#265 The Legacy of Jimmy Carter's Foreign Policy w/ Nancy Mitchell
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2023
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jimmy Carter only served four years as President (1977-1981) but his approach to foreign policy produced big results, including the return of the Panama Canal to Panama, a strategic nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union (SALT-II), and US formal recognition of the People's Republic of China. In this episode we welcome Nancy Mitchell back to the show to discuss the key moments in Carter's Presidency and how his administration's decisions look from the perspective of 2023.
Dr. Nancy Mitchell is Professor of History at North Carolina State University, where she specializes in the history of US foreign policy. Her most recent book, Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (Stanford University Press, 2016) won the Douglas Dillon Award in 2016 and the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize in 2017. You can hear our previous conversation w/ Nancy in episode #35 "Reassessing Jimmy Carter" (Dec. 2016).
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the road to now. |
| 0:08.7 | And this road's looping around, Bob. |
| 0:10.3 | This road's taking a hard line back to 2016 to revisit a topic and a guest that was in the early days. |
| 0:20.1 | Joining us right now, professor of history at North |
| 0:22.9 | Carolina State University. Nancy Mitchell, welcome to the show. Thanks very much. It's great to be back. |
| 0:28.8 | The last time we talked to you, and I went back and listened to this episode last night as I was |
| 0:33.8 | prepping, we spoke to you in December of 2016. That was two presidents ago. |
| 0:40.8 | It's crazy the show has been on this long. I want to, before we wrap up at the end, |
| 0:44.6 | talk about some, you know, the questions we asked there, like the prospects for the Trump |
| 0:48.7 | administration. But for now, we're actually back around to Jimmy Carter. For those of you guys who have been listening to the podcast regularly for the last |
| 0:57.2 | few episodes, we've taken this interesting path where we started out talking about |
| 1:01.3 | the memory of presidents, the way that their legacies are shaped, you know, at the time of |
| 1:05.2 | their death and then afterwards. |
| 1:06.7 | Then we shared this great conversation that Bob recorded with Andrew Young, you know, who was Carter's diplomat to the United Nations. |
| 1:14.7 | And in that conversation, what you couldn't hear is that like the 10 minutes, 15 minutes that me and Bob talked before we recorded, where Nancy Mitchell's name came up like five times when we were told. |
| 1:25.1 | Oh, yeah, Nancy Mitchell said that. |
| 1:26.4 | And Nancy Mitchell talked about this. And so we were like, well, why mitchell said that and nancy mitchell talked about this and so we were |
| 1:28.5 | like well why don't we have nancy mitchell back on and ben not only not only do we say |
| 1:34.4 | repeat the name nancy mitchell often uh in in many episodes our our guest comes up but when i spoke |
| 1:41.7 | with andrew young one of the first things he said to me, as I said, |
| 1:45.9 | when I was telling him what I was hoping to speak with him about, he said, you know, |
| 1:50.2 | woman named Nancy Mitchell wrote a great book about this. And I can't believe the documents |
... |
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