The Crisis of Confidence Speech

By the summer of 1979 a second oil shock had brought back gas lines, inflation was running above ten percent, and Jimmy Carter's approval rating had fallen below thirty. He was scheduled to give his fifth major address on energy on July 5. Instead he canceled it without explanation and retreated to Camp David, where for ten days he summoned governors, members of Congress, clergy, economists, and ordinary citizens to tell him what was wrong.

On July 15 he came down the mountain and spoke to a television audience of some sixty-five million. The country's problems, he said, ran deeper than gas lines. "It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will." Americans had lost faith in the future and in their institutions, and too many now worshiped self-indulgence and consumption. He traced the loss to the assassinations, to Vietnam, to Watergate, and to inflation.

He then laid out an energy program — import quotas, a large synthetic fuels effort, conservation — and asked Americans to see the fight over energy as a test of the nation's will. He never used the word malaise, which had appeared in a memo from his pollster Patrick Caddell. But the label stuck.

The immediate response was favorable, and his approval rose in the polls. Two days later Carter asked his entire cabinet to resign and accepted five of the resignations, which made the administration look as though it were in disarray and erased the gain. Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 on the promise of a country whose best days were ahead of it, and the speech became a shorthand for a presidency that told Americans what they did not want to hear. Some historians now read it as an unusually honest account of its moment.