Kaplan had some nice words about President Ford on the Atlantic’s online edition:

That’s Character
The dignity of Ford’s post-presidency

In all the commentary about Gerald Ford, one aspect of his life that has received little notice, but which I suspect is subconsciously behind a lot of the accolades, was his public role after he left the White House. It was understated to the point of disappearance. Two years ago in a piece about the media in Policy Review, I wrote that it may take long “for the realization to seep in that Ford has been our greatest contemporary ex-president. For in an age of mass media, where divinity is dependent upon being noticed by the crowd and being forgotten is the equivalent of excommunication””?high character is rightly defined by the willingness to embrace obscurity the moment one relinquishes lofty bureaucratic responsibility.”

Not surprisingly, one victim of this compliment to Ford is President Carter, who Kaplan has excoriated on numerous occasions since his first book, Surrender or Starve. Continued:

Indeed, because of the way technology has revolutionized the media, never before in history have all of us been so tempted, and under so much social pressure, to have our opinions in the marketplace. [CZ: Heck, why do you think I blog?] If any former president has been a creature of an age of mass media it has been Jimmy Carter, who for a generation now, cannot seem to go a few weeks without issuing a statement, embarking on a diplomatic initiative, or publishing yet another new book or article. Behind all his undeniable good deeds, this former president seems to have an obsession with being noticed by the crowd. While his diplomatic initiatives have sometimes been well-founded, overall they have complicated rather than helped along the work of sitting presidents, both Democratic and Republican. It is almost as though he has been competing with them, offering an alternative address for foreign dictators who don’t much like White House policy. And yet the more high profile stunts he tries””?and the more books he publishes””?the more devalued he seems to become. Being noticed by the crowd exacts its own law of diminishing returns.

Todd Gitlin at TPM Cafe has this response:

I can’t help wondering if Kaplan and his supporters were all so up in arms when Richard Nixon, during his twenty years of forced retirement, churned out books and op-ed pieces on every foreign policy question under the sun. Or for that matter, when Henry Kissinger did, and does, the same.

Certainly Nixon and Kissinger published numerous books after the end of their political careers. But the difference in their behavior as compared to Carter seems obvious. Both of these men were far more interested in history, and spent their time writing books on diplomacy, history, and promoting their version of the 1960s and 1970s with their memoirs. The closest Nixon got to criticism of, or competition with, the ongoing public polity was in his last book, written and published while Bush I was president, titled Seize the Moment: America’s Challenge in a One-Superpower World, saying that Communism had lost but freedom had not yet won, and America’s challenge now was to spread free markets and government to prevent authoritarian retrenchment. Kissinger was a little more forthright in his criticism of post-Cold War politics in Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, but even that was muted. That’s a far cry from regularly competing with the foreign policy of elected officials, which is what Carter has made of his presidency.

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