Carter's being generous to himself. It was Nixon who opened up relations with China (and it probably could only have been a Republican who took that first step), and Carter presided over the mess subsequent to the incredibly disatrous Iranian revolution.
> Carter's being generous to himself. It was Nixon who opened up relations with China
Carter didn't claim to have opened up relations with China, he claimed to have normalized relations with China.
> and it probably could only have been a Republican who took that first step
While there was a popular saying relating to that about Nixon, it doesn't really stand up too much; its hardly as if Kennedy and Johnson were perceived, at home or abroad, in ways which would have made that difficult in any way that it wouldn't be for Nixon. What really set the stage in the 1970s for the opening in relations that began under Nixon and culminated under Carter wasn't the political party of the US participants but the growing rivalry between the USSR and PRC.
