Poor Jimmy Carter. Was he simply a victim of circumstance? Was he truly incompetent? Was the moment too big for him? Was he, possibly, better than we realized? It is impossible to imagine a historiographical turn that allows for an affirmative answer to the last question, but otherwise historians have begun to reexamine the thirty-ninth president and his career.
This process really began with Douglas Brinkley’s The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey beyond the White House, a biography with a long tail, meaning that the book spends more time on Carter’s by almost all measures successful post-presidential career while acknowledging the shortcomings of Carter in the White House. Brinkley clearly admires Carter as a human being and sees in the decades that followed his one failed term a man who left office a punch line and rose to the level of statesman. Thus, the book is not really about the 1970s, or even about Carter during those years, but it provides a more complete picture of the man. Just as studies of the rise of modern conservatism, which reached its full flowering after 1980, require an understanding of the 1970s, so too does an understanding of Carter’s emergence as a Nobel laureate and doyen of human rights since 1980 help explain Carter’s presidency.
One of the more visible and noteworthy political trends that commenced in the 1970s and continued into the 1980s was the involvement of Christian evangelicals in American political life. Most evangelicals had eschewed politics until avowed evangelical Carter’s rise in the 1976 election. In Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, religious historian Randall Balmer explores the role of religion in Carter’s rise, but just as importantly reveals how Carter’s religiosity ironically enough fueled the rise of conservative Christians. While Carter personally opposed abortion but accepted the Democratic pro-choice platform on the issue, the religious Right fused morality with politics, and Ronald Reagan and other right-wing politicians proved to be the chief beneficiaries.
Perhaps the most clearly revisionist work on Carter is Kevin Mattson’s “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”: Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country. Mattson’s argument is clear and quite convincing: Jimmy Carter’s July 15, 1979, address to the United States (the so-called “malaise” speech, despite the absence of that word in the president’s remarks) gave a balanced, realistic assessment of the US “crisis of confidence” in which he identified the country’s “paralysis and stagnation and drift,” but also praised the country, calling for a “rebirth of the American spirit,” a hint of optimism that would not have been out of place in a Ronald Reagan speech. In Mattson’s telling, Carter ought to have been praised for his honest and forthright assessment of the state of the country. And, indeed, the initial response to the speech was overwhelmingly positive, until Carter’s critics started using it as yet another cudgel with which to pummel the beleaguered Georgian. For even fuller context, readers can see editor Daniel Horowitz’s Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s: The “Crisis of Confidence” Speech of July 15, 1979: A Brief History with Documents.
Less than four months later, radical Islamist students in Iran took over the US embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage for 444 days and for all intents and purposes consigning the Carter presidency to the dustbin. Mark Bowden’s popular history Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam and David Patrick Houghton’s scholarly US Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis are two of the most important works on that event.
