A Rough Apprenticeship, a New Beginning
He had passed through a difficult apprenticeship, plummeting in public esteem at one point to a 30% favorable rating. He was being regarded at home and abroad as a nice enough fellow but one without much flair for leadership or talent for using the formidable powers of his office. Then Jimmy Carter began to turn things around at Camp David, not during the deservedly acclaimed summit in September with Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat, but at a far less visible conference in April with Cabinet members and top White House advisers.
At that session Carter gave Chief Aide Hamilton Jordan authority to coordinate policies and pull policymakers into line. The President began concentrating on only the most important issues, dropping the original every-thing-at-once strategy that had spread him far too thin and exasperated Congress. As U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young put it, "In the early days Carter felt that he could force Congress and history and everything else to work according to his flow chart. He has learned that it doesn't happen that way."
By fall, Carter had run up an impressive string of victories on foreign and defense policies: ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty, sale of high-performance jet fighters to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, an end to the Turkish arms embargo, abandonment of the Navy's plans for a fifth nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
At year's end Carter came close to achieving a triple crown in foreign policy: he established normal relations with mainland China and seemed to have a breakthrough on strategic arms limitations with the Soviet Union. But he failed to get Egypt and Israel to sign a peace pact, even though he had, almost singlehanded, brought them closer to peace at the Camp David summit than they had been in 30 years. His achievements were also somewhat diminished by the U.S. inability to help bring calm to Iran.
Some political scientists were troubled that most of Carter's successes were in foreign affairs. Observed Seymour Martin Lipset of the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif: "Carter is in the same boat as Nixon, looking good abroad while facing a sea of domestic troubles." But the President did salvage some gains: a truncated energy bill despite the Administration's confused and uncertain performance of a year earlier, Civil Service reform and a veto of wasteful water projects.
Carter is still an enigmatic leader of uncertain political philosophy. He is not inspirational by nature, and is not likely ever to be a charismatic commander. This failing could make him vulnerable to a challenge. Much will depend on how he handles two issues that loom in 1979: ratification of SALT II by a Senate suspicious of Soviet motives and of Carter's seeming willingness to accommodate Moscow; and reducing inflation, on which he is steering a conservative course that will be attacked by the liberals. Both battles promise to be bruising, and their outcome will largely determine whether the new beginning that Jimmy Carter made in 1978 will carry him to a second term in 1980.
Rugged Activist for a Troubled Church