Tim Lee Carter
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Tim Lee Carter (September 2, 1910 - March 27, 1987) is a former member of the United States House of Representatives. He was a Republican from Kentucky.
Congressman Carter was born in Tompkinsville, Kentucky. He attended Western Kentucky State College, pursuing a pre-med curricula. Carter went on to earn his medical degree from the University of Tennessee in 1937. He then volunteered to serve as a medic in World War II, travelling with the Thirty-Eighth Infantry for over three and a half years. In 1940, Carter returned to practice medicine in Tompkinsville.
In 1965, Carter sought the Republican nomination for Congress, following the retirement of controversial Representative Eugene Siler. Carter won the election and served in the U.S. House of Representatives until his retirement in 1981. He was considered to be one of the more moderate-progressive Republicans in Washington, in the tradition of his Kentucky colleagues Thurston Ballard Morton, John Sherman Cooper, and other classic small-business republicans who often advocated for the poor.
Physician-Congressman Tim Lee Carter put forth the first Republican plan for national health insurance, and came to be known as the first Republican to call for the end of the Vietnam War. In addition, The Honorable Tim Lee Carter was appointed by President Nixon to the Shafer Commission which was charged with making policy recommendations concerning drug abuse. Under the stewardship of Pennsylvania's Governor Shafer and Physician-Congressman Carter, as well as a host of other dignitaries, medical professionals, and researchers, the Shafer Commission recommended against criminalizing marijuana--a policy President Nixon flatly refused.
In reference to U.S. foreign policy, the historically informed recall that it was a series of anti-communist Democratic presidents and their staff who had led the U.S. to war with Vietnam. This in an effort to exert a U.S. security agency proposed policy of regional economic control called "total dominance." The pitch-line (propaganda) used to sell the escalation of the war in Vietnam was the famed national security theory which came to be known as the "Domino Effect." The Domino Effect predicted states would fall, one after another, out of the sphere of economic control by the West--as they were brought under "communist" political control.
Less weight was given by Americans (the heirs of our own, long-forgotten, revolution) to the strivings of the masses of "unwashed" colonized peoples for political and economic freedom from economic, social, and political enslavement under their (in Vietnam's case French, Japanese, and Chinese) colonial oppressors, than to maintaining open markets for American goods.
Securing political control over states ruled by propped-up, illegitimate, client-regimes were the choices made over and over again, in the heat of the anti-communist furor and fear provoked by the rise of the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China. It was Democratic Congressmen who most vociferously sustained and promoted the policy of anti-communism, in spite of readily available intelligence which confirmed the Civil and internally motivated revolutionary nature of Ho Chi Minh's War against the almost universally despised Diet regime in Vietnam. The most vociferous actors in this effort included the American Congressman Henry "Scoop" Jackson and his ilk. (Also, see the neocon holdovers (Wolfowitz, etc.) who once served as Jackson's Congressional pages and assistants and who later went on to create the quagmire in Iraq.) Those nefarious choices, made by reactionary ideologs, set America down the highly destructive path we continue to tread today.
While an anti-communist himself, unlike many big government proponents of an American imperium at the time, as a WWII veteran, physician, and a moderate Republican representative from a poor agricultural region, Congressman Tim Lee Carter saw little reason to continue sending American boys to early graves in Vietnam in pursuit of a policy of shanghaiing soggy ricefields from a warren of starving agrarian peasants six thousand miles from home.
To this effect, Congressman Carter was the first Republican Congressman to call for the end of the Vietnam War during the Lyndon Johnson Presidency--well before the crucifixion of President Nixon for his inability to resolve the war he had inherited from Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. Carter's most remembered statement concerning Vietnam was offered directly, and firmly, to President Lyndon Baines Johnson: "No, Mr. President, we are not winning the war in Vietnam." To Congressman Carter, and to other Republican's and some courageous Democratic Congressmen, there was very important work to be done back at home.
Congressman Tim Lee Carter was dedicated, first and foremost, to the needs of his constituents. As a former medic during the Second World War, Physician/Congressman Carter understood the consequences of modern warfare more than most.
Tim Lee Carter's sister, Pearl Carter Pace was the first elected woman sheriff in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Pearl's and Tim Lee's father, James C. Carter had served for forty years as Circuit Judge in South Central Kentucky. Their brother, James C. Carter Jr. also served for forty years following in the footsteps of his father. Pearl was a tireless supporter, as well as a dear friend of President Dwight Eisenhower. She served in his administration as Chair of the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission and was known as the second most powerful woman in Washington during her service. Pearl's son, Stanley Carter Pace was taken as a prisoner of war of the German Army during WWII. He later rose to the Chairmanship of TRW, and, pulled out of retirement to return the giant defense contractor General Dynamics to credibility after grievous ethical lapses.
After his retirement, Congressman Tim Lee Carter, whose service to the rural sixteenth district in Kentucky led him to introduce himself as the "Congressman from Fountain Run to Kingdom Come," returned to live in Tompkinsville, Kentucky. Congressman Carter remained active in local, state and national politics until his death.
