In 1979, former President Jimmy Carter did significant political damage to himself in an extraordinary address to the nation on the energy crisis.
Carter listed criticisms of his presidency, painting a picture of an apathetic nation trapped in a moral and spiritual funk.
“It’s a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the heart, soul and very spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and the loss of our nation’s unity of purpose,” Carter said.
Ultimately, the speech came back to haunt Carter and allowed his opponents, notably Ronald Reagan, to portray him as a pessimistic and uninspiring leader.
Yet by the late 1970s, it seemed conceivable that Carter’s mastery of foreign policy at the height of the Cold War would give him a fair chance at a second term.
But a rise in revolutionary Islam — heralding a trend that would discourage future presidents — conspired to drive him from the White House.
The Iran Hostage Crisis: In October 1979, the United States allowed the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi – overthrown by the Iranian revolution a few months earlier – to enter the country for treatment. This infuriated Islamic revolutionaries who viewed him as an oppressive puppet of the United States and wanted him sent back to Iran to stand trial.
On November 4, a year before the American elections, student supporters of the Islamic revolution seized the American embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage.
The 444-day standoff transfixed the nation, souring the national mood by the day as television news reports reported on how long the hostages had been held. Little by little, this dashed Carter’s hopes of winning a second term.
His fortunes were also damaged by a daring and ultimately disastrous rescue attempt in which a U.S. helicopter carrying special forces crashed in the desert, killing eight U.S. service members.
At the same time, the Cold War was approaching a turning point.
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter decided to boycott the Moscow Summer Olympics and asked the Senate to delay ratification of SALT II.
As November 1980 approached, a sense of Soviet belligerence and the lengthening humiliation of the hostage crisis fostered the impression of an American power under siege.
“It was a perfect storm of unpleasant events, and Carter’s failure to have the Iranian hostages released before the 1980 election spelled doomsday,” Brinkley said.
Carter wrote in his memoir that his fate was out of his control as the election approached, but he prayed that the hostages would be released.
“Now my political future may well be determined by irrational people halfway around the world over whom I have no control,” he said.
“If the hostages were released, I was convinced that my election would be assured; If the expectations of the American people were disappointed again, I had little chance of winning. »
Throughout the campaign, Reagan criticized Carter as an ineffective leader, condemning America to perpetual decline.
“A recession is when your neighbor loses their job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his,” Reagan charged.
The actor-turned-California governor pulled off a landslide on Election Day 1980, winning 489 electoral votes.
In the final humiliation for Carter, on January 20, 1981, 20 minutes after Reagan was sworn in, Iran released the hostages.