"What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?" Jimmy Carter, America's "Malaise," and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country.

Lee, Ronald

"What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?" Jimmy Carter, America's "Malaise," and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country. By Kevin Mattson. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. 251 pp.

Historian Kevin Martson has written a short book about the circumstances surrounding a single presidential speech. On Sunday, July 15, 1979, Jimmy Carter delivered his "Crisis of Confidence" address from the Oval Office. This rhetorical performance, which has become known in popular discourse as the "malaise speech," drew the largest audience of Carter's presidency. The book, Mattson writes, "can be read as a historical mystery--how it was that Carter's words received immediate applause and yet wound up ensuring his defeat" (p. 9).

Mattson explores the political and cultural events that preoccupied the American public between April and July 1979. He explains the relationship between these events and the crafting and delivery of the "Crisis of Confidence" address. In the book's closing chapters, he examines the aftermath of the address, which culminated in Ronald Reagan's inauguration on January 20, 1981. This is a history, as Kenneth Burke might say, confined to a very tight circumference. Mattson eschews examination of the complicated origins of the problems that beset the Carter presidency for a narrative describing immediately vexing political conditions and an administration desperately attempting to manage rhetorically its dwindling political fortunes. In this text, the public dialogue, rather than material factors, is the shaper of events.

The proximate cause of the "malaise" discourse was the energy crisis. The OPEC cartel had limited production, driven up oil prices, and generated gasoline shortages in many parts of the United States. Images of long gas lines were a regular feature on the evening news. Rising energy costs contributed to economic stagflation. Carter's energy legislation failed to gain traction in Congress, and his early rhetorical efforts to rally the country around the crisis were poorly received.

The book's narrow circumference is manifested in a second way. Mattson is committed to a type of historiography that I call "decade-ism." He explains Carter's political struggles through a characterization of the 1970s. For Mattson, this period was in the grip of a decade-defining psychological malady. Leading characters give voice to the diagnosis and its attendant symptomology. Mattson's narrative closely follows Patrick Caddell, the White House pollster, as he wrote and presented to Carter a detailed report on the unraveling of American civic culture. As Carter contemplated the fate of his presidency, he retreated for 10 days to Camp David, where he spoke with a wide range of citizens about the country's condition. Mattson gives particular attention to Carter's conversations with Christopher Lasch, Robert Bellah, and Daniel Bell. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, though he passed away in 1971, is assigned an important role in shaping Carter's outlook. The Southern Baptist president had read Niebuhr's work and was especially taken by his vision of Christian humility. As the reader encounters Mattson's work, it becomes clear that those convinced of a 1970s social pathology--variously identified as cultural narcissism, the "Me Decade," post-Vietnam and post-Watergate trauma--extend beyond popular voices in the contemporaneous public dialogue. Mattson himself, as the book's subtitle ("The Speech That Should Have Changed the Country") suggests, accepts the validity of this diagnosis.

Mattson offers an insightful rhetorical analysis of the ways in which Carter's construction of the American people and their national character became a decisive moment in recent political history. Prominent opposition politicians--most notably and effectively, Ronald Reagan--turned Carter's discourse into a pessimistic and constitutive element of the liberal view of America. They argued that Carter was blaming the American people for his own failures. They substituted the rhetoric of presidential incompetence for the rhetoric of American malaise. It is from this point of contrast that Reagan crafted the uplifting themes that are so strongly associated with his presidency--"Morning in America," "A New Beginning," "A City Upon a Hill," "Ordinary American Heroes," and all the rest.

As an academic who writes and teaches about political discourse, I found very little "news" in this book. Mattson fills in some details about the struggle over the speech among Carter's closest advisors, but even here, especially in regard to Vice President Walter Mondale, much of this information was already well known. The book does nice work in connecting the dots between the talks that Carter had at Camp David and the words and phrases that ended up in the final speech. Unfortunately, Mattson is not a particularly dedicated rhetorical critic. The gold standard of books about single speeches is Garry Will's Pulitzer Prize-winning text Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (Simon & Schuster, 1992). Whereas Wills immerses the reader in the language of the address and its intellectual roots, Mattson is content with quick references to the Jeremiad, civil religion, Christian humility, and consumerism. There is no attempt to understand deeply Carter's own intellectual and moral development, nor is much effort expended on explaining the history of these themes in American public address. In its place, the reader encounters a far too facile rendering of the national character.

Such decade-by-decade assessments of the American makeup leave me unconvinced. I have read works of contemporary history that have meticulously documented the rising influence of consumerism on postwar society, most notably, Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar American (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), but that type of careful scholarship does not reduce to "decade-ism." Ultimately, Mattson gives the reader an all too brief snapshot of a rhetorical turning point in recent presidential discourse.

--Ronald Lee

University of Nebraska-Lincoln