Perhaps one of the better statements we can most accurately make is that his administration was pretty poor at covering things up, spinning - perhaps to the extent of lacking the confidence Americans required.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/books/review/president-ca...
And make no mistake: the partisan hackery is strong in criticism (more commonly, vacuous dismissal) of Carter. I know a Republican who calls him "that man", a la FDR's detractors.
Fighting to defend a dictator the West effectively installed to suppress a populist movement was unlikely to have a better outcome than the Shah being ousted.
People in the West seem to forget the Iranian Revolution was _extremely_ popular in Iran.
Why was it popular?
Because the Shah was a corrupt and oppressive regime that was hated by the Iranian people. The Iranian Revolution wasn't the first time he was forced out of Iran either.
This delusion that Iran could be "ruled" by the Shah as a positive outcome needs to stop. It isn't borne out by the facts and it would have ended up collapsing eventually. Popular leaders don't need organizations like SAVAK to torture its own people.
What makes a president memorable is what they do when they’re dealt a “bad hand.”
Obama may not be quite the boy scout that Carter has been, but my expectations are that he’ll become an elder statesmen of the republic that we’ll cherish similarly.
People aren't great in and of themselves. They are great within an environment.
So everyone is a "victim" of externalities.
He had lots of really nice things to say about Chavez and Castro when they died, for instance. Even if you're left wing, you need to acknowledge they did some pretty awful things to their people as leaders.
Lots of really nice things? What he said about Castro: "We remember fondly our visits with him in Cuba and his love of his country."
Those would indeed be funny accusations for an ex-POTUS to make.
I wonder if that is a fair judgement or whether he was just the victim of the economic cycle and external forces.