IF ONLY WE HAD A LEADER...:

People & Events: Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" Speech (The American Experience, PBS)

Dozens of prominent Americans -- members of Congress, governors, labor leaders, academics and clergy -- were summoned to the mountaintop retreat to confer with the beleaguered president. Sitting on the floor taking notes, Carter listened to criticism, much of it scathing, of him and his White House. Reagan biographer Steven Hayward has aptly described it as "the most remarkable exercise in presidential navel-gazing in American history." At the end of the "domestic summit," the president planned to deliver a nationally-televised address, telling Americans what he had learned and how he planned to lead them out of the current crisis.

At the heart of the internal debate over the administration's future was a memo by Caddell, Carter's pollster and resident "deep thinker." "What was really disturbing to me," he remembered, "was for the first time, we actually got numbers where people no longer believed that the future of America was going to be as good as it was now. And that really shook me, because it was so at odds with the American character." Caddell argued that after fifteen years filled with assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, and a declining economy, Americans were suffering from a general "crisis of confidence." Address this fundamental problem, he told the president, inspire the country to overcome it, and you will turn your presidency around.

Others in the administration, led by Vice President Walter Mondale, strongly disagreed. "I argued that there were real problems in America that were not mysterious, that were not rooted in some kind of national psychosis or breakdown, that there were real gas lines, there was real inflation, that people were worried in their real lives about keeping their jobs," Mondale said. "We could engage the nation by addressing those problems and asking for a new level of public support... I also argued that if, having gotten elected on the grounds that we needed a government as good as the people, we now were heard to argue that we needed a people as good as the government, that we would be destroyed."

"[We] had this real division," Caddell recalls. "And then Jimmy Carter ended it by saying... 'I've decided. I'm going to do everything that Pat said in his memo.' I thought the vice president was going to have a heart attack."

On the evening of July 15, 1979, millions of Americans tuned in to hear Jimmy Carter give the most important speech of his presidency. After sharing some of the criticism he had heard at Camp David -- including an unattributed quote from the young governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton -- Carter put his own spin on Caddell's argument. "The solution of our energy crisis can also help us to conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country," the president said, asking Americans to join him in adapting to a new age of limits.

But he also admonished them, "In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns." Hendrik Hertzberg, who worked on the speech, admits that it "was more like a sermon than a political speech. It had the themes of confession, redemption, and sacrifice. He was bringing the American people into this spiritual process that he had been through, and presenting them with an opportunity for redemption as well as redeeming himself." Though he never used the word -- Caddell had in his memo -- it became known as Carter's "malaise" speech.

Perhaps appreciating the president's astonishing frankness, the public rewarded him with higher approval ratings in the days that followed. But then, as historian Douglas Brinkley notes, "it boomeranged on him. The op-ed pieces started spinning out, 'Why don't you fix something? There's nothing wrong with the American people. We're a great people. Maybe the problem's in the White House, maybe we need new leadership to guide us.'" Historian Roger Wilkins concurs: "When your leadership is demonstrably weaker than it should be, you don't then point at the people and say, 'It's your problem.' If you want the people to move, you move them the way Roosevelt moved them, or you exhort them the way Kennedy or Johnson exhorted them. You don't say, 'It's your fault.'"

Mr. Carter was right, of course, that the American people were to blame for much of the problem--mostly for having let the Left run the country for fifty years. But he misunderstood--no surprise--democracy. The people are never wrong.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 9, 2004 12:49 PM