Julian E. Zelizer - Jimmy Carter

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTS SERIES

Joyce Appleby on Thomas Jefferson

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H. W. Brands on Woodrow Wilson

Alan Brinkley on John F. Kennedy

Douglas Brinkley on Gerald R. Ford

Josiah Bunting III on Ulysses S. Grant

James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn on George Washington

Charles W. Calhoun on Benjamin Harrison

Gail Collins on William Henry Harrison

Robert Dallek on Harry S. Truman

John W. Dean on Warren G. Harding

John Patrick Diggins on John Adams

Elizabeth Drew on Richard M. Nixon

John S. D. Eisenhower on Zachary Taylor

Paul Finkelman on Millard Fillmore

Annette Gordon-Reed on Andrew Johnson

Henry F. Graff on Grover Cleveland

David Greenberg on Calvin Coolidge

Gary Hart on James Monroe

Michael F. Holt on Franklin Pierce

Roy Jenkins on Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Zachary Karabell on Chester Alan Arthur

Lewis H. Lapham on William Howard Taft

William E. Leuchtenburg on Herbert Hoover

Gary May on John Tyler

George McGovern on Abraham Lincoln

Timothy Naftali on George H. W. Bush

Charles Peters on Lyndon B. Johnson

Kevin Phillips on William McKinley

Robert V. Remini on John Quincy Adams

Ira Rutkow on James A. Garfield

John Seigenthaler on James K. Polk

Hans L. Trefousse on Rutherford B. Hayes

Tom Wicker on Dwight D. Eisenhower

Ted Widmer on Martin Van Buren

Sean Wilentz on Andrew Jackson

Garry Wills on James Madison

Julian E. Zelizer on Jimmy Carter

ALSO BY JULIAN E. ZELIZER

Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National SecurityFrom
World War II to the War on Terrorism

On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and
its Consequences, 19482000

Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 19451975

The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment (editor)

The Constitution and Public Policy in U.S. History (co-editor)

Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (co-editor)

New Directions in Policy History (editor)

The American Congress: The Building of Democracy (editor)

The Democratic Experiment:
New Directions in American Political History (co-editor)

Jimmy Carter

Julian E. Zelizer

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTS

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., AND SEAN WILENTZ
GENERAL EDITORS

Times Books

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, NEW YORK

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Copyright 2010 by Julian E. Zelizer

All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Frontispiece: Bettmann / CORBIS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zelizer, Julian E.

Jimmy Carter : the 39th president, 197781 / Julian E. Zelizer.1st ed.

p. cm.(The American presidents series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8050-8957-8

1. Carter, Jimmy, 1924 2. PresidentsUnited StatesBiography. 3. United StatesPolitics and government19771981. 4. Southern StatesPolitics and government1951 I. Title.

E873.Z45 2010

973.926092dc22

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First Edition 2010

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

In memory of my grandparents
Rabbi Nathan and Florence Zelizer
and in honor of all the communities that my grandfather built

The president is the central player in the American political order. That would seem to contradict the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Remembering the horrid example of the British monarchy, they invented a separation of powers in order, as Justice Brandeis later put it, to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. Accordingly, they divided the government into three allegedly equal and coordinate branchesthe executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

But a system based on the tripartite separation of powers has an inherent tendency toward inertia and stalemate. One of the three branches must take the initiative if the system is to move. The executive branch alone is structurally capable of taking that initiative. The Founders must have sensed this when they accepted Alexander Hamiltons proposition in the Seventieth Federalist that energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. They thus envisaged a strong presidentbut within an equally strong system of constitutional accountability. (The term imperial presidency arose in the 1970s to describe the situation when the balance between power and accountability is upset in favor of the executive.)

The American system of self-government thus comes to focus in the presidencythe vital place of action in the system, as Woodrow Wilson put it. Henry Adams, himself the great-grandson and grandson of presidents as well as the most brilliant of American historians, said that the American president resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek. The men in the White House (thus far only men, alas) in steering their chosen courses have shaped our destiny as a nation.

Biography offers an easy education in American history, rendering the past more human, more vivid, more intimate, more accessible, more connected to ourselves. Biography reminds us that presidents are not supermen. They are human beings too, worrying about decisions, attending to wives and children, juggling balls in the air, and putting on their pants one leg at a time. Indeed, as Emerson contended, There is properly no history; only biography.

Presidents serve us as inspirations, and they also serve us as warnings. They provide bad examples as well as good. The nation, the Supreme Court has said, has no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.

The men in the White House express the ideals and the values, the frailties and the flaws, of the voters who send them there. It is altogether natural that we should want to know more about the virtues and the vices of the fellows we have elected to govern us. As we know more about them, we will know more about ourselves. The French political philosopher Joseph de Maistre said, Every nation has the government it deserves.