Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Jimmy Carter
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.
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.
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.
We Americans pride ourselves on our sophistication. We like to think that we are worldly-wise and cynical.
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