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Examining Carter’s Time as President

Jimmy Carter’s presidency began with a simple act meant to signal a new relationship between the people and their government: He and his wife, Rosalynn, got out of their limousine and walked a short part of the inaugural parade route, hand in hand. His time in office ended four years later with a spiteful gesture by the revolutionary government of Iran, which released 52 American hostages it had held for 444 days — but only when Mr. Carter was out of office.

It was the final insult of Mr. Carter’s term in office. But was his presidency, which ended 43 years before his death Sunday at age 100, really a failed one? 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.

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.

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.

Nor was Mr. Carter’s advocacy of human rights. 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.

Some of his domestic achievements continue to reverberate. 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.

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