'WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU UP TO, MR. PRESIDENT?'

Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country

By Kevin Mattson

263 pages. Bloomsbury. $25.

Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech — one in which the word malaise does not, curiously enough, appear — was delivered 30 years ago, on July 15, 1979.

Mr. Carter stared into television cameras during prime time and delivered a solemn jeremiad about a “crisis of the American spirit.” He worried aloud that “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”

It was the kind of secular sermon — introspective, searching, occasionally soaring — that can be a tear-jerker when delivered to swelling music on a TV show like “The West Wing” but works less well for real-world presidents. Mr. Carter’s speechwriters Hendrik Hertzberg and Gordon Stewart were brilliant, but they weren’t Aaron Sorkin.

Mr. Carter’s speech was a Hail Mary pass by a president in trouble. And like so many Hail Mary passes, it was picked off. Republicans clubbed Mr. Carter with its downer themes for the next year and a half. Ronald Reagan handily won the 1980 presidential election, denying Mr. Carter a second term. There wouldn’t be another Democrat in the White House for a long 12 years.

That Mr. Carter felt he had to deliver such a risky speech says a great deal about the political fix he was in at the time. It says plenty, too, about where the wobbling American psyche stood during the weird, unnerving summer of 1979.

In his new book, “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?: Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country,” Kevin Mattson, a professor of history at Ohio University, lays out the events of that summer like a big, rolling banquet. This isn’t a high-end meal — Mr. Mattson’s prose would not warrant even one star on Michelin’s scale — but it is surprisingly tasty, if only because the historical ingredients are fascinating and first-rate.

Mr. Carter’s political problems in July 1979 are easy to chart. The energy crisis was in full, ripe bloom; there were gas lines across the country, and truckers were organizing protests. Mr. Carter’s close friend Bert Lance, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, had just been indicted for defrauding the government through illegal loans. And one of Mr. Carter’s former speechwriters, James Fallows, had published a devastating article called “The Passionless Presidency” in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

“I came to think that Carter believes 50 things,” Mr. Fallows wrote, “but not one thing.”

The impression stuck. Mr. Carter was seen as dithering and ineffectual. His approval rating in some national polls was lower than Richard M. Nixon’s during Watergate. A “Draft Kennedy” movement, referring to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who would unsuccessfully challenge Mr. Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination, began to grow. To cap it all off, word got out that Mr. Carter had been attacked by a hissing rabbit while in a small boat, an event that would soon make jeering national headlines.

Outside the White House, bad juju — a doomsday vibe — perfumed the air. In March 1979 a nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania had nearly melted down. In May police cars were torched in San Francisco after Harvey Milk’s killer was given a lenient sentence. Also in May, an American Airlines DC-10 bound for Los Angeles crashed shortly after takeoff at O’Hare airport in Chicago, killing 271 people. It was the worst plane crash in United States history.

The sky seemed, literally, to be falling. The 77-ton Skylab from NASA was hurtling toward Earth, to crash who knew where on July 11. (It would ultimately explode harmlessly over the Indian Ocean.) On July 12 the country’s blue-collar id was uncorked at Comiskey Park in Chicago during a staged “Disco Demolition Night,” in which records were burned, and which led to riots and the canceling of a game. Did I mention that John Wayne had just died?

Bookstore windows reflected the mood. The title alone of Christopher Lasch’s surprise 1979 best seller — “The Culture of Narcissism” — felt like an indictment. It can’t have calmed Mr. Carter’s jittery nerves when, in May, the director Francis Ford Coppola arrived at the White House — he brought bottles of his wine from his vineyard — to screen a rough cut of “Apocalypse Now.” Mr. Mattson sets all these details to the thumping beat of that spring’s apt radio hit “Heart of Glass,” by Blondie.

In “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?” — the title comes from a New York Post headline of that summer — Mr. Mattson writes well about Mr. Carter’s staff and the intense jockeying that led up to the malaise speech. The president had spoken too often about the energy crisis, some of his advisers felt, and Americans were beginning to tune him out. He needed to say something new, something bold, to recapture the country’s attention.

The driving force behind the speech was the young pollster Pat Caddell, who used the first lady, Rosalynn Carter, to get the president’s ear.

Mr. Caddell may have been on to something. Mr. Mattson points out that Mr. Carter’s speech, at first, appeared to have been a success. Time and Newsweek approved; so did David Broder of The Washington Post. Mr. Carter, overnight, got an 11-point bump in some polls. Mr. Carter destroyed whatever momentum he might have created, however, by asking his entire cabinet to resign two days later. It made his presidency seem to be melting down. The New Republic’s editors wrote: “The past two weeks will be remembered as the period when President Jimmy Carter packed it in, put the finishing touches on a failed presidency.”

Mr. Mattson remains an ardent admirer of the malaise speech. Even if it “offers no memorable lines,” he compares it to both the Gettysburg Address and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“It shared with those speeches a view of the nation as a community bonded together spiritually and strengthened by facing adversity,” he writes. “It called on citizens for sacrifice the way John Winthrop’s original founding speech for settlers moving to Massachusetts, ‘City on a Hill,’ did.” These comparisons are a bit far-fetched, though Mr. Mattson reprints the speech at the book’s end, and it certainly doesn’t sound like any other political speech you’ve heard recently.

We misremember the speech today, Mr. Mattson argues, thanks to the “malaise” tag that was later attached to it. (He blames the old Washington hand Clark Clifford, then 72, for telling journalists before the speech that Mr. Carter was worried about a “malaise” in the country.)

Mr. Mattson is fond of Mr. Carter, but he can’t help ultimately observing: “Being a squeaky-clean outsider didn’t translate well into actual governance, a brutal truth about the Carter presidency.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/books/15garner.html?pagewanted=print

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company