{"id":15207,"date":"2014-08-01T09:32:33","date_gmt":"2014-08-01T08:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=15207"},"modified":"2014-08-06T08:44:21","modified_gmt":"2014-08-06T07:44:21","slug":"american-presidents-4-jimmy-carter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=15207","title":{"rendered":"American presidents (4): Jimmy Carter"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, I was back at the City Lit<\/a> to resume the course on post-war American presidents. For Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, our lecturer was Paul Hadjipieris (his parents are Cypriot and his wife is American).<\/p>\n

His approach was rather different from the lecturers on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He focused very much on their time as president rather than give a lot of biographical background and, more than the other lecturers, he made comparisons with other post-war presidents.<\/p>\n

Jimmy Carter was the 39th president who served from 1977-1981.<\/p>\n

He was a born-again Christian who took over his father’s peanut business and served in the Georgia Senate and as Georgia Governor before running for the White House. He presented himself as a Washington outsider at the post-Watergate time when the federal political system was in disrepute. His determination to be a kind of ‘people’s president’ led him to reject many of the trappings and traditions of the office and he famously declared: “I will never tell a lie”.<\/p>\n

Although Carter was a Democratic president at a time that Congress was controlled by the Democrats, his outsider status played against him at a time of a newly resurgent Congress and he had a troubled relationship with the legislature. Also he ran against the tradition of building up America’s image by making a controversial ‘crisis of confidence’ television address.<\/p>\n

Carter’s major focus was on America’s energy crisis and he created a new Department of Energy and passed the National Energy Act. However, US citizens were reluctant to trade down for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Meanwhile, having taken office during a period of international stagnation and inflation, this persisted throughout his term.<\/p>\n

On the foreign relations front, Carter was the first president forced to confront the rise of militant anti-American, Islamic fundamentalism. The taking of 52 American hostages in Teheran in late 1979, the failure of an attempt to rescue them, and their eventual release only minutes after he left office all helped to define his tenure at the White House as a time of perceived weakness. However, he was responsible for the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt and he signed the SALT II agreement with the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

In the presidential election of 1980, Carter was roundly beaten by the Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, suffering the worst electoral defeat of amy incumbent president in American history. However, perhaps more so than any other president in modern times, Carter was been incredibly active on the international stage throughout his post-presidential period and has been called “The American Ghandhi” (he is now 89).<\/p>\n