In Pursuit of Redemption
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
In Pursuit of Redemption The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House By Douglas Brinkley Viking. 586 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of...
...On other matters, however, The Unfinished Presidency comes up short...
...It is true that Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia after leaving the White House, John Quincy Adams returned to Congress to condemn slavery, and William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the U.S...
...Americans have not expected much from their ex-Presidents—at least not in modern times...
...It was Carter, a superb carpenter, who cheerfully rode a bus from Georgia to Harlem to build houses, and who helped turn Habitat for Humanity into a thriving concern...
...In his Preface, he insists that The Unfinished Presidency was written on two conditions: "that I would have full access to Carter's post-Presidential papers and trip reports, and that the biography would be unauthorized, so I would be free to draw my own conclusions...
...Indeed, one reads this lively, informative and largely worshipful biography with a sense that Brinkley is less a historian of the post-Carter Presidency than a member of the Carter court...
...Brinkley wrote the last part first in order to ride the wave of interest created by Carter's novel post-Presidency...
...Although careful to list the major contributors to Carter's Presidential Center—who include Adnan Khashoggi, the notorious international arms dealer...
...A lifelong workaholic devoted to serious endeavor, Carter combined a missionary's belief in uplifting humanity with a zealot's confidence in his judgment and abilities...
...Or ponder the link between Carter's relentlessly pro-Arab agenda and the millions he has received from the Saudi King...
...But those men were exceptions...
...Jimmy Carter has revolutionized the modern ex-Presidency...
...One hopes the fine historian in him will show the spin doctor the door...
...Opinion polls regularly rank him as having the "highest moral character" of any President...
...It was Carter who courageously monitored free elections in Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama, and then convinced dictators like Raoul Cedras and Daniel Ortega to step aside peacefully...
...It was one thing to sell the President's yacht and to promise the people that "I will never lie to you...
...He viewed his Republican opponent in 1980 as a shallow, stupid man...
...it was quite another to scorn political compromise as an inherently evil act...
...Believing that the Bush Administration had ignored opportunities for a "peaceful resolution" in Grenada, Panama and now in the Gulf, Carter sent a letter to influential coalition leaders urging them to repudiate President Bush's leadership and give "unequivocal support" to an Arab effort that would force Saddam Hussein from Iraq in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories...
...Brinkley, leaving the criticism of Carter to others, ends the chapter with a rather mild quote from General Brent Scowcroft: "Carter did a lot of positive humanitarian things...
...The Georgia peanut farmer had entered the White House as a political novice, with the slimmest public service of any President since Woodrow Wilson...
...Brinkley is not unaware of Carter's shortcomings...
...There is, of course, much to admire about this ex-President...
...This volume, I suspect, will prove to have been the easy one...
...Unlike fellow Democrats Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, who chose not to seek re-election in troubled times, Carter naively assumed voters would perceive the moral and intellectual chasm that separated him from Ronald Reagan...
...Carter is extremely popular today...
...Most would skewer an ex-President for working secretly to subvert the foreign policy of his country's government —a policy, one might add, that was ratified by the elected representatives of the people...
...What we glean from this book are both the extraordinary achievements of this revolutionary and the serious problems he has created for American policymakers ever since...
...When this fell through, Carter pleaded unsuccessfully with individual Arab leaders to withdraw from Desert Storm and seek a diplomatic solution...
...America's more recent ex-Presidents have been content to write their memoirs, improve their golf swings, and deliver puffball speeches to corporate executives for obscenely bloated fees...
...the economy was in shambles, with high unemployment, rocketing interest rates and double-digit inflation...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy," "Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice" Few American Presidents have been swept from office as convincingly as James Earl "Jimmy" Carter...
...Another historian might understand, too, why so many Israelis have trouble accepting Carter's continuing attempts to negotiate a back-channel Mideast settlement when he describes Israeli leaders as bullies and "psychos," but considers Yasir Arafat to be a saintly friend and Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad to be a man of his word...
...Moreover, he did so by studying these diseases, visiting the native populations, lobbying drug companies for free supplies, and raising millions of dollars on his own...
...No problem here...
...Brinkley presents this evidence, much of it new, in remarkably neutral terms...
...The statement is at once well-meaning and irrelevant, for the author's conclusions rarely differ from those of his subject...
...Another historian might question the use of truly dirty money for charitable ends...
...And what about Carter's loaded description of Bush as "effeminate," which Brinkley quotes without comment...
...Ryoichi Sasakawa, the pro-fascist Japanese shipbuilder...
...Brinkley goes into fascinating detail about Carter's dedication to poor and afflicted people...
...It was Carter who wrote long personal letters demanding the immediate release of political dissidents in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East...
...For Brinkley, it is "an astonishing experience" to hear former President George Bush "vociferously lampoon" Carter as someone who "hangs over the Democrats like a shadow, an unwanted reminder of the failure of their policies the last time they were in power...
...The most newsworthy part of Brinkley's book explores Carter's secret attempts to undermine the Persian Gulf Coalition in the very hours before the fighting began...
...At 56, in perfect health, he had no intention of rocking away his years on a front porch in Plains...
...The Unfinished Presidency is part of a projected three-volume biography of Jimmy Carter...
...What Brinkley will do with the other Jimmy Carter, who left office to a national sigh of relief, is anybody's guess...
...Brinkley's tack is to focus on the turmoil within Carter—his horror that military force would make things worse in the Middle East, leading American troops to spill Arab blood for the first time in our history...
...What he overlooked, aside from Reagan's great skill as a campaigner, was his own dismal record: American hostages were languishing in Iran, the attempt to rescue them having proved disastrous...
...Presenting himself as both a Washington outsider and a Christian populist, he irritated almost everyone who mattered in politics with his self-righteousness and "just folks" persona...
...But Brinkley, a first-rate historian at the University of New Orleans, is far more interested in the former—in revealing Carter the humanitarian, the global peacemaker, the enemy of oppression and disease...
...But his political judgment was just awful...
...In a forthcoming issue of the Political Science Quarterly, historian John Chambers further notes that Arab leaders have regularly manipulated Carter's friendship and rhetoric in order to legitimize their repressive regimes...
...Supreme Court—a post he relished far more than the Presidency...
...As House Speaker "Tip'O'Neill told a Carter aide on election eve 1980: "You guys came in like a bunch of jerks and I see you're going out the same way...
...The biographer is so solicitous of his thinskinned subject that he reflexively defends him from all criticism...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers...
...His sole purpose now, it appeared, was to redeem his failed (or, in Douglas Brinkley's charitable term, "unfinished") Presidency through a blizzard of noble, if well-publicized, deeds...
...The best Brinkley can do is concede that "Carter's close personal relationship with Arafat may have kept him from seeing the duplicitous side of the Palestinian president," and that Carter "was perhaps misguided to view him as a man of peace...
...Some would describe Carter's behavior as treasonous, or reasonably close to that line...
...It was Carter who helped launch programs to eradicate guinea worm and river blindness in Central Africa...
...and King Faud of Saudi Arabia—Brinkley shows no inclination to raise even the most basic concerns about their influence...
...He simply takes an elusive approach, as if fearful of fully exploring them...
...Agha Hasan Abedi, the billionaire chairman of the scandal-plagued Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI...
...Jimmy Carter was the only weapon Ronald Reagan needed...
...Doesn't Brinkley know that most Democrats believed this statement, or that it probably was true...
Vol. 81 • June 1998 • No. 8
