Well, it was well beyond that. It was David Rockefeller. It was Henry Kissinger. It was the establishment elite, who had very close ties to the Shah and felt that he should have asylum in the U.S. Jimmy Carter was told, in no uncertain terms, that only in the U.S. was there medical treatment advanced enough to deal with the Shah's cancer. It appears — I'm not an expert on this — but it appears that that is now very questionable. That there were other places that he could have gone to receive treatment, or have treatment brought to him.

It makes me wonder. What if Jimmy Carter hadn’t given into secret Washington establishment pressure to grant the Shah asylum in the U.S.? You can imagine an alternative historical timeline: one which might have seen Carter squeak past Ronald Reagan and win a second term, with everything that might have meant for the 39th president’s historical reputation. But in real life, that’s not what happened…

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster: Now, day one. Day one of Ronald Reagan's presidency, and day one of freedom for 52 Americans. The new president had not been in office an hour, when the former hostages became free men and women again.

Jimmy Carter’s presidency began with the hope to build a new role for the United States in a new world, but it ended in disarray and defeat. He was derided as weak, his ideas discredited. But he never abandoned his values, and the best was still to come in a remarkable post-presidency that lasted four decades.

Peter Bergen: What's Jimmy Carter's legacy and how did he shape the world we live in today?

Karl Inderfurth: His legacy is that he was the most successful, quote, failed president, in quote, in history. I mean, there were more accomplishments in the foreign policy realm in his four years than you can count in an eight-year, two-term presidency. Whether it be Panama, the Mideast, human rights. Something that is very gratifying for those of us who admired him, realizing that he made mistakes along the way. All presidents do. But there is a re-evaluation because the stigma of a failed presidency goes largely to the last year and a half in office when the albatross of the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and domestic issues especially inflation, gas prices. All of that. But history will treat Jimmy Carter very kindly and already the historians and biographers are correcting the perceived record. He was a consequential American president.

Karl Inderfurth: I mean, look, he was ahead of his time. He had solar panels on the West Wing, solar panels! He was so far ahead of his time, but he wasn't a great communicator. He didn't project that kind of empathy, passion, in his approach. But he felt strongly and passionately about what he was trying to accomplish. I think this revisiting of Jimmy Carter, is correcting the historical record to give credit where credit is due, to call attention to the successes, to call attention to his pursuit of peace. I think that will be the Jimmy Carter that the historians will write about.

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If you are interested in learning some more about the issues and stories we discussed in this episode, we recommend The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird and His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life by Jonathan Alter. They’re both available on Audible.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

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