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.