[MUSIC PLAYING] JOHN TIRMAN: Good afternoon. I'm John Tirman. And on behalf of the MIT Center
for International Studies, I welcome you to
the Starr Forum, where we will be hearing
from Kai Bird, who is the author of the recent
biography, The Outlier-- The Unfinished Presidency
of Jimmy Carter. If you haven't already,
please find the Q&A feature on the bottom of your toolbar. This is where you can
type in your questions. And we will, I
hope, be able to get to a number of questions toward
the end of our hour together. In addition, please pay
attention to the chat feature also on the bottom
of the toolbar, where we will be sending out
resource links, such as bios, upcoming events, and
other information, including a link and information
on purchasing this book, which I certainly recommend. Now, let me introduce
our speaker, Kai Bird, who happens to be an old
friend, I'm happy to say. As a biographer of quite renown,
he won the Pulitzer Prize with his co-author,
Martin Sherman, on their biography of
J. Robert Oppenheimer. He's also written about McGeorge
and William Bundy, John J. McCloy, Robert Ames, and others. This is a man possessed
by the biographer's bug. And in fact, he is the
director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. So it's a great honor
to have you here, Kai. And we'll give you a few
minutes to tee this up. And then I'll start
pelting you with questions. How's that? KAI BIRD: Sounds like fun. I love the Q&A period always. So I guess I should tell
you a little bit about how I came to this book. I've been working
on it six years. But I have been thinking
about Jimmy Carter since-- well, since his
presidency, when I was a young working
journalist at The Nation magazine and elsewhere. And then in 1990,
after I was finally finishing my first biography-- a massive 800 page tome
on John J. McCloy-- I thought about doing Carter. And my editor at The
Nation, Victor Navasky said, in a very clever way-- he says,
well, to explore this subject, what you ought to
do is write an essay for The Nation on what
Jimmy Carter has been doing with his ex-presidency. And so I went down to
Atlanta and interviewed a bunch of people who were
working at the newly formed, newly opened Carter Center. And I had a short
telephone interview with President Carter himself. And I wrote a very decent cover
magazine story for The Nation on Jimmy Carter's ex-presidency. And I came away from
the experience convinced that I was the wrong guy to
do a presidential biography of Carter because I didn't
understand the South. And that trip down
there convinced me that Georgia was part
of some foreign country. I didn't understand race. I didn't understand
religion, Southern Baptists. And they spoke a
different language. It was a different culture. And I came back and
told my wife, Susan, that if I were to
do Jimmy Carter, I thought we'd have to
move to Plains, Georgia for a couple of
years, and treat it like being a foreign
correspondent, and seep into the
land and the people, and get to know
this foreign entity called Georgia, South Georgia. Of course, my wife said,
under no circumstances was she moving to Plains, Georgia. So I put the project aside. But I was always
curious about Carter. And I went on to other books-- the Bundys, and Robert Ames. And of course, J.
Robert Oppenheimer that I co-authored with
Marty Sherwin who alas just departed us two weeks
ago on October 6. He died of lung cancer, which
I'm still in mourning for. He was a terrific
co-author and a great guy. And anyway, I went
on to other projects. But I always was
curious about Carter. And I eventually
came back to him in 2014 after I'd finished
my biography, The Good Spy. And initially, I wanted
to do a president. I thought that would be
just a cool thing to do. And I'd written about presidents
in many of my other books. And initially, I thought
of doing Ronald Reagan. I went out to the Reagan
Library for two weeks and plowed through the archives,
going box by box and folder by folder, getting
more and more depressed because I suddenly realized
that what they said about Ronald Reagan was true. He really was just
an empty vessel. He worked hard on his speeches,
largely giving the same speech again and again. And he kept a small
diary, handwritten diary which had all been published. But there was no give
and take in the archives that you could see between
Ronald Reagan and his aides in the White House over policy. He was just the guy
who was rolled out for his talking points. And he was very effective as
a politician on TV, I guess. But as a biographer,
I think I would just find him very difficult
to write about. Anyway, so I gave up on Reagan
and I came back to the Carter project and went down
to the Carter Library and had just the
opposite experience because Jimmy Carter famously-- if they remember him at all,
they remember his attention to detail. And he wrote a lot of
memos and read 200 pages of memos and letters every day. And you can see him thinking. He writes them in the margins,
in his neat little handwriting . And you can see his
thought processes going on. And so it was a
very rich subject. It was clear that it was
going to be a rich subject, in terms of the archives. And so I dove in and
spent six years on it. And I got access with
Carter, maybe five or six substantive interviews. And then I got to
hang out with him socially on numerous
occasions and got to know him a little more as a human being. And I think, for me,
it was a surprise because the Jimmy Carter
that I had in my mind from when I was a
journalist in the 1970s was actually quite different
from the Jimmy Carter that I met in the archives,
and through interviews, and diaries. He is much more complicated
than people think. And it's just a
very relevant story. The issues that he was
dealing with as a president-- energy, race, religious
fundamentalism, climate change, national health care,
the Iran Revolution-- all of those issues are things that
we are still grappling with. So we can learn a lot from
studying the Carter presidency. It was a presidency that
is much more consequential than people remember. He passed a lot of legislation. And he had an enormous number
of foreign policy initiatives. And of course, he had some
failures, the Iran hostage rescue mission in particular. And of course, they
remember that he did not get reelected, which is why, I
think, most Americans if they-- this was 40 years ago now. But most Americans, if they
have a memory of Jimmy Carter, it's, well, he's
probably a decent guy. We know of his work as an
ex-president with the fact that he goes out one week a
year with Habitat for Humanity and builds homes for the
poor and his work on behalf of the Carter Center monitoring
elections around the world, and his human rights work,
and his efforts to bring peace to the Syrian Civil War. He was a model ex-president. But they will quickly say, but
then he was a failed president. And I think after
reading The Outlier, most readers will conclude
that that's simply not true. It's a simplification. In fact, he was a very
consequential president and actually a
model, in many ways, of what a president should be. So I think, on that note,
I'll turn myself over to you. And you can fire away. JOHN TIRMAN: Thanks, Kai. I want to remind our viewers
that you can start writing questions in the Q&A function. And we'll get to
them later, I hope. There's so much. This is a very rich book. And there's so
much to delve into. But there's one thing that
strikes me particularly, partly because my own interest in Iran. This is something that I
didn't really quite realize. And you detail this in such
an insightful, analytical way. During the last
days of the Shah-- for our younger viewers,
the Shah of Iran was a favorite of
Nixon and Kissinger. But he was quite repressive
of his people at home. It's kind of a long story
we won't get into right now. But Jimmy Carter was faced
with a very sharp decline in the Shah's reign. That is, he was
losing his footing. And indeed, he finally
decided, after massive protests in the streets, to abdicate
essentially, to leave Iran, and to leave his last prime
minister, Bakhtiar, to perhaps hold off the
onslaught, essentially the popular onslaught
of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was in Paris in
exile at that point, but it was going
to return to Iran. So there were this few
days that were very tense, I think, for the president and
certainly for the Iranians. It was a time when Carter
was actually considering, of all things, a military
coup and, at the same time, not really mindful, I guess I
would say, of the human rights situation in Iran, wanting
to keep Khamenei at bay, but also not really
having successfully taken on the human rights issue with
the Shah and its government. What do you think
happened there? What do you think happened
with Carter and his, I think a failure,
of nerves actually. KAI BIRD: Well, it's
a very dramatic story, the whole revolution and
Carter's handling of it. And I argue in the book
basically that Carter was swept along by historical events. There was, I think,
no way that he was going to stop the revolution. The revolution came as
a surprise to both him and to the entire
national security establishment in Washington. Just months before the autumn of
'78 when the revolution really rolled into the streets, the
CIA put out an intelligence assessment flatly stating
that the Shah's regime was solid and unthreatened by any
real political instability. They were completely wrong. And Carter was the
president famously who put human rights at the
center of US foreign policy and made it a keystone of our
rhetoric and our principles. And yet, of course, also,
like any good politician, he was a pragmatist. And he looked at Iran
when he assumed office in January of '77 and assumed
that the Shah, who had long been identified as
an American ally, was going to be there for
the rest of his presidency. But he was embarrassed by what
the Shah's internal politics looked like. And on their first
meeting, he did take him aside
privately and tried to talk to him about
liberalization, and human rights, and
releasing political prisoners. And the Shah pushed back,
saying, oh, those people are communists and dangerous. And we have to deal
with them harshly. That was the occasion famously
when Carter and the Shah, on the South Lawn
of the White House, were giving their public
welcoming speeches. And there were
violent demonstrations that turned into violence
just blocks away. And the tear gas used to
suppress the demonstrators wafted across the South Lawn. And both the Sean and
Carter were photographed wiping tears from their eyes. Anyway, it was symbolic
of what was to come later. But you're right. When the revolution
was happening and the regime was clearly
falling apart, there was-- and I Chronicle
this in the book. There was an intense
debate inside the Carter administration that
basically came down to, well, can we save the Shah? And there were those
like the hardliner in the administration, Carter's
national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who
was pushing for option C as they called it, a coup. And the Secretary of State
by contrast, Cy Vance, who was typically
regarded as the dove, argued that this was
not really in the cards and that there were downsides
to attempting a coup. And in any case, the Shah
had no stomach for it. But till the end, even
as the Shah was leaving, Brzezinski was pushing
Carter to consider option C. And it's a dramatic story,
where Carter begins to give-- all right, well,
let's sieze big-- feel out the Iranian generals. He actually sends an American
general out to Tehran to do this, to check out on
whether the Iranian military had the backbone to
launch a crackdown. And at the same time,
his ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, a very
crusty, plainspoken ambassador, was making it very clear in
his cables back to Washington that it was hopeless,
that the Shah was not going to be restored,
that the generals were not willing to shoot into the crowds
and kill thousands of people. And yet, Brzezinski
kept pushing. And at one point,
famously-- there's this anecdote in the book where
Brzezinski persuades his Deputy Assistant Secretary
of State Newton to get on the phone
with Ambassador Sullivan and asks him point
blank, well, Zbig wants to know about a coup. Why can't you guys
give a green light to the generals for a coup? And Sullivan shoots back,
it's not going to happen and uses a swear word. And Newton expresses
astonishment that he would use
language like that. And Sullivan replies, well, you
want me to say it in Polish? It's like a pointed
rebuttal to Brzezinski. He knew that Brzezinski
was behind the question. Anyway, that's a long way
to answer your question. But I think Carter was
torn and conflicted. And yet, his
instincts were always not to use military force. And yet, he hired this
national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
who was constantly urging him to be
tougher and to think about using military force. JOHN TIRMAN: Yeah, it's very
striking, throughout the book really, the part
of his presidency that Brzezinski certainly
doesn't come off very well in your reckoning. And in fact, I read
a review of the book that said you were really
carrying water for Cy Vance. And how do you how do
you feel about that? KAI BIRD: I'm very comfortable
with my portrait of Zbig. He was a very feisty,
difficult man. And everyone around him
in the Carter White House was aware of this
and often resented his heavy-handed attempts to
get Carter to do things that he precisely did not want to do. At the beginning of
the administration, during the transition-- this is a very
telling anecdote-- Richard Holbrooke, who
had been a rising Young Turk in the foreign
policy establishment and had worked on
the Carter campaign, advising them on
foreign policy-- Carter calls up Holbrooke,
and asks him for his advice, and tells them
that he's thinking of putting Cy Vance in as
Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski in as national
security advisor. And Holbrooke says
after a long pause, knowing that this is not what
Jimmy Carter wants to hear-- he says, well, Mr
Carter, I think you could have either one. But the two of them together
would be very disruptive. And they have two
different world views. And this is quite true. Zbigniew Brzezinski
looked at the world through these Cold War blinders. He saw the Russians as the
enemy, a generational enemy. He saw them through Polish eyes. He was the son of a
Polish diplomat himself. And he just he hated
Soviet communism and hated the Russians. And whether it was the horn of
Africa, or Cuba, or the Middle East, he was always
thinking about those issues in terms of how to make the
Russians feel uncomfortable. Cy Vance had a completely
different world view. He was a consummate diplomat. He saw the Soviet Union
as a failing empire and not a threatening,
aggressive empire. And of course, as we
now know, he was right and Zbig was wrong. But Carter thought that he could
manage, like FDR or Lincoln, with a team of rivals. And he enjoyed Zbig
Brzezinski's presence. He enjoyed arguing with them. Early in the administration,
Carter gets a memo from Zbig who tells him, you need to
send a message to the Russians right away by showing
them that you're tough and do something militaristic,
just a show of force someplace. And Carter writes in the
margin in his neat handwriting, like Mayaguez? Referring to the disaster
of the Mayaguez rescue military mission off
the coast of Cambodia, which was completely
unnecessary and led to unnecessary loss
of innocent lives and had been a disaster
for Henry Kissinger on Gerald Ford's watch. And so Carter was-- he was very smart. And he was perfectly capable
of arguing with Zbig. And he rejected his
advice 99% of the time. But he never fired him. And for the life of me,
I couldn't figure out why because Zbig gave
him a lot of bad advice. And I quote at the
end of the book-- and this is in defense
of Cy Vance who, after he finally resigned in the
wake of the failed helicopter rescue mission in
the spring of 1980-- well, Cy Vance, after
the defeat of Carter by Ronald Reagan in
November of 1980, he's talking to the
one Richard Holbrooke again, coming back to the
beginning of this anecdote. And Holbrook
records in his diary that he is astonished to hear Cy
Vance say that he just couldn't understand why Jimmy
Carter had kept Zbigniew Brzezinski around him
because he was an evil man. Cy Vance, evil. This is not a man who uses
words like that easily. So again, I know
I've been criticized in a few of the book reviews for
being a little tough on Zbig. But zbig was himself
boastful about this. In one of my interviews
with Zbigniew Brzezinski, he made a point of
telling me, oh, one day I got into a difficult argument
with the president in the Oval Office. And I marched out,
came back to my office. And a few minutes later,
Carter's personal secretary walks in and very
formally offered him an envelope, a green
envelope on green stationery, which signifies that this
is a handwritten message from the President himself. And Zbig opens up the envelope. And there's a one page little
note from Jimmy Carter saying, don't you know when to stop? And Zbig was telling
me this story proudly because he
was proud of the fact that he could have
a relationship with the president, he thought,
where they could argue strongly with each other. That's who he was. JOHN TIRMAN: Yeah. There's another
bitter episode, which I think was quite
consequential even to this day. And that is Andrew Young's
firing leading to the Palestine Liberation Organization. And again, for our
audience, Andrew Young was a civil rights leader
very close to the president, was named by Carter to be
our ambassador to the United Nations. And well, you can explain
what happened there. But again, it
strikes me as being a kind of a failure of
nerve on Carter's part, especially given
what he already knew about the plight
of Palestinians. KAI BIRD: Right. Yeah, well, to provide the
context, Carter came in. And over the objections
of all his foreign policy advisors, he announced
that he was going to make, as a foreign policy
priority, an attempt to get peace in the Middle
East between the Israelis, and Arabs, and Palestinians. And he had appointed-- he appointed Andy Young to
the United Nations post, knowing that young was going
to be an outspoken advocate of human rights. And Carter made an initiative
in the spring of '77, talking for the first
time for a president. He talked about the need
for a Palestinian Homeland. And this, of course, was
extremely controversial. Anyway, move ahead
to August of 1979. Andy Young, as UN
ambassador, has a meeting that's under the radar. There are some
legitimate reasons for why he would
hold such a meeting with a representative of the
PLO in the home of the Kuwaiti ambassador. And someone leaks
this information, the fact that this
meeting took place. And it, of course, officially
violates the promise that Henry Kissinger made many
years earlier to the Israelis that we would never talk
to an official of the PLO until the PLO recognized
the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Anyway, the fact of
this meeting was leaked. And it gets a
little complicated. But Cy Vance,
incorrectly in my view, was given information that
indicated that Andy Young had lied to Tony Lake, one of
his top aides in the State Department, about the meeting. And in fact, he hadn't lied. He had just not told
the whole truth. He'd given a cover story. In any case, Cy Vance
got it into his head that Young had lied. And therefore, he had to go. And he went to Carter and
demanded Young's resignation. Carter was, again, extremely
conflicted about this. He deeply admired Andy Young. But he thought that if Young
had indeed lied to Tony Lake and, by one step removed, to
Cy Vance that, well, maybe he had to go. And young himself
volunteered to resign. Carter, years later, said that
he thought this was a mistake. He shouldn't have
accepted the resignation. He should have stood by Young. And in my accounting of
the whole event, which was a real turning point in
Jewish and Black relations in this country-- in my account, again, I have
to confess I blame Brezezinski. I think he was the guy who
leaked the information. He got an FBI wiretap
transcript of the fact that the meeting had taken place
in the Kuwaiti ambassador's home. And I think he was the one who
leaked it because he wanted to get rid of Andy Young. And it was, again, an episode
that Carter had real regrets about. JOHN TIRMAN: Did he
want to get rid of Young for policy reasons
or something else? KAI BIRD: Yeah, Young was off
the territory reservation, in terms of human rights. He was very outspoken. And in the eyes of
Brzezinski in particular, Young was simply not
enough of a Cold Warrior, had too rosy a view
of the Soviet Union, and was too much of a liberal. JOHN TIRMAN: Yeah. Turning for a moment to the
Cold War and the Soviets, this was a period that
was depicted, at the time, as an end of detente,
the collapse of detente, even before the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan [INAUDIBLE].. What do you think? How do you think the
Soviets regarded Carter? It started out with this
very, as you detail, somewhat idealistic
offer from Carter to cut the strategic nuclear
arsenals dramatically, sometimes described as a
clumsy process on his part, but nevertheless sincere. The Soviets recoiled at this. Why did they recoil? And did it have anything
to do with Carter's raising of human rights as the banner
of American foreign policy? KAI BIRD: Yes,
certainly, it did. At the same time that Carter
was making an initiative to, as you said,
cut dramatically the number of strategic
nuclear weapons, he wanted to negotiate
a SALT II treaty that had already been negotiated
by his predecessor, Henry Kissinger. And they'd agreed
to certain limits. And Carter wanted them
to go down even lower, to have fewer weapons. And he proposed
this to the Soviets. And their reaction was,
well, wait a minute, we've already
negotiated this treaty. Why are you suddenly
making new demands? That was point one. And point two, at
the same time Carter was talking about human rights. And he was talking
about Sakharov. And he was making
this, human rights, a public diplomacy pressure
point on the Soviet Empire. And the old, old line, comrades
in the Kremlin in those years, led by Brezhnev, were
horrified by this. And so they pushed back. And so the result was that
the negotiations over SALT II dragged on, and on,
and on until finally they got the
makings of a treaty. And then it never got
ratified by the Senate because of the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan. And again, in my book,
it's really interesting. Carter's instincts
are all quite liberal. His instinct is to
agree with Cy Vance, that the Soviet Empire
is a defensive empire, a weak empire, that it's
crumbling, that it doesn't work economically, in
any way efficiently, and that they're
not a threat to us. He was the guy who, early
in his administration, used the phrase, we're going
to drop our inordinate fear of communism, our inordinate
fear of communism, which has been an
albatross around our neck, forcing us to support right
wing dictatorships just because of our inordinate
fear of communism. Well, that's Jimmy Carter. It's not Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski was horrified
by that phrase. But then they
disagreed all the time about the nature of
the Soviet threat. And then suddenly , the
Soviets invade Afghanistan. And Carter was personally
shocked by this. And I argue wrongly so. He should have known
that it was coming. The intelligence was showing. And rationally, he should
have looked at the situation and realized that actually
the Soviets were invading Afghanistan to overthrow a
hard line Communist Party dictatorship in favor of a
more moderate Communist Party faction because the
guy in power was killing hundreds of people-- leftist and rightist, leftists
and religious fundamentalists-- and alienating everyone. Anyway, the invasion was also-- well, Carter's reaction to
it, I think, was overblown. But from that moment on,
Brzeznski had Carter's ear. And Vance's influence
was on the wane. And this is actually why he
resigns in April of 1980, because he can see that
Brzezinski has won out in this power struggle. JOHN TIRMAN: One
last question for me, and it can be a quick response. But I was so struck
by the opening of the book and
Carter's childhood that I can't think of another
president in the 20th century who had this hardscrabble
childhood, in the sense that they didn't
have electricity, they didn't have running water,
even though they weren't poor. But it was just, I
guess, the way things were in South Georgia. But how did that-- how do you think that
influenced him over time it's such an unusual
upbringing compared with the Bushes,
and the Kennedys, and all the rest of them. KAI BIRD: No, the great
mystery about Jimmy Carter is how he could
have come from where he came from in South Georgia,
not even Plains, which was population 650 people or so. He grew up in a little
hamlet two miles down the road called Archery. And he was virtually the
only little white boy in this hamlet. All his friends were
African Americans. For half the year, they marched
around the farm barefoot. He, well, picked
cotton, and he fished, and he hung out in
the barnyard with an African American foreman
was the only salaried employee. Their circumstances-- they
were well off white people. But their circumstances
were certainly Spartan. I mean, he lived in a
Sears and Roebuck assembled house, a little three
bedroom wooden house that had no running water,
no electricity. There was an outhouse
in the backyard. I think they got
electricity-- and that was a big event in Jimmy
Carter's life-- when he was about
14 years of age. And again, his father-- Carter grew up with
African American friends that he went
fishing with and sat in the pews in Sunday's church
singing African American hymns. He was very comfortable around
Blacks throughout his life. And yet, his father was
a white supremacist. He believed in segregation. He believed in the
supremacy of the white race. And so this is the mystery. How did Jimmy Carter come out
as a liberal in South Georgia? Well, it's all because of
his mom, quite evidently, Ms. Lillian, who was from
another southern tradition, this tradition of eccentric,
gentle-woman southern ladies who got away with breaking
all the social taboos. She liked to shock her
neighbors by admiring things about Abraham Lincoln, which
was a no-no in South Georgia. And she believed in the
equality of the races. And she was a nurse
who administered medicine and health care
to African Americans in South Georgia. And she gave Jimmy a love of
books and a searing ambition. And he was just very bright, and
made his way out of this world, and was determined to
make his mark on it. And he was religious,
but ambitious like crazy to win political power. And he knew exactly what
was necessary to do so. It's a fabulous
Shakespearean story that this man comes
from Archery, Georgia and becomes president of
the United States in 1977. It's just a most
improbable story. JOHN TIRMAN: Yeah,
it's a great story. Let me go to questions
from our audience. The first one is-- in the latter
stages of Carter's presidency, inflation was rampant
in the United States. To what extent that the adverse
economic situation rather than foreign policy failures
prevent his re-election? KAI BIRD: Yes. Well, as Bill Clinton
famously said, it's all about the
economy, stupid, right? And it always is. And presidents can get
away with doing a lot in the field of foreign policy. Carter had enormous
achievements-- the Camp David Peace Accords that led to
an Arab-Israeli peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. But on the issue of
domestic affairs, where again he got
an awful lot done-- he deregulated the
airline industry. He deregulated
trucking, natural gas. Even the boutique
beer industry that we see all over the country
today can be traced back to Carter's
deregulation policies that favored consumers. But he became president
in the early '77 in the wake of the
great energy oil price hikes of the early '70s. And he was concerned about
the environment, and energy independence, and our dependence
on Saudi and Iranian oil. And he also believed
that inflation, which had been jumpstarted
by these oil price hikes, was a threat to working class
and middle class Americans. So in a period where suddenly
we were faced with stagflation, both an economy that was
not employing as many people as we would wish
and high inflation, Carter tried very hard
to go after inflation. And finally, in
great frustration, and against the advice of
his political advisors, he appointed Paul
Volcker to head the Fed. And he did so in
the summer of '79, knowing that Volcker was going
to rack up interest rates, and restrict the money supply,
and make the economy scream because interest rates and
inflation were just phenomenal. Some interest rates went up
to like 18% in those years. So he thought that Volcker's
harsh medicine was necessary, although it was going to be
extremely politically damaging. So your questioner is right. He faced economic hurdles
that really cost him an enormous amount politically. JOHN TIRMAN: A couple
of questions here that are similar-- what do you think is Carter's
greatest legacy as president? KAI BIRD: Well,
I certainly think Camp David and the
Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty is a remarkable event,
partly because it never would have happened without the
personal diplomacy of one Jimmy Carter. I mean, to bring Menachem Begin
of Israel and Egypt's Anwar Sadat together for 13
days at Camp David, that produced something
that just never would have happened otherwise. And it almost didn't
happen even so. I mean, there were
numerous times when either Sadat or Begin
were trying to walk out. And Carter just found a
way to keep them there. So I think that treaty-- and it's a cold peace. But it has survived
all these years. And Egypt is no longer
at war with Israel. But it's also a
bittersweet thing because Carter believed he also
had, one, an agreement that would lead to solving the
Palestinian problem as well. And specifically,
he thought that he had gotten Menachem Begin to
agree to a five year freeze on all settlement
activities in the West Bank. Begin hotly disputed
this very soon after the Camp David Accords. But Carter always
believed that he had gotten this promise from Begin. And he believes to this day
that Begin either lied to him, or deceived him, or
backtracked in a dishonest way from what had been agreed to. So this explains why
we're still living with the
Palestinian-Israeli problem that we have today, where
the settlements have exploded into the now 700,000 settlers
in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And so Carter is still very
obsessed and disappointed by what has happened. But nevertheless, that was
an enormous foreign policy achievement. I would also argue that his
deregulation of the economy to benefit consumers
really transformed America. It allowed for in
the airline industry. It allowed for working class
and middle class Americans to fly on a regular basis. It lowered prices and
broke up the big monopolies had existed in the
airline industry and transformed the way we
Americans travel and work. Also, oddly enough, he
was the first president to really begin talking about
the environment and the climate change. They didn't use that
phrase at the time, but that's what they
were talking about. And so he was looking very
prescient in that way. Finally, I think the human
rights foreign policy initiatives, they
still are in place. And if you look back at the
collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the
Cold War, I think it's quite clear that Carter's
human rights initiatives were the ideas that helped
to really weaken the cement around the walls
around the Soviet Empire leading to what happened
with solidarity in Poland and the Czech human
rights revolution. This was all started by Carter. And so ironically, the
collapse of the Soviet Empire came about not because of
Ronald Reagan's defense spending on Star Wars and such,
but it came about because of human rights. So again, this is
very consequential. JOHN TIRMAN: It is. And could you talk about
Ted Kennedy's challenge to Carter in 1980 and how it
impacted Carter's relationship with Congress? KAI BIRD: Well, this is
personally embarrassing to me because, as a young
man in my 20s, I thought Jimmy Carter
was not liberal enough. And I think many of my friends
and journalistic scribes at the time had the same view. And we pined for Ted Kennedy. But you go into the archives
and you interview enough people, you sometimes learn something. And I learned that Ted Kennedy,
really by challenging a sitting president, he greatly
weakened Jimmy Carter, making him more vulnerable
to the challenge from Ronald Reagan. And the issue that he ran
on was national health care. And yet, it's very clear
to me from the narrative that Jimmy Carter wanted to
have national health care, too. He campaigned on it in '76. And then he got into office. And he's a small town
fiscal conservative. And he looked at the numbers. And he thought, hey,
Ted Kennedy can't get the votes for his
bigger health care package. And it's too expensive. And so he brought Kennedy
into the Oval Office. And they had a real argument
falling out, where Carter says, I want to offer a compromise
bill that will give Americans universal catastrophic
health insurance so that no American family
would spend more than $5,000 on a catastrophic health event. And this, of course,
if it had been passed and if Kennedy had come
aboard on this compromise, they would have had the votes. It wouldn't have
been that expensive. And it would have been
a foot in the door for the eventual
expansion of Medicare or the introduction of
a single payer system. But instead, Kennedy flatly
refused to compromise. Carter stubbornly believed
that Kennedy was walking out of these negotiations
simply because he wanted an issue to campaign on and that
he was a privileged Kennedy who thought that the presidency
was his by inheritance because of what had happened
is to elder brothers. And Carter just
wouldn't have it. He announced that he was going
to whip Ted Kennedy's ass and he did in the primaries. Carter could be
politically very ruthless. And he knew what it would take
to defeat a Kennedy challenge. And he did it. But Kennedy never
stubbornly refused to drop out, even
when the delegate mess made it clear that he
had no chance of getting the nomination. And right up until
the convention, Kennedy was up there. And he even refused to
do the famous shaking of hands in the air. And this weakened Carter's base,
divided the Democratic Party, and was a major reason,
I think, for why he failed to get reelected,
along with the hostage crisis and, I would argue,
Bill Casey, Reagan's campaign manager, who I believe-- and I have the smoking gun
memo that supports this notion. I believe Bill Casey,
as the campaign manager in the
summer of 1980, made a secret trip to Madrid, Spain
and met with representatives of the Ayatollah
Khomeini, promising him that he would get a better
deal from his candidate, Ronald Reagan, than he was going
to get from Jimmy Carter. And of course, this
prolonged the hostage crisis. And I have a short but, I
think, quite convincing chapter in the book that documents
this October surprise scandal. JOHN TIRMAN: Speaking
of the Kennedys, I was struck by a number of
anecdotes you had about how poorly received the Carters were
in Washington by the Washington elite. I remember some of that
actually, how unfair it was. Do you think that that
was all inside the Beltway gossip and turmoil and that
the voters didn't really pay attention to that? Or do you think that
actually sifted out into the electorate at large? KAI BIRD: I think-- JOHN TIRMAN: Go ahead. KAI BIRD: Very much. I think the Georgia boys, Jimmy
Carter and his Georgia boys, arrived in Washington. And you know Jody Powell,
the press Secretary, and Hamilton Jordan, his
de facto chief of staff were very young. They were in their early 30s. And they arrived in Washington
announcing that the Carter administration owed no one,
certainly not the Washington establishment, or the Georgetown
set, or the foreign policy establishment. They had won this campaign as
independents, as populists. They weren't bought and paid
for by any establishment. And they advertised this. Well, they were also
Southerners who had a little-- they had some insecurities about
being the first Southerners to occupy the White House. And in response, the
Washington Post in particular, but the press in general,
they couldn't figure out what to make of these Georgia boys. They were breaking some
of the social taboos, wearing work boots
into the Oval Office. And so pretty soon, Sally
Quinn, a terrific writer for the new style section of
the Washington Post, a very gossipy feature
a feature writer, began making fun
of the Georgia boys and published one profile after
another that went after them. And these stories spilled
out into beyond the Beltway. And you remember at one
point in August of '79, the Washington
Post put a headline on the front page of
the Washington Post, "Killer rabbit
attacks president." And a lot of people,
this is the only thing that they remember about Jimmy
Carter to this day, the killer rabbit episode, which was a
silly little story about how Carter was in a rowboat in his
pond near his house in Plains fishing one day alone. And a swamp rabbit
actually jumped into the pond and swam towards
the boat, being chased by dogs. And Carter took his oar
and slapped the water to turn the swamp rabbit away. And then he told this story to
Jody Powell a few weeks later. And Jody Powell told it
to an AP story editor. And suddenly, it
got on the wire. And it must have been
a very slow news day. But the Washington Post
put it on the front page of the Washington Post. And it became a sort of-- initially, it was a joke. But it became a metaphor
for our hapless president. And it greatly, I think,
had a consequence. It greatly weakened
him politically. And it fed this narrative
that these Georgia boys were country bumpkins
from the South who didn't know what
they were doing, didn't know the ways of
Washington, were incompetent. And it wasn't true. They were actually quite
intelligent, savvy, political operatives. And Carter was an
extremely hardworking, intelligent president. I think the Washington
Post has a great deal to own up to for its coverage
of the Carter administration. JOHN TIRMAN: Kai Bird,
thank you so much. We're at the end of our hour. I want to urge our viewers
to buy this book and read it. There's so much in it. If you're a history buff, it is
filled with wonderful anecdotes and analyses that,
as you say, are relevant to this day,
so many of these issues, still 40 years later. So thank you so much. And to our audience, thank you. Thank you for your patience
and your questions. And we'll see you next time. KAI BIRD: Thank you, John. JOHN TIRMAN: Bye-bye. [MUSIC PLAYING]
