Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
One More Helicopter
During a recent press conference to discuss his cancer diagnosis, Jimmy Carter was asked about his presidency and what he would have done differently:
“I wish I’d sent one more helicopter to get the hostages and we would have rescued them and I would have been re-elected,” Carter said. His response elicited laughter from the audience …
If you watch the video, it seems he’s joking a bit. Perhaps it only seems. James Earl Carter left the White House thirty-four and half years ago. To have provoked so immediate a response suggests that the failure of Operation Eagle Claw has been preying on his mind for decades. There is no phrase in the English language so terrible as “If only I’d…”
The unintended humour of the clip — which, perhaps, the 39th president missed — is that his fall from power is only partly attributable to the Iranian Hostage crisis. The crisis itself was a national humiliation for the United States, yet it so perfectly symbolized Carter’s vacillating leadership. Failing to send one more helicopter was simply one more example of Jimmy Carter’s executive maladroitness.
Let’s assume that one more helicopter had been sent, that Delta Force had been successful in rescuing the 52 American hostages in Tehran. It would have been regarded as a national triumph, a much-needed salvo after the psychological trauma of Vietnam. Carter’s leadership skills would certainly have been given a burnish. So what? President George H. W. Bush — riding high after the success of Desert Storm — had a crushing lead over his rivals going into 1992 campaign. We still wound up with eight years of sleazy Clintonesque scandals.
Operation Eagle Claw took place in April of 1980. Had the operation been a success it would have given Governor Reagan six months to whittle away at President Carter’s lead. Even in the aftermath of Eagle Claw, President Carter actually lead the polls for most of the 1980 campaign. What put Reagan over the top was his sterling performance in the debates. The final outcome was a ten point margin of Reagan over Carter. Had John Anderson dropped out, we might have seen a landslide foreshadowing 1984.
In 1980, the case for Jimmy Carter as a weak leader was damning, but the case for Jimmy Carter as an inept economic manager was decisive. Long before anyone heard of James Carville, the Reagan campaign understood that what mattered to Americans was the economy. Carter did not. Instead of projecting an air of concern for the hardships of the unemployed and the inflation pinched, Carter looked obsessed with a peace deal in the Middle East.
From the misery index to promises to cut taxes and shrink the federal government, the 1980 campaign demonstrated that, absent war, economics drives presidential campaigns. A generation and a half ago, American voters decided Ronald Reagan would be better at minding the store. History has vindicated that judgement. The GOP primary field — focused now on Hillary’s latest abuse of power — would do well to learn that lesson.
Published in History
“‘I wish I’d sent one more helicopter to get the hostages and we would have rescued them and I would have been re-elected,‘ Carter said. His response elicited laughter from the audience …”
So . . . not – – “they wouldn’t have had to endure so many more months of captivity” or “they would have been returned to their families sooner” or “perhaps the servicemen needlessly killed on that aborted mission might still be alive today” – – – ?
No, the main thing still haunting Carter about that mission after all these years is that it cost him re-election?
Doesn’t elicit much laughter from me.
You’re right. It was remarkably cold blooded of him.
Or perhaps he might have said, “I wish I had threatened to bomb the everlovin’ [CofC] out out them.”
Exactly. His concerns involve only himself. No thoughts about the hostages themselves. Or their families. Or the mess he put the nation in. Just his own re-election.
I was dating a guy, years ago, who related to me the exciting moment that he got to meet a former president: “And not just any president” he rhapsodized, “but Jimmy Carter! Someone I actually respect.”
That was the moment I knew I had no future with that boy.
So why was Carter making the decision on the helicopter requirements in the first place? Did FDR allocate the number of battleships providing fire support at Normandy or any of the Pacific invasions?
I wondered about that comment when I first heard it too – – sounded odd to me, since I couldn’t recall any specifics of the disastrous mission off-hand, only that it failed, helicopters crashed and people died – – but this quote, from the Operation Eagle Claw link above, cleared that up (and made Carter’s apparent obsession with the ramifications solely to his career all that much more galling to me, as the deaths occurred on exit):
“During planning it was decided that the mission would be aborted if fewer than six helicopters remained, despite only four being absolutely necessary. In a move that is still discussed in military circles, the commanders asked President Carter for permission to abort and Carter granted the request.”
I know the polls of that era indicate differently, but during the 1980 election it just felt to me as though the entire country was just enduring the last year of the Carter’s wretched presidency so that they could vote him out. It wasn’t just Carter’s failure at Desert One that doomed his reelection; it was doomed because his entire presidency was mostly a failure.
Even with one more helicopter, the chances of success were not high.
The same sand fouling that affected the equipment inbound could have affected them outbound.
The GHWB analogy is error. GHWB had an adverse media spinning things against him. The hero Carter would not have.
That’s what I thought in 2011.
Ah, yes. You see it’s not that his entire foreign policy was flawed, it’s that one little tweak in execution would have saved the day. It’s the same mentality that posited that an “unbelievably small” intervention in Syria could affect the outcome there and bring the Assad regime to heel.
Up until Obama, Jimmy Carter was the worst President of my lifetime. I was in college during hostage crisis and recall how impotent the US was at that time, thanks to his leadership, totally humiliating. To me, in my simple mindedness, it was an unanswered act of war. I could never understand why he couldn’t have turned tables and demanded release of the hostage within x amount of days or we will topple your government, no further questions. What bothers me even more these many years later is how embittered he is, how much he hates his own countryman for voting his sorry ass out.
As I recall, Carter was the doofus who thought it was just fine for the Shah to fall and this religious nut no one had ever heard of, from his hangout in Paris, would come to power in a revolution. I think Carter thought Khomeini was just leading a tent revival or something. But no, with his acquiescence, Iran became the font of exported Islamic terror. And it’s been Death to America ever since. Thanks so much, Jimmy.
This is easy for me to say, because I wasn’t a hostage and didn’t know any of them, but I believe that if we had viewed their taking as an act of war, and declared war on Iran as a result, the history of the next 40 years would have turned out a lot better than it did.
This sentence could become an internet meme for failed endeavors of all kinds: “I wish I’d sent one more helicopter.”
It’s not 1980 any more. Elections are about more than the economy these days, though I do think that if the current stock market crash leads to another recession, that will actually improve the GOP chances. Still, foreign policy and social issues are huge now and they should be. The world didn’t seem very simple back then, but it was actually a simpler place than now. The divide between conservatives and progressives is currently a grand canyon, and personally, I don’t think it can be negotiated. We either spin disastrously out of control, prog (Brave New World) fashion, or we regain some shared understandings about family. Foreign policy was terrible under Carter, no question, but I believe the world situation is worse now. We should learn from history. Obama could and should have learned some lessons from Carter’s many failures, but we also need prudent leadership that deals with contemporary problems with some historical guidance. It would be a mistake to think Carville’s dictum (It’s the economy, stupid) is the only game in town in the world of 2016.
For what it’s worth, I enjoyed meeting Carter, although the event confirmed to me that he’s no longer rational; he got angry about how bitter and partisan politics became under Reagan, and then blamed it on Citizens United. I don’t know if it would have been better or worse if he’d blamed the Illuminati or Lizard men.
Edit: Although I’m fine with not being dated (Mrs. of England is fine with that, too), if this opinion endangers future hanging out at meetups, I’m not so principled that I won’t disavow all thought of having written this and delete the comment, replacing it with a “That scoundrel Carter? Why, I wouldn’t feel fit to let the heel of my boot trample on his grave” sort of statement.
For those who haven’t met her, Kel is well worth sacrificing to hang out with.
We can’t know what difference an extra helicopter would have made; perhaps it would have worked out. After that, it’s hard to know what difference it would have made; these things are emergent. I do think that Carter was unlucky in the failure, and that America was lucky in it.
Carter was an idiot. I remember reading about the rescue attempt. He wanted complete control over the actual operation from the White House. he wanted a guarantee there would be no civilian casualties. He tied the hands of the on scene commander and demanded the impossible.
One more helicopter? The number of helicopters wasn’t the problem. One problem was the decision to use USMC helo pilots to fly Navy minesweeping helicopters under the control of a USAF controller to carry out an Army Delta Force mission in a sandy, dusty environment in which no one had trained.
From what I understand* the failure of the rescue mission didn’t lose him the election by itself so much as it confirmed what most people already suspected, that Carter was feckless and incompetent.
*I was born in 1978 so while I technically lived through the Carter administration, I don’t remember any of it.
There are lots of bad things that could have happened and which we could not predict.
However, the mechanical attrition has a highly predictable component.
I was just thinking this morning, after glancing past one of many new articles lauding President Carter’s many achievements, how we will need suffer the inevitable rewriting of history in regards to his administration, in light of his revealing his terrible illness. “Here it comes”, I thought.
Yes, it seems Mr. Carter lived by all the virtues he espoused while in office and, once he was just a citizen, I applaud his efforts. As the leader of the free world, those same virtues took us to the cusp of ruination and I’m no more likely to forget them than I am his Even & Odd license plate criteria just to get in line for gas.
Bless his heart for the decent man he’s proved to be and the long life he lead it as.
And let his tenure be a lesson to us all in what’s to come, as to how decency and hugs do not superpower leader make.
I disagree that he’s a decent man. He is bitter to this day that he wasn’t reelected.He has meddled with and undermined the foreign policy of all of his successors. From Slate :”In November 1990, two months after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Carter wrote a letter to the heads of state of permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. He urged the countries to drop their support for Bush’s proposed military solution. Instead, Douglas Brinkley outlines in The Unfinished Presidency… assessment of Carter’s post-presidential years, Carter asked countries to give “unequivocal support to an Arab League effort” for peace. ” He never met a dictator he didn’t like. I have even read that he didn’t build those Habitat houses, just showing up for a photo op.
I suppose one’s interpretation of decency is as varied as one’s religion. Or absent.
Like so many liberals, I imagine he thought his policies fulfilled a need to be thought altruistic, with no regard for ramifications.
I do believe he’s a deeply Christian man and that his Faith guides him. It’s proved naive and fruitless, time and time again in modernity. Unfortunately.
Ah, James – – you can always make me laugh. And think. And laugh some more . . .
That was a rather flip summation, on my part. If politics or such preferences were hardcore deal breakers for me, I’d have had about 1.5 dates over my two decades in NY. The Carter comment was just one in a long line of brow-furrowing moments for me where I questioned the boy’s judgment – – it’s probably more accurate to say, that was the moment I started to suspect we’d have no future together.
But he and I are still friends. In fact, I sang at his wedding. :)
He was a small man, a terrible president, and his ineptness lead directly to the current status in the Mid-East. Had he returned to peanut farming after governing Georgia the world would undoubtedly have been the better for it.
Future Carter memorial….
I didn’t need any more proof that Carter, despite having a ton of brainpower, is a complete idiot.
But I continue to see more proof whenever his peanut-hole opens up and noise comes out of it.
What’s more interesting is that a century or two ago, other US citizens were taken hostage by Muslim fanatics, and two Presidents raised a small armada and sent them to retrieve the hostages and refused to pay a ransom.
Later on, neither President was heard musing “I wish I’d sent one more frigate”. Because the fledgling Navy got the job done. Carter, an ex-Navy guy, should have a pair of clankers that would prevent him from acting such a milquetoast, but apparently he gave those up when he first set foot in the White House.
I think it’s a fine idea that when Presidents retire, they more or less shut up, excepting the occasional memoir.