The address Carter delivered was one whose “depth and sophistication,” Mattson notes, “reflect the seriousness of its intellectual inquiry into the nation’s values.” Its rhetoric was vigorous, its ambitions lofty (the speech was penned primarily by Carter’s chief speechwriter at the time, a young dynamo named Hendrick Hertzberg). “Malaise” came only later. Indeed, as Mattson demonstrates, the gloomy term was retroactively fused to Carter’s speech, quickly transforming itself from a phantom limb into an appendage of a rather more parasitic variety. One that quickly began, as all parasites will, to attack its host.
“Our memory of the speech comes from those who reworked it,” Mattson declares—those “who twisted its words into a blunt instrument that helped them depose a president.”
His book, Mattson states in a moment of melodrama, is thus not merely a work of history, but also a “presidential murder mystery.” It is an attempt to discover how Carter, whom Hunter Thompson called “one of the most intelligent politicians I’ve ever met,” could end his first and only term in the White House as a political punch line. (And a cruelly enduring one: in a recent episode of The Simpsons, Mattson notes, the citizens of Springfield unveil a statue of a four-fingered President Carter. The words emblazoned upon his likeness? “Malaise Forever.”)
Considering the many parallels Mattson posits between the political realities of 1979 and the political realities of 2009, it will perhaps come as little surprise that chief among the persons of interest the author’s investigation singles out for censure are the members of the national press corps. Sure, Mattson notes, Carter himself shares culpability for the speech’s final failure. Mere days after delivering it, the president asked his entire Cabinet to resign—”the purge,” this was dubbed—causing both economic panic and questions about his mental health. And sure, Republicans and their allies were waiting to pounce on and amplify the president’s every weakness. (Ronald Reagan: “I find no national malaise. I find nothing wrong with the American people.”) But in Mattson’s view, “malaise” owes most of its stubborn stickiness to the press, whose hasty packaging of the political present guides, in turn, the political future.
Summarizing the speech on July 16, the Los Angeles Times declared that Carter had outlined “the moral malaise into which the country had descended.” The über-columnists Evans and Novak suggested that the speech was a “warning of ‘malaise’ in the land.” In The Washington Post, David Broder predicted that the president would continue to address “what he sees as malaise in the country.” All this in light of the fact that, immediately following the speech, White House switchboard operators found themselves overwhelmed by thousands of incoming calls—some 84 percent of them praising the speech, Mattson notes. And that, immediately following the speech, Carter’s approval ratings shot up 11 percent.
While the evidence in Mattson’s “murder mystery” is clear, less so are its means and motive. And perhaps that’s inevitable. Perhaps the conclusions here are obvious, neither requiring nor deserving the dignity of detail. They filter, after all, back to the familiar press pathologies—groupthink, cynicism, a sweet tooth for spectacle—that journalists are accused of so often we risk numbness to their deeper causes through the anesthetic of cliché itself.
About these pathologies, Mattson has little to say beyond the usual bromides. He diagnoses a “lens of cynicism and jadedness” and leaves the matter at that. Still, his book does suggest the danger presented by a press corps that fails to fulfill the pact it makes with history—a failure which amounts to its own “fundamental threat to American democracy.” We are, after all, a nation of words. From Winthrop’s sermons to the Declaration’s summons, from “I Have a Dream” to “Yes, We Can,” we have defined who we are not just according to what we do, but according to what we say. We have known each other—which is to say, we have known ourselves—through language.
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/i_got_what_america_needs_right
#1 Posted by Hardrada, CJR on Thu 30 Jul 2009 at 05:45 PM
I haven't read Mattson's book, I admit. But for those who didn't live through the Carter administration, a closer look at the period may be in order before accepting what appear to be Mattson's attempt to revive Carter's reputation. The 1960s and 1970s were an era when political institutions went off the tracks - when the idea of politics as salvation for our sins suffered real discredit. Speeches denouncing American greed, materialism, etc., will always get a good academic press, but Carter came across as blaming the masses when it was the political elites - whom he had originally campaigned against - who had betrayed the trust of the public. He had 'gone Washington' by 1979. Carter's tone-deaf personality was such that he was strongly challenged within his own party - most of Kennedy's supporters agreed with Carter on specific issues. It's not the fault of ordinary human beings that they are more responsive to postive incentives than to hectoring.
The 'malaise' attributed to his speech was subsequently lifted by the election of a more competent successor and his team. It's not at all unusual for particularly self-righteous leaders to blame the people for his own shortcomings, which is why Carter remains the Democratic counterpart to Herbert Hoover in our politics.
Oh, and Hendrik Hertzberg's current employer, The New Yorker, is replicating the fate of the Carter Administration, losing money and readers . . . I guess it's the fault of the reading public, which just won't do what those editors and politicians tell them to do.
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 31 Jul 2009 at 12:33 PM
[i]It's not at all unusual for particularly self-righteous leaders to blame the people for his own shortcomings, which is why Carter remains the Democratic counterpart to Herbert Hoover in our politics.
[/i]
Sure, Mark... the American people are a bunch of smart, responsible and forward-thinking folks, and Jimmy Carter should be ashamed of himself for implying that they might eventually have to take responsibility for their actions.
Don't worry, be happy.
#3 Posted by Hardrada, CJR on Fri 31 Jul 2009 at 04:19 PM
Hmm, Hardrada's comment underlines that contempt for some generic stereotype of "Americans" - a contempt always denied in the abstract by people on the Left - which is the subtext of so much of Left politics and culture. I'll leave the large statements about "Americans' to such deep thinkers, and simply note that all sides - the Kennedy-wing Left of the Democratic Party and the Republicans, too - agreed with the public perception that Carter's incompetence as a president, whatever his potential competence as a clergyman - was evident by 1979.
#4 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 3 Aug 2009 at 12:49 PM
Once again, you can see why Carter, Caddell and Hertzberg were so tragically out of touch. Americans weren't worried about Watergate (6 years old) Vietnam (7 years old) or the environment. Nor were they all hanging out at Studio 54. Maybe wealthy litterati living in Manhattan were going to Studio 54 or thinking about a long-ended war they dodged so common Americans from small mill towns could die in their place. These elitists were not in Conneaut, Ohio or Flint, Michigan or Dunkirk, New York. Common American working people were losing their jobs, losing their careers, losing their homes, losing their towns and losing their national pride. This spectacular disaster of a speech which clearly blamed the Amnerican people for Carter's pathetic failures is possibly the worst piece of political rhetoric of the 20th Century. Walter Mondale showed his humanity when he begged Carter not to give a speech that didn't understand that Americans were really suffering. Sorry, but this tragic speech made Reagan possible.
#5 Posted by Botendaddy, CJR on Thu 25 Feb 2010 at 07:16 PM