Download Former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter won the presidency

Carter Domestic Issues
Former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter won the presidency in the 1976 election. A day after his
inauguration, he granted amnesty to Americans who had evaded the draft, in the hope of moving the nation
beyond the Vietnam War. Severe inflation continued, fueled by the ongoing energy crisis.
Economic Problems Sap Confidence Carter
struggled with the energy crisis and severe inflation
during his leadership. Inflation ate away at people’s
savings, raised the prices of necessities, and made
American goods more costly overseas. The U.S.
automobile industry suffered greatly as well. Japanese
car companies vastly expanded their sales in the United
States by selling better-built and more fuel-efficient cars
at reasonable prices.
At the center of the nation’s economic troubles was the
ongoing energy crisis. In 1973, a gallon of gas cost about
40 cents. By the end of the decade, it cost close to $1.20.
To make matters worse, the winter of 1976– 1977 was an
especially bitter one in parts of the United States,
increasing the need for heating oil. Fuel shortages
caused factory closings and business losses.
The 1979 Oil Crisis brought on by decreased oil production due
to a revolution in Iran caused another spike in gas prices and
inflation. Carter responded to the oil crisis by calling on
Americans to conserve and by asking Congress to raise taxes on
crude oil, which he hoped would encourage conservation.
However, the bill that finally passed in the Senate had few of the
president’s ideas in it. Critics saw this as one more example of
Carter’s poor leadership skills.
Carter did implement several domestic policies
that his successors would build on during the
1980s. The Community Reinvestment Act of
1977 which Congress passed and Carter signed
into law in 1977, also helped address the
nation’s economic woes.
In order to create economic opportunity for
citizens, this law required banks to make loans
in the same neighborhoods where they took
deposits. This requirement enabled many lowto moderate-income Americans, especially
ethnic minorities, to become homeowners for
the first time. The law remains in effect today.
Whether it has had unintended consequences,
possibly contributing to the mortgage crisis that
triggered the Great Recession of 2007 to 2011 is
an issue hotly debated in the business
community.
Carter Foreign Policy
Early in his presidency, Jimmy Carter announced that his
foreign policy would be guided by a concern for
human rights. He tried to use his foreign policy to end
acts of political repression, such as torture. Carter also
worked to achieve detente, and in 1979, he signed the
SALT II treaty to limit nuclear arms production.
Carter's greatest foreign policy success and setback were both in the Middle East.
Egypt and Israel had been enemies since Israel's founding in 1948. In 1977, Carter
invited the leaders of the two nations to the presidential retreat at Camp David. For
nearly two weeks, the three leaders carried on the difficult negotiations that produced
what is known as the Camp David Accords.
These agreements provided the framework for a peace treaty in which Egypt formally recognized the nation of
Israel, becoming the first Arab nation to do so. In return, Israel withdrew its troops from the Sinai Peninsula,
which it had controlled since the 1967.
The Iran Hostage Crisis Carter hoped that the Camp David Accords would usher in a
new era of cooperation in the Middle East. Yet, events in Iran showed that troubles in
the region were far from over. Since the 1950s, the United States had supported the
anticommunist rule of the Shah, or emperor, of Iran. In the 1970s, however, opposition
to the Shah began to grow within Iran. Anger toward the nation that had long propped
up the Shah’s repressive regime—the United States—would soon boil over as well.
Dying of cancer, the Shah fled Iran in January 1979.
Fundamentalist Islamic clerics, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, took
power. Carter allowed the Shah to enter the United States to
seek medical treatment.
The reaction to this event led to enraged radical Iranian
students invading the U.S. Embassy in Iran and taking 66
Americans as hostages. The Khomeini government took control
of both the embassy and the hostages to defy the United States.
The hostage crisis consumed Carter’s attention during the last year
of his presidency. To many Americans, his failure to win the
hostages’ release was evidence of American weakness. As Peter
Bourne put it in his biography of Jimmy Carter, “Because people felt
that Carter had not been tough enough in foreign policy . . . some
bunch of students could seize American diplomatic officials and hold
them prisoner and thumb their nose at the United States."
The hostage crisis began to change the way Americans viewed the world outside their borders. Nuclear war
between the two superpowers was no longer the only threat to the United States. Although the Cold War still
concerned Americans, the threats posed by conflicts in the Middle East threatened to become the greatest foreign
policy challenge of the United States.