A.Recent press reports indicate that Republican proxies, including former Treasury Secretary and Texas Governor John Connally, meddled in the Iranian hostage crisis to benefit Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.
This report once again raises one of the major questions in recent American political history: would Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday December 29, 2024 at the age of 100, have been re-elected if he had obtained the release of hostages? As always, historical counterfactuals are impossible to prove or disprove. But in this case, while it’s tempting to think that the release of the hostages would have upset the race, a closer look at history reveals that Carter’s political turmoil was much deeper than the Iran crisis.
One of the best contemporary narrators of Carter’s political struggles turned out to be Peter Jay, the British ambassador to the United States for two years of the 39th president’s term. Jay – a journalist by training – was a keen observer, so his undercover dispatches to London shed light on Carter’s political rise and fall.
Jay’s first cables from Washington in 1977 described unique historical conditions that allowed an unknown Southern governor to win the presidency. For more than a decade since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, a steady stream of blows—from race riots to Vietnam assassinations to Watergate—had “deeply shaken” what Jay called “the pillars of American self-esteem.” – morality, invincibility, stability and growth.
In Jay’s mind, Carter’s election expressed “as clearly as anything the desire of the American people for a new beginning.” After years of relentless calamity, Americans were ready for something new and different.
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Jay acknowledged that the new president brought to the White House a unique combination of personal attributes: impeccable ethics, “a subtle, penetrating, glacial mind” and a commitment to tackling tough issues head-on, all of which contrast strongly. to the failures of his immediate predecessors of both parties. Carter’s chief virtue was “his boldness” in identifying major policy problems and proposing solutions guided largely by “his perception of the national interest, without regard for short-term political or narrow sectoral considerations.” . When presented with the conventional wisdom for avoiding political pain, Carter’s standard response to those around him was, in effect, “Don’t chicken out.”
Jay praised Carter’s assessment of “the bankruptcy of lobby politics…and his laudable determination to take the high road to national leadership.” If given a range of options from “most immediately unpopular but basically correct” to “most popular but basically wrong”, Carter could be counted on to choose the former.
Perhaps the best manifestation of this trait occurred in September 1977, when Carter’s aggressive lobbying secured ratification of the Panama Canal treaties. The president was convinced that the national interest would be best served by transferring control of the canal to Panama – despite vigorous opposition to what conservative critics called a “gift.” According to Carter, his opponents were either misinformed or ill-intentioned. Although he felt their arguments were politically powerful, the price he had to pay in the election was an acceptable consequence of a good deed.
However, just two months later, Jay began to feel significant discomfort with the president’s one-size-fits-all approach. In a confidential cable sent to London titled “Is Mr. Carter in Trouble?” “, the ambassador observed growing doubts about the president’s ability to translate his lofty aspirations into political reality.
This cable noted how quickly Carter, as president, was buffeted by problems that, ironically, emerged from the very forces that brought him to power. He arrived at the presidency at a time when it was a weakened institution. “The abuses of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the changing structure and attitude of Congress” all combined to “hinder the work of the future working president.”
A huge class of independent lawmakers elected in 1974 – the “Watergate babies” – intended to reassert Congress’s authority in governing the nation. This push for legislative independence included members of the president’s own party, who seemed more comfortable opposing the White House than following Carter’s orders on Capitol Hill. According to Jay, some Carter aides privately admitted that when they arrived at the White House “they had no idea…the magnitude of the [institution of the] The presidency was damaged.
But Jay also later acknowledged that Carter’s problems weren’t all structural. Instead, there was “a muted, uncertain quality” to the way he treated “people and problems”, which left “even those best disposed towards him perplexed, disappointed and sometimes irritated” .
The president lacked “the imagination to see how things would affect others” and did not share Carter’s habit of considering “all sides of every problem.”
Carter exacerbated this lack of insight with what Jay called a “dangerous propensity” to view the truth as “its own messenger.” Rather than explaining himself or selling his policies, Carter believed that it was enough to “have a good reason.” [for policy].” In short, Carter had “proved [to be] a better statesman and a worse politician than could have been expected.
These observations come as Americans endure a constant parade of negative news, particularly about the economy. Carter’s significant successes, capped by the Camp David Accords in September 1978, at best only interrupted this steady flow. What Reagan began calling the “misery index” – a sum of inflation and unemployment figures – reached an all-time high during Carter’s tenure. The president seemed increasingly powerless to reverse the misery.
In July 1979, Carter’s most famous speech confirmed Jay’s lukewarm assessment of his political instincts. While the president’s primary focus was supposed to be energy policy, he chose to simultaneously delve into a deeper “crisis of confidence” among the American people (later described as a national “unease”). Although the speech was far better received than history records it, Carter, in his own words, “squandered” any advantage he might have gained by immediately insisting that his entire cabinet resigned, which reflected instability. Once again, he has miscalculated political optics in a way that undermines his policies.
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By the end of his term as ambassador, Jay’s prospects had darkened considerably. Carter was “not very well liked in America,” Jay admitted. “Nor has he inspired full confidence in other world leaders, friendly or otherwise.” Carter’s “insular and highly unconventional style of governing,” as well as his lack of sensitivity to politics, were to blame for these problems. In more than two years as president, he has failed “to make the virtue and necessity of this radical departure widely understood.”
Carter’s approval rating when Jay filed that last cable was 29 percent. Above all, it was five months Before the hostages were captured in Tehran. Carter’s poll numbers remained in this difficult zone for the remainder of his presidency, except for a temporary jump just after the hostage crisis when Americans rallied behind the flag.
Massive interest rates (the Federal Reserve’s painful antidote to inflation), rising gasoline prices, and a major challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) also hurt Carter in 1980. But as Jay had observed, the president was plagued by growing doubts about his unconventional leadership and his ability to combat any of these problems in a way that would satisfy the public.
So, would the return of the hostages have made a difference? The evidence suggests that this is probably not the case. It could be argued more convincingly that if the Republican interference efforts had been made public, it would have generated enough outrage to torpedo Reagan’s chances. But whatever happened in those secret conversations, the Reagan campaign strove, successfully, to preserve the denial.
On his way out, having been replaced by new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Jay predicted that even if Carter lost, the United States “is certainly not going to disappear… Just give them a visible enemy and a fast horse, and you will will always see what old Americans can do. » This prediction proved prescient. Carter lost in 1980 to a man who specialized in fast horses and visible enemies.
Russell L. Riley is the White Burkett Miller Center Professor of Ethics and Institutions at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.
