In 1977, Jimmy Carter was elected the 39th U .S. President, defeating President Gerald Ford.
His term was marked by high inflation and rising oil prices, which led to long lines at the gas pump.
He also faced the Iranian hostage crisis, in which the U .S. Embassy in Tehran was stormed by pro -revolutionary students who took American diplomats and citizens hostage.
We're good to go.
C -SPAN interviewed former President Jimmy Carter in 1999, discussing his 1976 campaign, his experiences in the White House, and the accomplishments of his administration.
I think?
President Carter, I saw a speech you gave four years ago in which you said that Harry Truman was the best president of the 20th century.
Do you still believe that?
Well, I said he was my favorite.
I think in many ways he was one of the best, if not the best.
In the first place, I don't think Harry Truman ever told a lie.
I think he told the truth to the American people all the time, whether it was good or bad news.
I think he was the first real pronounced champion of human rights, at least in my lifetime.
And he demonstrated it in very difficult ways by bringing a successful conclusion to the Second World War, when we could have been abusive and condemnatory and destroyed the society.
Of Germany and Italy and Japan.
Instead, it was his background wisdom and judgment that to let all of these countries survive the war, not with destruction, but with a new breath of freedom and a commitment to democracy, which has persisted in all three countries.
I think he was quite generous, too.
Obviously, the Marshall Plan, so -called, which was just announced by George Marshall, could very well have been called the Truman Plan.
So he was generous to his cabinet officers.
I just have, you can see, a great admiration for him in many ways.
When you were president, had you thought a lot about what you wanted to be as a president, what the office should be, and have you changed your opinion on that since you look, now you can look back on your four years?
Well, obviously I thought about that a lot.
I began planning to run for president immediately after the Democratic Convention in 1972, when George McGovern was nominated.
We began to assess every aspect of the campaign itself.
What news media we should contact, the detailed history and laws of each individual state where I would be contesting other candidates.
My first presumption was that I would be run kind of in between George Wallace on my right and Ted Kennedy on my left.
I was disappointed when Kennedy withdrew from the race because my plans had been made accordingly and a lot of...
Substitutes came in for him about 9 or 10, as a matter of fact.
And then, of course, when I went around the country to campaign, which I did assiduously, the different questions that were asked to me concerning the Middle East, concerning China, concerning Panama, concerning the free enterprise system in our country, concerning environment,
concerning education and welfare and so forth, made me mandatorily start getting my thoughts in order.
And so I would say that by the time I was inaugurated, I had a very clear picture of what I wanted to do as president.
And I have to say, not with too much ego, that we accomplished almost all of them.
We had a very good and productive relationship with the Congress.
A batting average that was at least equal to that of Lyndon Johnson, for instance, if you look at things statistically.
We had some very difficult issues to face, normalizing relations with China, breaking official ties with...
Are you glad that you pardoned those people that went to Canada, the draft evaders?
And it involved tens of thousands of young men who had the choice.
In fact, I have three sons.
My oldest son was in Georgia Tech, a very fine school.
He thought the draft procedures were very unfair in that anyone who could afford to go to college didn't have to go, and the poor kids or the minority kids were the ones who went.
He thought that was unfair.
And there were a lot of other people who he didn't object to going to war.
It was three years in Vietnam.
But I thought that it was time to get it over with.
I think the same attitude that President Ford had in giving Nixon a pardon.
So after I made my inaugural speech, before I even left the site, I went just inside the door at the National Capitol and I signed the pardon for those young men.
And yes, I think it was the right thing to do.
One of the first speeches I made was to the American Legion Convention, and my father was a legionnaire.
I was a veteran, too.
And there were a few legionnaires in the front row that refused to stand up when I walked in as President of the United States.
I knew there would be some adverse reaction to what I did, but yes, I think it was the right thing to do.
How much impact did the little village of Plains, Georgia have on the entire campaign?
I know, you know, all the networks set up their trailers there, and it became a stage.
I think it had a profound effect.
Because, you know, I was genuinely not part of the Washington scene.
And when I went around the country, I could see the extreme disillusionment that existed among the people of our country, not only about the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandals and the revelations by the Congress that the CIA had actually committed crimes,
including murder, And the fact that the people felt that they had been misled about the war and so forth.
So my basic approach was to project myself as an outsider who had experience as a governor who had administered all the federal programs, you know, at the local and state level,
who was at ease with the race issue.
I had strong support from Martin Luther King, Sr.
I had strong support from people like Andy Young.
So putting all those combinations together was a key to my ultimate success.
And I think that being from Plains proved vividly almost every day when the reporters were there and having that as a deadline, a byline, that I wasn't misleading anyone.
I was really an outsider.
And a lot of the things that I used for the campaign, my presence in the wheat fields and in the peanut fields, my pictures in my own woods or at my own barn,
showed that I was really a farmer down to earth.
The Plains Baptist Church became a focal point of a lot of photography.
So the things that I offered I think were attractive, which was proven by the final results.
The secret to my success, by secret I mean secret from my opponents, and there were almost a dozen of them, very nice people, was that we had secret campaigns going on.
Everybody knew where I was.
But the same day I was campaigning, say, in Iowa, my wife would be in Florida, my mother might be in Maine.
My oldest son, Jack, and his wife might be in Pennsylvania.
My middle son might be in Wisconsin.
My youngest son might be in California.
And my mother's sister, Emily, would be in another state.
We had seven campaigns going on simultaneously.
We always went back to Plains on the weekend, where we could report to each other, this is what I heard in Maine, this is what I heard in Wisconsin.
And I would make sure that they knew how to answer the basic questions.
What are you going to do about?
This or that.
So we had a team that divided during each week, but got together on the weekends to share our experiences and to prepare for the following week.
At the same time, once the general election started, of course, Fritz Wandale and I never campaigned together because we had learned then the advantage of being in two places at once, at least.
And so the only time we ever made a common appearance was in Flint, Michigan the night before.
How much time do you spend in planes now?
We go to Plains whenever we possibly can.
We try to be there on the weekends in particular.
Rosa and I have a very deep involvement in our local community, including our church.
I teach Sunday school there when I'm home.
And I just noticed that last Sunday, last year rather, I taught 37 times.
So that's two out of three Sundays we're home.
But quite often we get home Friday night or Saturday morning and then leave on Monday.
You know, the memo that was written back on November the 4th, 1972, Ham Jordan, your chief of staff, and I know you had a lot to do with the memo, but there was one paragraph I wanted to ask you about, and it has to do with the media, because it goes back to the planes and the image.
Mr. Jordan wrote to you, like it or not, there exists, in fact, an eastern liberal news establishment which has tremendous influence in this country, all out of proportion to its actual audience.
The views of this small group of opinion makers and the papers they represent are noted and imitated by other columnists and newspapers throughout the country and the world.
I guess I wanted to ask you whether you think that's still true and what impact the media had on the image you had then and now.
I think it's still true.
I wouldn't want to identify them, although we did in preparing the data that Hamilton wrote down and shared with us.
But there were a few nationwide columnists.
Plus the regular reporters for the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times, whose writings, without acknowledgement, made a great impact on other reporters,
including television reporters.
And so we made an inventory, in effect, or a list of all of those people who we considered to be opinion shapers.
And this obviously included Face the Nation and Meet the Press interviews.
So we planned very carefully and in an escalating fashion how I would get to know these people.
Some of them were very eager to come down to Georgia and to meet with me and to meet with candidates who were running for president before the 1972 campaign.
And I would get to know them even as a...
NEW YORK Times.
countryside in Iowa and talked to people, you know, teachers and policemen and I guess bartenders and others, and he sized up what we already knew about Iowa and wrote a headline in the New York Times.
Did the other reporters ever dream that I might come in first in Iowa?
They were looking at me as coming in fifth or sixth because they very seldom got out of Des Moines.
They would stay there and enjoy themselves and talk to each other.
But he actually went out and And he got opinions from people around the state, and he projected that I was going to win, which I did.
This amazed a lot of people, and it focused attention on me, which is very beneficial.
And then we went to New Hampshire.
I was not supposed to come in near the top in New Hampshire.
I came in first.
The big test for me early on was against George Wallace in Florida, who had done formably well four years earlier all over the country, not just in the South.
And he was solid in...
The northern parts of Florida.
Scoop Jackson was a very favorite of the Jewish community, say, in Miami.
But I came in first in Florida, too.
And when I won those first three major contests against all kinds of opponents, then I think the other candidates began to say, this is a guy we've got to stop.
But by then, it was almost too late for them.
We're 23, 24 years later.
Could anybody do what you did again?
No, I don't think so.
Why not?
Because nowadays the campaigning is done through television, which is enormously expensive, as you know.
And in these days, the raising of $20 million is almost mandatory if you hope to be recognized, even by the reporters, as a substantive candidate.
If you can only raise $7 million or $10 million, even up to this point, a year before the election.
Then you're kind of written off as incompetent or inadequate or unpopular.
Well, we didn't use any so -called soft money then.
We campaigned in the primary and also in the general election on hard money, which has very strict limits.
It would be quite difficult now for anyone to do as we did and to campaign from schoolhouse to schoolhouse to courthouse and stand in line and hand out pamphlets and factor shifts.
Early in the morning, meet with farmers, make speeches from the auctioneer's desk at hog sale barns in Iowa.
That's the way we ran our campaign.
And if I had faced then a candidate with $20 million in the bank who was able to dominate television in New Hampshire or in Iowa or in Florida,
I doubt seriously that I could have won in those states.
When you look back on your own presidency, and I want to go through a bunch of things as quickly as possible just to get your take later.
You created the Department of Energy, you created the Health and Human Services, and then you spun off education.
Would you do that today again?
Yes, because people forget it was not a creation of a Department of Energy, it was a bringing together of 30 different agencies into one agency.
That worked, though.
That was manageable, yes.
And I think it's impervious now to any major modifications.
It was very important then, and still is.
It covered the gamut all the way from solar power to nuclear destructive power.
And it made it manageable.
And I was, my background was in education.
I was on the Sumter County School Board during the integration years and I was the chairman of the University Committee in the Georgia Senate and I was a key player in different ways about education.
And when I got to, well even before I got to Washington, I could see that education was basically submerged under health and welfare.
There was no cabinet post for education.
And most of what the federal government then did on education was just to resolve lawsuits.
Between the federal government and states and so forth, which was to me very I'd say almost disgusting.
So I thought that it would be better to have education stand by itself to play the crucial role of the federal government in offering some frosting on the cake that dealt primarily with kids who were untreated well,
not treated well at the state and local level.
Which I think Lyndon Johnson had done so well, say, with Head Start.
But that way, I think the education department was very necessary.
You deregulated the airlines.
Well, that was, you know, I think in looking back, that was one of the most remarkable things that we did during the four years that has not yet been recognized.
I'm pleased that you have done it.
I was a businessman.
In fact, I was the outstanding young businessman of Georgia once.
That's my background.
And I deregulated, we deregulated the airlines and the railroads and trucking.
We deregulated the banks and banking.
We deregulated communications, television, radio.
We deregulated oil and gas.
So in effect, we brought freedom to almost every aspect of the economic structure of America that never had been known before.
And the consequences of that... are now accepted as routine.
But they were revolutionary in character.
Why do you think people haven't paid much attention to that?
Now people take for granted that airlines have to compete with each other and that truckers have to compete with each other and that banks can merge or that banks can offer savings and loan or even insurance capabilities or that the price of oil and gas is not ordained from Washington but has to find its own level.
I know.
Well...
I had some good advisors, first of all, who knew the inner workings of the ICC and the CAB and those other agencies that you mentioned.
And there was a kind of an unpublicized willingness, I'd say, I wouldn't say eagerness, within the Congress to make the changes that I proposed.
For me, it was a high priority.
And for the Congress, there was an element of dormancy about it.
These were not highly controversial issues.
Even some of my best supporters from Georgia, like Delta Airlines, didn't like my deregulating all the airlines.
But of course they have prospered since then.
And there has been some adverse consequences in a way because with a monopoly on a particular route which existed before deregulation.
So Eastern Airlines could say, okay, we fly from Miami to Atlanta and then on up to New York.
If our pilots or if our workers want a 15 % raise, we won't argue with them.
We'll just give them to it, give it to them, and then we'll pass it on by a 20 % increase in fares.
This is the way things were done before.
But I thought that was wrong.
And I think the main reason we were able to get it...
Did you think much about your speech making back in those years?
Did you work at it?
Did you write your own speeches?
You know, before I went to Washington, I had never had a speechwriter.
I wrote my own speeches on my own typewriter.
And I still do, by the way.
But in the White House, it was expected that professional speechwriters would do the writing, and that the president would basically make a few editorial changes and then read them on a teleprompter.
That was not my way of doing things.
So I had a couple of speechwriters who resigned in anger, and one of them wrote negative stories about the White House life.
We're good to go.
I think?
Speech -making didn't come easy to me.
I think, however, to be objective about it, when I was campaigning around the country and speaking to 20 people or maybe 100 people, I think my sincerity did come across.
And when I said, I will never lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don't vote for me.
I think people...
In retrospect, the walking from the Capitol down to the White House inauguration day, the carrying of your own bags, the imagery that you created, would you do that again?
Yes.
Well, the carrying of my own bags is something I still do, and always did.
That was not a contrivance or an artificiality that was suggested to me by media experts.
I got by easily for five days of campaigning.
I would have a little...
We're good to go.
I think?
From Wisconsin.
He wrote me a note and he said that there was such a vast chasm in trust that existed between the people of the nation and Washington that he thought I might do something to break that tradition and maybe even expose myself more directly to the American people,
or words to that effect.
Rosa and I talked it over and we had this bright idea of getting in the limousine, driving around the capital and then getting out and walking down Pennsylvania Avenue.
And then we brought that with the Secret Service, responsible, obviously, for our safety.
And they said, well, if you can keep it completely secret and don't let anybody know in advance that you're going to do it, we think the surprise element will probably be an additional protective factor.
So, in effect, you know, we walked down Pennsylvania Avenue like any other people going to a fair or something, with thousands of people on both sides, and exposed to...
This is out of the blue, but it gives you a chance to talk about the Iranian thing.
What was your reaction when Cyrus Vance resigned after that landing of the helicopters in the desert in Iran?
And is that why he resigned over that issue for some reason?
about different little issues.
Si was one of the Secretaries of State and there are others that I won't name now who were very protective of the State Department.
And I looked upon myself as a descendant of Thomas Jefferson as a president.
They looked upon themselves as a descendant of Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State.
So if anything happened that might cause discomfort to an employee A worker in the State Department, Si would come to see me in the Oval Office and with very hurt feelings would threaten to resign.
So that was the fourth time and he actually resigned.
Si had been involved in the meetings in the Cabinet Room, only I think seven of us present, when we decided to go ahead with the rescue operation.
And when he was absent, which was on occasion, Secretary of State has to be gone, his deputy, Warren Christopher, was there.
So we did not take Cy Vance by surprise.
When I made the final decision that this is the time to go in, after we had all been briefed on how it might be done, it was a very complicated procedure, Cy happened to have been away from Washington.
He came back, and I called another meeting of a Security Council, and we had another...
Third discussion of the issue and then unanimously, except for Vance, we all decided to go ahead with the rescue mission.
After that, I was surprised and disappointed and somewhat angry when Cy announced that he was resigning.
If the mission had been successful and he resigned, I would have taken it with a lot more equanimity.
But when he was unsuccessful, I was kind of peeved when he resigned, when I was strained at best.
Would you do anything differently today, looking back on the whole Iranian hostage crisis?
Yes, I would send one more helicopter in.
We figured that it would take five full helicopters to bring all of our people out, including the rescue team and every hostage.
If we didn't have five, we would have to leave some Americans behind.
He would very possibly be executed.
So we had an extra helicopter and then another extra helicopter.
One, for some reason never yet ascertained, turned back to the aircraft carrier instead of going through with his mission.
One went down in the desert in a sandstorm.
And we had one extra one then.
We had five on the ground, ready to go.
And when they got ready to take off, they ran into each other.
They hit a DC.
What do you want your legacy to be?
Well, if I had, you know, I would like to be remembered as being a champion of peace and human rights.
We established human rights publicly and globally as the foundation of our entire foreign policy.
And I think that commitment has resulted in a lot of ending of human rights abuses and democratization and freedom in countries even going on today.
It's a notable thing.
And the other one was a commitment to peace.
I was a professional naval officer.
I went through Annapolis.
I tried to give my life to defend my country as a career.
I was a submarine officer.
And I strengthened the military establishment tremendously while I was in office, primarily because of the brilliance of Harold Brown, who was my Secretary of Defense.
And he was the president of Caltech, and he was worthy to receive a Nobel Prize for physics.
And all of the modern -day weapons that were used, say, in the Gulf War were developed under him.
Well, Harold Brown, while I was president.
But I thought that it was better not to use our military strength, to have it as one of the persuasive factors, but to use my influence and the influence of the great United States of America to bring peace to people.
So we went for four years.
Despite some very serious challenges and opportunities, we never fired a bullet.
We never dropped.
For a moment, talk about the American presidency, the office of the president.
Would you change anything if you could?
Is it as powerful as it should be?
So in foreign policy, the president is it.
In domestic legislation, almost all the legislation that was passed during my four years originated in the White House.
I can't remember a single major bill that originated in the Congress.
The Congress expected me to present to them, "This is what I want you to do about these subjects." And we had a very good batting average, as I said.
The thing that the President has practically no control over is the economics of the nation.
He has an equal role to play with the Congress in taxation.
But the Federal Reserve Board really determines the rate of inflation and the tightness of money, which results in the growth of the economy.
Even greater than that, though, is the free enterprise system of our country.
What the conglomerate mass of major corporations do, General Motors and IBM and so forth, I need not name the others, And the other factor over which the president has no control is the international situation.
You know, if a war erupts or if you have a so -called Asia crisis, which we've had lately, the president of the United States has nothing to say about that or do about that.
When Nixon was in office as president, I was governor, and we had the formation of OPEC and the oil embargo against anyone who traded with Israel.
And we had long...
Last question.
You and your wife, Rosalind, have been married for how many years?
Fifty -three and a half.
Your children, four of them, are how old and where are they?
Well, our oldest son was born just a year after we were married.
He's in Bermuda.
He's a very successful banker.
Our second son, Chip, was born in Hawaii in 1950 when I was in the Navy, Submarine Force.
He's a vice president of the Friendship Force, which is a massive exchange program of Americans and others going back and forth to live in homes of foreigners.
He's now working on Iran, Iraq, Russia, and Cuba.
And our youngest son, Jeffrey, got a degree in geography and computer science.
He helped to develop some very successful software programs and And to start some very fine, successful companies.
So he's retired at a very early age, and he's spending a lot of his time raising three of my grandsons.
And Amy?
Amy has finished her graduate work at Tulane in art history, married to a fine young man who's a webmaster for a southern company, and we just enjoyed having lunch with and admiring one of the most extraordinary little grandsons in the world.
Who's now two and a half months old.
Same as her mother now, mostly.
And how many grandchildren do you have?
Ten.
Ten grandchildren.
Our oldest grandson, by the way, is in the Peace Corps in South Africa.
And his grandmother, his great -grandmother, Lillian, my mother, was in the Peace Corps.
So, we have a strong relationship.
Thank you, Mr. President.
It's been a pleasure.
What kind of crack do you normally smoke, Mr. Biden?
Let me start again.
My name is Jason D. Ford, but to most I am known as Jelly Roll.
My name is Brett Favre.
I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
My name is Michael Phelps.
My name is Sho Chu, and I am the CEO of TikTok.
Have you apologized to the victims?
I've...
Would you like to do so now?
Well, they're here.
You're on national television.
Would you like now to apologize to the victims?
Tonight, all eyes are on Iowa.
I am today suspending my campaign.
The New Hampshire primary.
The time has now come to suspend my campaign.
The events were shameful, criminal, violent, all of those things, but did not qualify as insurrection.
This will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.
Isn't how old we are?
It's how old our ID is.
It's one of the reasons why this program is so valuable, because it does bring people together.
Without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, there can be no presidency as we know it.
The Republican -led House will not be jammed or forced into passing a foreign aid bill.
I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important.
On this vote, the ayes are 311 and the nays are 112.
The bill is passed.
Declaring the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives to be vacant.
The yeas are 359, the nays are 43, with seven answering present.
Hopefully, this is the end of the personality politics.
Tonight, this event is being televised live on C -SPAN.
For the next 90 minutes, we are going to be live from a brand new exhibition.
Welcome to the National Book Festival.
What's so great about C -SPAN is that you hit every sign.
This was a rigged, disgraceful trial that the real verdict is going to be.
November 5th.
We'd be well served to remember the long and cherished tradition we have in this country of settling our political differences at the ballot box.
Today's decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do.
Look, if we finally beat Medicare.
It was a bad night.
They're trying to push me out on the race.
I'm staying in the race!
Take a look at what happened.
I want to speak to you tonight about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics.
The most significant operational failure of the Secret Service in decades.
I proudly accept your nomination for President of the United States.
I've decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.
Just over a hundred days before an election, Democrat party bosses Force Joe Biden off the ballot.
There's the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.
No place in America for anti -Semitism.
Give us the tools faster, and we'll finish the job faster.
We are here tonight!
A C -SPAN don't play.
Wait a minute, I'm talking now.
If you don't mind, please.
Does that sound familiar?
She went out, never touched.
By a human hand.
Certainly falls into the general definition of fascist.
That's a good looking group.
Hello everybody.
There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now.
Yeah.
I think it's called Puerto Rico.
Thanks for being with us on election night.
Look what happened.
Is this crazy?
This will...
The outcome of this election is not what we wanted.
House Democrats have fallen a few seats short.
We are going to raise an America first banner above this place.
The American people have spoken.
It's a new day in the United States Senate and it's a new day in America.
Politics is tough and it's in many cases not a very nice world but it is a nice world today and I appreciate it very much.
A transition that's so smooth it'll be.
As smooth as it can get and I very much appreciate that, Jim.
You're welcome.
Thank you all.
Cox supports C -SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy.
More now from the C -SPAN archives of former President Jimmy Carter, who has died at age 100.
In May 2018, he gave the commencement address at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
The former president reflected on how his faith has guided his life before, during, and after his presidency.
President Carter also spoke about what he sees as some of the greatest challenges of our time, including economic inequality, the threat of nuclear war, and discrimination against women and girls.