ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
For more on - for more perspective on Carter's political legacy, we're now joined by NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving. Hi, Ron.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Hey. Good to be with you.
LIMBONG: Ron, Carter's time after leaving the White House - we've heard all throughout this hour that this bit of his life often overshadows his presidency, in part because he faced a lot of crises and left office after a landside loss to Ronald Reagan. So how does his presidency look now in retrospect?
ELVING: There has been a certain amount of reassessment done, particularly in just most recent years by sympathetic, mostly liberal commentators who feel that Jimmy Carter has not been given his due. Now, if you go back and look at the four years of his actual time in office, he had some early successes. He had the Panama Canal treaties which were negotiated finally, and they had been under negotiation since the 1950s. He concluded that in 1977, got those treaties signed. And, of course, the Panama Canal Treaty, I suppose, is going to be controversial again, now that President Trump - or President-elect Trump has brought it up as a sore point. But at the time, Carter was bringing to fruition a longtime ambition on the part of Republican and Democratic presidents alike to normalize our relationship with Panama and to give them operational control of the canal that crosses their country. That's where things have been since, and we can talk another time about Trump's objections to that arrangement. But it has been essentially a settled matter since 1977 and the final handover of the canal in 1999.
So it's also memorable that within that first two years, he was able to bring together the leaders of Egypt and Israel. And I know we've already talked about that during the course of this hour, but it was stunning. And it was an achievement that no president before him had gotten anywhere close to achieving. And so that is something that he will always have in his name, the Camp David Peace Accords, so called because he personally supervised and shuttled - diplomatted (ph) back and forth between those two leaders at Camp David, where he invited them to come and negotiate the treaty. It was an extraordinary achievement, but almost immediately, the political payback turned against him - in 1978, had a really rough midterm.
LIMBONG: Right.
ELVING: It's when a lot of prominent Republican figures that we all have known a lot about ever since came to town. We would name among them, say, Newt Gingrich, for example, Dick Cheney, first elected to the House in 1978. It was a big Republican year, and it set the stage for what would be another big Republican year in 1980 and, of course, the rise and election of Ronald Reagan.
LIMBONG: Yeah. Real quick, we've got one minute left. If you can think of the lasting legacy that he has, what would you say it is?
ELVING: That a president can make more of his fame and his name recognition and his power, if you will, after he has left office than he did when he was in office - that it can be not just redeemed, but it can be expanded and turned into something else entirely, and that many of the moral decisions that he made and represented are going to look better and better as time goes on.
LIMBONG: Yeah. That's NPR senior political editor and correspondent, Ron Elving. Ron, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Andrew. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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