President Carter: The White House Years

President Carter: The White House Years – Stuart E. Eizenstat

“Carter really is a decent person, and I think that decency was perhaps too strong” – Zbigniew Brzezinski

“That little son-of-a-bitch can’t handle a two-bit ayatollah. I’ll take my chances on Reagan” – 1980 voter 

“I am not a great communicator” – Jimmy Carter

Since I write lengthy reviews of all the books I read, I sometimes begin to formulate my review in my head while I’m still reading the book. Such was the case here. There was so much I wanted to say about this book while reading, and sadly, a lot of it wasn’t good. I will say that this book did get better as it went on, but some of the negative elements managed to persist throughout.

First (and this is not a ‘negative’), note that this book is not a biography. This book focuses on President Jimmy Carter’s one four-year term as President of the United States from 1976-1980. There is a small bit of background on his upbringing, and even less on his post-presidency.  There’s 900 pages of material here. That’s an awful lot of pages for covering only four years. This element WAS a negative. There’s simply too much here. This book is written by insider Stuart E. Eizenstat who served as Carter’s Domestic Affairs Advisor throughout Carter’s term.  So it’s good that we get an insider’s unbiased view, but Eizenstat should have been a bit more frugal when he fleshed out his material. Being the Domestic Affairs Advisor, it probably isn’t too surprising that he places a heavy focus on the domestic issues (Energy, Environment, Economy, etc.) but these are the topics that should be discussed sparingly. It’s just not interesting material.  I notated this when I reviewed Robert Dallek’s excellent bio of JFK. Dallek knew what stuff captivated a reader, and he limited exposing his audience to all the mind-numbing stuff.  Eizenstat does no such thing. We read in malodourous detail every single tedious nuance of things like Carter’s energy initiatives along with every single step in the process of who supported the initiative, who didn’t, the tradeoffs in the Halls of Congress and on and on and on.  I’ve read instruction manuals for garbage disposals that were more compelling.  Once Eizenstat shifts gears and talks about The Middle East, The Panama Canal, the Ayatollah, and Afghanistan, the book does become much more interesting, but it still manages to get a bit bogged down even in these chapters.

Which leads me to my second gripe. The story here of Carter’s presidency is not told sequentially.  I don’t think I’ve ever read a historical account when the author didn’t tell the story of his/her subject chronologically.  This was a much bigger deterrent than I would have expected.  For example, when the book begins its chapter on ‘Energy’ on page 137, the author basically goes through all of the events during the four years of Carter’s presidency related to Energy. This became too confusing as you often forgot the time frame you were actually reading about at the time. The author would consistently state things like “Carter met with his advisors again in April and……” and I wanted to scream “APRIL OF WHAT YEAR?” This peculiarity also made it incredibly difficult to view any sort of progression of the administration.  Telling a story of a presidency in the order it occurred allows the reader to see a person mature into the role (Kennedy) or deteriorate into deception (Nixon). It was hard to grasp when the ups and downs actually occurred since the whole book was such a mish-mash.  To be fair though, there were very little ‘ups’ in Jimmy Carter’s presidency. More on that later.

My next gripe is the author goes back and forth between telling the story in ‘third person’ and ‘first person’. Yes, the author was there in the middle all of this, but I found it incredibly distracting when he would ‘stop’ the story and pontificate on what HE thought and what HE was going through and how HE knew Carter was right/wrong, etc. This was too much of a disruption.  I think the author should have kept the “I’s” out of the story and told this entire retrospective in third-person.  It would have been perfectly acceptable to keep himself in the story.  I just would have rather seen him as a character as opposed to a narrator.

Then we come to the overall thesis of the story. Stu Eizenstat is trying very hard to ‘set the record straight’ on Jimmy Carter.  Throughout the whole book, he constantly serves as an apologist for Carter no matter how many maladroit gaffes the president makes.  And he makes tons of them.  To be fair, Eizenstat doesn’t try to hide Carter’s mistakes, he just tries to excuse the majority of them for one reason or the other. There were many times when I literally roared out loud with laughter when I would read of one of Carter’s blunders, yet there were other times when I simply wanted to crawl under the table and disappear because I felt so sorry for the man. At times Eizenstat sounded like one of those helicopter-soccer moms who admits that her child is the worst player on the team, but then states that her child really should be awarded the most valuable player on the team because ‘he really does have a big heart’.  It became quite ridiculous at times.

This is not to say that I, personally, think badly of Jimmy Carter as a person.  No, I think he’s quite a wonderful human being, and his post presidency years has proved this.  It’s just that history shows us time and time again that being a great human being doesn’t necessarily equip you to be the leader of the free world. It seems as though Carter’s biggest problem was that once he became President, he didn’t want to play the ‘politics’ game anymore. This was a grave mistake.  Instead of hob-knobbing with influential congressional leaders over drinks after hours, Carter instead locks himself in his office and proceeds to do things such as study the history of Argentina until 3 a.m.  He simply didn’t know how the game in Washington worked. He ended up alienating far too many people in the inner circles in Washington including many in his own party.  We read about how Ted Kennedy, Tip O’Neil, and even Walter Mondale couldn’t stand him.  At one point, Mondale seriously ponders handing in his resignation.  A Vice-President wanting to resign. Has that ever happened before?

Something I learned in this book was that Carters infamous ‘Malaise’ speech was actually quite well received the day after it was delivered.  Again, though, Carter manages to take a ‘good thing’ and blow it. Only a couple of days after the speech, Carter decides to clean house and sack a huge chunk of his cabinet. This, again, puts the country in yet another sour mood, and since this event happened so soon after the ‘Malaise’ speech, a retrospective analysis now looks at this speech as one of his biggest blunders. The guy just couldn’t catch a break.

So sadly, upon conclusion, my opinion of Jimmy Carter wasn’t swayed in the direction that the author intended. There was just too much turmoil, uncertainty, and lack of leadership for me to be convinced otherwise. I must restate that Carter is an incredible humanitarian, and he did set many things into motion as President that seemed quite far-fetched at the time (human rights, conservation of the environment, energy saving initiatives), so we can now look back at a lot of what he accomplished with fondness and new admiration.

Overall, this book was great for about 600 pages. It’s just a shame that one had to weed through 900 pages to discover them.  If you’re a person, however, that enjoys reading a 77-page chapter on stagflation, it is possible that you might disagree with my conclusion and enjoy this book a tad better than I did.