In 1979, former President Jimmy Carter did himself significant political damage in an extraordinary address to the nation on the energy crisis.
Carter listed criticisms of his presidency, painting a picture of a listless nation trapped in a moral and spiritual funk.
“It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation,” Carter said.
Ultimately, the speech came back to haunt Carter and made it easy for opponents, not least Ronald Reagan, to portray him as a pessimistic and uninspiring leader.
Still, in the late 1970s, it seemed conceivable that Carter’s command of foreign policy at the height of the Cold War would give him a fair shot at a second term.
But a swelling of revolutionary Islam – heralding a trend that would confound future presidents — conspired to sweep him out of the White House.
The Iran hostage crisis: In October 1979, the United States let the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi — who had been overthrown by the Iranian Revolution a few months earlier — enter the country for medical treatment. That infuriated Islamic revolutionaries who saw him as an oppressive US puppet and wanted him returned to Iran for trial.
On November 4, a year before the US election, students who supported the Islamic revolution seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage.
The 444-day standoff transfixed the nation, souring the national mood day by day as television news bulletins tallied how long the hostages had been in custody. Gradually it dashed Carter’s hopes of a second term.
His fortunes were also battered by a daring and ultimately disastrous rescue bid in which a US helicopter carrying special forces crashed in the desert, killing eight US servicemen.
At the same time, the Cold War was approaching a pivotal point.
After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter decided to boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow 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 an impression of US power under siege.
“It was a perfect storm of unpleasant events, and that inability of Carter to get those Iranian hostages released before the 1980 elections spelled doomsday,” said Brinkley.
Carter wrote in his memoirs that his destiny was out of his hands as the election approached, but prayed the hostages would be released.
“Now, my political future might well be determined by irrational people on the other side of the world over whom I had no control,” he said.
“If the hostages were released, I was convinced my election would be assured; if the expectations of the American people were dashed again, there was little chance I could win.”
Throughout the campaign, Reagan berated Carter as an ineffectual leader consigning America to perpetual decline.
“A recession is when your neighbor loses his 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 stunning 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.
