Jimmy Carter’s legacy

It’s obvious that much went badly during Mr. Carter’s time in the White House. To some extent, he was overtaken by events that had been set in motion well before he took office. The seething resentment among many Iranians that led to the hostage crisis dated back at least a quarter-century. The economic problems that dogged the administration were a continuation of trends that had been developing through two or three administrations, and they were greatly exacerbated by the oil crisis triggered by Iran’s revolution. The general dismay with and alienation from government could be, and generally were, seen as in large part products of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

In fact, there were solid and lasting accomplishments by the Carter administration. The Camp David agreement, which has brought a long if uneasy peace to what was the most dangerous conflict point in the Middle East, was his administration’s greatest foreign policy achievement. It’s hard to see how the accord between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin could have been reached without Mr. Carter’s constant presence during the talks and careful attention to the needs of the two principals.

There was no great political benefit to be had in that endeavor, and there was even less in another: the treaties that changed the status of the Panama Canal Zone and ended a number of American prerogatives there. It wasn’t a popular action, but Mr. Carter pursued it to completion because he thought it the most sensible and fair solution to a problem that threatened to become worse over time as Panamanian politicians demanded change and fomented discontent in a sensitive area.

Nor was Mr. Carter’s advocacy of human rights as an essential element of American foreign policy particularly politic. In practice, of course, he found that reconciling such high ideals with U.S. interests abroad was no simple matter: He faced many of the same contradictions as presidents before and after him, and ended — in both his presidency and his post-presidential travels — feeling the need to deal with some pretty unsavory leaders.

Some of his domestic achievements continue to reverberate. Mr. Carter did more than all previous presidents combined to diversify the federal judiciary, appointing 57 non-White people and 41 women to the bench. He also pushed through a 1978 law deregulating the airline industry and boosting competition, which made fares more affordable and increased the number of routes offered.

Perhaps the most damage was done to his presidency and his reelection chances by the combination of economic stagnation and inflation, exacerbated by a continuing energy crisis. His appointment, late in his term, of Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve was seen as essential to the economic turnaround eventually brought about by Mr. Volcker’s measures over eight years during the Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations — albeit at the cost of a recession that devastated many people’s lives.

Many of Mr. Carter’s mistakes were matters of style and temperament. He didn’t get along well with the press, and he paid for it; much of the mockery directed at him seems in retrospect overdone. But he contributed to it with a tendency sometimes to overmanage, by misreading how some of his actions would be perceived — as in his demanding resignations from his Cabinet at the height of his troubles — and a strain of what was often seen as self-righteousness, expressed at times in a scolding tone in his public discourse. Characteristically, Mr. Carter would on occasion frankly acknowledge his shortcomings in this regard.