American Experience

I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt... Lyndon Baines Johnson... Richard Milhous Nixon... Do solemnly swear... That I will faithfully execute the office... ...of president of the United States.

ANNOUNCER: "American Experience" presents the definitive collection of presidential biographies.

Tonight... My name is Jimmy Carter and I'm running for president.

ANNOUNCER: He promised the country new leadership.

MAN: Jimmy Carter represented honesty and decency.

ANNOUNCER: But his presidency would be held hostage.

WOMAN: It came to symbolize whether he was strong.

ANNOUNCER: The definitive collection of presidential biographies continues with "Jimmy Carter."

MAN: His devotion to peace and human rights keep on resonating.

ANNOUNCER: Tonight on "American Experience."

(crowd exclaiming) MAN: Blast off!

The clock is running!

(horn honks) (crowd cheering) (gunfire) MAN: Gibbons is down!

JIMMY CARTER: I promised you four years ago that I would never lie to you, so I can't stand here tonight and say it doesn't hurt.

About an hour ago, I called Governor Reagan in California and I congratulated him for a fine victory.

I look forward to working closely with him... DAN CARTER: All his life he believed that if you worked hard enough at it, understood the issues, mastered information, then you would come out first.

I said to him, "It must have been hard to turn over the keys to Ronald Reagan," and he said, "You don't know how hard it was."

NARRATOR: On January 20, 1981, after one of the most humiliating defeats in American political history, President Jimmy Carter returned home to Plains, Georgia, to what he called, "An altogether new, unwanted and potentially empty life."

ROSALYNN CARTER: He really was better than I was when we came home because, um, I was so depressed about it that he was always trying to prop me up.

(crowd cheering, applauding) NARRATOR: Four years before, he had stunned the nation.

(cheering) PATRICK CADDELL: Going from total anonymity to being president of the United States in less than 12 months is unprecedented in American history.

If it weren't for the country looking for something in '76, Carter could never have gotten elected.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: He offered a biography of what we wanted to hear-- a farmer, Main Street values, Plains-- and he carried that message through.

It was the right message at the right time.

CARTER: Our commitment to human rights must be absolute.

NARRATOR: He had promised a new beginning, to heal the wounds of Watergate and Vietnam-- a government as good and decent and compassionate as the American people.

(crowd chanting) But events would overwhelm him-- an energy crisis, inflation, an Islamic revolution, and 53 Americans held hostage 444 days.

Carter came to be regarded as a good and decent man who was in over his head.

ELIZABETH DREW: He's a very, very smart man and very well-intentioned, but feel... feel is very, very important in politics, especially in a president, and Carter just didn't have very much of it.

What he had was a moral ideology and the issues where he proved successful-- the Panama Canal treaties, the human rights crusades, peace in the Middle East-- those were issues where his moral ideology guided him.

In a nation that was proud of hard work... NARRATOR: "Carter was one of the more exasperating men ever to claim the White House," one journalist said.

"His tenacity, so admirable, could shift to stubbornness, "his religious faith to self-righteousness.

His brilliant mind could be bound up by intricate details."

Many times the one argument that I would find would ruin a person's case is when you'd say, "This is good for you, politically."

He didn't want to hear that.

He didn't want to think that way and he didn't want his staff to think that way.

He wanted to know what's right.

BRINKLEY: This is one of the most highly ambitious people you'll ever meet.

I mean, you don't make it from Plains, Georgia, to the White House just on charm.

But what makes him complex is he's got that kind of hubris and arrogance and also this Christian humbleness, and that's the battle he's constantly finding himself in.

NARRATOR: "As a child, my greatest ambition was to be valuable around the farm and to please my father," Jimmy Carter wrote of his boyhood in rural Georgia.

"He was the center of my life and the focus of my admiration."

DAN CARTER: I can't believe that Jimmy Carter ever felt lost, in the sense that he didn't know where his place was in the world.

And a lot of that comes from his father, who not only was a well-respected, powerful figure in the community, but I think had a real sense of who he was.

And that certitude and self-confidence was something that his son, I think, absorbed unconsciously.

NARRATOR: By the standards of southwest Georgia, Earl Carter presided over a small empire.

A staunch segregationist, he owned some 350 acres of land where he planted corn, cotton and peanuts, employing more than 200 workers at harvest time.

Five sharecropper families, who depended on him for their survival, lived year-round at his farm in Archery.

Carter's mother, Lillian, was an avid reader, loved traveling and was known to enjoy a sip of bourbon.

She put in long hours as a nurse at a nearby hospital and devoted much of her free time to helping sick neighbors.

She got paid in chickens and vegetables and that kind of things because she really helped and felt called to help those that had less than her, and I think she instilled that in all of her children.

ROSALYNN CARTER: She was the only person in Plains who would take up for Abraham Lincoln if he was ever brought up.

Today it's unbelievable to think about that, but back then it was just a way of life, and we never thought anything... we never thought it was really wrong.

NARRATOR: Lillian set for Jimmy the example of service to others.

Earl put the steel in his character.

BETTY GLAD: He was very demanding.

He expected his children to be the very best, and, um, in some ways they all had that built into them.

NARRATOR: "I never remember him saying 'good job' when I did my best to fulfill his orders," Jimmy later said.

"The punishments he administered remain vivid in my memory."

(train whistle blows) A short distance from the Carter farm was Plains, Georgia-- population 600-- the only place for miles to get a cup of coffee, a haircut, buy or sell goods.

It is the place Jimmy Carter always called home, where as a child he went to the all-white Baptist church on Sundays and where he attended the all-white public school.

DAN CARTER: Everybody knew that he was special.

He was somebody different, smarter than, worked harder than, did more than, ceaselessly working at improving himself, even as a child.

NARRATOR: Jimmy made all "A"s. He played basketball and joined the book lover's club, read Shakespeare's King Lear, Ben-Hur, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

He dreamed of joining the Navy.

His uncle Tom Gordy had excited his imagination with tales of adventures, and postcards and gifts from exotic, faraway places.

In June 1943, at age 18, the farm boy from Plains was admitted to the U.S.

Naval Academy at Annapolis-- the first Carter ever to leave Georgia to pursue a higher education.

ROSALYNN CARTER: Jimmy's sister Ruth was my best friend and she had a picture of him on the wall in her bedroom.

I just thought he was the most handsome young man I had ever seen.

One day I confessed to her that I wished she would let me take that photograph home, because I just thought I had fallen in love with Jimmy Carter.

NARRATOR: Rosalynn Smith was shy, a dedicated student, read the Bible daily and went to church on Sundays.

Her mother once described her as a girl who could wear a white dress all day and keep it clean.

E. STANLY GODBOLD: She was very bright.

She was a reader.

She liked to look at maps.

She was always interested in seeing the world and, uh, she always wanted to get away.

ROSALYNN CARTER: I went to a meeting at the church and I was standing outside and Jimmy drove up with Ruth and her boyfriend, got out of the car and came up and asked me to go to the movie.

He kissed me good-bye.

I was thrilled to death, and then we started corresponding and, uh, by the time Christmas came, I was swept off my feet.

NARRATOR: One month after his graduation from Annapolis, Jimmy and Rosalynn were married.

She was 18, he was 21.

Two years after joining the Navy, Ensign Carter was accepted into the submarine service.

It was a way to advance rapidly in a highly competitive environment.

BRINKLEY: The military was everything for Jimmy Carter.

It's his training.

He's never a minute late for anything.

Punctuality means everything.

His sense of order...

There's no sense of a mess around Jimmy Carter.

It's a certain kind of person that works in a submarine.

It takes a kind of mental discipline.

NARRATOR: After six years in the service, Lieutenant Carter earned one of the most coveted posts in the Navy-- senior officer of the USS Seawolf, on the vanguard of America's nuclear defense program.

ROSALYNN CARTER: He always had one of the best positions in the Navy, and I think it gave him a lot of confidence that he could do whatever he wanted to do.

NARRATOR: In 1953, less than a year after he began duty on the Seawolf, Carter received a message from home.

His father had cancer and was not expected to live long.

Ten years had passed since Carter left Plains for a career in the Navy.

Visits home had been rare.

Father and son had grown distant.

As he sat by Earl's bedside, Jimmy discovered a side of his father he'd never seen before.

"Our long conversations were interrupted by a stream of visitors, black and white," Carter later wrote.

"A surprising number wanted to recount "how my father's personal influence "and many secret acts of generosity had affected their lives."

GLAD: He saw that he had really built a community around himself.

A lot of people liked him and, uh, came to see him when he was sick and when he died, came to his funeral.

And what Jimmy realized, he didn't have a community for himself.

He's actually said to me, "You know," he said, "I wondered at that time, if I died, "how many people would come to my funeral or how many people would care if I died."

And I think it made him, at a fairly fundamental level, examine what life is all about.

BRINKLEY: He was a shining star in the U.S. Navy who could have gone very, very far.

He dropped all that to emulate his father, to take over his father's business.

I don't think there's any higher tribute a son could make to his father than to say, "Now that you're dead, Daddy, I want to stand in your shoes."

NARRATOR: When Jimmy told Rosalynn, she was furious.

"She almost quit me," he later said.

CHIP CARTER: Mom was kind of disappointed to be going back to Plains, and she had worked a good bit of her life to get out of there and, uh, they were going back to take over a business that wasn't doing very well.

NARRATOR: Carter applied all his energies to peanuts.

"He was always experimenting," Rosalynn later wrote.

"Trying new things, dreaming up something else he wanted to do."

"I had to admit I was enjoying life," Rosalynn later said.

The Carters went fishing, played golf, took frequent vacations.

(no audio) Jimmy served on the Sumter County Board of Education, taught Sunday School at the Plains Baptist Church, was scoutmaster, vice president of the Lions Club.

"But he had come to the point of boredom," Rosalynn remembered.

"And one weekday morning in 1962, he got up and put on his Sunday pants."

I was really shocked.

I had no idea he was thinking about running for the state senate.

NARRATOR: The campaign that launched Jimmy Carter's political career lasted all of 15 days.

There was no money and no staff-- only family and friends and his own determination.

Though he would always play the reluctant politician, even by his first campaign, Carter was no stranger to politics.

DAN CARTER: Politics was something he lived and breathed from the time he was a child-- a kind of weekly, daily, even during election season interaction, barbecues.

You gathered on the county courthouse grounds for speeches.

He talks about going to rallies with his father and remembering them very well.

And I think he came to see politics as something not alien, not something he had to make a decision to do, but was almost natural.

NARRATOR: "I received a startling education," he said, "one that set the tone for my future career."

On January 14, 1963, the morning after the traditional whiskey and barbecued wild hog dinner, Jimmy Carter was sworn in as a member of the Georgia Senate.

He was one of 89 new legislators joining the Georgia Assembly, many of them determined to change the old ways of Georgia politics.

LEROY JOHNSON: I had the good fortune of being the first black to be elected to the General Assembly of Georgia in 100 years.

Carter was one of those persons who came to the Senate at that time, and he was not a leader of the Senate.

He was quiet.

He was effective.

He was deliberate... and he made no waves.

NARRATOR: In 1966, after two terms in the Georgia Senate, Jimmy Carter jumped into the race for governor of Georgia.

He ran well behind arch- segregationist Lester Maddox, famous for wielding an ax handle to keep blacks away from his chicken restaurant.

Carter promised better schools, better hospitals, better roads, and a more competent government.

"It is hard to hear "Senator Carter talk about state government and not be impressed by his integrity," one reporter wrote.

DAN CARTER: You're not going to turn the applecart upside down, but you're going to bring changes, you're going to bring improvements in the South and you're going to do it by applying good, sound business techniques to everything from the way you run your public institutions to the way you run your government.

NARRATOR: Carter took his message to every corner of Georgia.

"We never stopped," Rosalynn recalled, "no matter what."

By Election Day, he was closing in on the lead.

CHIP CARTER: We went to bed thinking we were going to win.

I'd gotten up and gone to school the next day, being congratulated about my father winning the primary, and then Billy came to the... about 2:00 in the afternoon and told us that Lester Maddox had beat us by less than a half of a percentage point.

So, it was very disheartening.

NARRATOR: "We all felt sick," Rosalynn recalled.

"We were $66,000 in debt, and Jimmy had lost 22 pounds."

After all the miles traveled, the handshakes, the long days, Jimmy Carter was right back where he started when he first ran for the Senate in 1962.

Weeks later, with the loss still fresh in his mind, Jimmy went for a walk with his sister Ruth, an evangelical Christian and spiritual healer.

All of his life he had been a churchgoing Christian, but now felt that his faith had been superficial.

"We are both Baptists," he said, "but what is it that you have that I haven't got?"

"Total commitment," she replied.

"I belong to Jesus-- everything I am."

"Ruth," he answered, "that's what I want."

BRINKLEY: At that point he decided that he'd always put Christ in his life first and politics second.

But that's been a struggle for him, because politics is the ego and Christ is the humbleness.

NARRATOR: The born-again Christian traveled north to blighted neighborhoods in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts as a "personal witness" for Jesus Christ.

BRINKLEY: He would go door to door, getting people to witness Christ, take Jesus into their lives.

I mean, can you imagine?

Ten years later this man is president of the United States, and he's banging on doors, asking people, "Do you want a Bible?

Will you take God in your life?"

I'm Jimmy Carter, I'm running for governor.

How are you?

NARRATOR: In 1970, with renewed fervor, Carter ran for governor of Georgia a second time.

I have been campaigning almost 18 hours a day without stopping for eight months.

I've seen almost every factory shift in Georgia, been in almost every store... ROSALYNN CARTER: It was just kind of an obsession.

He had lost, so he had to win.

And we worked as hard as we could.

Bye.

Hi, y'all.

NARRATOR: It would not be the amateur run of 1966, but a well-coordinated effort.

Carter brought in two Southwest Georgia boys: Jody Powell as his personal assistant, and Hamilton Jordan to manage the campaign.

Advertising man Gerald Rafshoon would handle the media.

Bert Lance, a banker from Calhoun, played the role of advisor.

LANCE: ...though it was a tough, tough campaign and there were many who thought that Carter could not possibly win.

NARRATOR: Carter's rival for the Democratic nomination, Carl Sanders, enjoyed a commanding 20% lead.

He had the backing of the Atlanta business establishment and the support of African Americans, voting in greater numbers since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Carter went after Sanders with a vengeance.

TV ANNOUNCER: Some candidates in this governor's race have large campaign contributions behind them.

Big money asking big favors.

Jimmy Carter only has the people of Georgia... NARRATOR: Carter portrayed Sanders as a tool of the Atlanta business establishment and himself as a hard-working Everyman.

ANNOUNCER: No wonder Jimmy Carter has a special understanding of the problems facing everyone who works for a living.

Isn't it time somebody spoke up for you?

GODBOLD: He wanted to appeal to the large middle-class, blue-collar type, predominantly white, and most of these people are going to be segregationists.

GLAD: He courted the racist vote.

There were some radio ads that he ran in 1970.

He said that "Unlike Sanders, I am not trying to get the..." and he sort of slid over whether it was "block" or "black" vote.

But it sort of meant the same thing.

GODBOLD: Carter himself was not a segregationist in 1970.

But he did say things that the segregationists wanted to hear.

He was opposed to busing.

He was in favor of private schools.

He said that he would invite segregationist governor George Wallace to come to Georgia to give a speech.

JOHNSON: The only solace that we got and received was the fact that, in private meetings, he convinced us that if he was given an opportunity, he would make things better.

He'd always come up with this question of trust.

"Trust me.

I believe in doing the right thing."

GLAD: If you are really trying to accomplish good moral ends, you may have to be a low-life politician to get there.

And he didn't probably like doing it that much, but he was willing to do it.

(rifle fires, crowd applauds) (rifle fires) CARTER: At the end of a long campaign, I believe I know our people... NARRATOR: On January 12, 1971, Jimmy Carter, age 46, was sworn in as governor of Georgia.

North and South, rural and urban... NARRATOR: In his inaugural address, he revealed his true feelings on race.

I say to you quite frankly, that the time for racial discrimination is over.

(light applause) No poor, rural, weak or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.

(applause and whistles) JOHNSON: We were extremely pleased.

Many of the white segregationists were displeased.

And I'm convinced that those people that supported him would not have supported him if they had thought that he would have made that statement.

DAN CARTER: I do remember reading his inaugural address and thinking, "This is wonderful."

You've got a governor in a Deep South state who is stating emphatically not just that it's time to accept change, but that it's time to really move far beyond that and end all forms of discrimination.

NARRATOR: Carter appointed an unprecedented number of women and African Americans, stimulated foreign investment, reformed the state's criminal justice and mental health systems.

I see unfair taxes and government waste and I see runaway spending... NARRATOR: The centerpiece of his agenda was a radical plan to streamline state government with savings at every level.

LANCE: Everybody had to pay for their own lunch.

You know, we had to put two dollars into the kitty.

Mary Beasley, who was his secretary at the time, would ask you what you wanted, so you felt honored to be able to go ahead and spend money for a dried-out sandwich.

NARRATOR: The governor's proposal to slash the number of government agencies provoked outrage.

CARTER: I welcome the confrontation with heads of departments.

You know, I'm willing to fight with anybody who opposes a recommendation that would be helpful to... JOHNSON: I saw a completely different side of Carter.

In the Senate, he was not assertive.

As governor, he was assertive.

He knew where he wanted to go, and he knew the direction he wanted to go in.

And he wanted complete compliance.

NARRATOR: By the time his reorganization bill reached the Senate floor, Carter had alienated most of the assembly.

But his bill squeaked through by a handful of votes.

FORTSON: As I told the committee up there, he reminds me of a South Georgia turtle who's been blocked by a log.

And he just keeps pushing, pushing, pushing straight ahead.

He doesn't go around here until he finally gets a soft spot in the log, and right on through he goes.

He is a man of great determination and steel.

NARRATOR: Election season 1972, Jimmy Carter extended his hospitality to Democratic hopefuls.

Barely two years in the governor's mansion, he already had his eye on the White House.

CHIP CARTER: Every Democrat running for office came to Georgia.

And every single one of them, Dad would ask to come and stay with him at the governor's mansion, and realized that they were just people like him.

NARRATOR: That July, Carter led the Georgia delegation to the Democratic National Convention, hoping for the second spot on the ticket.

I'm over here in the box and I really can't tell what's going on so much.

But Jimmy comes over from the floor and briefs me every once in a while.

As you said, it's the first time I've ever been to a convention and I'm just so excited about it.

GERALD RAFSHOON: I remember at the end of the McGovern speech, at 3:00 in the morning, Hamilton Jordan and I were walking away from the convention hall.

I said, "You know... "if Ed Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, Terry Sanford, "Scoop Jackson, George Wallace, "Ted Kennedy can run for president, Jimmy could run for president."

And then of course we said, "If these guys who are running these campaigns"-- like we met the people in the McGovern campaign-- "can run a campaign for president, hell, we could do that."

I called Ruth.

I said, "Jimmy's going to run for p-p-..." I couldn't even say the word, it was so... unreal to me.

NARRATOR: Carter officially announced his candidacy in December 1974.

The one-term Southern governor was a long shot.

Nobody knew him.

It was like picking a name out of the phone book.

I mean, it takes a bit of hubris to think you're the best person to be the president of the United States because you were a one-term governor of Georgia.

MAN: Once and for all, why not the best?

BRINKLEY: It's a kind of arrogance run amok.

MAN: You see his name was Jimmy Carter... CARTER: I want to see us once again have a nation that's as good and honest and decent and truthful and competent and compassionate... and as filled with love as are the American people.

JOHN FARRELL: At that time, character was a monumental issue.

The country had been through a horrible time and Jimmy Carter represented honesty and decency.

CARTER: I'll never tell a lie.

I'll never make a misleading statement.

I'll never betray the confidence that any of you has in me.

BRINKLEY: Lyndon Johnson lied to us about Vietnam.

Richard Nixon lied to us about Watergate.

He's saying, you know, I'm not one of those turkeys who's messing things up up there.

(Allman Brothers' "Ramblin' Man" playing) Lord, I was born a ramblin' man... NARRATOR: Carter's campaign strategy was simple: run early and run hard.

Before any other candidates even announced, Carter had traveled more than 50,000 miles, visited 37 states and delivered more than 200 speeches.

BOURNE: He was a wonderful speaker before small groups.

He would get up and talk, without notes, with extraordinary passion.

Almost like a preacher, really having the spirit with him.

NARRATOR: It was a grassroots effort financed on a shoestring.

CHIP CARTER: We had all these stepping stones we had to do.

We had to qualify for federal matching funds by a certain point.

And we accomplished every one of them.

Every time you accomplished one, it gave you more and more confidence.

ROSALYNN CARTER: We had our boys out, we had Aunt Sissy out, we had his mother-- all going in different directions.

CHIP CARTER: At one point in the presidential campaign we had 11 family members in 11 different states at the same time.

We were out every day, knocking on doors.

We knocked on 60,000 doors in New Hampshire.

That was probably almost every Democratic household that we could identify in the whole state.

WALTER CRONKITE: Jimmy Carter took a long lead tonight in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

He won the New Hampshire primary handily.

(applause) I remember when we couldn't find a microphone.

(crowd laughs and cheers) NARRATOR: Carter's stamina seemed superhuman.

"Behind that Huckleberry Finn grin," one reporter observed, "there is a perfectionist campaign machine that shuts down only six hours out of 24."

State by state, the delegates kept adding up.

By the time the Democrats convened in New York, in July 1976, Carter had a lock on the nomination.

(band plays "We Shall Overcome") MONDALE: The fact that Carter could unite the nation, North and South, and give us a clean shot for the presidency-- this was the culmination of my dreams.

My name is Jimmy Carter and I'm running for president.

(applause and cheering) And now I've come here to accept your nomination.

(thunderous applause) GLAD: He'd pulled off a miracle.

In the fall of 1975, he was barely visible as a candidate, below five percent in all the polls.

And suddenly, six months later, he has the Democratic presidential nomination, and he is running 70% in the public opinion polls.

That is a miracle.

Now, the problem was that he had his vulnerabilities, and they showed in the fall.

(train whistle blowing) CARTER: This election means a lot to our country.

NARRATOR: Carter began the fall campaign against incumbent president Gerald Ford with a 15-point lead.

CARTER: We've been disappointed, disillusioned.

We've been kept out of government.

We've been embarrassed.

Sometimes we've been ashamed... NARRATOR: He returned to the themes of honesty and trust that had defined his primary campaign.

Jimmy Carter will say anything, anywhere, to be president of the United States.

NARRATOR: But as Election Day approached, he was pressured to take a stand on the issues.

He wanders, he wavers, he waffles and he wiggles.

He isn't the man... LANCE: He was a moderate to the moderates.

He was a conservative to the conservatives.

He was a liberal to the liberals.

And in fact, he was all of those things.

We're going to have a fair government once again.

We're going to have a government that's open and not secret, once again.

JOSHUA MURAVCHIK: His standard line when asked about his foreign policy was that he wanted to provide a foreign policy as good as the American people.

Well, gee, that's great but what in the world does it mean?

You can depend on it.

You help me, I'll help you.

Thank you very much.

GLAD: The gist of what he presented was that he would be a centrist Democrat who had liberal values in his heart, as well as the desire for frugality and thrift and efficiency in government.

And so he could appeal to people from all parts of the Democratic Party.

But as Julian Bond said at one point, "The problem with this is that his support was an inch deep and a mile wide."

NARRATOR: Alarmed that support among liberal Democrats was eroding, Carter's young staff made a bold move.

CADDELL: We did the Playboy interview to show that being a born-again Christian was not a threat to more secular Democrats and young people.

NARRATOR: For five hours, Carter tried to explain his views on culture, politics and faith.

Toward the end of the interview, exasperated at not being understood, he said, "I've looked on a lot of women with lust.

I've committed adultery in my heart many times."

CADDELL: If you read the interview, the "lust in your heart" line was to try to explain that he, too, was a sinner, that...

But the language was-- and I would see this all the time-- Carter used language that was germane to his world, to his... like we all do-- to our own cultural context.

Here's a guy who is so moral, but on the one hand he talks about he's lusted after women in his heart, and he talks about shacking up and he uses language that's going to really enrage and turn off a lot of people.

BRINKLEY: Do not underestimate what a crisis that interview and the "lust in my heart" caused Carter.

It almost derailed the entire Carter campaign.

They were in havoc over it.

CADDELL: In retrospect, it was kind of amusing.

It wasn't very funny at the time, trying to explain to people that Jimmy Carter was not some child molester, you know, I mean, or pervert.

The Playboy thing has been of very great concern to me.

I don't know how to deal with it exactly.

NARRATOR: By the time Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford met in the first of two presidential debates, Carter's lead had evaporated.

The momentum belonged to Ford.

Two weeks later, he blundered.

FORD: There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.

Uh, I'm sorry, could I just follow... Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence... MONDALE: We knew that this was going to hurt, that a lot of people couldn't see how a president would say that.

It gave us about a week, as I recall, to pound away on this.

And you could just feel people moving on that question.

So what it did, I think, was rather than electing us, it stopped our slide.

(applause and cheering) NARRATOR: By Election Day, the polls showed a dead heat.

It was not until 3: 00 a.m. that the networks announced the winner-- by one of the closest margins in American history.

(cheering) CADDELL: I look back now, and I just...

I'm amazed.

Going from total anonymity to being president of the United States in less than 12 months is unprecedented in American history.

If it weren't for the country looking for something in '76, Carter could never have gotten elected.

He'd never have been allowed out of the box.

BRINKLEY: He offered a biography of what we wanted to hear: farmer, Main Street values, Plains.

It was the right message at the right time and it didn't happen by accident.

Carter created that message, knowing that that's what would win the day.

I came all the way through.

Took 22 months, and I didn't get... choked up until I... (crowd chuckles) (crowd applauds) (crowd cheers and whistles) CRONKITE: This was not planned, it was not scheduled and whether this is Carter's surprise for his inaugural, by golly, Bob, how about that?

NARRATOR: The morning of January 20, 1977, Jimmy Carter surprised the nation.

CHIP CARTER: I remember I was out there walking and you could hear Walter Cronkite over the loudspeaker saying, "The president is walking down the street!"

It was a major moment of the Carter presidency symbolically.

It was great theater.

DAN CARTER: Here was this tremendous breath of fresh air.

He was going to bring something new to Washington, bring new people and new ideas.

CARTER: Our commitment to human rights must be absolute, our laws fair...

It was so different from what had come before.

People were looking for something that was simple, something that was pure, and it just struck a chord in the American people.

CARTER: More is not necessarily better.

HERTZBERG: Jimmy Carter was exactly what the American people always say they want: above politics, determined to do the right thing regardless of political consequences, a simple person who doesn't lie, a modest man, not somebody with a lot of imperial pretenses.

That's what people say they want and that's what they got with Jimmy Carter.

NARRATOR: The Carter team arrived in Washington full of confidence, ready to take on the Washington insiders they had run against.

CADDELL: I felt like the advance wave of the German army arriving in Paris in 1940.

I mean, this is a Democratic city, and they were terrified-- I mean, terrified.

You could feel it in the air.

They did not have a lot in common with the national political party.

They did not have a lot in common with the Congress.

They were a very close-knit band of brothers and they were intensely loyal to Jimmy Carter.

And they were pretty cocky guys as well.

JODY POWELL: There was clearly some degree of suspicion and maybe even a little bit of resentment that... "Here come these folks riding in here "that didn't really pay their dues.

"They're not us.

"They're not our kind of folks and all of a sudden they're in the White House," and "We'll show them that this town is tougher than they think."

DREW: His top people had no experience in Washington.

And they were sort of contemptuous of Washington.

Well, it's one thing to sort of run against Washington, but you have to live there and you have to govern there and you have to work with the people who are there, and it really doesn't get you anywhere to have this attitude if you want to get anything done.

You get things done by power.

You get power from having public support.

My argument was that in order to maintain power we would have to reinforce constantly the message of what we were doing.

Good evening.

Tomorrow will be two weeks since I became president... NARRATOR: On February 2, Carter addressed the nation in a fireside chat on energy.

The country had been through an oil scare in 1973.

To head off a new crisis, Carter appealed directly to Americans to rally around a new program.

All of us must learn to waste less energy.

Simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night, we can save half the current shortage of natural gas.

If we learn to live thriftily and remember the importance of helping our neighbors, then we can find ways to adjust.

NARRATOR: Carter led by example.

He curtailed the use of limousines, canceled magazine subscriptions, unplugged television sets, and put the presidential yacht, Sequoia, on the auction block.

He turned off the air conditioners and it was so hot in the White House, people would come in there... (laughs) It was unbelievable.

It would be a hundred above in there.

NARRATOR: To save on staff overtime, all White House functions would end at midnight.

No hard liquor would be served.

HERTZBERG: Jimmy Carter is a low church Protestant, where it's a sin not to have a hard wooden bench to sit on in church.

And he brought that simplicity to the White House.

DAN ROSTENKOWSKI: We were all invited down to the White House every other Tuesday.

We walked into the private dining room on the first floor off the East Room.

We looked at the table and there were these little fingertip cookies, and...

Tip O'Neill looked at me and he said, "What's this?"

I said, "I guess that's breakfast."

So the president walked in, you know, walked around the room and shook hands with everybody.

And O'Neill looked at the president, and he says, "Mr. President, you know, we won the election."

CARTER: That's the last time you were here?

That's the last time I was in the Oval Office.

NARRATOR: Carter presented his agenda to the speaker of the house, Tip O'Neill.

Energy was Carter's number-one priority.

But it was competing with his long list of other legislation-- bills on hospital cost containment, urban policy, ethics in government.

You brought enough for four years' work.

I understand that.

NARRATOR: There was nothing in the package to grease the wheels of government.

Some are of more priority than others.

NARRATOR: When Carter struck from his budget 19 multimillion-dollar water projects that had been approved by President Ford, congressmen were furious.

DREW: He was absolutely right to take it on-- these sort of boondoggles and unnecessary, really, pork-barrel things-- but he didn't know how to take it on.

You have to build political capital, you have to build alliances, you have to make deals.

LANCE: The quid pro quo was not in him.

If you came to him and said, "Look, we can get so-and-so to vote for us," he would turn a deaf ear.

NARRATOR: "He never understood how the system worked," Tip O'Neill would later complain.

"And although this was out of character for Jimmy Carter, he didn't want to learn about it either."

DAN CARTER: If your job is to find the public good, to arrive at what the public good is and then to articulate it, and then you become the voice of the people.

And when you do that, it becomes very difficult to compromise.

ROSTENKOWSKI: On one occasion when I was talking to President Carter I said, "Mr. President, "you know, I've had three presidents before you "and I'll have several after you.

"I'm telling you, from the vantage point "of what I see in the legislative process, "you will be able to do and what you won't be able to do.

Now, you can accept that or not accept it."

But Carter's attitude was members of the House and Senate are bad guys.

FARRELL: Carter put O'Neill and the others like him in the same category with the corrupt Georgia courthouse pols that he had been fighting for much of his life.

The same kind of back-scratching, featherbedding pol, worrying about the next election, worrying about their public opinion polls, coming in and not doing what was right.

BRINKLEY: Often, he wouldn't return phone calls of leading senators.

There was a kind of an abrasive attitude he had towards them.

He never showed them the respect.

So they all eventually got bitter and turned on him.

DAN CARTER: Even if he had had a personality transplant and he had spent three hours a night playing poker with Tip O'Neill, I don't think that would have made the difference.

I mean, he was... he was faced with an extraordinarily difficult set of circumstances, which in part sprang not only from the political situation, but from his... the... the lack of a connection between his own views and those of his party.

NARRATOR: "There will be no new programs implemented "unless they are compatible "with my goal of having a balanced budget by the end of my first term," he pledged.

But liberal Democrats, eager to resume the social agenda of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, would not back away.

STUART EIZENSTAT: There had been an eight-year period when there had been no Democratic president.

There were a lot of pent-up and legitimate desires by constituency groups for more investment in a whole range of programs.

Although he sympathized with much of it, all of his instincts were to cut budgets, reduce the deficit dramatically.

But he was always under pressure from the Left to have more spending.

NARRATOR: At a breakfast meeting, Carter berated the congressional Democratic leadership for adding $61 billion in new programs to his budget.

"The Democratic Party needs to remove the stigma of unjustified spending," he said.

"Mr. President," Tip O'Neill reminded Carter, "the Democrats are the champions of the poor and the indigent."

BOURNE: Carter thought that big social programs and large amounts of federal spending would bankrupt the country.

He could see, I think, very clearly, the way the world was going, and he knew that old era had to be phased out.

Carter, looking back, was being very long-sighted in saying, you know, "We just don't have an open-ended, "never-ending amount of money to spend.

We have to get things in balance."

NARRATOR: Carter's commitment to fiscal restraint appealed to a growing number of Americans.

"He brings to the office a refreshing habit of plain words and simple manners," wrote Newsweek.

"A mind and discipline of tempered steel and an insatiable appetite for work."

Jimmy Carter had entered the presidency with only 51% of the vote.

By June, he enjoyed an approval rating of over 70%.

Then came an event that rocked the foundation of the Carter presidency.

It was called the Lance Affair.

In July 1977, Carter's budget director, Bert Lance, was accused of financial improprieties at his bank in Calhoun, Georgia.

A federal investigation cleared Lance of all illegal activity, but concluded that he had engaged in "unsafe and unsound banking practices."

CARTER: Bert Lance is a man of competence and a man of integrity, and that his services... NARRATOR: Believing the affair was behind him, Carter stood by his friend.

Bert Lance enjoys my complete confidence and support.

I'm proud to have him as part of my administration.

NARRATOR: Carter had miscalculated.

To the press, the issue was ethics, not the law.

Sensing a scandal, they went on the attack.

POWELL: There were a lot of journalists who very much wanted to prove that they could be as tough on a Democratic president as they had been on... on a Richard Nixon.

There was a... a real desire to make sure that it was clear that they were going to pursue this every bit as aggressively.

One of the things people like to go after more than anything else is what they perceive as hypocrisy.

So that you're judged by the standards that you set for yourself.

And certainly, Carter's talking about, "I'll never tell you a lie" and emphasizing honesty provided an easy opportunity.

NARRATOR: Carter's inner circle urged him to get rid of Lance.

But he was torn between loyalty to his friend and his own reputation.

For weeks, he allowed the Lance Affair to fester.

REPORTER: Do you feel you were drummed out?

LANCE: My statement speaks for itself.

I have no comment about being drummed out.

I said in my statement that I had to analyze and question what... LANCE: The day that I resigned, I came home, and I was spent.

I lay down on the bed crying about the situation, just from the standpoint of just having run out of any adrenaline or emotion or anything else, and so we had all that horde of media out on the front yard that had been there constantly.

I guess it was a suicide watch.

REPORTER: Any comment at all?

DREW: Looking back, it wasn't that big a deal.

But what it did do at the time... was give the first blow to the image that Carter was trying to project that his was a squeaky-clean administration.

Whether my own credibility has been damaged, I can't say.

I would guess to some degree.

An unpleasant situation like this... NARRATOR: Carter's approval rating plunged 25 points.

POWELL: It would have been better for the president if we had brought that to an end sooner.

It threw us off our stride.

It made it harder for us to talk about other things and sort of played into questions about whether we could lead and run the country.

CADDELL: Until that moment, we had been driving the agenda.

Everyone danced to our tune.

After that, we danced to everybody else's tune.

And that hurt us with the public, because now Jimmy Carter is not in charge.

(cheering and applause) NARRATOR: On May 22, 1977, before the graduating class at the University of Notre Dame, President Jimmy Carter unveiled a new foreign policy for the United States.

Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism.

NARRATOR: Carter had come to office with no experience in foreign affairs, but determined to make his mark.

In his first year alone, he met more than 40 heads of state, resumed talks on diplomatic relations with China and with the Soviet Union on arms control.

He launched a new peace process in the Middle East and signed a new Canal Treaty with Panama, transferring, after 75 years, ownership of the canal to the Panamanians.

But it was a principle straight from his heart that would redefine America's role in the world.

We have reaffirmed America's commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.

GADDIS SMITH: That was his greatest speech, standing up for our own values, and expecting then that the world would appreciate that, and that we would be-- he didn't use this phrase, but it's an old phrase in American history-- like the beacon on the hill, the beacon of freedom and liberty and democracy.

GLAD: He will be remembered for putting on the agenda hereafter the whole issue of human rights.

We now assume that the goal of a state is not only to protect its national security interests.

It has an obligation to try to deal with human suffering where it has the ability to do that.

I feel very deeply that when people are put in prison without trials and tortured and deprived of basic human rights that the president of the United States ought to have a right to express displeasure and to do something about it.

MONDALE: His idea is that every child is a child of God and, based on his faith, entitled to the stature and respect and the rights of what that means.

NARRATOR: But the biggest challenge to Carter's human rights policy would come in the Middle East.

Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.

NARRATOR: Carter was aware of the brutality of Iran's secret police and of 2,500 political prisoners held in Iran's jails.

But the Shah, installed to the throne in a U.S.-backed coup in 1953, had long been a trusted ally.

New Year's Eve, 1977, in Tehran, Carter reaffirmed America's support.

One week after Carter's visit, anti-Shah demonstrations broke out.

When Iranian secret police fired on the demonstrators and killed several students, religious leaders called the Shah's government anti-Islamic.

DREW: Iran was a very complicated situation.

And the Shah was very useful to us.

At the same time, something else was going on, something very powerful was going on in Iran.

And as I recall, we kind of missed it.

We knew there was some resentment and we knew somewhat of the history of the country, but we were not conscious, nor were we informed, of the intensity of the feelings.

NARRATOR: Since the days of Plains and peanuts, the marriage of Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter had blossomed into a full partnership.

Sometime before Carter became president he realized what a valuable adviser to him Rosalynn was.

She was a major player in the campaigns and she did have good rapport with the people.

She, of course, was ambitious in her own right.

She wanted to be more than a fashion plate and somebody who gave teas.

ROSALYNN CARTER: The first year Jimmy was in office, I became so frustrated.

Every night, Jimmy would get off the elevator at the White House and I would say, "Why did you do this?"

or "Why did you do..." something.

And one day, he finally said, "Why don't you come to cabinet meetings?

And then you'll know why we do these things."

So I started going-- it was always on my calendar-- and I'd just listen.

I didn't participate, but I listened.

And then I knew why the decisions were made.

NARRATOR: The first child to live in the White House since the Kennedy years, nine-year-old Amy had the run of the place.

She roller-skated down the marble hallways, played in a tree house her father built for her, and even got a new dog, named Grits.

BRINKLEY: She was the apple of her father's eye.

President Carter hadn't spent a lot of time with his three sons when they were growing up, so he tried to put a lot of attention and energy into Amy.

NARRATOR: In keeping with Carter's populist image, Amy was sent to public school.

The media made much of the fact that her best friend was the daughter of the cook at the Chilean embassy.

She was such a shy, intelligent girl, it was very hard always having that media glare.

And I think after the White House, she's tried her best to stay out of the limelight.

NARRATOR: In 1978, the first signs of a gathering economic storm were becoming visible.

The stock market was at its lowest point in three years, the trade deficit growing, unemployment on the rise.

The most serious problem that our nation has is inflation, and it's getting worse.

It's absolutely imperative that Americans commit themselves-- all of us-- to a common sacrifice to control this rapid increase in prices.

Carter inherited a no-win economic situation.

I see him as the last presidential victim of the war in Vietnam.

Every war this country has fought, once it is over, the economy has to readjust to a peacetime economy.

I call on the private sector... GODBOLD: And what always happens is runaway inflation.

NARRATOR: Carter implored labor and business leaders to keep wages and prices down, and pressured Congress to cut back spending.

CARTER: I believe the American people will understand... NARRATOR: But inflation kept rising, his words falling on deaf ears.

JAMES LANEY: He has this enormous determination to go after and do what he thinks ought to be done.

The capacity to explain, persuade, inspire, mobilize, energize the whole country...

I do not have all the answers-- nobody does.

LANEY: That was far more tenuous and uncertain.

CARTER: But I want to let you know that fighting inflation will be a central... LANEY: He thought people would just follow, but that didn't happen.

CARTER: And I want to arouse our nation to join me in this effort.

NARRATOR: There were growing doubts about Carter's leadership.

The president, most Americans believed, was too mired in details, was ineffective with Congress, had attempted too much and delivered too little.

EIZENSTAT: This is a classic case where first impressions often sets in with people and the first impressions of that first year were: too many things, lack of priorities, a lack of accomplishment.

The fact is, we actually had a good legislative record, but we had thrown so much up that, in comparison to that, it... the accomplishments seemed to pale.

ROSALYNN CARTER: I would sometimes say, "Why don't we do this in your second term?"

and he would say, "What if I don't have a second term?"

And I think he felt that way the whole time-- that if something needed to be done, it needed to be done.

NARRATOR: With an approval rating of only 33%, Time magazine concluded, "He has the potential for growing in the office, but he does not have a great deal of time left."

NARRATOR: Nestled in the mountains of Maryland, Camp David was Jimmy Carter's refuge.

It was the place he and Rosalynn repaired to on weekends to get away from the pressures of Washington.

In September 1978, Jimmy Carter would enshrine Camp David, and himself, in history.

MONDALE: He had spent a lot of time studying the Middle East.

He felt very deeply that we should try to find peace over there, and boy, he really bet his presidency on that.

GLAD: He was already very low in the polls-- he had practically nowhere to go but up-- but he still could possibly win a second term, and if he failed, that would... that would certainly write him off.

NARRATOR: Since the creation of the state of Israel, every attempt to bring peace to the Middle East had failed.

Refugees, land disputes, terrorism plagued the region.

Four wars, the last in 1973, had left a bitter legacy of hate and mistrust.

NARRATOR: Everyone urged Carter to stay away from what seemed an intractable situation, but he would not be deterred.

"I slowly became hardened, and as stubborn as at any other time I can remember," he wrote.

The Middle East, for years had been, and was then, the place where you thought, "If we're going to end up blowing up the world, "that's where it will start.

"If there's going to be a nuclear confrontation "between the superpowers, it's going to come out of the Middle East," so finding... you know, finding a way to tamp that down was, to him, extremely important.

NARRATOR: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat took the first step toward peace in November 1977, when he became the first Arab leader to set foot on Israeli soil.

Carter seized the opportunity.

The following September, he welcomed President Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David to negotiate a treaty that would lay the foundations for peace in the Middle East.

GLAD: He brought all of his skills and all the best sides of himself to the whole operation, and all of the potential in Jimmy Carter was out there at Camp David.

It was a... really, an extraordinary time.

SMITH: He had studied things so carefully.

He knew the population of every village in the West Bank and Israel.

It's hard to think of a president in our history who had that much capacity to absorb and retain detail.

GLAD: He made a mistake at the very beginning.

He thought, and told his aides, "You know, we're just going to bring together Begin and Sadat, "and they'll talk and they'll get to know each other and they'll understand each other."

Well, he got them there, and it turned out, after the first three meetings, they were practically never talking to each other and things were going downhill very fast.

NARRATOR: "It was mean," Carter later recalled.

"They were brutal with each other.

Face-to-face discussions became an impossibility."

On day three-- the expected deadline for an agreement-- Carter had accomplished nothing.

"There must be a way," he kept saying, "there must be a way."

That night at dinner, alone with Rosalynn, he arrived at a solution.

If the two men could not talk to one another, they would have to talk through him.

He decided that essentially the Americans would draft the proposal and put the proposal on the table.

You wouldn't have an Egyptian and an Israeli proposal.

You would have an American proposal.

NARRATOR: "I must admit that I capitalized on the situation," Carter later wrote.

"It greatly magnified my own influence."

Carter devoted himself to drafting an agreement.

With more than 50 issues to be resolved, the work was painstaking.

He was remarkably tenacious, persistent, persuasive, tough-minded, tough both with Sadat on some occasions and with Begin on other occasions.

BRINKLEY: That people trusted him as an honest broker came to play in a very magical and important way.

He is seen as somebody who is not a cheat or a liar.

He is somebody who puts his money where his mouth is.

NARRATOR: "My world became the negotiating rooms, "the study where I pored over my notes and maps of the Middle East," he recalled.

"Between sessions, I craved intense exercise and lonely places where I could think and sometimes pray."

ROSALYNN CARTER: He had things scheduled after the first week, and I was going into Washington to do some of the things he was supposed to do.

And when I would leave to go in, they would say, "Don't smile, because everybody will think they'll be all right.

Don't look grim, because they'll think it's failing."

That was hard.

It was from the depths to the heights all the time at Camp David.

One minute you would think it was going to pass and everything was so exciting, and then... and another... another time, it would be just hopeless.

POWELL: It always seemed to me that the odds were against success; it always seemed like a long shot, and so I was...

I spent a good bit of my time thinking about, "How are we going to deal with this thing if it collapses?"

NARRATOR: Shuttling back and forth between Sadat and Begin, Carter began to put together an agreement... a framework for negotiations in the Middle East which would address the fate of the Palestinians and the future of Gaza and the West Bank... and a separate peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

Israel would return the Sinai territories occupied since the 1967 war.

Egypt would recognize the right of Israel to live in peace.

On September 14, day ten, Carter turned to the issue he knew could derail any progress made so far-- the dismantling of Israeli settlements in the Sinai.

BOURNE: Carter was unable to get Begin to make any concessions that would really have locked up an agreement, to the point where Sadat just got fed up and said, "Well, I'm going home," you know.

"I'm just not going to wait any... be here any longer," and literally sort of had his coat on and was out the door.

NARRATOR: Carter begged Sadat to stay, appealing to their friendship and mutual trust, and reminding him of Egypt's good relations with the United States.

Sadat decided to remain at Camp David.

Saturday, September 16, Brzezinski wrote in his diary: "The President is driving himself mercilessly.

"He has single-handedly written the proposed document for the settlements on the Sinai."

Carter presented the formula to Begin.

At first he called the demands on Israel "excessive," "political suicide."

But in the end he relented, agreeing to submit the question of the Jewish settlements to the Israeli parliament.

Jimmy Carter saw a picture of the three major participants on his desk, and he told his secretary to find out the names of Begin's grandchildren and so then he wrote little notes, putting in the names of all the grandchildren.

He went over to Begin and said, "You know, this is not just for us.

This is for our grandchildren, and let me give this to you."

And Begin was profoundly moved by this.

NARRATOR: The Camp David Accords were hailed as a monumental triumph of diplomacy.

(applause) NARRATOR: "With his brilliant success and inspired leadership, "Carter has taken a first big step toward realizing the promise of his presidency," was the verdict of the press.

These negotiations provide that Israel may live in peace within secure and recognized borders, and this great aspiration of Israel has been certified, without constraint, with the greatest degree of enthusiasm, by President Sadat, the leader of one of the greatest nations on earth.

(applause) BRINKLEY: There will never be a history of the Middle East written without Jimmy Carter's name in the index.

A hundred years from now, 200 years from now, people will be talking about the Camp David process that began in those Maryland mountains.

BOURNE: Camp David was the plum of his administration.

This was the crowning glory, and it enshrined him in history.

To these two friends of mine, the words of Jesus: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be the children of God."

(sustained applause) NARRATOR: Sadat and Begin were awarded the Nobel Prize for their contribution to peace.

Camp David became the touchstone for all future negotiations on the Middle East.

Yet Carter's great success did nothing to improve his standing with the American people.

MONDALE: There was something about how we had slipped in the eyes of the American people that prevented us from getting what should have been an enormous lift out of this incredible diplomatic feat.

We thought, "Boy, this shows we can get things done.

It does bring peace in a crucial area."

And there was no movement at all.

It was very dispiriting.

WOMAN: Say it's only a paper moon... NARRATOR: At home, President Carter's leadership was in question.

On the world stage, he kept piling up accomplishments.

In January 1979, he received Chinese Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping in Washington to celebrate the establishment of formal relations between the United States and China.

WOMAN: If you believe in me... NARRATOR: In June, he met Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev in Vienna, to sign the SALT II arms control agreement.

From there, it was on to Tokyo for a major economic summit.

CADDELL: The country is having this terrible domestic problem and the president is somewhere out on the other side of the world, and not for a couple of days-- for weeks.

And I remember getting on the phone and saying, "You people got to come home now."

NARRATOR: In one year, the American economy had spun out of control.

Gasoline prices had more than doubled, mortgage rates pushed 20%.

Unemployment kept on rising.

LANCE: There were just so many forces at work.

When inflation becomes rampant, interest rates are high and the business cycle is turning against you, it becomes almost impossible.

NARRATOR: Of all the problems facing the nation, most Americans now agreed inflation was the most urgent.

In the summer of '79, fueled by rising oil prices, it surged to 14%.

ROGER WILKINS: Inflation makes you doubt the future.

When you have inflation, you don't see as much building going on, you don't see as much investment going on, you don't see as much hiring going on.

People weren't seeing their savings growing, and as a matter of fact, people were terrified that inflation would impoverish them in their old age.

NARRATOR: Carter acted decisively.

To reduce the budget deficit and bring inflation under control, he cut into social programs.

"New realities," explained the White House, "must temper our nation's commitment to the poor."

BOURNE: It stirred up a hornet's nest of opposition from the Ted Kennedy people, from the traditional FDR coalition.

They were very, very angry.

NARRATOR: African-American leaders felt betrayed and vowed to wage an all-out fight on what they called Carter's "immoral, unjust and inequitable budget cuts."

WILKINS: The leader who most encapsulated the goals that I wanted was Martin King, at the end of his life, saying to the country, "We have to do something about poor Americans.

"We're the richest country on the face of the earth, and we've got to do something."

Every time I vote for a Democrat, I want that Democrat to have Martin's spirit about poverty in his soul.

Jimmy Carter ran away from that.

(warning siren wails) NARRATOR: Across America, frustration was reaching a breaking point.

In Levittown, Pennsylvania, truckers barricaded expressways to protest high fuel prices, setting off riots, which left 100 injured and led to more than 170 arrests.

CADDELL: I thought in '79, we were really headed down the tubes.

I now thought we were in deep, deep trouble, and I thought the president was becoming irrelevant.

NARRATOR: Polls showed Carter falling behind Ted Kennedy as the preferred candidate among Democratic voters, and even losing trial heats to the likely Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan.

WOMAN: I don't think he has control of the situation; I think he's a very religious man, a very nice man, but I just don't think he's capable of the job.

A lot of people think he's shaky, you know, and I'm one of them.

I think he's kind of shaky.

I think that he's a really floundering leader.

I don't see him as a leader, and I don't look to him for leadership.

NARRATOR: President Carter's approval rating was 25%-- lower than President Richard Nixon's at the time of Watergate.

"It all seems to be falling down around me in the White House," he told a friend.

"I don't know what to do."

MONDALE: I think he was losing some of that essential nerve that he has in such abundance, but just for a brief moment there.

It was really, uh...

I was heartsick, and I felt so sorry for him.

NARRATOR: Carter groped for a way to reassert his leadership.

One adviser suggested that he give a major speech on energy and put the full blame of the economic crisis on the high price of Middle East oil.

EIZENSTAT: When we drew the outlines up, he was really quite disgusted.

This is just more of the same.

It doesn't address the basic problems.

People will see this as pablum.

We need something more.

ROSALYNN CARTER: Jimmy had made several speeches on energy.

He was trying to impress upon people the fact that they needed to conserve and it just seemed to be going nowhere with the public.

And so he just said, "I'm not going to make the speech."

So he got on a conference call with his senior staff, and the way he put it, very pungently, was, "I just don't want to bullshit the American people."

NARRATOR: Carter retreated to Camp David.

For the next ten days, businessmen, labor leaders, governors, pop psychologists and clergy were called to the mountaintop to participate in one of the most extraordinary episodes of presidential soul searching in American history.

HERTZBERG: Basically this was a kind of self-psychoanalysis by Carter and the administration.

He sat up there and listened to the most scalding critiques of his presidency.

NARRATOR: "They told me that I seemed bogged down in details," Carter wrote.

"That the public acknowledged my intelligence and integrity, "but doubted my capacity to follow through with a strong enough thrust to succeed."

Within Carter's own staff a fierce debate raged over what had gone wrong and what President Carter should say to the American people.

Carter's pollster argued the president should address a subject deeper than energy or the economy; that there was a crisis of the American spirit.

CADDELL: For the first time, we actually got numbers where people no longer believed that the future of America was going to be as good as it was now.

Never in the history of American polling had that ever existed-- that Americans ever, even if they believed it, ever evidenced, would say, "Oh, my children will have it worse than I am.

"The country's going to get worse.

We've already had our heyday."

And that really shook me, because it was so anti... so anti-American.

I made the point, and Mondale made the point, that if there was a problem with the American spirit, it was because of the underlying problems of inflation and energy, not because there was something wrong with the American people.

I argued that there were real problems in America that were not mysterious, that were not rooted in some kind of national psychosis or breakdown; that there were real gas lines, there was real inflation, that people were worried in their real lives about keeping their jobs.

CADDELL: The vice president of the United States was looking at me and basically accusing me of being insane.

You had this real division, and then Jimmy Carter ended it by saying-- and this moment, I'll never forget it-- he ends the thing, saying, "I just wanted to hear what you all said.

"I've decided; I'm going to do everything that Pat said."

Good evening.

This is a special night for me.

NARRATOR: On July 15, after a ten-day retreat, Jimmy Carter descended from the mountains of Maryland to deliver the most controversial speech of his administration.

I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation.

I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways.

It is a crisis of confidence.

It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.

HERTZBERG: The speech was more like a sermon than a political speech, and it had the themes of confession, redemption and sacrifice.

And he was bringing the American people into this spiritual process that he had been through and presenting them with an opportunity for redemption as well as redeeming himself.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.

FARRELL: The speech unfairly was labeled the "malaise speech," because it talked about the fact that the country was in a difficult situation, which it was.

But Americans don't always want their public leaders to come to them and say, "Hey, we're in a bunch of trouble."

When your leadership is demonstrably weaker than it should be, you don't then point at the people and say, "It's your problem."

If you want the people to move, you move them the way Roosevelt moved them, or you exhort them the way Kennedy or Johnson exhorted them.

You don't say, "It's your fault."

BRINKLEY: The op-ed pieces started spinning out saying, "There's nothing wrong with the American people.

"We're a great people.

"Maybe the problem's in the White House.

Maybe we need new leadership to guide us."

It boomeranged on him.

POWELL: If you make a bold stroke like that, you do have to think about how do you follow it up.

What does day three and day four and day five look like?

How do you translate that into additional steps?

And we botched that.

NARRATOR: To give the impression of a fresh start, Carter asked his entire cabinet to submit their resignations.

Five were accepted.

FARRELL: By firing the cabinet the way he did, Carter just telegraphed to the country that he wasn't up for the job.

It was a sign of panic.

It looked like this was a president who was thrashing about, looking for other people to blame.

NARRATOR: Carter's approval rating dropped even lower.

"After all the Camp David meetings, "the dramatic speech on July 15 "and the cabinet firings, he is back where he began," one analyst wrote, "a chief executive rejected by his ultimate constituency-- the American people."

That fall, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party finally broke with the president, throwing its support behind Ted Kennedy.

The senator from Massachusetts would wage a brutal campaign for the Democratic nomination.

For Jimmy Carter, nothing seemed to be going right.

He collapsed while running a ten-kilometer race.

It was taken as a sign of weakness.

He became the butt of jokes when a story broke that he'd been attacked by a giant rabbit while fishing in Georgia.

Even the Carter family, once thought fun and colorful, was becoming a liability.

Billy was investigated for accepting a bribe from the Libyan government.

Furious, Carter distanced himself from Billy.

"I have no control over my brother and he has no control over me," he said.

On November 4, 1979, it would all seem trivial.

A few days earlier, 3,500 Iranian students had marched toward the American embassy in Tehran, threatening to overtake it.

(demonstrators chanting) NARRATOR: The anti-Shah movement, which had begun in early 1978, had grown into a full-fledged Islamic revolution.

The Shah was driven into exile and the Ayatollah Khomeini became the leader of a new and mysterious Islamic republic.

BRZEZINSKI: I never had any illusions about Khomeini.

I didn't have much familiarity with fundamentalist Islam, but I knew he would be a menace.

SMITH: If Carter had been more critical of the Shah, conceivably it would have been a little more difficult for the Ayatollah Khomeini to identify the United States as the great Satan and to say everything that is wrong in Iran is basically the fault of the United States.

Maybe the fact that the United States had been a significant player in Iran since 1945 was such that it was too late for Carter or anybody to change the deeply hostile nature of the Iranian revolution, but it might have made a difference.

NARRATOR: In the first few months of the revolution, Carter had worked to build a relationship with the Khomeini regime.

But the history of U.S.-Iranian relations would soon catch up with him.

For months, the deposed Shah of Iran had wandered the Middle East, then Latin America.

Ill with cancer, he asked permission to come to the United States for medical treatment.

MONDALE: There were several of us sitting around the table talking about whether the president should permit the reentry of the Shah.

We had people tell us that if we let the Shah in, there could be a real negative repercussion in Iran.

But the Shah was sort of pathetically flying around the world, and here's this great country saying, "Well, we won't even let you come to one of our hospitals."

He went around the room, and a lot of the people said, "Let him in."

BRZEZINSKI: I argued that he should be allowed in, because we treated him as an ally in good times, and I felt it was our responsibility to treat him as a former ally, but a friend, in bad times.

I felt American credibility was at stake.

MONDALE: And he said, "And if, then, this revolution moves in a way "to take our employees in our embassy hostage, then what will be your advice?"

And the room just fell dead.

(men shouting in Farsi) NARRATOR: The Shah arrived in the United States on October 22.

Two weeks later, Iranian students seized the American embassy.

53 Americans were to be held hostage until the United States returned the Shah to Iran.

Everyone awaited word from Khomeini.

Seeing an opportunity to consolidate his revolution, the Ayatollah gave his blessing, calling the U.S. embassy "a den of spies."

CARTER: The United States of America will not yield to international terrorism or to blackmail.

CADDELL: It was a defining event.

This is the entire United States government captured and held illegally under international law and being taunted every day.

WILKINS: The whole world saw these images of these people burning American flags, stomping on images of Carter and the most rancid sort of disrespect and hatred of the United States, on television, around the world, all the time.

NARRATOR: "I would lie awake at night, "trying to think of steps I could take "to gain the hostages' freedom, without sacrificing the honor and security of our nation," the president wrote.

Carter rejected all military options as too risky.

"The problem," he said, "is that we could feel good for a few hours, until we found that they had killed our people."

BRINKLEY: He was determined to bring every one of those men back alive.

You see the moralism of Carter, the Christianity affecting his foreign policy making, his belief in each human life having a great sanctity to it, his not wanting to have blood on his hands.

The successful statesmen have to balance risks, and sometimes... sometimes a risk to a relatively limited number of lives down the road saves many, many more lives.

POWELL: To react in a way that was strong and powerful would have set us off down a road that no man could say where it might lead.

(TV news theme playing) ANNOUNCER: The Iran crisis.

America held hostage.

WALTER CRONKITE: Good evening.

The 100th day of captivity for 50 Americans in Tehran... DAN RATHER: The 100th flag for 100 days of captivity.

NARRATOR: As spring 1980 approached, the hostages had grown into a national obsession, their memory kept alive by millions of yellow ribbons.

RATHER: ...and the nation shares their ordeal.

NARRATOR: No stone was left unturned trying to bring them home.

While Secretary of State Cyrus Vance dealt with Iranian government officials, Hamilton Jordan met secretly with anyone who held out hope.

(voices murmuring) I think I have an infection in this eye.

NARRATOR: "Our lives became a seesaw of emotions as scheme after scheme fell apart," Rosalynn later recalled.

"Every time we saw the hostages on television, I counted them."

ROSALYNN CARTER: No one can know how much pressure there was on Jimmy to do something about that.

And I would go, like, "Why don't you do something?"

And he said, "What would you want me to do?"

I said, "Mine the harbors."

He said, "Okay, suppose I mine the harbors, "and they decide to take one hostage out every day "and kill him.

What am I going to do then?"

DREW: Fairly or not, it came to symbolize the question of whether Carter was a leader, whether he was competent, whether he was strong.

(clock ticking) NARRATOR: By April, pressure was growing intense, and the situation increasingly hopeless.

"We could no longer afford to depend on diplomacy," Carter was forced to conclude.

"I knew from an intelligence report "that there was little prospect of the hostages' release "for the next five or six months.

I decided to act."

It was called "Desert I."

It required six C-130 transport planes, a 90-man rescue team, two C-141 Starlifters, eight helicopters and nearly impossible logistics.

GLAD: It was a highly risky operation.

The CIA even talked about the number of people-- including the hostages-- who might be killed; but it was doing something.

NARRATOR: South of Tehran, in the Iranian desert, the rescue mission turned into a disaster.

Two helicopters failed, another crashed into a C-130 in a sandstorm.

Eight men died in Desert 1.

Three more were severely burned.

CARTER: It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation.

It was my decision to cancel it when problems developed.

The responsibility is fully my own.

POWELL: I sort of thought at the time, "Well, people will give the president credit for trying."

But I also realized that now the chances of being able to get those people out anytime in the near future was very, very slim, and that, from a political standpoint, that was going to be a heavy burden to bear.

NARRATOR: In August 1980, President Carter survived the challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy for the Democratic nomination.

The campaign had been bitter and divisive, but in the end, Kennedy had seemed too liberal and too tainted by scandal.

(cheering) EIZENSTAT: The attack from the left was extremely debilitating, and the fact that we had a divided party going into the general election in 1980 against Ronald Reagan was an additional albatross beyond the hostage crisis and beyond inflation.

REAGAN: Jimmy Carter's administration tells us that the descendants of those who sacrificed to start again in this land of freedom may have to abandon the dream that drew their ancestors to a new life in a new land.

NARRATOR: Republican candidate Ronald Reagan launched his campaign on Labor Day with a broadside attack delivered before an audience of working-class Americans.

...record is a litany of despair, of broken promises, of sacred trusts abandoned and forgotten.

WILKINS: Reagan was a very formidable fellow.

The combination of his beliefs-- which were not numerous, but they were clear-- um, and his acting skills really made people sit up and say, "This is... this guy means and believes what he's saying."

NARRATOR: Carter trailed Reagan by more than 20 points.

With the Soviets in Afghanistan, the hostages in Iran and the economy in shambles, he was vulnerable.

LANCE: We were still going through tough economic circumstances.

People were hurting.

Interest rates were higher, unemployment was higher, inflation was greater.

ANNOUNCER: When you come right down to it, what kind of a person should occupy the Oval Office?

NARRATOR: Unable to run on his record, Carter went on the attack, portraying Reagan as trigger-happy cowboy with his finger on the nuclear button.

ANNOUNCER: ...and a destroyer to Ecuador to deal with a fishing controversy?

CADDELL: We didn't have any cards to play because there wasn't any cards to play.

We were now trapped by events, trapped by a government that couldn't come up with any ideas, and basically, we were frustrating the hell out of people.

But they still trusted Jimmy Carter not to blow the world up, and that was our only hope.

...the cost of hospital care... NARRATOR: On October 28, 100 million viewers, the largest audience ever to watch a presidential debate, tuned in.

The candidates were running neck and neck.

...then the insurance would help pay for it.

These are the kind of elements of a national health insurance important to the American people.

Governor Reagan, again, typically, is against such a proposal.

MODERATOR: Governor?

There you go again.

When I opposed Medicare... CADDELL: He had won it in the first half-hour by not being crazy.

What had happened was you could see the shift in the beginning of the debate, over 90 minutes was a sense of "he's not dangerous."

And that's all he had to do.

DAN RATHER: Today, the vigil of the hostages lengthens to one whole year.

NARRATOR: The Monday before Election Day played like a nightmare for Jimmy Carter.

ANNOUNCER: Today, the Majlis spelled out conditions for release of the American hostages now ending their first year in captivity, and the four conditions are the same as those set down... POWELL: A good portion of that weekend leading up to it and all day Monday, Americans were literally having their nose rubbed in this embarrassing, irritating, humiliating situation.

NARRATOR: Carter campaigned all day and into the night in Mississippi, Oregon, Washington.

He arrived in Seattle at 3: 00 a.m.-- the last rally, the last speech.

POWELL: I had stayed on the plane to finish up something.

Before I could get off, the phone rang.

And it was Hamilton Jordan and Pat Caddell back in Washington.

They had seen the tracking polls from that day, and they said, "It's basically over."

Tomorrow, vote for yourselves.

Vote Democratic, help us.

God be with you.

POWELL: I went in to hear his speech, thinking that I was the only person there who knew that, basically, the election was over and that we had lost.

NARRATOR: It was a landslide.

Carter won only six states.

For the first time in 28 years, the Democratic Party lost control of the Senate.

On the last day of his presidency, Jimmy Carter stayed up through the night.

A deal with Iran had been reached.

The release of the hostages was imminent.

A crew from ABC News stood by to record the historic moment.

You're not sending that film anywhere, are you?

MONDALE: He wanted to get these hostages home on his watch.

And this was not about getting reelected anymore.

This was about getting this done, because he felt so deeply about it.

We were in the Oval Office around, maybe, 2:00 in the morning.

And nothing happening.

Dead silence.

But we got to the time where it was 9: 00 in the morning.

We had to be at the inaugural.

The new president was coming in at 11: 00.

And finally, we all started running off.

And we still had one officer back there with a phone, the hot line, in case there was any news.

REPORTER: Here they are now.

WOMAN: Is there any word about the hostages?

Have they taken off?

MONDALE: And he was in contact with Carter all the way up the inaugural route and on the platform.

So if there were anything that was positive or negative, he'd hear about it.

MAN: And the home of the... MONDALE: And of course, the story was that Khomeini released them the minute after Reagan was president.

(man finishes anthem) NARRATOR: January 20, 1981.

3,000 people gathered at the old train depot in Plains to welcome the Carters home.

POPE: There was a sea of umbrellas out there in the public, standing in the cold and the rain, waiting for him.

And it was a bittersweet day.

CHIP CARTER: I think they reacted just like anybody else would that had just been rejected by 200 million people.

It was one of the toughest times they've ever been through, I think.

ROSALYNN CARTER: He really was better than I was when we came home, because I was so depressed about it that he was always trying to prop me up.

NARRATOR: The Carters settled in to write their memoirs and to make plans to build a presidential library.

But Carter had little enthusiasm for building what he called "a monument to myself."

ROSALYNN CARTER: One night, I woke up and Jimmy was sitting straight up in the bed.

This is after we'd been home about a year.

And I said, "What's the matter?"

I thought he was sick, because he always sleeps all night, even in the White House.

He can turn things off and go to sleep.

And he said, "I know what we can do at the library.

We can have a place to resolve conflicts."

And so that was the germ of the idea for what became The Carter Center.

NARRATOR: Inspired by his success in the Camp David Accords, Carter envisioned a place where he could host world leaders and mediate civil wars and political disputes.

At a cost of $28 million, The Carter Center would span 35 acres, include an arboretum, a lake, and room enough for a staff of more than 100.

When we dedicate this center, Mr. President, we dedicate an institution that testifies, as does your life itself, to the goodness of God and to the blessings He bestows upon those who do their best to walk with Him.

NARRATOR: In 1986, at the inauguration of The Carter Center, President Reagan expressed the growing respect many now felt for the man they had once rejected.

(applause) NARRATOR: Through The Carter Center, Jimmy Carter would launch his new career as an elder statesman.

In his travels throughout the world, Carter has championed the cause of the poor and the disenfranchised.

HERTZBERG: Being a good post-president doesn't retrospectively make you a better president.

What a post-presidency can do, though, is to illuminate which aspects of a president's character were real and which were phony.

All of his strengths-- perseverance and dedication, integrity, those have all turned out to be very, very real.

LANCE: He never lied to the American people, he kept the peace, he brought the hostages home without loss of life-- all the things that he said that he was going to do.

It was a time when we needed that sort of person as president that people could put some faith and trust in.

BRINKLEY: What was Carter?

He never had a kind of nutshell program.

He had no interest in either the New Deal tradition of Franklin Roosevelt or the New Frontier tradition of John Kennedy or the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson.

He never crystallized a great agenda of what he wanted to do.

He simply tackled issues as they confronted him, one by one by one.

HERTZBERG: I think history is going to look at him in a kindlier light than his contemporaries did.

His values, his devotion to peace and human rights, keep on resonating in a way that his failures and weaknesses don't.

American Experience "Jimmy Carter" is available on DVD.

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Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH ac cess.wgbh.org