You may know that in his infamous 1979 “malaise” speech President Jimmy Carter didn’t once utter the word “malaise.” And you probably know that the televised July 15 address, more properly dubbed the “Crisis of Confidence” speech, instantly and irrevocably crystallized Carter’s image in the eyes of the American people as a pessimistic, can’t-do president, hopelessly outmatched by events–which in 1979 included an energy crisis featuring soaring gas prices, endless lines and sporadic violence at the pump, runaway inflation, economic stagnation, and a theocratic revolution in Iran. Carter made the elemental mistake, so the story goes, of blaming the American people for the country’s troubles, conveniently absolving himself of responsibility and self-righteously lambasting Americans for their materialism, their consumerism, their loss of nerve. And the American people responded by turning decisively away from Carter.

But it’s not so neat and tidy. As Kevin Mattson convincingly shows in What the Heck are You Up To, Mr. President?, the immediate response to Carter’s speech was in fact pretty positive — one measure of which was a double digit jump in the president’s approval numbers! (Admittedly, Carter was starting from a low base: in the summer of 79 he was more unpopular than Nixon had been at the height of Watergate.) Americans, it turned out, appreciated a bit of straightforward honesty, however harsh, from their president. And by way, read the text or watch the video of the speech and you’ll see that Carter was every bit as hard on himself as on the American people.

In the PBC interview below, Kevin Mattson explains how Carter came to give this extraordinary address, how it went over at the time, how he quickly squandered the gains it won him, and what the malaise speech has to say to us today. Mattson is the Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University and the author of several books.

Let’s start a couple of weeks before Jimmy Carter gave the televised address that came to be known as the “malaise speech.” It’s July, 1979. Carter’s advisors feel he needs to make a speech about energy. Gas prices are sky high and there are endless lines and even violence at the pump. The networks have blocked off air time — but suddenly Carter says, Forget it. No speech, I can’t do this. What happened?

Kevin Mattson: Well, Carter had been out of the country doing a lot of diplomatic work. And the month of June was an especially bad one with gas lines growing. There had been a violent truckers strike against the rising cost of diesel and the dwindling supply of diesel. And there had also been a riot in late June in Levittown, Pennsylvania, all around the issue of the dwindling supplies of gas that’s all tied into the fact that the Iranian revolution had occurred recently and Iran had cut off its oil supply.

So he comes back in early July, and his advisors are saying, You’ve got to give an address about the energy crisis. But he had already given a number of addresses about the energy crisis and was skeptical about whether it was the right thing for him to give at that moment. But he says, I’m going to think it over. They essentially send him a speech that’s written in haste. He finds it incredibly boring, can’t make it past the first few pages. He calls up the White House and says, Cancel the speech. When he’s pressed by his people, as reported by Hendrick Hertzberg, Carter says, “I don’t want to bullshit the American people anymore.”

But no public explanation, which sets off a media frenzy.

People wonder if Jimmy Carter’s gone crazy, if he’s actually escaped the country. People wonder, as one press person asked the White House, [whether they were] installing rubber wallpaper in the White House yet? It looks really bad. And that’s what really sets up a domestic summit that Carter holds at Camp David and then that leads up to the speech that’s given on July 15th, which is completely different from the speech that had been scheduled for July 5th.

So after refusing to give the energy speech, he invites a procession of businessmen, politicians, spiritual leaders, governors, small town mayors up to Camp David to give him advice. What do they tell him?

He gets a lot of very serious and tough-minded advice. There are people who are telling him he should do one thing about the energy crisis and people who say the opposite. But I think the most important message he takes away from all the conversations at Camp David is one that he went in with. It had to do with the civic spirit of the country, the idea that the violence on the gas lines, the riots that had erupted, were indicative of a broader problem in American culture — the problem of individualism, of people being self-interested, which ties into the idea of the 1970s as the Me Decade, defined by a “culture of narcissism.”  [On this reading], Americans had a very difficult time understanding what they could do collectively to solve problems.  Carter goes in with this idea and by the end of the summit he says, I’m not going to make simply an energy crisis address. I’m also going to address this broader civic crisis.

Sum up the speech for us. What made it so different from any other presidential speech to that point?

The first part of the speech is usually seen as the part where he’s castigating the American people, where he’s saying we have some significant problems and these problems aren’t purely political. There’s a moral dimension to this. And then the second part is where he outlines what can be done in terms of policies, rallying as a nation as if in wartime to fight the energy crisis.

I think what shocked a lot of American people was that they were expecting to hear an energy crisis and they heard something that sounded much more like a jeremiad or a diagnosis of the American soul. He argues in the speech that as a country we’ve come to worship self-indulgence and consumption, that we’re mired in “fragmentation and self-interest”; that our people are losing faith in the ability of citizens to serve as the rulers and shapers of our democracy. The tone of the speech is rather tough and brutal. In fact at one point he says, “My message is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.” It was also strange to hear the American president telling the truth to the American people, as Hendrick Hertzberg, the speechwriter who was doing a lot of the writing of the speech said. Carter said we have significant doubts about ourselves as a nation and about our role in the world and what we can accomplish, and that what we need to do now is we need to make the energy crisis into a significant national challenge, and to rally around that.

And he’s pretty tough on himself.

He is. Most historians who look back at the speech, and many people at the time, thought that the speech was a disaster because Carter was blaming the American people for their problems. But in fact throughout the speech Carter injects a great deal of humility. He says, you know I’ve had failures as a president, I’m not going to lie to you. He clearly did not lay the blame entirely on the shoulders of Americans.

What’s really amazing is that the general interpretation of the speech is that Carter is blaming the American people, who thus, we would assume,  rebelled against Carter. In fact, I think because of the honesty, and because Americans did have significant doubts about the state of the civic culture of the country at the time, they in fact reacted very positively to the speech. There was a great deal of mail and telephone calls that flooded in [to the White House] where people said, You know you’re right, you really identified a key weakness in this country, and I’m going to do my part to try to solve the energy crisis. It actually winds up winning Carter an 11 percent bump in the polls!

At the same time, you quote an advisor to Ronald Reagan as saying this was the first moment he realized that Reagan could beat Carter in the 1980 election.  How do you read that?

I think America has two ways of thinking about itself and its destiny and role. One is a tough-minded realism, a pragmatic outlook about America’s ability to accomplish great things.  I think that’s the spirit Carter addressed. On the other hand, I think Americans are also drawn towards optimism, hopefulness. And what Reagan was able to do was to now make conservatives the party of optimism. So when he announces his candidacy in November of ’79, he says, You know, I’ve looked upon the American people and I see no malaise. Whereas [the Democrats] became the party of pessimism, the party of malaise.

And Carter didn’t help himself by within a few days of making the speech firing his entire cabinet, which made him seem erratic.

That’s right. One fun thing about writing history is that you can find these moments in the past where you can really see things turning in one direction or another, and you notice a kind of contingency. There’s no doubt that when Carter gives the speech and he gets this positive reception, he’s got something going for him. But two days later he fires his entire cabinet. What that does is it rivets attention inside the beltway. What Carter had done with the speech was to say, This is not just a problem of Washington. Now it looks like the government starting again to fall apart. He basically does himself in at that moment.

And the rest is history.

My sense of it is that he can’t rebound after that, and that it’s no surprise that the speech starts to get reworked into that general tale of presidential failure. We start to understand the speech as a speech of a failed president, whereas in fact I don’t think it was that way. It was only that two days afterwards he does this thing that sets off a maelstrom of problems for him.

I think the consensus about Carter’s presidency is that he was a smart, very decent, very moral man who was just in over his head. And maybe it’s true that he had a lot to deal with on the economic front and the hang-over from Vietnam, and of course the Iranian hostage crisis, and so on. What’s your take on that?

A lot of people think that this book is a 100 percent celebration of Jimmy Carter, just by the sheer fact that I think we’ve maligned his presidency and haven’t really understood it in context. My sense of Jimmy Carter is that even when the American people felt that he was not an effective or good president, nobody ever questioned his moral standing and his own sense of being an upright and forthright leader and an honest leader. What people questioned was his political skill. That was one thing that he in many ways just never had. He had a horrible relationship withCongress, for example, even though it was a Democratic Congress!

But again, you know we can blame Carter for lacking political skill, but on the other hand, put it in context: We’d just come through Vietnam and Watergate. Congress was not going to go along with the president, no matter who it was, and they were going to be sharply critical of whatever the president rolled out. It’s very difficult to imagine anybody stepping into the presidency at that moment and doing a swimmingly good job.

Do you think Carter’s “malaise” speech still has something to say to us today?

I do. I think you read the speech in our own context and you can say, This guy had his finger on a lot of important themes that I think we’re still grappling with and will continue to grapple with. And we do need to go back and think about our reliance upon foreign fossil fuels. We do need to worry about our culture of individualism. We do need to worry about all the things that Carter talked about in his speech and take them quite seriously. One of the reasons to go to the malaise speech, I think, is to remind Americans that Carter, whatever his political leadership deficiencies, did have a fine understanding of the moral state of America.