Inside the White House

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Oh, good afternoon. It’s wonderful to see all of you here today in this late July warm, hot and sunny London, which is quite extraordinary. I see many familiar faces, which is not surprising. We have a very distinguished membership, as you know, and a very, very distinguished speaker today. It really is an honour. I must hold up the book, ‘cause it’s, in addition to being very well reviewed and a remarkable book, it’s also quite a piece of work, President Carter: the White House Years. We have Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat here today to speak to us about Inside the White House, and not only from the point of somebody who’s obviously written, recently, quite a serious piece of work about this, but Ambassador Eizenstat was Chief White House Domestic Policy Advisor and Head of the Domestic Policy Staff for President Jimmy Carter. I must say, it’s really wonderful to talk about President Carter. We’ve done a lot of talking at Chatham House and around the world about other Presidents, more recently, and it’s quite something to have a moment of reflection to look and think back to a very different period of American history. So, it’s wonderful to have you here today.

I also wanted to mention that Ambassador Eizenstat was the US Ambassador to the European Union, 1993 to 1996, and he was Deputy Secretary of the Treasury following that, 1996 to 2001. So, you’ve had many…

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Under-Secretary of State in-between.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

And, I’m sorry?

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Under-Secretary of State in-between.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

And Under-Secretary of State in-between. So, brings a wealth of experience and so – and is going to speak to us for about 20 minutes, before we open it up to questions and answers. This is on the record, not under the Chatham House Rule. But it’s also, and I will come back to this, but it’s also very interesting, given everything that’s going on in the world and given your policy experience at the level that you were, participating in the 1990s, that you’ve chosen to come back and write about President Carter. Who is something, I must say, in my own work, I’ve done a lot of work historically in human rights. President Carter is, of course, somebody that I’ve paid a tremendous amount of attention to, not only during his Presidency. I remember every night, you know, the news, the Iranian hostage crisis, all these things that were formative for so many of us during our childhood years. But in the case of President Carter, for so many years, including right up to the present, is somebody who we’ve paid just a tremendous amount of attention to. So, this is wonderful, it’s an honour to have you here…

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Thank you.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

…at Chatham House and we look forward to your remarks [applause].

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Thank you very much, Leslie. It’s an honour to speak at this prestigious forum and I’m deeply grateful for my very dear, long-time friend, Robin Niblett, who is the distinguished Director of Chatham House, for making it possible. He gave me a special treat, before the speech, to go into the room where William Pitt the Elder actually presided as Prime Minister. I want to also thank Olivia Beer, the Events Manager, who’s been really terrific in assisting this, and Leslie, thank you for moderating it.

I want, of course, to speak about President Carter: the White House Years, but given the dramatic events that have occurred in the United States and in Europe, the potential threats to Western democracy and to our alliances, I also hope during the question period that Leslie will moderate, that we’ll have an opportunity to get into that as well.

Jimmy Carter’s political idol was President Harry Truman, and he placed his famous slogan, “The buck stops here,” on his Oval Office desk. Both Presidents left office highly unpopular. Truman is now remembered much more for his achievements than for his failures and these achievements included creating the post-World War II institutions that are now under attack. And I hope that my book will have a similar impact on a reassessment of Jimmy Carter, not just as an admired Former President, but as a President as well. Even though we were routed in the 1980 election in a bid for a second term, I believe that he is the most underappreciated and most accomplished one term President that we’ve had in American history, both for his achievements at home and abroad.

Abroad, he enhanced the international order that Truman helped create and strengthened our alliances in the global free trade system. And at home, almost 70% of all of our major legislative proposals were passed by the Congress, just under the percentage of the legendary Master of the Congress, Lyndon Johnson, who, by the way, Leslie, was the first President I served in the White House. And he did it with a level of bipartisan support that has evaporated today. President Carter respected his office, its power and its limitations, the institutions of our Government, including the Justice Department and FBI, and the role of the Free Press, even though he felt unfairly treated, as frankly, every President does about the Press. But he realised the importance of the Press to a functioning democracy. His Vice President, Walter Mondale, put it very succinctly, “We told the truth. We obeyed the law and we kept the peace.”

Now, the wrap on the Carter Presidency rests on what I call several Is: Iran, inflation, inexperience by the President and his so-called Georgia Mafia, when they came into Washington, and interparty warfare with Ted Kennedy and the Liberal wing of the Democratic Party and I do not, in any way, in my book try to whitewash those problems away. I deal with them directly, candidly and honestly. But the problem is, they’ve totally obscured the many successes at home and abroad that I saw at his right hand. And so, I wanted to write this book, while there were still living eye witnesses, and before history’s verdict was indelibly sealed in people’s minds, as Carter having been a failed Presidency, ‘cause I believe that, taken as a whole, the achievements outweigh the very real mistakes and failures, my own included, and I’m candid about those as well.

In a sense, the voracity of this account rests on a habit I’ve had since college and Harvard Law School and I took into the White House, which was being an inveterate notetaker. I took verbatim notes of every meeting, every phone call, everything I saw and witnessed, in real time, and that will give you a picture, not only of what it’s like to work in the White House under President Carter, but what the Presidency is like as well, the hot house atmosphere of the White House. And I augmented those 5,000 pages of notes that I took, with over 350 interviews, five of the President alone, and I wasn’t selective. I interviewed all the people who had an impact on the administration and on the decade in which we governed, Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals, detractors and supporters, to give an honest and candid look at the Presidency.

I want to share with you now, because the understanding – we have to understand the period in which we govern, to take you back to the 1970s and then what I’ve learned in the 40 years since. The 1970s were a period of really epic change, in which the post-World War II consensus had already begun to unravel under the pressures of a decade long of slow growth and high inflation, what we called stagflation, our first loss in a military war abroad, in Vietnam, and urban violence. It was a decade in which a whole set of new movements began, which are with us today: the Consumer Movement, the Environmental Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, and yes, after the landmark Roe v Wade decision on abortion, the Pro-Life Movement. And in addition, it was a decade in which a new political force arose, which, again, is very much with us today, and that is the ascendency of the Conservative Evangelical Christian Movement.

For the first time it became political and its Founder, the Reverend Falwell, accused Jimmy Carter, who was perhaps the most religious President we’ve ever had in the White House, of not being a true Baptist and of harbouring homosexuals on his staff. It was also a time in which that coalition was put together by Ronald Reagan in 1980 of Richard Nixon’s so-called silent majority of frustrated blue collar workers, together with this new Evangelical Movement and that helped power Ronald Reagan to victory against us in 1980. And that remains the central political base of Donald Trump today, the Evangelicals in the South and the frustrated blue collar workers in the North.

It was also a decade abroad in which the Soviet Union was at the apex of its power and influence. A huge military build-up supporting Communist revolutions in the Horn of Africa, through Cuban proxy troops, supporting Euro Communist parties in Western Europe, particularly successfully in Italy. It was also a decade in which a new power began to arise on the world scene, the People’s Republic of China. It was the decade in which a Polish born Pope, Pope John Paul the II and Jimmy Carter himself, began to give hope to the nation democratic movements in the Communist East Bloc. And yes, it was a decade in which a revolution occurred, which is front page today and which burst on the scene during our administration, the Radical Islamic Revolution in Iran, which ushered in the first radical Islamic State, whose desire for nuclear weapons capability and support for terrorist groups throughout the Middle East remains a challenge today, as it was to us.

To bring it home to the UK, it was also a decade in which Margaret Thatcher, the famous Iron Lady, was elected Prime Minister in 1979, in the middle of Carter’s term, defeating the President’s close friend, Jim Callaghan, as a result of what was called Britain’s Winter of Discontent and high unemployment and high inflation in the UK. The very ills that Ronald Reagan played on in defeating Jimmy Carter and if you want a more current thread, it’s the same type of concerns that led to Brexit here and to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

So, let me take you through just a few of the domestic accomplishments and then, I’ll go to the ones that will engage you more in foreign policy. The foundation of the energy security the United States enjoys today, and we will soon be the largest energy producer of oil and gas in the world, larger than Saudi Arabia, larger than Russia, larger than the Gulf States, and that foundation of that energy security was based on three major energy bills we passed, which ended price controls on natural gas and crude oil and encouraged domestic production. It put conservation at the centre of our energy policy and we inaugurated the new clean energy generation of wind power and solar, even symbolically, having Carter put a solar panel on the roof of the White House.

He was also a great consumer champion, appointing consumer advocates, not as today, those who came from govern – from industries to regulate their own industries and transform totally, our over-regulated transportation system, creating more competition at lower prices, in trucks and rails and in airlines, and really democratised air travel in the United States, bringing it to the middleclass, allowing new carriers, like JetBlue and Southwest to come into play. And again, with a UK perspective, we signed new Open Skies Agreements with the UK and other allies, allowing carriers like British Air, for the first time, to have full access to the United States, in return for our carriers having access to theirs, and we didn’t stop there. We began the deregulation of telecommunications and ushered in the whole new cable era, and for those of you who may be aficionados of your local craft beers, particularly in the United States, we lifted prohibition era regulations, which had prevented their flow.

He was the greatest environmental President since Theodore Roosevelt, doubling the size of our whole National Park system by the Alaska Lands Build, over the fierce opposition of the Alaska delegation, which wanted the whole state open for oil and gas exploration. We also put in place the very ethics laws which are today, so relevant and so under attack. We won the election in 1976 in an immediate post-Watergate era, in which the scandals of Nixon were very much front and centre and where Carter’s promise, “I’ll never lie to you, I’ll have a transparent and open Government,” really resonated. But it wasn’t just rhetoric. We put into place real legislation, that’s more important, again, than ever, in an ethically challenged Washington.

The Ethics and Government Act, for example, for the first time and still does, require senior officials to disclose their assets and any conflicts of interest, imposes gift limits when you’re in office, restricts your ability to lobby the agencies from which you came after office. We created Inspectors General to root out fraud, waste and abuse, and very relevant today, we created the Office of Special Counsel, the very office that Robert Mueller is using today to investigate Trump, and more on that in a second.

I had a humorous incident involving the gift limit. After a magazine incorrectly asserted that I had a great low for – love for what we had, the one cent Tootsie Roll, I think they still sell them today, I got a giant box from the Tootsie Roll company, of Tootsie Rolls, at the West Wing Office of the White House. And I thought I was going to be father for life to my young kids, bringing these Tootsie Rolls home, only to find out from the Ethics Office that, without trying to count every single bloody Tootsie Roll, that probably was worth more than $25. So, I returned it to the company, with a letter explaining we’d had a new set of moral and ethical standards. Well, sounds great, except that a year later there was a profile of the Tootsie Roll company, in which the CEO said, “Eizenstat tried to have it both ways. He sounded high and mighty and when we opened the box, it was empty.” So, I’m still trying to find the Secret Service Agent at the White House who took my Tootsie Rolls.

More seriously, at a crucial time, during our re-election campaign, ironically, the Special Counsel that we created to investigate potential wrongdoing by senior officials, the first target, ironically, was the President’s own Chief of Staff, Hamilton Jordan, who was falsely accused by Roy Cohn, who was an infamous hatchet man for Senator McCarthy during the so-called ‘Red Scare’, and was, by the way, Donald Trump’s first political mentor, of having, “Snorted cocaine in his client’s bar in New York,” totally false. Now, it cost him $1 million in legal fees, but that’s not the point. The point is that Carter never once tried to interfere, to badger, to belittle that investigation. Contrast that with the way in which Mueller is regularly attacked by the President for his investigation of Russian interference in our election, calling it a witch hunt, calling him dangerous, totally different than the way we treated it.

This Southern President was also a great champion for civil rights, coming from the Deep South. He appointed more women and more minorities to senior positions in his administration and to Federal Judgeships than all 38 Presidents before him put together and supported affirmative action for minorities for their entrance in universities, something being attacked by the administration today, and to boot, saved New York City and Chrysler from bankruptcy. He created the modern Vice Presidency with Walter Mondale, taking a position of derision and making him a full partner, with full access to all classified documents, all meetings, one-on-one lunches. And went even a step further, by moving him into the West Wing, where, as in real estate, location, location, location is critical, it is in the White House too, and he made him a full partner.

Inflation was a curse during the 1970s, in the United States, in the UK and throughout Europe. It was a decade of high inflation and it was our domestic Achilles’ heel. We had the misfortune of inheriting that inflation from President Ford and President Nixon and, honestly, it got worse, during our tenure, in part because of the Iranian Revolution and the doubling of oil prices, which led to the same gas lines that President Nixon had after the OPEC embargo in 1973. And here’s the important thing, Carter recognised earlier than all of us, myself included, that the main problem we had was not unemployment, it was inflation. He gave five anti-inflation speeches, he had wage and price guidelines with sanctions, two Anti-Inflation Tsars, nothing worked and he said to us, going into a re-election campaign, “I’ve tried everything. I’m not going to let my legacy be high inflation, even if it means my re-election. I’m going to appoint Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve.” Knowing, because Volcker told him, in a celebrated meeting I describe in the book, that Volcker was going tighten the money supply, raise interest rates, raise unemployment, in effect, squeeze inflation out of the system the hard way. And we knew what was coming and Carter never once complained about it, not once during the whole election campaign, about having double digit interest rates. And Volcker gives a great tribute to Carter, both in my book and in an endorsement, for Carter having stood by him.

Contrast that with what’s happened this very week, in which the President has attacked the Federal Reserve in ways that are really unprecedented. It’s an independent Central Bank for modest increases and interest rates, to avoid future inflation from his own massive tax cuts and defence increases. Inflation did come down dramatically, as a result of what Vockler did and what Carter encouraged him to do, but not in time to help us for our re-election. It came down in the first year or so of Reagan’s tenure and has been low ever since. It’s emblematic, in many ways, of so many of the things that we did, Leslie, had fruits that bore only after we left office.

And foreign policy, his greatest accomplishment was the Camp David Accords and the resulting Egypt-Israel Peace Agreement, which I believe, and I think Historians believe, to be the single greatest act of Presidential diplomacy in American history. For 13 agonising days and nights at Camp David, the Presidential retreat, a couple of hours from Washington, he negotiated separately with Prime Minister Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, because they were like two scorpions in a bottle. They could not negotiate with each other. He personally drafted 20 separate draft agreements and two personal anecdotes ended up being successful.

The first was on the first Sunday of the 13 days, he took Sadat and Begin to the nearby Gettysburg battlefield, where one of the climatic battles of our Civil War was fought, to underscore the fact that five wars between Egypt and Israel were enough. And then, on the last Sunday, 13 days’ later, we had come very close to an agreement, but we were not there and Prime Minister Begin said, “Mr President, I’m not bluffing, I cannot and will not make any more compromises. I’ve ordered an El Al plane to take me back from Andrews Air Force base. I’m out of here.” Carter, recognising that this would undercut President Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem, that it could inflame the entire Middle East and undercut all the moderates and engulf his own administration itself, took another personal trip, and he did this on the basis, and I’ll contrast that in a second, of really poring over intelligence records on Begin and Sadat, what made them tick? Where were their Red Lines?

He met with our Ambassadors to Egypt and to Israel, to really understand these two main characters, and he knew Begin had a great love for his eight grandchildren, and so, he got each of their names and autographed a photograph of himself, Begin and Sadat at Camp David, saying to each of them, “I hope this will lead to peace.” And he hand delivered it to Prime Minister Begin’s cabin at Camp David and watched as Begin recited the names of each of his grandchildren and saw his lips quiver and his eyes begin to tear. He put his bags down and he said, “Mr President, I’ll make one last try.” The rest is history. 40 years’ later that treaty has never been violated and Israel and Egypt co-operate in fighting Islamic terrorism. Contrast that with the brief Singapore Summit with Kim Jong Un of North Korea, where there is still – with a one-page document, no common understanding, and the even more recent Helsinki Summit between Putin and Trump, in which on a one-on-one meeting no aide was even present and it’s still unclear what was discussed.

Jimmy Carter also put human rights at the centre of his foreign policy, the first and only President to do so. It was to him the sort of reverse side of civil rights at home. It was trying to extend American values abroad and it’s a standard by which future Presidents are judged. This was not a, sort of, dewy eyed, naïve policy. It was done as a soft power weapon during the Cold War, to combat the Soviet Union and compete in the arena of values and ideas for the hearts and minds of the people around the world and he applied it in two separate instances.

The first were to the Pro-American, anti-Communist military regimes in Latin America, who were very repressive and as a result, got 1,000s of political prisoners released, gave momentum to the democratic movements, which flowered after he left office and married that to the Panama Canal Treaty, which was the most difficult battle we had in the Senate. Every American felt the Panama Canal was our canal, not Panama’s, and getting that passed with two thirds of the Senate vote was really difficult. Two personal anecdotes here.

The first was, something you would not see in today’s polarised Washington. One of the real heroes was the Senate Minority Leader, Republican Leader, Howard Baker, who was all of five foot seven, but he made up in his physical stature with being a giant of a man, who was willing to cross party lines and knew that by supporting that canal it probably would end his ability to get the Republican nomination later in his career, but he did it because he was right. Another, and even more colourful vote and more improbable, came from a Conservative Republican Senator named Hayakawa, who famously coined the phrase, “It’s our canal, we stole it fair and square.” And Mondale, his Vice President, having been a Senator, knew Hayakawa and thought maybe there was some chance of appealing to him for his vanity and so, he put him on the phone with Carter in the Oval Office and the President said, “Senator, what can I do to convince you to vote for this treaty?” And he said, “Mr President, if you will agree to meet me every two weeks so I can share my wisdom about the world with you, I’ll support the treaty.” And the President said, “Every two weeks? I wouldn’t want to limit you to just two weeks.” Flattered, he voted for it, Carter never saw him again.

We also applied human rights to the Soviet Union. We reached out to the Dissident Movement, headed by Sakharov, to the Soviet Jewish Immigration Movement. We intervened during the trial of Sharansky, who headed the Soviet Jewish Movement, against the false charges that he was a US spy and that human rights policy struck a blow with what I call the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union. But we joined that with hard power as well.

Now, let me make it clear, I am very praiseworthy of Ronald Reagan for his military build-up and the impact that that had on the unravelling of the Soviet Union, but all of the defence increases, all of the major weapons systems, which came into force during the Reagan administration, we began, we green lighted. The new long range cruise missiles, the intermediate nuclear weapons in Europe, the Stealth Bomber, the MX mobile missile, we all started. And our tough stance against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, still a country in turmoil, played a significant role in unravelling the Soviet Union, and if you want to know what tough is, try a grain embargo on shipping grain to the Soviet Union three weeks before the Iowa primaries, where they grow a lot of grain. Or learning the lesson of the 36 Olympics, where we went to Berlin, while Hitler was rising, and we boycotted and got our European allies to boycott the Moscow Olympics, these had a real impact.

China was also a major victory. Again, Nixon and Kissinger deserve all the credit for the opening to China, but they did not restore diplomatic relations to the People’s Republic, because of the power in the Republican Party of the so-called Taiwan Lobby. We took the lobby on and we won and in the first meeting, in which I was present in the Cabinet meeting with Deng Xiaoping, and all four foot 11 of him, I remember saying to myself, “How does this guy control a billion Chinese?” So, we’re in the Cabinet Room and he said, “Mr President, I appreciate you restoring diplomatic relations, but what I really want is I want you to give us the lowest tariff levels for our Chinese products that you give to our – to your most favourite trading partners.” And I know he said that, “There’s a law called the Jackson-Vanik Law, which bars the Soviet Union from getting those, but that’s because they don’t allow free immigration in the Soviet Union. We will.” And he takes the little White House notepad and pencil, pushes it over to the President and he says, “Mr President, you write on here the number of Chinese you would like us to send you each year, a million, ten million.” And the President says, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll take ten million Chinese each year, if you’ll take 10,000 American Journalists.” Neither had to fulfil that pledge.

Carter also embraced our European allies and saw them as key to our US national security, rather than berating or belittling them. The President has now, almost unfathomably, personally criticised the Prime Minister of Canada, the Chancellor of Germany, and your own Prime Minister. He’s divided the US from our allies by denigrating the value of NATO and the EU to our national security, which we embraced. We also made effective use of what are called G7 summits, which still exist, with the key democratic free market countries, which the current President treats with distain and disinterest, coming late to the one in Canada and leaving early.

The best example is the 1978 Bonn Summit, which was the landmark as the most successful ever held, and your own Prime Minister at the time, Jim Callaghan, had a major hand in that, proposing a tripartite agreement. The Germans and the Japanese would stimulate their economies by tax cuts. The United States would go to world price markets in oil, and the French would agree to open trade and that has held and been extremely important. We also valued NATO, and in the first weeks of the administration, the President instructed his Defence Secretary to upgrade and modernise NATO’s capabilities, culminating in the adoption of the NATO Long-Term Defence Plan.

Our most difficult defence decision was to convince our European allies to counter the deployment by the Soviet Union of their mobile SS-20 missiles, by placing US intermediate nuclear forces in European theatre, something they were not willing, initially, to do. But we were successful in doing it, with the support of another British Prime Minister, then Prime Minister Thatcher, convincing Schmidt and our European allies to accept cruise and Pershing missiles in their country, to counter the Soviet missiles, by a dual track system, deploying them in return for arms control negotiations to eliminate the new Soviet weapons. And Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs years later that this decision, which was implemented by Reagan, but begun by us, convinced him that they could never match our defence capabilities and it was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

Now, to be very candid and honest, the coup de grâce to the Carter Presidency was administered by the cruel, radical, brutal, ageing revolutionary Cleric, Anatol – Ayatollah Khomeni in Iran, whose top aide, by the way, is one of those I interviewed. He held Americans hostage, American Diplomats, in our own Embassy, for 444 humiliating days, outwitting the administration and eroding our political support. Now, I don’t think we can be blamed for the revolution itself and the exile of our ally, the Shah, any more than President Eisenhower could be blamed for the Castro Revolution in Cuba, 90 miles from our shore. But we made mistakes galore. Let me mention a few, because they are with us today. It was, in my opinion, the worst intelligence failure in American history. The CIA, which had reinstalled the Shah in 1953, and upon whom every President had lavished tens of billions of dollars of our most sophisticated arms, did not realise that his domestic support rested on quicksand. They didn’t know, can you believe, that for five years, he had been getting cancer treatments for an incurable form of cancer. They didn’t realise the impact of Khomeni in exile’s cassettes, inflammatory cassettes, inflaming the revolutionaries in Iran, absolutely unacceptable.

One of the toughest decisions we had was how to handle the hostage crisis once it occurred and here the President, in my opinion, made another mistake. He decided to hole himself up in the White House, cancel foreign trips, cancel campaigning in the Democratic primaries, to show he was working full-time on the hostage crisis. But it had the reverse effect, it backfired by making him the hostage in the White House and giving the Iranians greater leverage. Then, what to do, how to release them?

I recommended, and our National Security Advisor, Dr Brzezinski, recommended immediate military action, not bombing Tehran, but manning the harbours, or blockading the harbours, out of which Iranian oil flowed, to choke their economy. Instead, the President pledged to the hostage families that his first goal was getting their loved ones back safely, and he did, but at enormous cost to our reputation and to his. What it did was cause even greater Press attention. The Nightline programme of Ted Koppel started then and Walter Cronkite, who was then the Dean of American reporting at CBS, every single night he’d close his 30 minute broadcast by saying, “Night 103, night 204, night 307,” of the hostage crisis. It was absolutely brutal. We had many agreements and every one we reached was vetoed by Khomeni.

The final blow came with the unsuccessful, disastrous rescue mission, called Desert One in the desert of Iran and it did not occur, as is commonly thought, because we had too few helicopters. Indeed, Carter added two more to what the military wanted. It occurred because we had four military services on a very complex manoeuvre, with three stops before you got to the Embassy in the – in Tehran, in the middle of a major city and those four military services had never practised before. We did not have a joint command at that time and when the rotor of one of those helicopters hit the C130 cargo plane on Desert One before we ever started, and eight servicemen died in flames, those flames engulfed our administration as well.

My book is not just about policy, it’s about people and they could come out of a Shakespearean play: the humorous and the villainous, the heroic and the tragic, and they include Sunny Jim Callaghan, Schmidt, Giscard d’Estaing, his mother and all the other major characters. But the principal player, of course, was President Carter himself, who rose from a tiny gnat infested hamlet of 500 people in South West Georgia to become the 39^th President of the United States. By his own indefatigable campaigning, and I was in that campaign from start to finish, and by tapping into the same anti-Washington, and we’ll talk about, perhaps, the contrast, mood that powered Trump to victory as well.

Carter was himself what I call the first new Democrat, fiscally Conservative, mildly populist, anti-establishment, but socially progressive on race and poverty and a liberal internationalist and free trader, who believed in open and free trade and in our alliances. He was criticised, and rightly so, for excessive reading of papers before making a decision, always asking for more, sometimes even sending back our memoranda with typos and misspellings. But I’ve begun to think, over the years, that’s not a bad way to make decisions, compared to doing so by tweets. He had a very odd view of politics. He was a ferocious campaigner. He did what it took to get elected. But then he believed once you were in the White House, you parked politics at the Oval Office door, you did the right thing, and you would ultimately be rewarded for it. This was a strength and a weakness. It was a strength because it allowed him to take on politically unpopular issues, like Panama, like energy, like the Middle East. But it was a weakness because he forgot that the President is not only the Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces, he’s the Politician in Chief. He has to constantly nurture a winning coalition behind him and to stand behind him when times get tough. This is, by the way, a lesson Donald Trump has learned, it’s his strength. There’s not a day or a tweet that goes by in which he’s not reinforcing his base, showing he stands behind them, even if his actions are divisive or controversial.

So, let me close by simply saying this, I believe my book will take you deeper into the White House than virtually any other Presidential history. You will be a fly on the wall of what it’s like to work in the White house, the unending pressures, the conflicting interest groups, the absence of really good options from which to take. So, in my book, I’m not nominating Jimmy Carter for a place on Mount Rushmore, where our most revered Presidents are carved, but I believe he belongs in the foothills, with a handful of others who left their enduring mark on American society in the world, and that’s the principal argument of my book and I think the principal legacy, which we can talk about today. Thank you very much [applause].

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you, that was wonderful, and I have to say, it’s – I think it’s a really important book. Many of us follow President Carter for his work post-Presidency, but I think as, certainly I know as a child, in Carter’s America, that the take home points were really gas lines and the Iran hostage crisis. It took me going to graduate school to realise that there was a whole lot more and so, I think the book’s incredibly important for Carter as a President, not just Carter post-Presidency.

I want to ask you one question on human rights and then, I know you want to talk about parallels or lessons for today as well, but we’ll also open it to the audience. I wanted to ask this question, because I think what you said is really important and I think we don’t necessarily, in today’s context, recognise quite how radical it was to put human rights on the agenda in the way that President Carter did. And what you said was very interesting, that for him, it was very much directly linked to his concern for civil liberties and civil rights and the Civil Rights Movement, of course, which had gained a lot of steam at home. So, there was that link very much between domestic values and international values and it’s also, you know, very radical, given that, in the last several years, many human rights funders and human rights organisations have taken a very specific decision to get out of Russia, because I think it’s too difficult. And if you think of the context in which President Carter decided to get into the Soviet Union, it seems remarkable that right now, people would be saying it’s just too difficult. So, I wanted to ask you the question, how much resistance did you face, or did President Carter face, in that period when he said, you know, human rights – I mean, yes, there was some opening, there was some falling internationally in the Cold War at that period, but how much resistance did he face internally to really trying to put human rights on the agenda internationally?

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

I mean, a tremendous amount and, first of all, Leslie, let’s recognise, it was not applied universally. For example, Carter never publicly criticised the Shah of Iran for his human rights record. Privately, he urged him to reach out, but publicly he didn’t, nor to Saudi Arabia or others. So, there was a recognition that there are times to apply it and times not to. But having said that, let me give you, again, an anecdote. The very first week of the administration, right after the inauguration, we get a purloined letter sent by Andrei Sakharov, who was a Noble Prize winning Physicist and the leader of the, sort of, underground Democratic Movement in the Soviet Union, to the White House. It’s amazing that it ever got there, but he did and he, Sakharov, said, “Mr President, it’s very important that you stand up for the Democratic Movement in our country.” And we were just about to start the round of nuclear negotiations for what became the SALT II Treaty, and there was a choice to make, because by answering that letter we knew it would offend the Soviet Union and Carter did, and it did offend them, and I think it delayed the conclusion of SALT by many months. But it became a consistent thread, and again, we applied it in Latin America to pro-American anti-communist themes, and there was a tremendous resistance to that.

So, let’s contrast this with the more traditional American foreign policy, which I would say applies as well today, but the Kissinger-Nixon model was called real polity. What that meant was, when United States is engaged in foreign policy, you don’t look at the internal affairs of a country, you look at their external conduct and that’s what you should be concerned about. We felt that you needed to do both and that was the major difference, and it paid of richly in Latin American.

Again, an anecdote, I have a very close friend, Diego Guelar, who became the Argentine Ambassador to the European Union when I was the US Ambassador and he told me, in one of my interviews, the following story. He was a young law student, pro-Democratic student, in Buenos Aires, at the midst of the pro-American Military Dictatorship, totally suppressive and he said, “I,” in the interview, “I want President Carter to know that I am alive today, I have my position as Ambassador today, because of him.” And he said that there were 23 bullets shot into his car while he was in it and he miraculously escaped. So, that’s one of 1000s of instances in which prisoners were released and which the Democratic Movement was given a real voice. That’s absent today and again, it has to be applied with care, but it’s very important for Carter, and I think for the country, that our foreign policy reflect our best values.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Okay, I’m going to open it up. I have one more question, but we don’t have a lot of time, so I want to be sure that we get questions from the audience. I’ll let you start.

Tangy Morgan

Hi, and Tangy Morgan, St James’s Roundtable at Chatham House. But, more importantly, I grew up in Georgia and, actually, I remember President Carter. I was a Page in the Capitol when he was the Senator, as well as when, you know, he was Governor, as well as President and I guess, listening to you, I’m really, really excited about the fact that you’ve outlined all of his accomplishments during his Presidency. My concern has always been that he ran on the Peanut Farmer, you know. He’s, “I’m the Peanut Farmer from Georgia,” and somehow, he never has been able to shake that, even with the Presidential Library in Atlanta and all of the great work that he’s done. And I just wonder, did that ever – did he ever have a regret about maybe using that as the, kind of, the slogan…

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

No, he never had…

Tangy Morgan

…or…?

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

…any regret, because he wouldn’t have been a President without it.

Tangy Morgan

Exactly.

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

But the regret is this, so he ran as a common man, a business, a small businessman, an honest person, a Governor who had said, “The time for racial discrimination is over,” putting Martin Luther King Junior’s portrait in the State Capitol, and so forth. When he campaigned, like 100 days before the Iowa caucus, he always stayed, not in a hotel, because we couldn’t afford it, but in a supporter’s home. He carried his own bags. So, after he’s elected as President, he starts carrying his own bags and he says, “I don’t want to have the famous Hail to the Chief, you know, played when I enter an office.” And I remember, having worked with President Johnson, I said, “It’s not worth my being in the White House if I can’t hear Hail to the Chief.” And we finally convinced him, “You’re President now. You’re President of the United States. You’ve got to take off the Peanut Farmer and the everyday man,” and that was always a dilemma, how to keep your contact with average people and still be President.

Now, we did something quite unique, not done since. Donald Trump has rallies all the time with his supporters. We did something different. A 100 times we had open Town Hall meetings, unscripted, anybody could come, any question could be asked, so that we kept an identification with average people. We brought in the regional and local press on Saturdays, so it wasn’t just the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. So, we tried to do it, but scaling that divide, trying to show he was President, but also, trying to show that he was still the common man, was a dilemma from start to finish.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Okay, I’m going to collect questions, ‘cause we have many. The gentleman here in the back and again, if you say who you are.

Shao

Hello, I’m Shao from Chinese Embassy. I had the pleasure of meeting President Carter in Georgia about a few years ago and I very much enjoyed it. My question is that you mentioned about the normalisation of relations with China, but now, about 40 years since then, President Trump is now waging the trade war against China, blaming the deficit, etc. How do you look at the changes, over the years, and do you think this normalisation with China is something worth doing?

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

And the gentleman right here at the back?

Euan Grant

And thank you very much. Euan Grant, Institute of Statecraft. I do teach, I have done for many years, Desert One in trading courses and it is very much – the reason it is taught, as it’s taught in business schools, is very much on inter-organisational communication. I don’t subscribe to this view that other countries would have made it a triumph and it was down to US particular failings, I don’t believe that’s true.

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

In fact, may I just say, we asked the Israelis, who had done, you know, the rescue…

Euan Grant

Yeah, which is the other one…

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

…in Uganda…

Euan Grant

…I teach, yeah.

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

…if they thought this could work.

Euan Grant

And they said, “No.”

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

They said, “No.”

Euan Grant

No, of course, yes. My question is, given your past role as Ambassador to the E – of the US to the EU, how do you see the EU now and how it has changed, both member states and collectively, in the abs – in any absence of strong American leadership and co-operation? It’s nothing to do with Donald Trump, is the EU up to the job in a peer power conflict potential world? Thank you.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Okay, China, Europe, we’re going to take one more question, right next to him, the gentleman right here, and that’s the questions, isn’t it?

Faruk

Faruk from Iran. During the Iranian Revolution, I was heading the most famous left party in Iran and I was thinking about Mr Carter’s achievement in Iran and was very upset at that time with his legacy. But over the time, I changed my mind and nowadays, I wanted to know, you mentioned President Carter was confronted with different crises, one of them was a hostage crisis. How do you rate this crisis if you want to place – which place do you give to this hostage crisis? Thank you.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Okay, so we have five minutes.

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

So, let’s…

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

And we do have more people in the audience.

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

As a Southerner, I speak slowly…

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

We’ve had China here, I’ve got Iran, so…

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

…so that’s a real challenge. Okay, so…

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

We might get to one more question.

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

…let’s take the last question first. I mean, in my opinion, with all the problems we had, the Kennedy challenge and the Democratic Party splitting the party, the inflation problems, which I mentioned, without question, the hostage crisis is the number one problem. It was – I think we could’ve survived if we hadn’t had the hostage crisis. Now, could we have done anything to prevent it? So, here were the options. The Shah’s support begins to erode. Could we have done more to sure him up? And there, there was a split within the administration, between Vance, the Secretary of State, and Brzezinski. Brzezinski wanted to encourage him to use force, to put the demonstrations down and in the end, Carter did say, “If you want to use force, you can.” And the Shah said, and he’s quoted in his own book, “A monarch can’t shoot his own people.” And his Ambassador, Zahedi, who I interviewed, said, “The Shah pulled back from the confrontation.” Then, there’s the question could Khomeni have been kept from coming back to Iran?

Remember this irony, 1964 the Shah exiles Khomeni to Iraq, to be under the thumb of Saddam Hussein and he stays there for, like, 15 years and then the Shah makes the fatal decision, as his support begins to crack at home, he says, “Wait a minute, this guy is right next door. Maybe I should send him to France,” not realising France has free speech, and so, he uses that exile to foment the revolution. Could we have – I mean, Brzezinski was even talking about downing his plane, asking the French not to let him leave. I don’t – I’m not sure any of that could have happened. But once it happened, we did try to establish some normal relations and there was a precursor to the actual taking, in November 4^th of 1979, of our hostages, of our Diplomats. In February of that year, after Khomeni was in power, there was an initial effort by the students to storm our Embassy and at that time the Iranian Government, under Khomeni, put it down. We beefed up security. We had assurances it wouldn’t happen again. When it did happen again, we expected the same result. Khomeni flipped, his son convinced him that he had to get out in front of the radial students and the rest became history. So, absolutely, it was number one problem.

Number two, you mentioned that I didn’t want to, but you wanted to talk to me, okay. So, what we should be doing is the following. We do have a real problem, and I’ll combine this with China, and I’m going to be very frank, China’s trade and investment policies are unacceptable. Forced technology transfers, trying to steal technology, forced joint ventures as a condition of doing business, but these are best addressed by a rules-based system and with our European allies. So, what are we doing? Instead of uniting with the European Union, whose companies in Europe are subject to the same problems ours are on the other side of the pond. Instead, we unilaterally impose sanctions against European companies. We drive them away from the US, and we have a US – you have an EU-China Summit, which just happens, in which the EU embraces the Belt and Road Initiative, which you had not before. So, instead of uniting the alliance to deal with China, but deal with it, not by unilateral tariffs, but by using WTO rules and by diplomatic means, we’ve really divided them.

Now, I want to say it, and I mentioned this at the beginning, I think we are in a really existential period. You talked about the EU and the role it plays. Let’s look at the connection between Brexit, Trump and the Populist Nationalist Movements in Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, even Italy, Poland and the thread that connects them is immigration. It may be Islamic immigration in Europe, it may be Hispanic immigration in the US, but there – it may be Polish immigrants in the UK, but it’s that sense that the country is being changed in ways that change the face of the country, the values of the country and then so forth. So, this transcendental problem of democracy is not only occurring in the United States, where there are attacks on the judiciary, attacks on the FBI, attacks on the Independent Counsel, attacks on the Press, in ways that are unprecedented, but it’s also happening within Europe and between the US and Europe.

The attacks on NATO, the attacks on the EU, instead of strengthening the EU at a time, it has a real problem, not only because of Brexit, but because of what’s happening throughout the eastern part of the European Union, with its member states. It needs US support. Instead, those very Populist Nationalist parties are being supported by the administration. So, we really are at a very, very difficult point in time in democracy in the US and in Europe. I think we will survive it, because our institutions are strong, but don’t let anybody think that it’s just a passing fancy.

What Donald Trump did, to his credit, he understood, when Hillary, who I worked for did not, and when 15 other Republican candidates ran, that there was a profound concern and discontent by a lot of middleclass America that felt that after the financial crisis and the great recession, that they had been forgotten, they were being left behind. Now, unfortunately, instead of positive policies to apply to those, their grievances are being stoked in ways that go against immigration and against minorities. You have to understand, the United States is a country of 320 million people. We will be, by 2040, you know, we’re talking about 20 years from now, a majority minority country, that is African Americans, Hispanics and Asians will be a majority of the United States by 2040 and already are in our largest state in California. We have got to have Presidents who are cohesive, not divisive forces, who say yes, white working class people have problems and we’re going to address them, but not in ways which divide our country. We have a very, very complicated situation and we need unity more than ever, in an era in which, again, we’re going to be a majority minority United States.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

We’re right at the end, so I know very, very quick, I might take one more question, if you’re alright and the we’ll let you have the – a closing statement as part of that.

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Sure.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Right here in the front row, and we need something positive to finish this with, ‘cause it’s our last event before the summer.

Member

Oh dear, this is not positive at all, I’m sorry. Thank you very, very much. Really riveting and I think we’re all here, sort of, spellbound a little bit by your talk. With what you’ve just said, your last few lines here about the complications of immigration, I’m not trying to be simplistic here, but what role has Russia played in destabilising the immigration issue?

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Okay. So, I mean, here is another remarkable thing. The President’s embracing Putin, who has intervened, not only in our election, according to 17 intelligence agencies, but intervened in the elections in Europe, who is stirring up division and anti-immigrant feelings, who is dividing, just as he wants to do, the US from our transatlantic allies living in the European Union, so, it’s having a very real impact. And instead of taking that dead on and strengthening NATO against Russia, we seem to be denigrating NATO, denigrating our allies and embracing Putin, and this is a very serious problem.

Now, having said that, and here, I think, we – you know, on a positive note, instead of simply criticising, we need to be constructive. So, on the immigration issue, we do need an immigration system, in the United States, which prevents people from illegally coming in at random, at the same time as we need an immigration system, which encourages legal immigrants. I mean, the administration is proposing cutting legal immigration by 50%. We need to demonstrate that we understand that un-chequered immigration by illegals is a problem, at the same time as we address immigration from a more constructive way. And I think, Leslie, at the end, again, I have to be optimistic, because I think that we have a divided system of Government, the three branches. I think the courts, ultimately, the Congress, will act as a check and that we will not simply have a runaway situation, but there’ll be a lot of damage done in the meantime, a lot of broken glass and we have a lot of repair to do. But it’s important that people speak up, and I ended my – I was going to end my prepared remarks by the following. So, you’ll forgive me for mentioning Patrick Henry, who was the hero of another revolution that you think of less favourably, and he said, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” I think, today, we need to say now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of democracy and a rules-based system and to stand up for it.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you very much [applause].

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Here’s the book.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

The book is here and the Ambassador is…

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Thank you.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

…available.

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

Thank you all for coming and I…

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Thank you very much.

Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat

…hope you’ll enjoy the book.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Have a lovely summer and continue to engage with us through the web.