Carter in his Oval Office address, July 15, 1979
July 15, 1979: President Jimmy Carter gives a speech from the Oval Office at the White House. He had intended to talk about the energy crisis, and he did, in the 2nd half of the speech.
But in the 1st half, he addressed another concern. His pollster, Pat Caddell, told him that, in his words, the American people faced "a crisis of confidence," stemming from the lingering feelings from the assassinations of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal. This stuck in Carter's mind.
In the preceding days, Carter had invited many people to Camp David, the Presidential retreat in the Catoctin range of the Appalachian Mountains, near Thurmont, Maryland, about 62 miles northwest of the White House. There, they shared their concerns with Carter, who explained:
It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper, deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realize more than ever that as president I need your help. So I decided to reach out and listen to the voices of America.
I invited to Camp David people from almost every segment of our society: Business and labor, teachers and preachers, governors, mayors, and private citizens. And then I left Camp David to listen to other Americans, men and women like you.
It has been an extraordinary ten days, and I want to share with you what I've heard. First of all, I got a lot of personal advice. Let me quote a few of the typical comments that I wrote down.
This from a Southern Governor: "Mr. President, you are not leading this nation -- you're just managing the government."
"You don't see the people enough any more."
"Some of your Cabinet members don't seem loyal. There is not enough discipline among your disciples."
"Don't talk to us about politics or the mechanics of government, but about an understanding of our common good."
"Mr. President, we're in trouble. Talk to us about blood and sweat and tears."
"If you lead, Mr. President, we will follow."
Carter did not identify the Southern Governor. In his memoir, former President Bill Clinton, then the 32-year-old Governor of Arkansas, didn't mention the speech, so it probably wasn't him.
But Carter had to admit that the Governor, and the others he was talking to, were right:
I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy...
I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence.
It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
And in the 2nd half of 1979, all through the 1980 campaign, and ever since, Carter's opponents -- including Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who opposed him in the Democratic Presidential Primaries -- used the word "malaise" to describe the feeling that the Carter Administration had given America.
* Carter's "giveaway" of the Panama Canal to, you know, the country it was actually in, Panama. Never mind that it was the idea of the preceding President, Gerald Ford, a Republican. (It was one of the big reasons that Reagan ran against Ford in the 1976 Republican Primaries.)
* Carter's own inability to handle a 2nd round of inflation -- in each case, caused largely by Middle Eastern nations raising the price of oil.
All of this happened before the speech, as well as before the Iran Hostage Crisis that began on November 4, 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, and Carter's reaction to each: For the former, his dragged-out negotiations to get the hostages out and the failure of the "Desert One" rescue mission on April 25, 1980, which probably gave his re-election campaign a mortal wound; and for the latter, his boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics that were scheduled for Moscow, which did more to effectively depict the Soviets as an "Evil Empire" than anything Reagan ever said his life.
But it jumped to 6.0 percent the next month, was 6.3 percent by January 1980, and then in the Spring, it shot up: 6.9 percent in April, 7.5 percent in May, 7.8 percent in July -- just in time for Reagan to accept the Republican nomination. It was around 7.5 percent for the rest of Carter's Presidency, including when he left office on January 20, 1981 -- in other words, exactly the same as it was when he was inaugurated.
But how was it under Reagan? By the end of 1982, it was 11 percent, because of his stupid tax cut. It didn't get back below the 5.6 percent that it was in May 1979 until... April 1988.
However, it wasn't just the unemployment rate. Inflation was high. So were interest rates. And wages had begun to stagnate. The stagnancy and the inflation were combined into a single word: "Stagflation." That, as much as anything else, created the malaise.
And a generation of working people in their 30s and 40s, who had been activists as young people in the 1960s, were used to standing up to those in power and saying, "Enough! We will not put up with this crap anymore!" And they saw the "malaise," and, as they had been trained to do, they blamed the people in power.
But the President didn't use the word then. Nor did the word appear in any of his public statements during his Administration. So who started using the word "malaise" to describe the situation then? Apparently, it was Hendrik Hertzberg, Carter's chief speechwriter, who wrote this speech, in an interview the next day.
Yes, there was a malaise. But Carter sure as hell didn't cause it. It was brought about by a cumulative effect of things that happened under Presidents of both parties, including, to a degree, Carter himself. In his case:
* The refusal (seen by conservatives) of Carter, and, indeed, every President since World War II, from Franklin Roosevelt to Carter (yes, all of them, including the Republicans Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford) to properly stand up to the Communist and terrorist menaces, anywhere in the world.
* Carter's "giveaway" of the Panama Canal to, you know, the country it was actually in, Panama. Never mind that it was the idea of the preceding President, Gerald Ford, a Republican. (It was one of the big reasons that Reagan ran against Ford in the 1976 Republican Primaries.)
* Carter's own inability to handle a 2nd round of inflation -- in each case, caused largely by Middle Eastern nations raising the price of oil.
All of this happened before the speech, as well as before the Iran Hostage Crisis that began on November 4, 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, and Carter's reaction to each: For the former, his dragged-out negotiations to get the hostages out and the failure of the "Desert One" rescue mission on April 25, 1980, which probably gave his re-election campaign a mortal wound; and for the latter, his boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics that were scheduled for Moscow, which did more to effectively depict the Soviets as an "Evil Empire" than anything Reagan ever said his life.
Conservatives, desperate to keep up the image of Ronald Reagan as a great President in the wake of the successes of liberal Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the failures of both George Bushes and Donald Trump, are determined to show that Carter was "a failed President." They endlessly described first Clinton, then Obama, and now Joe Biden as "another Jimmy Carter." They still do to this today, even though Carter hasn't been President for 41 years. Part of the way they point this out is by using the word "malaise."
When Carter was inaugurated on January 20, 1977, the national unemployment rate was 7.5 percent. That's too high. It inched up to 7.6 percent in February. Then it began to drop. By January 1978, it was 6.4 percent. By January 1979, 5.9 percent. By May 1979, 5.6 percent -- the lowest it had been since August 1974, the month Nixon resigned. I should point out that the factors that would drive it up were already in place by that point. Indeed, unemployment is often a lagging indicator of how good (or bad) the economy is. When Carter gave that speech in July 1979, it was 5.7 percent. Not great, but hardly cause for alarm.
But it jumped to 6.0 percent the next month, was 6.3 percent by January 1980, and then in the Spring, it shot up: 6.9 percent in April, 7.5 percent in May, 7.8 percent in July -- just in time for Reagan to accept the Republican nomination. It was around 7.5 percent for the rest of Carter's Presidency, including when he left office on January 20, 1981 -- in other words, exactly the same as it was when he was inaugurated.
But how was it under Reagan? By the end of 1982, it was 11 percent, because of his stupid tax cut. It didn't get back below the 5.6 percent that it was in May 1979 until... April 1988.
However, it wasn't just the unemployment rate. Inflation was high. So were interest rates. And wages had begun to stagnate. The stagnancy and the inflation were combined into a single word: "Stagflation." That, as much as anything else, created the malaise.
And a generation of working people in their 30s and 40s, who had been activists as young people in the 1960s, were used to standing up to those in power and saying, "Enough! We will not put up with this crap anymore!" And they saw the "malaise," and, as they had been trained to do, they blamed the people in power.
Except they didn't see big business as part of the problem, the way antiwar activists saw Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas building bombers and Dow making napalm as part of the problem in Vietnam. No, these people looked to the government, and only the government, as the problem.
That's why so many of them sided with Ted Kennedy in the Winter and Spring of 1980. It wasn't so much a vote for the insurgent candidate (many people, as it turned out, had a problem with Ted's private life) as it was a protest vote against the incumbent or establishment candidate, as in for Henry Wallace against Harry Truman in 1948, for Gene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy against Lyndon Johnson and then Hubert Humphrey in 1968, for Reagan against Ford in 1976, and later for Pat Robertson against George H.W. Bush in 1988, for Pat Buchanan against Daddy Bush in 1992, for Ralph Nader against Al Gore in 2000, for Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton in 2008 (the only one of these that went all the way), and for Bernie Sanders against Hillary in 2016.
That's why so many of them sided with Ted Kennedy in the Winter and Spring of 1980. It wasn't so much a vote for the insurgent candidate (many people, as it turned out, had a problem with Ted's private life) as it was a protest vote against the incumbent or establishment candidate, as in for Henry Wallace against Harry Truman in 1948, for Gene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy against Lyndon Johnson and then Hubert Humphrey in 1968, for Reagan against Ford in 1976, and later for Pat Robertson against George H.W. Bush in 1988, for Pat Buchanan against Daddy Bush in 1992, for Ralph Nader against Al Gore in 2000, for Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton in 2008 (the only one of these that went all the way), and for Bernie Sanders against Hillary in 2016.
A United Auto Workers official put it this way:
It's a different generation of workingmen. None of these guys came over from the old country, poor and starving, grateful for any job they could get. None of them have been through a depression. They've been exposed, at least through television, to all the youth movements of the last ten years...
They're just not going to swallow the same kind of treatment their fathers did... They want more than just a job for 30 years.
Compared to his successors, Carter did amazingly well at creating jobs. Under his Presidency, jobs increased by an average of 2.58 million per year; Reagan, 2.01 million; Bush 41, 668 thousand (not million, thousand); Bill Clinton, 2.86 million; Bush 43, 160 thousand; Obama so far, 1.40 million.
Annual rate increase? Carter 3.06 percent, Reagan, 2.06 percent; Bush 41, 0.62 percent; Bill Clinton, 2.48 percent; Bush 43, 0.12 percent; Obama so far, 1.11 percent (keeping in mind that he inherited the Dubya meltdown of 2008). Jimmy Carter created jobs at a greater rate per year than any President since LBJ.
Want that in table form? Jobs per year, in millions:
D Clinton 2.86
D Carter 2.58
R Reagan 2.01
D Obama 1.58
R Bush 41 0.67
R Bush 43 0.16
It's a different generation of workingmen. None of these guys came over from the old country, poor and starving, grateful for any job they could get. None of them have been through a depression. They've been exposed, at least through television, to all the youth movements of the last ten years...
They're just not going to swallow the same kind of treatment their fathers did... They want more than just a job for 30 years.
Compared to his successors, Carter did amazingly well at creating jobs. Under his Presidency, jobs increased by an average of 2.58 million per year; Reagan, 2.01 million; Bush 41, 668 thousand (not million, thousand); Bill Clinton, 2.86 million; Bush 43, 160 thousand; Obama so far, 1.40 million.
Annual rate increase? Carter 3.06 percent, Reagan, 2.06 percent; Bush 41, 0.62 percent; Bill Clinton, 2.48 percent; Bush 43, 0.12 percent; Obama so far, 1.11 percent (keeping in mind that he inherited the Dubya meltdown of 2008). Jimmy Carter created jobs at a greater rate per year than any President since LBJ.
Want that in table form? Jobs per year, in millions:
D Clinton 2.86
D Carter 2.58
R Reagan 2.01
D Obama 1.58
R Bush 41 0.67
R Bush 43 0.16
R Trump -0.75 (lost 750,000 per year, most of that due to COVID in 2020)
Job growth per year:
D Carter 3.06
D Clinton 2.48
R Reagan 2.06
D Obama 1.04
R Bush 41 0.62
R Bush 43 0.12
Job growth per year:
D Carter 3.06
D Clinton 2.48
R Reagan 2.06
D Obama 1.04
R Bush 41 0.62
R Bush 43 0.12
R Trump -0.52
In other words, Carter was 23 percent better at creating jobs that "job-creating machine" Clinton, and 48 percent better at it than Reagan who "turned the economy around" and brought about "Morning in America."
You know conservatives: As their avatar, Reagan, said, "Facts are stupid things." He was trying to quote John Adams: "Facts are stubborn things."
Conservatives always want you to believe that everything was just fine until noon on Inauguration Day when the Republican President went home; and then went to hell as soon as the Democratic President-elect says, "So help me, God." And that it works the other way: As soon as the Democratic President gives way to the Republican President-elect, everything became fine.
Never mind that Reagan himself, in his Inaugural Address, said that America's problems "will not go away in days, weeks, or months. But they will go away." Which was true: The only questions were how, and when. And then he preceded to tell the biggest lie any President had ever told to that point: "Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem." And then, he spent the next 8 years proving his point.
Why, a conservative born after 1980, not old enough to really remember Reagan as the sitting President, and raised on the myth more than the man, would probably find it hard to believe that the U.S. hockey team that beat the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, could have done so under President Carter, rather than under President Reagan. (Carter wasn't there for that game, but Vice President Walter Mondale, a Minnesotan and a hockey buff, was.)
Or maybe Reagan was just lucky, and Carter wasn't. As someone put it in the Summer of 1981, "If Carter had fired the air-traffic controllers, there would have been a crash the next day."
In other words, Carter was 23 percent better at creating jobs that "job-creating machine" Clinton, and 48 percent better at it than Reagan who "turned the economy around" and brought about "Morning in America."
You know conservatives: As their avatar, Reagan, said, "Facts are stupid things." He was trying to quote John Adams: "Facts are stubborn things."
Conservatives always want you to believe that everything was just fine until noon on Inauguration Day when the Republican President went home; and then went to hell as soon as the Democratic President-elect says, "So help me, God." And that it works the other way: As soon as the Democratic President gives way to the Republican President-elect, everything became fine.
Never mind that Reagan himself, in his Inaugural Address, said that America's problems "will not go away in days, weeks, or months. But they will go away." Which was true: The only questions were how, and when. And then he preceded to tell the biggest lie any President had ever told to that point: "Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem." And then, he spent the next 8 years proving his point.
Why, a conservative born after 1980, not old enough to really remember Reagan as the sitting President, and raised on the myth more than the man, would probably find it hard to believe that the U.S. hockey team that beat the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, could have done so under President Carter, rather than under President Reagan. (Carter wasn't there for that game, but Vice President Walter Mondale, a Minnesotan and a hockey buff, was.)
Or maybe Reagan was just lucky, and Carter wasn't. As someone put it in the Summer of 1981, "If Carter had fired the air-traffic controllers, there would have been a crash the next day."
*
July 15, 1979 was a Sunday. These Major League Baseball games were played that day:
* The New York Yankees lost to the California Angels, 5-4 at Anaheim Stadium. (It was renamed Edison International Field in 1997, and Angel Stadium of Anaheim in 2004.) The Yankees led 4-3 in the bottom of the 9th, but Billy Martin had the exact opposite problem of Yankee managers under Brian Cashman: He left his starters in too long. And Ron Guidry ran out of gas, giving up a walk to Tom Donohue and a walkoff home run to Bobby Grich.
Rod Carew was on the Angels' roster, but did not play in this game. Chris Chambliss and Jim Spencer homered for the Yankees. Reggie Jackson went 0-for-4. Thurman Munson went 2-for-4. Just 18 days later, he would be dead.
* The New York Mets lost to the San Francisco Giants, 4-0 at Shea Stadium. Marc Hill and Mike Ivie homered for the Jints. Three pitchers, starting with Ed Whitson, combined for an 8-hit shutout. Steve Henderson got 3 of those hits for the Metropolitans.
* The Montreal Expos beat the San Diego Padres, 4-0 at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. Scott Sanderson (5 innings) and Elias Sosa (4) combined on a 5-hit shutout. Andre Dawson hit 2 home runs, and Ellis Valentine hit 1.
* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 10-3 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. Mike Schmidt went 1-for-5. Pete Rose went 2-for-4 with an RBI. Bob Boone went 4-for-4 with 2 RBIs.
* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Atlanta Braves, 7-3 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Willie Stargell and Bill Robinson hit home runs for "The Family."
* The Minnesota Twins beat the Toronto Blue Jays, 9-4 at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto.
* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Chicago Cubs, 7-1 at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. Tom Seaver outpitched Rick Reuschel. Both Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan were injured, and neither played.
* The Detroit Tigers beat the Chicago White Sox, 14-5 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
* The Milwaukee Brewers beat the Cleveland Indians, 10-4 at Milwaukee County Stadium. Robin Yount went 2-for-4 with an RBI. Paul Molitor did not play.
* The Kansas City Royals beat the Texas Rangers, 4-3 at Royals Stadium in Kansas City. (It was renamed Kauffman Stadium in 1993.) George Brett went 0-for-4.
* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Houston Astros, 3-1 at the Astrodome in Houston.
* The Boston Red Sox beat the Oakland Athletics, 3-2 at the Oakland Coliseum. Carl Yastrzemski went 0-for-4.
* And the Baltimore Orioles beat the Seattle Mariners, 6-1 at the Kingdome in Seattle. Ken Singleton went 2-for-5 with a home run and 3 RBIs. Eddie Murray also went 2-for-5, with 1 RBI.
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