#35 Jimmy Carter & US Foreign Relations w/ Nancy Mitchell
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2016
⏱️ 49 minutes
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Summary
Jimmy Carter's Presidency is one few Americans remember fondly. In a 2013 ranking created by statistician Nate Silver, Carter took the #26 spot, right between William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolidge. The economic crises Carter inherited upon taking office in 1977 plagued his administration, and his perceived weakness in fighting the Cold War only added to the sense of unease created by America's loss in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. But is it possible that Americans' perceptions of Carter don't match the reality?
Dr. Nancy Mitchell says that's the case, and she joins Bob and Ben to explain why. She explains Jimmy Carter's Presidency through the lens of his foreign policy in Africa, and argues that Carter was not an ideologue, but a full-fledged Cold Warrior who was committed to maintaining US influence abroad. Nancy also discusses the legacy of Carter's Presidency today, and applies her expertise on US Foreign Policy to assess Barack Obama and Donald Trump's approach to diplomacy.
Dr. Nancy Mitchell is a Professor of US Diplomatic History at North Carolina State University. She has published extensively in her field of expertise, and her most recent book, Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (Stanford University Press, 2016) recently won the American Academy of Diplomacy's Douglas Dillon Award for Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy.
More on this episode and The Road to Now is available at our website: www.theroadtonow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up, on the road to now. |
| 0:03.2 | There are things to be very critical of with Carter, but I do think that he deserves a better |
| 0:10.6 | rap in history than he's gotten. He got elected in some way similar to Trump. |
| 0:16.5 | If you just do a search of New York Times headlines in 1977 and 78, |
| 0:23.4 | there are more headlines on Africa and African issues than there are on the Middle East. |
| 0:28.8 | It's really something that's forgotten now, how important Africa was at that moment. |
| 0:34.3 | I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:35.1 | I'm Ben Sawyer, and this is the road to now, live from Bob Crawford's house. Yes, we're in my basement. That's right. Although not live, I guess, to be fair. We're recording this on a Thursday. We'll be airing this on a Monday, but you guys get the impression. We're live enough for you all, right? Live enough for ourselves. And we just got back. I came up here. |
| 0:54.5 | I'm home visiting my mother Gloria back in Mount Pleasant, North Carolina. |
| 0:58.3 | I drove up to Bob's place, and we went over to NC State University, where we had a fantastic interview with Nancy Mitchell of NC State University. |
| 1:06.9 | Bob, you want to... |
| 1:09.0 | Nancy wrote a book recently about Jimmy Carter and his foreign policy with regards to Africa. |
| 1:15.6 | And she, through that research, and she did very extensive, extensive research into the Carter |
| 1:22.0 | presidency, she has reimagined what we once thought as a given. |
| 1:30.4 | Well, you know, Carter has this reputation of being an impotent president. |
| 1:34.5 | Right, yeah. |
| 1:35.3 | You know, we think of the gas crisis. |
| 1:37.5 | We think of the recession. |
| 1:39.9 | We think of a time when America's standing in the world was diminished. |
| 1:46.0 | Right, the Iranian hostage crisis. And what Professor Mitchell has done is shown us areas that he was very successful, and he was very hawkish. |
| 1:54.0 | Right. |
| 1:55.0 | Don't think of Carter as a hawk. |
... |
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