U.S. Foreign Policy in the Carter Years, 1977-1981: Highest-Level Memos to the President consists of 2,557 documents and 8,904 pages of memoranda used to brief and advise President Carter on the most important national security issues of the day. The set comprises all currently declassified daily memoranda from the secretary of state (or acting secretary) and the national security advisor. These daily updates are supplemented with the meeting minutes of the National Security Council and its two committees, and weekly memoranda from the national security advisor detailing the activities of the National Security Council staff. Many of the documents have Carter’s personal annotations.
In some respects, Jimmy Carter relied even less on formal National Security Council meetings than his predecessors, using them not for actual decision-making as much as a venue to discuss current problems. In addition to holding between 35 and 40 NSC meetings during his presidency, he reduced the number of NSC subcommittees from eight to two: the Policy Review Committee and the Special Coordination Committee. This makes the work of those bodies of greater interest to researchers. The Policy Review Committee’s purview was issues that fell under the authority of one agency – policy toward an individual country, for example – and were chaired by whomever was most responsible for that topic, often the secretary of state. The Special Coordination Committee’s purview was issues that involved several agencies, such as arms control negotiations, and was always chaired by the national security advisor (or his deputy). After either committee concluded a meeting, a short memorandum was sent to the president with policy recommendations that often served as the basis for a presidential directive. This collection includes both the condensed and verbatim records of those meetings, depending on what was publicly available at the time of publication.
One of the unusual highlights of this set is that it encompasses written advice given directly and solely to President Carter by his two highest-level foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. (Others, including Vice President Walter Mondale and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, were also important policy contributors but were not consistently at the same level as Vance and Brzezinski, and their direct communications with Carter about pure foreign policy matters are far less numerous and accessible.) Crucially, many of the Vance and Brzezinski memos include handwritten responses from Carter. As such, they open a window into the unfiltered opinions of the president and his most senior aides about the issues they considered to be of special importance.
In addition, these memos, along with Carter’s often trenchant rejoinders, offer insights into the personalities of the players and how they interacted with each other in the policy process. It is important to note that Jimmy Carter continues to be alternately praised and lambasted by outside observers, while the tempestuous relationship between Vance and Brzezinski has always been important for understanding the administration’s foreign policy choices. Given the significance of these personality issues, the relatively unguarded nature of many of the comments in these records makes them unusually valuable for researchers in assessing not just the policies but also the personal characteristics and interactions of these notable historical figures.
The collection also includes all available summaries and minutes of the Policy Review Committee and the Special Coordination Committee, two of the most important policy-formulating bodies of Carter’s presidency, shedding light on the views of other cabinet officers and agency heads who helped shape U.S. foreign policy. Access to these materials makes it possible to trace the evolution of the administration’s approaches to world affairs, to comprehend the rationales behind different policy options, to learn which agencies and officials supported which choices, and to understand how final decisions were reached.
A further benefit for researchers is that, unlike document collections focusing on a single country or topic, this compilation, if read chronologically, allows researchers to experience the unpredictable daily flow of events and crises exactly as Carter and his top advisers did. Alternatively, when isolated by topic, the documents let readers explore specific events as they unfolded and see how they fit within the context of the many other global issues facing the president.
| Time Period | Number of Documents |
| 1977 | 580 |
| 1978 | 633 |
| 1979 | 661 |
| 1980 | 662 |
| 1981 | 21 |