The summer of 1979 featured disco in the nightclubs, “Saturday Night Fever” on the radio, and long lines at the gas pumps, where prices were high and supply was short.

High unemployment, inflation and the energy crisis engendered by foreign oil producers crippled the country. The 444 days of the crisis when a newly revolutionary Iran took and held American hostages, coupled with the deaths of eight servicemen in a botched rescue attempt, had begun. In 1980, Russia invaded Afghanistan, and the U.S. response was a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Confidence in the American way of life waned and convinced many Americans that the man in the White House, Jimmy Carter, was inept, unlucky or both.

His approval rating plummeted to a record low as a recession and a growing perception of weakness took hold. It was a crushing blow to an administration that began with promise and optimism.

“The tragedy of Jimmy Carter is that his fourth year was disastrous,” Robert A. Pastor told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was a Carter adviser and professor of international relations at American University before his death in 2014.

“The number of setbacks that occurred ultimately set the stage for his defeat and has colored the way people look at Jimmy Carter,” said Pastor. “And it has prevented them from appreciating what he did do.”

Carter rose from relative obscurity to the presidency in two years, with the help of his family and the Peanut Brigade, friends from Georgia who knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors across the U.S. to vouch for him face-to-face with Americans. He offered “a government as honest as the people,” after the national embarrassment of President Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal.

Carter’s first three years in office yielded “extraordinary accomplishments,” Pastor says. The president brokered the Camp David Accords, a peace agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian Prime Minister Anwar Sadat. That led to the two foreign leaders winning the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize.

He normalized relations with China and made human rights a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. Carter signed the Panama Canal treaty, established the departments of energy and education, and vastly expanded national parks and recreation areas and preserves, including the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area — one of metro Atlanta’s favorite green spaces.

Carter — as a Democrat — deregulated airlines, transportation, financial institutions and lifted sanctions on actions such as the home brewing of beer, which eventually led to America’s craft-brewing boom.

Definitively, he cut oil imports by half in an effort to free the nation from energy dependence on foreign nations. That dependence had become frighteningly clear from an oil embargo by OPEC nations, which had jacked up fuel costs, caused shortages and hamstrung a faltering economy.

Carter tried to address the economic and other problems in what came to be known as the “malaise” speech, even though he never uttered that word. His fifth major address on the energy crisis, the speech was complex, preachy and prescient. The speech was well received until, as historian Douglas Brinkley noted in a PBS documentary, “it boomeranged on him” with a series of following events.

In the speech, he asked American’s to return to their roots of optimism and faith in democracy and each other. He described an erosion in trust among neighbors and a gridlocked government beholden to special interests as a “crisis of confidence.”

“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,” he said. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

Carter urged a new age of limits and sacrifice. “The solution of our energy crisis can also help us to conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country,” he said.

To some, it came across as more of a sermon from the life-long Baptist Sunday school teacher than a presidential address.

A week later, Carter asked his entire Cabinet to resign, a poorly managed house-cleaning that suggested the White House was falling apart. Many came to believe that Carter — not the loss of vision and hope by the American people — was the problem.

As the economy’s fluttering drift continued, the former Navy engineer was criticized as being a micro-manager and more interested in the process of setting up policy than he was in producing effective ones. He had to fend off attacks of being too much of a D.C. outsider to get much done inside the Beltway, and he suffered other inside attacks for being too conservative for the liberal wing of his party. And when he ran for reelection, he was challenged in his own Democratic primary by U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, which made matters worse.

A year later, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide. Carter returned to Plains to lick his wounds and begin the long work that 24 years later would earn him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Carter admitted his mistakes as president three decades after leaving the White House, but said he didn’t regret what he did. “I never have felt discouraged or disappointed when I look back at those four years,” he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose during a media tour in 2010 to promote his book “White House Diary.”

To “60 Minutes” reporter Lesley Stahl he said, “I think I was identified as a failed president because I wasn’t reelected.”

Carter told interviewers that his proudest achievement was that “all the hostages in Iran came home alive.” They were released moments after Reagan took the oath of office.

If he could do anything differently, he has said, he would have sent one more helicopter in an attempt to rescue the hostages. Three of the eight helicopters failed, causing the mission to abort. The botched rescue further entrenched his perception of ineptitude. He was tagged as weak “because I didn’t bomb Iran,” he told Rose.

His biggest mistake? “Not becoming a trusted and supported leader of the Democratic party,” he told Rose.

“I ran as an outsider,” he recalled. “I rode the wave of dissatisfaction with the government.”

“Americans were discouraged and embarrassed,” as he ran for president, he told Rose. The Vietnam War had just ended, Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency after Watergate. The country had witnessed the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Americans were cynical and deeply distrustful of government. “I capitalized on the displeasure of the American people,” he said.

But as president, he also pursued an aggressive agenda to right the ship that confused voters and alienated lawmakers. He had big and futuristic ideas, but some analysts said he struggled to explain those to voters in ways that resonated with them.

Reagan took office, welcomed home the U.S. hostages from Iran, and removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House.

Carter went on after his presidency to establish a continuing life on the world stage through his work at the Carter Center, eradicating diseases, brokering peace between warring nations, ending hunger, fighting for the environment and human rights without the constraints of having to answer to a voters, a political party or Congress.

He and his wife Rosalynn, blessed with long lives, persisted in the work for more than 40 years. Rosalynn Carter died at age 96 on Nov. 19, 2023. The former president died at age 100 on Dec. 29, 2024.

In his book “Sources of Strength” he wrote that one should not concentrate on the number of years one might have left, “at best, life is short, and its duration is unpredictable.”

Instead, he wrote, use whatever time you have to make life meaningful.

“I feel at ease with history,” he told a USA Today interviewer in 1986.

“I feel that our record will stand the test of time.”

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