Ever the Wonderboy
Hayward, Steven F.
BOOKS IN REVIEW missed his conservative ferocity as an idiosyncrasy. In short, they wrapped him in the Blue State flag before they buried him. In the posthumous anthology, he rises again...
...That loony episode, coupled with his collapse from exhaustion during a 10-kilometer run in suburban Maryland, ele vated him to stardom in most stand-up comedians' monologues, a hilarious distraction from his fumbled effort to solve the Iranian hostage mess that was the capstone to his failed presidency...
...How else can one explain Carter's unconscionable efforts to sabotage the 1990 Gulf War or his cozy relationship with anti-American terrorists like Yasser Arafat, Danny Ortega, Hafez Assad, and the North Korean gangsters...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW missed his conservative ferocity as an idiosyncrasy...
...Steven Hayward is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank populated by few, if any, fans of James Earl Carter, Jr...
...It seemed ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡the right thing to do at the time, an angry reaction to the Nixon/Watergate mess and the dim bulb succession of Veep Gerald Ford, a man seemingly better qualified to bolt bumpers on Fords in his native Michigan than to take pratfalls in the White House...
...Diamonds Are Forever Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Fetwork of Terror by Douglas Farah (Broadway Books, 225 pages, $24.95) Reviewed by John Corry As S DOUGLAS FARAH SAYS, apparently correctly, he as "often far ahead of what U.S...
...By Steven F. Hayward (Regnery Publishing, 272 pages, $27.95) Reviewed by Brock Yates EA CULPA: I was one of the pathetic dupes who voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976...
...Most of the major media did not include in their coverage his additional remark, "Christ says, don't consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife...
...T HE REAL JIMMY CARTER only goes part way in revealing what a hapless dunce (or "grinning dunce" as this magazine memorably labeled him) the subject truly was...
...Yet Hayward the scholar assaults the ex-president not with the hyperbole of an Brock Yates is author, most recently, ofAgainst Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years (Thunder's Mouth Press...
...Carter's Panama Canal giveaway, his obsession with "human rights," his instantly failed Camp David accords, his betrayal of the Shah of Iran, and his botched handling of the 1978 oil crisis all helped to plunge his approval rating to a dismal 25 percent even before he was assaulted by a "killer rabbit" while fishing in Georgia...
...His erratic behavior, which ranged from the saccharine to canine viciousness, is truly the subject not of Hayward's polite dissection but rather that of a learned psychiatrist...
...Al Qaeda bought the diamonds from the murderous rebels of Sierra Leone to use as currency in John Corry, a senior editor of The American Spectator, travels frequently to Africa...
...Six weeks before the election Carter admitted in a Playboy interview that he lusted in his heart after women...
...It was during his failed 1980 presidential campaign that ABC's Barbara Walters noted in an interview, "Mr...
...A quarter-century later that brief interlude in the voting booth haunts me while it produces endless amusement for my wife Pamela, who saw the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, for what he was, a nasty, egocentric Lilliput whose Cheshire-cat smile shielded a blurred, disjointed, hopelessly murky and marginally schizophrenic personality that prompted comedian Pat Paulsen to quip, "They wanted to put Carter on Mt...
...Grant, and even Bill Clinton look like later-day Pericleses by comparison...
...But perhaps his anti-American behavior has nothing to do with politics, but more with jealousies directed at the Bush family and their connections to Ronald Reagan¡ªthe man who squashed him like a hollow cashew in the 1980 presidential election...
...Almost unmentioned is his steely wife Rosalynn, who hated Washington society as much as it hated her, or his soused, redneck brother Billy and his scraggly daughter, Amy, who plunged into the counterculture at Brown and disappeared forever...
...After reading The Real Jimmy Carter, one is led to wonder not only what is wrong with the man's mental state, but what form of dementia seized me and my fellow citizens who gave him 50.1 percent of the popular vote in 1976...
...Not exactly equal to the Gettysburg Address or Roosevelt's "day of infamy" speech, but branded trademarks of a tenure in the White House of a man who makes Warren G. Harding, U.S...
...Farah, then the West African correspondent for the Washington Post, wrote the first account of al Qaeda's interest in the "blood diamonds" of Sierra Leone and, by extension, Charles Taylor's government in Liberia...
...In the posthumous anthology, he rises again in all his Clinton-hating, hipster-crippling, Baby Boomer-excoriating glory...
...Throughout his long career, his toothy smile and cuddly demeanor concealed a knife-edged ruthlessness and propensity to align himself with unsavory characters in behalf of his own glory...
...During the run-up from his father's peanut farm to the governorship of Georgia, he simultaneously courted the axe-wielding racist Lester Maddox and Martin Luther King, Jr.¡ªa juggling act that deserves high marks for cleverness if not morality...
...While the liberal media have elevated Carter to a position of "America's greatest ex-president" due to his hand-wringing, Chamberlain-like advocacy of peace at any price wrapped in a hopelessly hypocritical mantle of born-again Christianity, Hayward spikes this adoration with a prosecutor's indictment that reveals Carter as a petulant loser whose post-presidency actions often border on the treasonous...
...This of course only adds to Carter's appeal among the U.S.-hating European left, who awarded him a Nobel Peace Prize for his Quisling-like behavior¡ªa display of Yankee baiting unequaled until the year's awarding of the Cannes Film Festival Palm to that fat, socialist crypto-slob Michael Moore for anti-Bush agitprop...
...That interview, plus his speech vilifying his fellow citizens for their alleged "malaise," stand as the only memorable remarks to come out of his presidency...
...In my case, during the month of November 1976, he was dead right...
...One ongoing theme of Hayward's analysis centers on Carter's incredible pettiness and dark penchant for veiled hatred...
...arch-critic or political foe, but with the scalpel cuts of an academic surgeon, carefully dissecting the little man's political career and his more recent love-fests with every degenerate dictator on the planet...
...While the White House has sheltered a ragged parade of mountebanks, scoundrels, and poseurs over its two-century history, few have bordered as close to dementia as Jimmy Carter...
...One cannot read about how Carter isolated himself from his Democratic cohorts in Congress, his demented selection of peaceniks like Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and arms control chief Paul Warnke, plus lefties like Anthony Lake, Richard Holbrooke, et al., without puzzling over his sanity...
...Hayward stays the course in dealing with Carter's bungled policy decisions while essentially ignoring his even goofier private life...
...Rushmore, but they didn't have room for two faces...
...Mencken once said that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people...
...Michael Kelly, to the life...
...intelligence gencies knew as they scrambled to under stand al Qaeda's money in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks...
...Hayward thankfully avoids laps es into psychoanalysis while carefully recounting Br'er Jimmy's dismal and often contradictory record as a public and private figure, but he cannot avoid describing a truly bizarre personality...
...Ever the Wonderboy The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators, and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW For all his erratic behavior, Jimmy Carter is a fierce duplicitous warrior bent on his own form of success...
...President, in recent days you have been characterized as mean, vindictive, and hysterical to the point of desperation...
...Moreover, this wily old fox never hesitated to bloat his resume, claiming to be a "nuclear physicist" following his service on nuclear submarines...
Vol. 37 • July 2004 • No. 6
