- Included among the Political Analysis Posts List.
- The Trump election is not the first time that a foreign power has meddled successfully in a Presidential campaign. There was also Jimmy Carter.
Martin Winfree
December 10, 2018
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Shared with Public
We’ve been here before. I am particularly interested in what the academics in my would-be audience might think of this thesis, say, W Ernie Guyton, Priscilla Dodds, Alan Baragona, Sid Cundiff, and George Konstantinow. I never have read this anywhere; I just thought it up myself and have hardly ever talked about it. But it sure makes sense to me. The paragraph about Jimmy Carter teaching Sunday School is another one that I am particularly proud of.
The Trump election is not the first time that a foreign power has meddled successfully in a Presidential campaign. It might not even be the second – but I will leave the uncovering of that to others.
Jimmy Carter’s rise to the Presidency in 1976 is even more unlikely than that of Trump, and there are a lot of similarities – in the post-Watergate period, there were a host of Democratic Presidential hopefuls. The election polls were also off in 1980; Ronald Reagan wound up defeating Carter in his re-election bid in a landslide, but the polls showed a fairly close race.
I will never forget seeing an issue of a national magazine (Time I think) that gave a one- or two-page profile of the various Democrats running for President that year. The last one was Terry Sanford, the former governor of my home state of North Carolina, who was running strictly as a “favorite son” – and the next to last one was Jimmy Carter.
Carter’s success was so out of the blue that it formed part of the narrative in Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone – it is quite a good novel also, and one of the better King movies – concerning the attempted rise of a truly diabolical man to the Presidency. (Just to be clear, he is not comparable at all to Trump; this character was genuinely evil and was planning to “push the button” if he got into office). In it, the protagonist, John Smith (yes, it’s true) had a horrible accident and was in a coma for 4½ years. When he finally awoke (and found himself with psychic powers – this is a Stephen King story after all), King delighted in laying out what had gone on in the world while he was out of it – Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and this peanut farmer he had never heard of who was now President.
When the Iranian hostage crisis erupted in November 1979 – almost exactly one year before election day – Carter was consumed from then on trying to get the hostages freed. Nothing worked. Carter was portrayed as ineffectual because he wasn’t able to end the crisis.
With Carter hobbled, Ted Kennedy decided that he would have one last run at the Presidency – it was an odd campaign, too; I remember seeing numerous Kennedy yard signs and placards in Raleigh that year that were the plain red and black kind that people running for City Council use. That brought about my favorite Jimmy Carter quote: “If Kennedy runs, I’ll whip his ass.” (He did, too).
The 1980 election was also the beginning of evangelical Christians as a political force in conservative American politics – and the start of their utter hypocrisy as well. Ronald Reagan was the one they backed; after all, he was pro-life and right-wing and said all of the things that they wanted to hear. But he barely made a half-hearted attempt at appearing religious; Reagan rarely even attended church services. Also, Reagan had gone through a divorce. (Yes, Virginia, being a divorcé used to be a major black mark on a man’s character – such innocent times those were.)
But Jimmy Carter was actually an evangelical Christian himself – probably the first and last genuine evangelical Christian to reach the White House to date. He never made a big thing of it, so I guess most people don’t know that Carter began teaching Sunday School from a young age and continued doing that all through his campaign, and after his term as President, and even whenever he happened to be in Plains, GA while he was President. For all I know, he is still doing that to this day even at age 94. Can you imagine going to a Sunday School class with the man who was in office as the President of the United States as the teacher? That is what Jimmy Carter did; that is how committed he is to his faith.
So, the Iranian crisis dragged on. ABC launched its late-night program Nightline while all that was going on that featured a countdown of how many days it had been since the hostages were snatched. But honestly, short of invading the place (the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba wasn’t that many years earlier then, so no one was saying we should do that), there was really nothing Carter could do but keep negotiating and just try to wait them out. There was that fun movie back in 2012 called Argo, about a daring plot to get 6 Americans freed who had managed to evade the roundup of the others. But the 52 Americans in the US Embassy that had been captured were securely held by the Ayatollah.
Ultimately, after Reagan was elected, the hostages were freed; as I remember, it didn’t take any negotiations at all – it just happened. The hostages arrived on an airplane back in the USA on Inauguration Day 1981 after 444 days in captivity. It was quite a feather in the cap of brand-new President Reagan.
I have thought a lot about the Iranian hostage crisis over the years; I was still pretty young back then, just 29 when Reagan became President, and I was a Nightline junkie, too. I doubt very much that they teach it this way in history class (you will sure never get any Republican to ever admit it), but the only scenario that makes any sense if you think about how it all went down is that Iran deliberately held onto the hostages in order to punish the United States in general and the current President in particular. The fact that the hostages came home just as Reagan was being inaugurated makes the inadvertent quid pro quo crystal clear.
If nothing else comes out of the whole Russia collusion business (see the Trump Tower meeting discussion in Part IV), I do hope that this is the end of the notion that the Republican Party scares the Communists and the terrorists and the other bad actors in the world, and that the Democrats are viewed as a bunch of wimps that they can push around. The GOP has been spouting this nonsense for decades, and there is not one single grain of truth in it. After all, Democratic President John F. Kennedy is the one who stared down Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis. Collusion be damned – no one on earth disputes that Trump was the choice for President of Russian leader Vladimir Putin (who might as well be a Communist; he cut his teeth in the KGB after all). Iran doesn’t give a damn who the President is, or what party he is in – maybe they do by now, but they sure as hell didn’t in 1979.