The Carter paradox

My earliest memories of anything related to the presidency are yellow ribbons tied around trees. The ribbons signified the hope that 53 Americans who had been taken hostage in Iran would be safely released. Jimmy Carter was president. I was 9 years old. Fairly or otherwise, that crisis became perhaps the most important issue of Carter’s White House tenure. He knew that the precipitating event — his allowing the Shah of Iran to enter the U.S. for cancer treatment — could result in violence against Americans. Against his better judgement, Carter bowed to powerful voices like Henry Kissinger’s. The president’s misgivings proved to be prescient. After the Shah arrived, Iranian students kidnapped the Americans. Relations between the two nations have never recovered. As I think about that crisis, it occurs to me that Carter embodied everything that most Americans say they want in a president — though, in reality, they don’t. For example, we claim to want someone who single-mindedly focuses on our interests, which is what Carter did (obsessively so) during the hostage crisis and the concurrent economic crisis. That didn’t matter. Americans also pretend to want a president who is inveterately truthful, a trait that Carter epitomized. He...