The presidency of Jimmy Carter was both shaped and bracketed by energy.
Editor's Note: Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for
Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.
Critics saw him as weak, but, in his single term in office, Carter had significant achievements in foreign affairs, the environmental, and energy policy.
Editor’s Note: The author was a longtime columnist and senior editor at Newsweek, and since has been a television commentator, documentary filmmaker and author of three New York Times bestsellers.
Nixon, Ford, and Carter developed a friendship of sorts on a memorable flight to Cairo to honor the recently slain Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat.
Jimmy Carter was at home in his study in Plains, Georgia, on October 6, 1981, when the call came in a little after daybreak. A reporter was on the line asking for his response to the attempted assassination of Anwar Sadat.
In their surprisingly short history, presidential debates have never lived up to our expectations. Yet they’ve always proved invaluable.
Americans won’t choose a president who chides them.
“I no longer believe that there is a moral majority.
The “loser decade” that at first seemed nothing more than a breathing space between the high drama of the 1960s and whatever was coming next is beginning to reveal itself as a richer time than we thought.
That’s it,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then U.S. ambassador to India, wrote to a colleague on the White House staff in 1973 on the subject of some issue of the moment. “Nothing will happen.
In this year of the bicentennial of the Constitution, American Heritage asked a number of historians, authors, and public figures to address themselves to one or both of these questions:
Only ten of our 40 presidents have written accounts of their time in the White House.
David McCullough’s
THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS
It is very rarely that a book of history has an important impact on current events.
America has taught the world that freedom is humanity’s birthright. Why should we expect President Carter to keep quiet about it?
We Americans pride ourselves on our sophistication. We like to think that we are worldly-wise and cynical.