Well, Carter won Georgia twice and Reagan won California twice. So I suppose it evens out.
If you’re speaking governorship rather than the presidency, Carter won only once (out of two tries, the first being in 1966) and served from 1971 to 1975.
The rescue attempt could have been done better - it was a fiasco.
If you mean Stinger missiles, that was Reagan. Carter was President when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, not when they were driven out of Afghanistan.
You are correct about the Camp David accords, though. That, and boycotting the Olympics, were pretty much the highlights of Carter’s foreign policy.
Regards,
Shodan
I never liked the Olympic boycott myself.
Do was the invasion of Grenada, but the media were kept from the reality of that. The rescue attempt had a much better justification for the effort, however.
It’s ridiculous to blame Carter for the 70s. Carter was elected in 1976, we already had double digit inflation under Ford. The oil embargo was 1973. And so on. If you want to argue that Carter didn’t do much to fix the problems he inherited, that’s fine.
Carter was a middle of the road figure. He doesn’t belong on any great president list, but he doesn’t belong on a list of disasters either.
Plus, disco was finally destroyed on July 12, 1979 under Carter’s watch. Give the man some credit.
Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. Carter was very much seen to own the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and the failed rescue attempt. Had it succeeded, it would probably have done much to burnish his reputation.
How did Carter ever think that the Soviets, faced with the threat of a US boycott of the Olympics, would quake in fear and hurriedly withdraw from Afghanistan? That’s the threat an idealistic, projecting-own-assumptions-onto-others person makes.
To be fair to Carter, he didn’t AFAIK think it would cause the USSR to withdraw - it was to deny the Soviets a large influx of cash from tourism, a boost in publicity, and to signal moral disapproval. Carter was big on moral disapproval.
To further be fair, Carter suffers by contrast to Reagan. Carter was the kind of President who tries to help by shaming the Soviets into withdrawing from a country they invaded. Reagan was the kind of President who tries to help by giving the Afghanis the means to blow the Soviet helicopters out of the sky.
Carter’s approach to the Cold War was to treat it sort of like a misunderstanding, and try to gently influence the Soviets into doing the right thing. Reagan’s approach was simpler - “We win, they lose.”
I have yet to meet someone who thinks Carter was a great President.
Regards,
Shodan
Generally, I’d say keeping the focus on the fact that the Soviet Union was the kind of country that would invade neighbouring countries and try to conquer them served the US geopolitical interests.
While the US is by no means perfect, it was far preferable to the Soviet Union, and keeping the focus on the Soviet Invasion drove the point home.
I think Carter had intended the grain embargo to be a bigger Stockton the Olympic boycott. It failed utterly, but he was hoping…
His dealings with the Soviets were also weak, and communism arguably spread more during his term than any other single Presidential term. He basically threw in the towel on the Truman Doctrine. And this was at a time when the Communist bloc was growing weaker, although we didn’t know that at the time. By the time Reagan took office, it didn’t take much to turn the tables on them. But Carter could have started that process earlier if he hadn’t reconciled himself to 2-3 billion people living in slavery in perpetuity.
You go to a rescue mission with the military you’ve got, rather than the military you’d like to have. In 1979, we had a military that was still recovering from Vietnam, and was a far cry from today’s well-honed fighting machine.
Since Presidents aren’t involved in the operational planning of such missions, the choice that Carter had was, do we try this, or not? Even though it wound up failing badly, I think it was the right choice. What’s your opinion?
Carter himself didn’t see himself as that detached from the operational planning of the mission
Cite.
Cite. Obviously planning and command-and-control are not exclusively the President, but Carter’s SecState resigned before the mission, saying that it couldn’t succeed.
And analysts have criticized
Cite.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s not like the Carter administration was helplessly given the military it had, no way to improve it. In his book,* Inside Delta Force,* Eric Haney - one of the commandos in Operation Eagle Claw - blames the low defense spending of the Carter administration and poor equipment condition as one of the (many) reasons for the mission’s failure.
Did Reagan seriously think the Communists were going to tear down the Berlin Wall because he said so? Both man were making a public statement of their disapproval of the Soviet regime.
Carter increased defense spending during his presidency. He also started a number of new military programs. But he also shut down some military programs he saw as wasteful.
Keep in mind Carter was a Naval Academy graduate and had been a professional military officer; he saw the military more realistically than any President since Eisenhower had. He knew if you just threw money into the defense budget, a lot of it would be misspent on glamour projects; the stuff that makes generals and admirals happy rather than the stuff that makes it possible for soldiers and sailors to fight better.
The B-1 bomber is a good example. Carter said it was a poorly designed program and shut it down. Reagan started it back up again when he was President. History has proven Carter right. The B-1 has been a problem. They do fly and can be used. But they have lower capabilities and higher operating costs than the B-52’s they were supposed to replace. The Air Force has already started phasing them out of service.
As for Haney, there are a lot of questions about his book. It’s clear he exaggerated his military record and other officers in Special Forces have gone on record saying some of the things he wrote about never happened. Given this, I don’t think we should accept his claims about political issues as indisputible facts.
This is the problem. Pretty much every expert today says it wouldn’t have succeeded, in fact success was basically impossible because it was so badly planned and relied on multiple points of failure. The helicopters crashing at the very beginning was actually the more preferable option as opposed to what would have happened, the entire task force being stuck at the embassy with no possible hope of exfiltration and being killed to the man while AC-130’s and F-4 Phantoms razed most of Tehran trying to save them.
Like many other people Carter was sick of the constant meddling and coups we supported in the name of ‘stopping communism’. Our attitude either drove somewhat socialist countries intot he arms of the Soviets or we just ran a corporate sponsored coup to install some friendly right wing dictator and who cares how many they killed.
There are countries that to this day remember the US primarily for the meddling we did in their country and rightly hold it against us. Carter wanted that bullying image to end, but Reagan just restored it and gave us such wonders as the El Salvadoran Death Squads and the Contras.
You think communism spread more during Carter’s presidency than it did during Truman’s? Truman was President from 1945 to 1953. During that period communist regimes were established in Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, North Korea, North Vietnam, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. During Carter’s presidency communist regimes were established in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua.