Not once mentioning “malaise,” the now-infamous word synonymous with illness, President Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech given July 15, 1979, was a deadly virus coughed upon the American people. A handful of college professors have tried to rehabilitate this oration with grotesque revisionism, but even the Carter White House speechwriters who worked on it, such as Rick Hertzberg, never talk about it. Former Carter White House speechwriter Chris Matthews runs like a scalded cat when asked, making sure all know he had nothing to do with the speech.
In the words of Shakespeare, Carter’s rudely stamped “Malaise Speech” has already gone down in history as possibly the worst speech in American presidential history. It was apocalyptic. It was dark. It was brooding. It blamed the American people for the problems created by their own government.
The word “malaise” was never used in the speech, although it was used in a memo by Carter pollster Pat Caddell. But the French word came to sum up perfectly the Carter presidency. It was an era of sacrifice and limitations and a drooping national mood, reflecting some of the writings of liberals at the time, including The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch.
Carter’s statements about “the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives” and “the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation” acted as airborne germs, spreading and infecting the American people. It caused a cultural plague of unhappiness and unrest among all who listened.
Vice President Walter Mondale was so opposed to the speech that he considered resigning his office. Mondale recalled warning Carter that “for an administration that got elected to be as good as the people, it’s a bad idea now to say we need people as good as the government.” This was “Deacon Carter,” the brooding, judgmental Baptist, spreading his message of sin and fire and eternal damnation.
In giving his speech, Carter at first seemed to address his own inadequacy, stating, “I’ve worked hard to put my campaign promises into law, and I have to admit, with just mixed success.”
Even this attempt at self-deprecation proved a failure. A half-hearted admission of incompetence disguised as a “mixed success,” it only further highlighted his inability to take responsibility for the state of the nation, which was awful in the summer of 1979. Inflation was out of control. Interest rates were out of control. Unemployment was out of control. The Soviets were on the march and preparing to take advantage of American weakness by invading Afghanistan that fall. The message of his own failures did not last long.
In sticking with this theme of irresponsibility, Carter was quick to turn his personal “I” into a collective “We,” graciously sharing the blame with the American people. “We are losing our confidence in the future, he said. “We are beginning to close the door on our past.” His wild generalization, that the entirety of American society had lost their confidence in their country and now refused to remember their past, startled listeners. As David Broder of the Washington Post wrote the next day, “It will surely go down in history as one of the most extraordinary addresses a chief executive has ever given.”
President Carter went on to insist that it was “clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper — deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or depression.”
Across the country impatient Americans huffed and puffed waiting in gas lines that curled around the corner. As Carter asserted that their problems were bigger and deeper, they stamped their feet and cursed Carter and his weak foreign relations with the Middle East that had resulted in the shortages. Americans were unlikely to close the door on these past memories any time soon, later ensuring that Carter might not win renomination. The passions of Sen. Ted Kennedy were stirring.
And yet, receiving no noticeable pushback from the media — not yet anyway, an ominous sign of things to come — Carter’s poll numbers miraculously increased the day after his speech. But only briefly.
Former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, then a presumed candidate for the GOP nomination, weighed in on the speech and accurately summarized, “There really isn’t any crisis in the country. There’s just a crisis in the White House.” Boom!
Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency would be known for many things: stagflation, a terrible economy, weakness in the face of Soviet advances, but also the Camp David Accords and ushering in the Age of Reagan. Yet to his everlasting chagrin, Carter’s failed four years in office will always be reduced to the word “malaise,” and his awful, terrible, embarrassing speech in July of 1979.
Craig Shirley is a Ronald Reagan biographer and presidential historian. Francesca Goerg is his research assistant.
