The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

REMEMBERING JIMMY CARTER

THE RHETORICAL EVOCATIONS OF PRESIDENTIAL MEMORIES

A Thesis in

Communication Arts and Sciences

by

Brandon M. Johnson

 2020 Brandon M. Johnson

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

August 2020

The thesis of Brandon M. Johnson was reviewed and approved by the following:

Mary E. Stuckey Professor, Communication Arts and Sciences Thesis Advisor

Stephen H. Browne Liberal Arts Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences

Michael J. Steudeman Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Director of CAS100A

Denise H. Solomon Head and Liberal Arts Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences

iii ABSTRACT

This thesis is an analysis of the public memory of Jimmy Carter and the way the historical resources of his presidency (including his perceived moral character) are interpreted and evoked as a shorthand for presidential failure by associating him with a rhetoric of weakness.

Broadly, I consider the nature of presidential memory, asking how a presidency passes from history to memory. I suggest that presidential histories serve as inventional resources in the present, with rhetors evoking interpretations of the past as rhetorical appeals. These appeals are acts of memory, and analyzing how they function discursively and are deployed strategically draws out how presidential memory works and what implications it has to presidential rhetoric.

The different strategies used in remembering the presidency of Jimmy Carter are useful texts for rhetorically critiquing this process because Carter is often deployed as a rhetorical shorthand, providing a representative example of interpreting presidential pasts.

I begin by considering the evolving scholarship and historiography on Carter and conceptualizing how presidential pasts can be interpreted in the present through acts of remembering. My next three chapters consider how Carter is evoked in the present. Chapter two is about the constitution of his moral character during his political career in Georgia and in the

White House, which established an important inventional resource for later strategies of remembering him. I explain how Carter developed his image of moral character by relying on a split between personal morality (including his own faith) and public policy, which allowed him to navigate contexts of race and segregation in the South. I suggest that his rhetoric was broad enough to appeal to both white voters who had supported George Wallace and to African

Americans who responded to his perceived morality, creating a tenuous electoral coalition.

Chapter three is a close consideration of how presidential memory functions, analyzing what discursive strategies and textual forms are used to evoke presidential pasts. I draw from The New

iv Rhetoric to argue that in Carter’s case, evocations of his memory rely on associating him with weakness and then using his presidency as the benchmark of failure, which other candidates

(usually Republican) try to disassociate themselves from while comparing their rivals to Carter. I reveal that this association relies on a masculine conceptualization of “strength” that works to limit diplomatic solutions and further genders the presidency as an institution. My fourth chapter centers on the Iran Hostage Crisis, which I position as the “definitive” memory of the Carter presidency because it is often presented as his final failure and because it is emblematic of the strategies of memory I describe throughout my thesis. I show how historians and politicians alike interpret the crisis as both a personal struggle between Carter and the Iranians and the result of personal weakness on the part of Carter (extending chapter three’s analysis). I include an analysis of the film Argo, which I argue is an attempt at cinematic redemption, to demonstrate the national shame evoked by this way of remembering. I conclude by looking at how Carter’s character and many of the traits used to malign his presidential memory have made him a successful ex- president and ask what that means for the presidency as an institution and for future scholarship.

What these evocations of Carter lose are the nuances of history or the fact that, actually,

Jimmy Carter did get the hostages released. All remembering simplifies, but in the case of Carter, it also works to forget aspects of his presidency worth remembering (such as his morality) and to mask undercurrents of race and gendered rhetoric operating in the presidential rhetorics of memory. Consequently, the implications of my analysis are twofold. Historically, I intervene in existing interpretations of President Carter to add a new rhetorical dimension to the ways we consider his presidency. Rhetorically, I outline the strategies used in remembering past presidents, laying the groundwork for future analysis and a continued consideration of how the ways we remember the history of the presidency shape how we conceptualize its future.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... vi

Chapter 1 Introduction: Interpreting Presidential Pasts ...... 1

Carter in Context: The Rhetorical Resources of History ...... 6 Studying Presidential Memories: The Rhetorical Evocations of Memory ...... 11 From History to Memory: Outline of Analysis ...... 16 References ...... 20

Chapter 2 Remembering Carter’s Character: Intersections of Race, Religion, and Policy in Carter’s Moral Rhetoric ...... 29

Constituting Character: Personal Morality and Public Policy ...... 33 Race, Religion, and Politics: How Carter’s Moral Rhetoric Navigated Race and Segregation in the South ...... 39 The Man from Plains: Constituting Character in Georgia Politics...... 39 Race and Religion in Carter’s Presidential Rhetoric ...... 45 Conclusion: The Rise of the Religious Right and The Redemption of Jimmy Carter ..... 51 References ...... 56

Chapter 3 Evoking Presidential Memories: The Carter Presidency as Shorthand for Presidential Weakness ...... 66

Rhetorics of Presidential Memories ...... 69 Interpreting the Carter Presidency: From History to Memory ...... 73 Too Small for the Office: Initial Framings of the Carter Years ...... 74 The Shift to Memory: Remembering Carter During the Reagan Administration .... 79 Available Means of Presidential Memory: Carter as Shorthand ...... 82 Conclusion ...... 86 References ...... 90

Chapter 4 Carter’s Signature Failure: Remembering the Iran Hostage Crisis ...... 97

Four Hundred and Forty-Four Days: Carter’s Crisis ...... 100 The Defeat of Jimmy Carter: Remembering the Iran Hostage Crisis as Personal Weakness ...... 102 The Iran Hostage Crisis as A Personal Struggle ...... 105 The World “Laughing” at the United States: Rhetoric of Weakness ...... 107 Argo as Redemption ...... 113 Conclusion ...... 118 References ...... 122

Chapter 5 Conclusion: Presidential Memory and the Post-Presidency ...... 129

References ...... 137

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis would not have been possible without the support of a variety of individuals. I would be remiss if my first acknowledgement was not to my advisor, Dr. Mary Stuckey, who has guided this thesis from its inception. Her comments at every stage, from one-page memos to full line edits of earlier drafts (returned with supernatural speed) were instrumental in its timely completion. Beyond that, I am grateful for her investment in my growth as a writer and scholar.

Both members of my committee have also been influential. Dr. Stephen Browne’s Rhetorical

Criticism seminar both expanded my understanding of what rhetorical critics actually do and served as the beginning of my third chapter. Our conversations about memory are reflected in every piece of theory in this thesis, and his questions during my prospectus defense pushed me to refine my argument for the better, even if I am still unsure if I ever truly worked out the difference between history and memory. Dr. Michael Steudeman has consistently gone above and beyond in supporting my scholarship. The second chapter would not exist if not for his contributions, and it was in his Public Policy Seminar that I refined that chapter into something much more incisive than it otherwise would have been. In addition to my committee, I would like to thank Dr. Kirt Wilson, whose two seminars helped my refine my grasp of both memory studies and graduate-level writing in general. Parts of chapter four, particularly the analysis of Argo, were also improved by guidance from Dr. Katya Haskins. The origins of this thesis go back even further to my undergraduate education at University of Richmond, which prepared me well for graduate-level writing. Traces of my first rhetoric foray into the Carter presidency, begun in Dr.

Timothy Barney’s seminar, found their way into the fourth chapter.

vii I appreciated the Communication Arts & Sciences department’s continued flexibility and support throughout my degree and during the unprecedented circumstances of Covid-19. The department also provided financial support to attend the Rhetoric Society of America’s 2019

Summer Institute, where I conducted archival research appearing in my fourth chapter.

(Regarding that archival research, I would like to recognize the assistance of the staff at NARA

II, the direction of archivist Cate Brennan, and the camaraderie of my fellow RSA seminarians.)

The administrative work of Director of Graduate Studies Dr. Andy High and our College of the

Liberal Arts Staff, including Robin Kowa Chakravorty, also ensured that this thesis was submitted on time and in its proper format. Finally, I must acknowledge the intellectual contributions made in seminars by my fellow graduate students, but more importantly, their friendship over the last two years. If finishing this thesis in isolation has taught me anything, it is that there was real value in the seemingly random topics of conversation in our little maze of cubicles. The journey here would not have been the same without its beginning in Sparks 316.

Introduction Interpreting Presidential Pasts

Presidents and presidential candidates alike look to the past for rhetorical resources as they articulate their visions of the future. They call on (and thereby preserve and alter) national mythologies of American exceptionalism and the frontier, claim continuity with ideals of freedom and democracy, and rely on the legacies of past presidents while adapting those legacies to their own purposes. The presidency is inherently self-referential, using collective memories of past presidents in the present. Presidents like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln serve as bipartisan symbols of presidential greatness while presidents like FDR or Reagan are used for more partisan evocations. However, while certain presidents are used as examples of greatness, with presidents and candidates seeking to associate themselves with them, others are remembered as shorthands for presidential failure. Since the 1980s, President Jimmy Carter has emerged as one of the presidents in this second category.

Carter’s presidency provides inventional resources for contemporary journalists, pundits, and presidents to craft narratives of simplistic failure. He is a president more often remembered for what he did after leaving office, and although as a person he is valorized as a moral paragon, his presidency is often remembered as “terrible.” This interpretation of Carter’s presidency as a symbol of failure remains relevant because the presidencies we remember as “failures” also imply what is considered a “successful” presidency. So how does one become the barometer of presidential failure and what does that mean for our understanding of the U.S. presidency? To answer those questions, this thesis will analyze how memories of Jimmy Carter are evoked as rhetorical appeals to understand how Carter is remembered, the consequences of that way of remembering, and how presidential memories are used in the present.

2 We see the evocation of President Carter as a rhetorical strategy most clearly in its deployment as a negative rhetorical appeal. Carter is often remembered as a simplified shorthand for presidential failure. Robert Alexander Kraig calls him a “tragic” symbol representing the alleged failure of idealism in a foreign policy context, especially among conservatives.1 We see these evocations when conservative media outlets call a president like Barack Obama the “new

Carter,” an enthymeme relying on the audience interpreting Carter as a failure and already knowing (or remembering) the rhetorical resources to remember him in that way.2 As another example, recall Mitt Romney’s criticism of Obama’s foreign policy in the 2012 presidential election. Romney said, “There’s a reason why the Iranians released the hostages on the same day and at the same hour that Reagan was sworn in. As president, I'll offer that kind of clarity, strength and resolve.”3 Romney’s appeal implies that, unlike Reagan, Carter was too weak to release the hostages, and through that evocation of Carter he associates Obama with that weakness. These are not neutral historical references. They are strategic interpretations of the past used in the present. In other words, these interpretations of the past are rhetorical, meaning that through analysis, the rhetorical critic can draw out how they are structured and what they do.

A recent exchange between Carter and President Donald Trump is representative of the ways Carter is remembered as shorthand. The June 2019 exchange began when Carter, whose perceived moral character has helped position him as a moral critic throughout his post- presidency, escalated his criticism of Trump by questioning his legitimacy, saying that Trump was “put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”4 Trump responded to the criticism by denying his reliance on Russian interference and then calling Carter a “nice man” but a “terrible” and “forgotten” president.5 Trump began by assuring his audience that he was not criticizing Carter from a moral perspective, but was instead referring to his presidency, a common distinction that separates Carter’s character and post-presidency from his actual presidency.

Trump concluded with a reference to the Iran Hostage Crisis, positioning it as the climax to a

3 narrative of failure when he said, “Look at what happened with Iran--they tied him up in knots.

The reason Ronald Reagan probably became President.”6 The crisis is often presented as Carter’s final failure and suggests a causal link between the crisis and Reagan’s election. In Trump’s criticism we see many of the common strategies used in remembering Carter. He may have been a good man, critics claim, but his weakness and inability to resolve the Iran Hostage Crisis led to

(and also necessitated) the election of his apparently stronger and better successor, Reagan. Carter is not forgotten (at least not literally) as Trump suggests, but his presidency is remembered in a simplified and unflattering way, rhetorically separated from his character and post-presidency.

My thesis confronts the underlying logics behind these evocations of Carter’s public memories, seeking to understand how and why we remember President Carter and what that means for rhetoricians, historians, and the American public.

I argue that the historical events of the Carter presidency, including the initial constitution of his moral character, are interpreted in the present to evoke him as a shorthand for presidential failure that relies on an association of Carter with weakness and an interpretation of the Iran Hostage Crisis as a personal failing by Carter. An approach inspired by memory studies and historically-minded understandings of rhetorical criticism will allow me to analyze this way of remembering Jimmy Carter, which will also illustrate how presidential pasts are interpreted and evoked as rhetorical resources in the present and the ideologies they can mask. In Carter’s case, a deeper analysis reveals that his initial moral character was actually constituted through complicated and strategic intersections with race and segregation in the South and that the associations of him with weakness and failure rely on a masculine logic of “toughness” that de- emphasizes the value of morality and diplomacy in foreign policy. A close engagement with these ways of remembering the Carter presidency has interlinked historical and rhetorical purposes.

Historically, it uses a rhetorical approach to nuance an often-overlooked presidency. Rhetorically, it looks at the ways presidential histories are transformed through rhetoric into simplified

4 memories to be used as strategic evocations in the present. In sum, this thesis is an inquiry into both public memories of Jimmy Carter and the nature of presidential remembering itself.

I am not the first scholar to suggest a new look at the Carter presidency. The scholarly understanding of the history behind the Carter administration has evolved over time.7 In the early

1980s, Carter was generally considered to be a clear failure as president.8 Many Reagan- supporting conservatives criticized his human rights focus and accused him of reducing U.S. international influence.9 As is common, journalistic opinion eventually softened, with some pundits coming to his defense by the late 1980s, and by the 1990s, some historians had also begun to call for a re-evaluation of Carter.10 Within the field of communication, scholars immediately recognized that Carter represented some kind of change in presidential politics, and early work in the Quarterly Journal of Speech and other speech journals offered initial analyses.11

Many scholars emphasized Carter’s faith-based rhetoric.12 In later years, scholars across various fields analyzed Carter’s diplomatic achievements and his emphasis on bringing human rights onto the national agenda.13

Despite a trend of partial redemption in scholarship, in popular culture, Carter is still rarely referenced, and when he is portrayed, it is usually used for comedic effect as an image of failure. Arguably the most prominent popular reference to Carter comes from a 1993 episode of

The Simpsons, in which the town of Springfield, unable to afford a statue of Abraham Lincoln, settles for a cheaper statue of Carter. This leads the disappointed crowd to riot, reducing Carter to a punchline.14 Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech has also become a plot device for representing either a failure of a speech or a general sense of national unease; it is used as an

“unsexy” topic of conversation to try to prevent romantic tension between two characters on

Parks & Recreation, and the opening sequence of the second season of Fargo plays the speech to establish a mood of national unrest.15 The 2012 film Argo, which I consider in more detail in chapter four, also uses Carter’s handling of the Iran Hostage Crisis to create a sense of national

5 shame, which must be redeemed by the daring rescue of the six diplomats trapped in the

Canadian embassy in Tehran that the film portrays.16 One of the only prominent, positive portrayals of Jimmy Carter is actually from King of the Hill. In a Christmas episode called “The

Father, the Son, and the Holy J.C.,” Carter (voiced by David Herman) appears as a metaphor for

Jesus Christ (established by his initials and his role as carpenter) to resolve a dispute between

Hank Hill and his father.17 In this portrayal, Carter’s exemplary character is highlighted, a theme that has emerged in more recent nonfiction portrayals. In contemporary references, Carter’s moralism and humble nature are often contrasted with the perceived corruption of Trump, offering some evidence that a more favorable memory is developing, at least within the news media.18 However, even this memory is simplified, relying on Carter crossing the low bar of not being corrupt, which still simplifies his actual presidency into a failure not worth remembering.

Throughout my thesis I will complicate this simplification and suggest that the Carter presidency faced complicated historical contexts and also offered contributions worth remembering, such as his moral emphasis.

Given my reliance on the historical contexts of the Carter presidency, which contain the rhetorical resources for remembering Carter, I begin this introduction by considering the most prominent events of the Carter administration and the relationship between that historical record and the later acts of memory I analyze. I then draw on the field of memory studies to conceptualize how presidential memories can be interpreted and evoked as rhetorical appeals within public address. I outline how this understanding will be used in the methodology of how I perform my rhetorical criticism in my second, third, and fourth chapters. I conclude the introduction by previewing the overall arc of my argument.

6 Carter in Context: The Rhetorical Resources of History

The actual history of the Carter administration is an important part of my argument because it is in the past that rhetors find the rhetorical resources to remember Carter.19 As such, I must consider the foundational, co-constitutive relationship between history and memory. Yet this section is not an exhaustive history of the Carter administration or a biography of Carter’s life. Though I value history in its own right, the full scope of the complicated relationship between history and memory is an abstract debate beyond the scope of my thesis. Consequently, I will take the pragmatic approach of defining history from the perspective of a rhetorical critic, focusing on its role as a rich inventional resource for rhetorical evocations in the present.

To begin, I must establish working definitions of memory, history, and the past. The latter is important, because on a fundamental level, this thesis and the conceptualizations of both history and memory are about interpretations of the past. I could certainly fill an entire section complicating our perceptions of time or the implied linearity of events, but in the interest of scope and simplicity, I will revert to simple definition: events that happened before our present are in the past. They may be written down in textbooks, personally remembered, or immortalized in statues and museums, but the events of the past happened chronologically before our present. We

“know” the past either through our own personal recollections of it or from the historical records left behind, such as census data, archival materials, or in a more ancient sense, archaeological evidence. The past provides images and events that can be interpreted in the present. In this, we see that both history and memory are interpretative endeavors at heart and that even if we define history as including “official” narratives of the past or more abstractly as the record of previous events, it is already a social construction.20 Given this, memory is in many ways an interpretation of an interpretation.

7 If both history and memory are interpretations of the past, then we encounter a definitional problem for my analysis. What exactly is the difference between history and memory, aside from the fact that one is the focus of my thesis? Maurice Hawlbachs distinguishes between the two by their scope, making history a “universal” matter while memory focuses on specific groups.21 I make a similar distinction to an extent, in that the memories of Carter I analyze never purport to be comprehensive histories of his presidency, but beyond scope, a definitional conflict at a philosophical level remains. To escape this conundrum, I will rely on a pragmatic move that privileges a rhetorical perspective, though that move actually emerges from my reading of historian Alon Confino. Confino conceptualizes a co-constitutive relationship between history and memory, arguing that it is “an outcome of the relationship of the past and the full spectrum of symbolic representations available in a given culture.”22 The focus on “available” types of

“representations” recalls Aristotle’s foundational definition of rhetoric as “observing” the

“available means of persuasion.”23 In this, I find a way out of my definitional problem by focusing on the most foundational definition of rhetoric. History, whether by containing archival sources, textbook interpretations, or simple records of past events, is an inventional resource providing the available symbols for remembering. The act of memory is deciding which of these historical moments to remember, when to do so, and how to remember it, all of which are inherently rhetorical considerations. Through this understanding I will define history as the

“available means of memory,” or the historical resources that can be evoked and used in the present. Memory, then, is an interpretation of the available historical resources.

Since history provides these resources of remembering, I must consider the historical contexts from which memories of a past presidency emerge. My consideration of history is in line with a long tradition of historically-minded rhetorical criticism.24 As far back as 1947, Ernest J.

Wrage made the case that studies of public address could contribute to the larger “history of ideas,” and even as the field turned to more theoretically-oriented pursuits, scholars like Barnet

8 Baskerville maintained that the general history of public address was still a worthwhile pursuit.25

My historical focus is not a call for returning to this older work, but a recognition that engagement with history offers contributions to the field of rhetoric by providing examples of the specific strategies used in calling on and using the past as a rhetorical resource.26

Beyond providing a new historical perspective on the past, my historical emphasis is necessary to contextualize the appeals that I analyze because these memories emerge from their co-constitutive relationship with history. For these reasons, each of my chapters considers different areas of Carter’s presidency and post-presidency in some detail. Chapter two covers

Carter’s childhood, his pre-presidential political career in Georgia, and the elections of 1976 and

1980 to consider how they function as the “available means” of memory. In that chapter I also look at how Carter’s character was constituted, because I consider the constructed “image” of a president during their tenure a historical resource in its own right. (For another example, the fact that Ronald Reagan created a “cowboy” image through his rhetoric in the 1980s shapes later memories of him.) Chapter three is concerned more narrowly with memory, but it traces a rough rhetorical history of Carter’s perception after he left office. Chapter four is about the Iran Hostage

Crisis and contextualizes it as important for both American history and the available history of

Carter’s presidency. In this way, these chapters will expand my historical overview here, but to set up these later chapters I will begin with a brief overview of the most prominent historical events from the Carter presidency.

In many ways this is a conventional history of the Carter presidency, relying on the kinds of interpretations that I will complicate throughout my analysis. However, these historical events are also the ones most commonly invoked when remembering Carter, and understanding these events help contextualize what historical resources of the Carter presidency are “available.”

Carter’s 1976 election offers a historical starting point for understanding his lone term and contextualizes the choices he made given his available options. Carter, formerly a state senator

9 and then the governor of Georgia, narrowly defeated Republican candidate Gerald Ford in the

1976 presidential election. Although he had some political leadership experience from his time as governor of Georgia, Carter was billed as an outsider “change” candidate offering something new to an American electorate jaded by the Watergate scandal and its aftermath.27 Beyond politics, he was presented as a moral, humble son of a peanut farmer from the small town of Plains, Georgia, with his campaign centered on promises for “competence” and “compassion.”28

When the moral man from Plains took office on January 20, 1977, he confronted many different contexts and constraints. In Stephen Skowronek’s political time framework, Carter was a “disjunctive” president, representing a fragmented regime that did not offer him much institutional support.29 He was also a Cold War president, having to balance his foreign policy concerns with a delicate U.S.-Soviet relationship endangered by Soviet intervention in

Afghanistan and the fragile geopolitical balance of détente.30 Domestically, Carter faced a growing energy crisis combined with rising inflation throughout his term. Carter referred to the ongoing situation as a “crisis of confidence” in a July 1979 speech, though it would later be known as “malaise.”31

As Carter faced these contexts, he mixed what could be remembered as diplomatic victories with what would later be remembered as embarrassing moments and defeats. Carter negotiated a treaty promising to return the Panama Canal to Panama, signed the SALT II treaty with the Soviet leader Brezhnev, and brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and

Israel.32 These diplomatic achievements, and the Camp David Accords in particular, are the most prominent resources for positive interpretations of Carter (alongside his general character as president, considered in chapter two). However, Carter was less successful domestically and legislatively and he was unable to chart a satisfying way out of the energy crisis. While Carter enjoyed fairly high approval ratings in his first year, the American public grew frustrated with his inability to solve these issues, contributing to lower approval ratings by 1979.33 By then, images

10 of Carter’s weakness and ineffectiveness were created that were useful for later negative appeals.

Carter’s diminishing reputation was best captured by an incident in which the president was

“attacked” by a “killer rabbit” during a fishing trip. The media coverage of the story made him into a comical figure that became the subject of mockery ranging from demeaning articles in The

Washington Post to a parody folk song.34

Beyond these various inventional resources, the Iran Hostage Crisis is the historical event most closely linked with the Carter presidency. That crisis began on November 4, 1979 when radical Islamic students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two hostages. They were angered by Carter allowing the recently-deposed Shah of Iran, who had been installed in a

U.S.-backed coup in 1953, into the United States to seek medical treatment.35 The ongoing crisis created a sense that Carter was unable or unwilling to take the decisive action that the American public desired.36 Ultimately, this perception of his inability to free the hostages would be interpreted and remembered to represent a perceived failure of the Carter presidency, as I outline in my fourth chapter. However, that perception is in itself an interpretation of these historical resources.

Haunted by the ongoing crisis, domestic “malaise,” and low approval ratings, Carter lost the 1980 presidential election in a landslide to Republican candidate Ronald Reagan.37 The 1980 election saw Reagan win the votes of a new evangelical Christian voting bloc as he constituted a new “Religious Right.”38 The 1980 election is crucial to later evocations of Carter’s memory, as it is often remembered in a way to both position Carter as a definitive failure and to set up an ongoing contrast with Reagan. If the Iran Hostage Crisis was the emblematic failure of the popular memory of the Carter administration, then having Carter’s predecessor appear to immediately resolve that crisis offered a final insult.39 In sum, malaise, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and anecdotes of Carter’s weakness provide negative available means of memory, while Carter’s

11 diplomatic achievements (like the Camp David Accords) and his own character are more commonly used in positive interpretations.

Carter is more noted for what he did after losing re-election.40 (Though of course, the fact that he was originally president explains why we specifically remember him at all.) After leaving office, he continued to participate in his church while undertaking many philanthropic efforts, and in 2002, he was awarded the Nobel peace prize.41 A common refrain is that Carter has been a much better ex-president than president.42 While understandable (and developed further in my conclusion), I argue that this larger framing de-emphasizes the Carter presidency itself, which I consider worthy of both political and rhetorical analysis.

I do not mean to suggest that Carter is secretly one of the country’s greatest presidents, nor do I want to paint him as a tragic figure by playing into simplified, melodramatic narratives.

Like any presidency, it was one of successes and failures, and more so than simply a moment of transition or a cautionary tale of a presidency gone wrong, it has rhetorical and historical value to scholars and to the American public. For the purposes of my argument, it provides the rhetorical resources for Carter’s shift from historical figure into a resource for rhetorically-crafted memories. It is through these available means of history that the ways of remembering President

Carter emerge.

Studying Presidential Memories: The Rhetorical Evocations of Memory

If these contexts of the Carter presidency are the available symbolic resources of history and if interpretations of these resources are acts of memory, then I must now theorize how memories function. If memory draws from history, then how does it interpret the past, how is it used, and why does it matter? In my understanding of history, a rhetorical engagement with the past is not a direct usage of history or a direct evocation of one “true” history, but is instead a

12 symbolic intervention in and use of the historical record of the past.43 The act of choosing which stories from the past to tell and how to tell them is rhetorical in its deliberate engagement with a certain version of history. It is not simply a recitation of history, but a rhetorically-constructed and often revisionist history made present.44 It is also not summoned directly, as the infinite scale of human history and incomplete nature of historical records renders the past “unknowable,” but while the past cannot be captured exactly, it can still be remembered.45

When a rhetor calls on the past, they are interpreting history by remembering the past in a certain way. With the evocation of the Carter presidency, rhetors like Marco Rubio or Fox News rely on their interpretations of the Carter presidency as a rhetorical appeal. These appeals are drawn from memories of Carter. Consequently, my objects of analysis are memories of President

Carter as evoked in various texts within public address. To operationalize a methodology of critique, I turn to the field of memory studies to consider how to analyze the rhetorical form and functions of these memories.

Memory studies is an interdisciplinary and international scholarly conversation spread among diverse scholarly fields and international contexts, all concerned with understanding how memory is created and used.46 Classical understandings of memory from the Greco-Roman tradition understood it as a craft or technique to enhance speaking through memorizing speech material, tying its origins to rhetoric by its inclusion in early rhetorical training materials.47 Greek scholars like Plato and Aristotle often considered memory in terms of its failures, or the ways it could be forgotten or falsified, but contemporary rhetoricians look at the ways in which memory can be a creative force.48 Buoyed by a growing interest in Holocaust memory during the 1980s, memory studies as a contemporary scholarly conversation expanded throughout the 1990s, especially in the United States and Europe. Memory became, in a sense, a critical term for

“cultural history,” or a new theory for understanding the past.49 Considering memory studies scholarship helps provide theoretical resources for making sense of presidential pasts.

13 A memory of a president is not just a reference to the historical record, but is a social construction that draws on history to produce a new “collective” memory.50 Here I draw on the influential work of Maurice Hawlbachs, who understood memory as emerging from group interactions, which represented a “lived history” and “collective frameworks of memory” within the groups.51 The collective can be a social group, a familial unit, or in my case, a broader political collective including specific political groups (like Republican critics of Carter) and the

United States as a nation. Recurring tropes in public address, like the usage of Carter as an example of presidential failure, can be evocations of memories, keeping them alive in American collective memories.

From a rhetorical perspective, Bruce E. Gronbeck understands collective memory as a

“rhetorical evocation of the past,” with evocations allowing “past and present” to “live in constant dialogue, even in a hermeneutic circle where neither can be comprehended without the other.”52

These evocations serve as rhetorical resources in the present even as they work to reshape the past. 53 Memory is animated through evocations of the past, which are often used for political motives.54 Symbolic intervention through rhetoric evokes these memories, making them

“recognizable” and politically useful in the present.55 Through these symbolic interventions, memory emerges from the past, rendered as a rhetorical resource for the present.

There are many ways to rhetorically evoke memory. Rhetors can use physical space by crafting memorials and monuments, but a memory can also be a more abstract evocation, such as a set of feelings about a specific event seen when a rhetor uses the past in a certain way within a speech or address. 56 In some cases, the memory is not even referenced at all, but is seen in the silence around it or the ways in which it is forgotten.57 Work on rhetorical history is generative for considering how memories function, especially if we understand memory as being seen within a specific text and functioning as what Wrage might consider an “idea.” In other words, a speech that relies on evoking a memory of Jimmy Carter relies on the idea of Carter in the version of

14 public memory it perpetuates, and by taking the speech as a text in its own right, I can draw out the form and function of Carter’s memory within it.

For considering what evocations of memory do rhetorically, I draw inspiration from what

James Jasinski describes as a “constitutive” approach to history. In contrast to an

“instrumentalist” approach that centers historical context on the “immediate situation,” a

“constitutive” approach “takes up Wrage’s challenge to study the refractions and modifications of political concepts and ideas… as they unfold in textual practice.”58 Jasinski suggests that such an approach could analyze “the ways specific discursive strategies and textual dynamics shape and reshape the contours of political concepts and ideas.”59 (For my analysis, I add “memories” to political concepts and ideas.) Just as a text contains “constitutive potential” through its

“discursive forms,” referring to its argumentative structure or the tropes therein, texts can also

“exhibit constitutive force through the cultural circulation and discursive articulation of their textual forms.”60 In this methodology, analyzing the discursive form of the text (meaning how the remembering in the text is actually structured or is used argumentatively) has value beyond simply performing a close analysis of the text itself. Rhetorical criticism reveals how the memory is being used within larger public discourse and in presidential rhetoric.

Even as presidents themselves can use their inherent prestige and definitional power to draw on larger mythologies and narratives of the American past (shaping national pasts at the same time) or to invoke past presidents as precedent, the collective memories of past presidencies help constitute how Americans remember the presidency as an institution.61 Who Americans remember as presidential failures also defines what is considered a presidential success. The collective memory of the presidency, with its importance to a nation’s past, is often a site of contestation.62 For example, Reagan and later Republicans present 1980 as a new beginning, whereas other groups, like Democrats, frame the so-called “Reagan Revolution” more negatively.

Even as memories are called upon, the usage of a memory also reformulates or perpetuates it.

15 When Republican critics call Barack Obama the “next Carter,” they not only call on an understanding of Carter as a failure, but they also perpetuate that understanding of his memory.

I will broadly define my texts as different forms of presidential memory. By presidential memory, I do not necessarily mean presidential evocations of the past, though a president can certainly use the memories of other presidencies, or even their own, in rhetorical appeals. Instead,

I am looking at memories of the presidents themselves, or how they are remembered through rhetoric. In my theoretical framework, a presidential memory is an interpretation of a past presidency, one relying on the available historical resources, that is often evoked in contemporary rhetorical appeals for political purposes. To see instances of presidential memories within my primary texts, I am looking for uses of the memory of Carter, including references to his failure, within texts like Republican speeches and certain popular representations of the Carter presidency. We see these evocations not in a distinct speech, but in their myriad uses.63

Presidential memories are seen at the moment of their use when a rhetor interprets the past to call on it as a rhetorical resource. When Donald Trump uses Carter as an example of a failure or refers to his weakness in the Iran Hostage Crisis, those two appeals are evocations of presidential memories. In turn, my critique looks at the how these evocations are being used rhetorically. I am concerned with when rhetors call on specific memories, but I also seek to animate the specific strategies used to invoke these memories. This engagement with memory is inherently critical, “demystifying” the systems of power (to borrow a phrase from Raymie E.

McKerrow) behind the presidency and the processes of remembrance around it as an institution.64

These memories capture larger elements about the ways the presidency as an institution exerts power and the ways we talk about the past. By critiquing them and revealing these systems of powers and hidden ideologies, along with how they function as rhetorical appeals, my analysis confronts the presidency as a hegemonic institution.

16 My methodology proceeds by drawing from this memory studies influenced understanding of rhetorical criticism. My actual texts vary from chapter to chapter, ranging from policy rhetoric and direct evocations of the Carter presidency by his immediate predecessors to more contemporary comparisons made involving Carter or his representation in popular culture and in the news media. In critiquing these texts, I look for specific evocations that offer interpretations of the Carter presidency, identifying these as presidential memories of Carter. I then perform a close reading to determine how the past is being interpreted and how it is being deployed as a rhetorical strategy. Once I have broken down the underlying logics behind these memories, I then ask what they reveal about the larger historical and rhetorical circumstances around Carter and the ideologies and institutional systems of power behind the presidency that they mask.

From History to Memory: Outline of Analysis

Having established my historical and theoretical contexts, I will now provide an overview for how I will critique the collective memories of President Carter by locating their evocations among various rhetorical appeals. I divide my analysis into three chapters. Broadly, my analysis begins in chapter two by looking at the initial constitution of both the historical resources for remembering Carter and the creation of his perceived character. If that chapter is about history, then chapter three is about memory, in which I look at how Carter’s memory is used discursively while considering the nature of presidential memory itself. My fourth chapter narrows its scope, using the Iran Hostage Crisis to further illustrate the way memory functions rhetorically and to consider the consequences of how Carter’s presidency is remembered. The overall arc of my analysis considers how a presidency is remembered over time and how those memories ultimately become a simplified shorthand for evocations in the present. To do so I move from the historical

17 resources for remembering in my second chapter to a close consideration of the textual forms of evoking Carter’s presidency in chapter three before concluding with the Iran Hostage Crisis as a case study illustrating the co-constitutive nature of history and memory and the rhetorical uses of presidential memory. Each chapter expands my overall analysis while making specific rhetorical interventions into important moments of presidential public address. I will briefly outline how each chapter considers the memory of President Carter.

Chapter two, “Remembering Carter’s Character: Intersections of Race and Religion in

Carter’s Moral Rhetoric,” is about character and the available historical means of memory, as seen in the intersection of Carter’s moral rhetoric and his relationship with race and segregation in Southern politics. Historically, it covers Carter’s entire political career, from his time as

Georgia State Senator in the 1960s to his 1980 electoral defeat. I argue that in his political career,

Carter used a rhetorical strategy of separating his personal morality from public policy, which helped him navigate the complex politics of race. Carter’s moral rhetoric was abstract enough that it could appeal to both white voters who had supported segregationists like George Wallace and

African American voters who still saw Carter as a moral man. Avoiding policy specifics allowed

Carter to make symbolic overtures to both sides through more abstract appeals, helping his rise in

Southern politics and holding together a tenuous but effective electoral coalition in 1976, revealing a more strategic side of Carter. Though this strategy would become less effective by the end of his presidency as Americans sought a more detailed plan for addressing national issues, it laid the groundwork for Carter’s own character by foregrounding personal morality. Carter’s image of moral character would become a prominent way of remembering him both negatively

(by perverting his moral focus to represent weakness) and later, positively, by setting up his exemplary post-presidency. Carter’s relationship with race provides a representative case study for the constitution of his moral character as an available historical resource while also being an

18 important area of analysis in its own right by foregrounding the often de-emphasized role of race in Carter’s upbringing and election.

The character constituted by Carter, along with the other events of his presidency, would become the available means of memory that could be evoked as rhetorical appeals. Chapter three,

“Evoking Presidential Memories: The Carter Presidency as Shorthand for Presidential

Weakness,” is about how these rhetorical resources are specifically evoked through rhetoric, looking at the discursive forms of the actual evocations and when and how evocations are used politically. I argue that Carter is used as a shorthand for presidential failure that centers on an association of his presidency with weakness. In turn, presidents use him as a contrast with what they establish as their own “strength.” I rely on The New Rhetoric and its definition of association/disassociation to theorize how these evocations function discursively by associating

Carter with weakness and then look at how that association was used through the 1980s and into the present. I draw out how many of these memories operate on a gendered logic of toxic masculinity that limits the foreign policy actions a president can take by critiquing how “strength” is defined in the evocations of Carter’s memory.

I conclude with a case study of the Iran Hostage Crisis in chapter four, “Carter’s

Signature Failure: Remembering the Iran Hostage Crisis.” I argue that the Iran Hostage Crisis has become the signature memory of President Carter. The crisis is evoked as a simplified narrative that presents the incident as a personal struggle between Carter and the Iranians, one that he lost because of his “weakness,” expanding the rhetoric of weakness I outline in chapter three. I also analyze the film Argo, which I position as an attempt to “redeem” the perceived failure of

Carter’s handling of the Crisis. In addition to illustrating the interpretation of the past, the rhetoric of weakness, and the use as shorthand present in Carter’s memory, my analysis of the Iran

Hostage Crisis also highlights the way that these evocations of the past are not just references to history. They are rhetorical interpretations with real foreign policy and symbolic consequences.

19 I conclude by analyzing the post-presidency of Jimmy Carter, which has been better received than his time in office. I contrast the portrayal of his philanthropic work with his presidency and consider its larger implications, wondering why it is that the traits that make him a moral man apparently made him a bad president, and suggest that this may reveal a limitation in our conceptualization of the presidency itself in that we understand it in a way that precludes a moral emphasis. I also consider future avenues of analysis for considering the implications of presidential memory. I close with a personal reflection on what remembering Carter does in the context of 2020 and why we may want to remember Carter now more than ever given an increasing loss of public faith in the presidency.

In many ways, while my main argument is about the rhetorical nature of presidential memory, this thesis is still on some level a re-evaluation of the Carter presidency from a rhetorical perspective. In contemporary politics, perhaps a re-evaluation of Carter has already begun. Carter has been called many things, but immoral is usually not one of them, and amidst current concerns of corruption in post-Trump politics, Carter recalls a sense of lost morality.

Though I welcome a re-evaluation of Carter’s place in U.S. history, I also caution a full embrace of remembering Carter as a president too pure for the world of politics. He made tough foreign policy decisions and many of his policies did in fact fail. Instead, I ask that as both scholars and citizens we look at the public memories of Jimmy Carter in a more nuanced light. It is time to ask why we remember President Carter the way that we do and to consider what that means for our understanding of the U.S. presidency.

20 References

1 Robert Alexander Kraig, “The Tragic Science: The Uses of Jimmy Carter in Foreign Policy Realism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5.1 (2002), 1-30.

2 Liz Peek, “Is Obama Another Carter?” Fox News, October 10, 2009, retrieved from: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/is-obama-another-carter and N.a., “Is Obama the new Jimmy Carter?”, The Independent, October 5, 2010, retrieved from:https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/is-obama-the-new-jimmy-carter- 2097553.html. Trump has also used Carter as a benchmark for presidential failure, tweeting that Carter is “no longer considered the worst President in the history of the United States,” implying that he had been until Barack Obama’s term. See Donald J. Trump, (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter post, 7 Sept. 2013, 8:36 AM, retrieved from: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/376323127393136641. The following year, Trump would cite Carter’s criticism of then-president Obama as a “new low” in Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter post, 9 Oct. 2014, retrieved from: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/520158785542053888. Aristotle defines the enthymeme as a kind of abbreviated syllogism, one with an unstated premise that the audience “fills in” themselves. See Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. H.C. Lawson-Tancred, New York: Penguin Books, 2004.

3 Louis Jacobson, “Mitt Romney says the Iranians released hostages in 1981 because they feared Ronald Reagan's approach to foreign policy,” PolitiFact.com, March 7, 2012, retrieved from: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/07/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says- iran-released-hostages-1981-becau/.

4 Sarah Cammarata, “Jimmy Carter says a full investigation would show Trump lost in 2016,” Politico, June 28, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/28/jimmy-carter- russia-investigation-trump-lost-1387634. Carter’s interest in legitimacy is expected, as election integrity has always been a key part of Carter’s philanthropic work, as seen in N.a., “Democracy Program,” The Carter Center, accessed July 15, 2019 from: https://www.cartercenter.org/peace/democracy/index.html. Regarding Carter’s earlier criticism, Carter has long been a moral critic, weighing in on various topics throughout the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies. Carter and Bill Clinton have had a strained relationship over the years. See Douglass Brinkley, “Clintons and Carters Don’t Mix,” The New York Times, August 28, 1996, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/28/opinion/clintons-and-carters-don-t- mix.html?mtrref=www.google.com and Carol Felsenthal, “Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton: They Genuinely Dislike Each Other,” The Huffington Post, April 3, 2008, retrieved from: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jimmy-carter-and-bill-cli_b_94926. Carter was a critic of George W. Bush’s foreign policy and American entry into the Iraq War, publishing an op-ed warning against military force in 2003. See Jimmy Carter, “Just War--or a Just War?”, The New York Times, March 9, 2003, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/opinion/just-war-or- a-just-war.html. Carter also accused Barack Obama of abusing human rights, highlighting Obama’s use of drone strikes. See Amy Bingham, “Jimmy Carter Accuses U.S. of 'Widespread Abuse of Human Rights',” ABC News, June 25, 2012, retrieved from: https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/jimmy-carter-accuses-u-s-of-widespread-abuse-of-

21 human-rights/. For a look at Carter’s criticism of Trump, see Daniel Bush, “Jimmy Carter calls Donald Trump’s decision to appoint John Bolton his ‘worst mistake’,” PBS.org, March 27, 2018, retrieved from: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/jimmy-carter-calls-donald-trumps- decision-to-appoint-john-bolton-his-worst-mistake and Caroline Kenny, “Jimmy Carter: Kavanaugh's confirmation to Supreme Court a 'very serious mistake',” CNN, 18 Oct. 2018, retrieved from: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/18/politics/jimmy-carter-brett-kavanaugh- unfit/index.html. Carter also proclaimed Trump a “disaster” in terms of “human rights and taking care of people and treating people equal” in Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, “The un-celebrity president,” The Washington Post, August 17, 2018, retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/08/17/feature/the-un-celebrity- president-jimmy-carter-shuns-riches-lives-modestly-in-his-georgia- hometown/?utm_term=.a994f72a2a2.

5 Donald J. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference | Osaka, Japan,” Whitehouse.gov, June 29, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings- statements/remarks-president-trump-press-conference-osaka-japan/. For an overview of the incident, see Anita Kumar, “Trump escalates spat with ‘forgotten president’ Jimmy Carter,” Politico, June 29, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/29/trump- jimmy-carter-russia-1390416.

6 Donald J. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference | Osaka, Japan.”

7 For a 1990 report on the emerging scholarly response to Carter, see Gary W. Reichard, “Early Returns: Assessing Jimmy Carter,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 20.3 (1990): 603-620. For some historical rankings of presidents that include Carter, see Jack E. Holmes and Robert E. Elder, “Our Best and Worst Presidents,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 19 (1989), 529-557 and Robert K. Murray and Tim H. Blessing, “The Presidential Performance Study,” Journal of American History 70 (1983), 443-455.

8 For two negative histories see Clark R. Mollenhoff, The President Who Failed: Carter Out of Control, New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1980 and Donald S. Spencer, The Carter Implosion: Jimmy Carter and the Amateur Style of Diplomacy, New York: Praeger, 1988.

9 Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Legitimacy and Force: Political and Moral Dimensions, Vol. 1, New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988, 144. For the leftist critique see Jenny Pearce, Under the Eagle, London: Latin American Bureau, 1982, and Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War, London: Verso, 1983, 214-233. See also Lawrence Shoup, The Carter presidency and Beyond, Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1980.

10 John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A re-evaluation, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, 14-15, Mark T. Rozell, “Carter Rehabilitated: What Caused the 39th President's Press Transformation?”, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 23.2: 317-33, and Burton I. Kaufman and Scott Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter Jr., Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006, 252-253. See also Bennet Kelley, “The Carter Presidency Revisited,” The Huffington Post, August 22, 2015, retrieved from: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-carter-presidency- rev_b_8025974.

22

11 John Patton, “A Government as Good as Its People: Jimmy Carter and the Restoration of Transcendence Politics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (1977): 239-248, David L. Rarick, Mary B. Duncan, David G. Lee, and Laurinda W. Porter, “The Carter Persona: An Empirical Analysis of the Rhetorical Visions of Campaign ‘76,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 62 (1977): 258-273, and J. Louis Campbell, III, “Jimmy Carter and the Rhetoric of Charisma,” Central States Speech Communication Journal, 30 (1979), 184. See also Dan F. Hahn, “The Rhetoric of Jimmy Carter, 1976-1980,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 14.2 (1984): 265-288.

12 Keith V. Erickson ,“Jimmy Carter: The Rhetoric of Private and Civic Piety” Western Journal of Communication, 44:3 (1980), 221-235, Christopher Lyle Johnstone, “Electing Ourselves in 1976: Jimmy Carter and the American Faith,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 42 (1978): 214-249, and Dan F. Hahn, “One’s Reborn Every Minute: Carter’s Religious Appeal in 1976,” Communication Quarterly 28.3 (1980): 56-62. For a more recent look at Carter’s “evangelical style,” see D. Jason Berggren and Nicol C. Rae, “Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush: Faith, Foreign Policy, and an Evangelical Presidential Style,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36.4 (2006), 606-632.

13 For a look at Carter and human rights, see Mary E. Stuckey, Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the National Agenda, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. For the scholarly conversation around the Panama Canal, see Milene Ortega and Mary E. Stuckey, “The Other Presidential Rhetoric: Rhetorical Mobilization with the White House,” in Stephen J. Heidt and Mary E. Stuckey, eds, Reading the Presidency: Advances in Presidential Rhetoric, New York: Peter Lang, 2019, 65-87 and Robert A. Strong and Ronald A. Sudol, “The Rhetoric of Strategic Retreat: Carter and The Panama Canal Debate,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 379- 391.

14 A random crowd member reacts to the statue’s unveiling by proclaiming Carter to “history’s greatest monster,” though it is unclear if that joke is at Carter’s expense or if the intended humor is in the absurdity of the claim. See The Simpsons, “Marge in Chains,” directed by Sam Reardon, written by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, Fox, May 6, 1993.

15 Parks and Recreation, “Road Trip,” directed by Troy Miller, written by Harris Wittels, NBC, May 12, 2011 and Fargo, “Waiting for Dutch,” directed by Randall Einhorn and Michael Uppendahl, written by Noah Hawley, FX, October 12, 2015.

16 Ben Affleck, dir., Argo, Warner Bros., 2012.

17 King of the Hill, “The Father, the Son, and the J.C.,” directed by Tricia Garcia and Klay Hall, written by Etan Cohen, Fox, December 16, 2001.

18 Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, “The un-celebrity president,” The Washington Post and Amber Roessner, “The renaissance of Jimmy Carter and what it means for 2020,” The Washington Post, July 11, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/11/resurrection-jimmy-carter-what-it- means/?utm_term=.afc3fa8b61c6 .

23

19 For general histories and foreign policy-centric perspectives of the administration, see Timothy P. Maga, The World of Jimmy Carter: U.S. Foreign Policy, 1977-1981, University of New Mexico Press, 1994, Burton I. Kaufman and Scott Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter Jr., Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006, and Betty Glad, An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

20 Kathleen J. Turner, ed., Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1998, 1-8. See also Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007.

21 Hawlbachs says that history is a “universal memory of the collective species” that seeks to find demarcating lines to divide the past, while memory is focused on the perceptions of a specific group, finding continuity in the transformations over time in a group’s memory. See Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter, New York: Harper & Row, 1980, 78-86. See also Barry Schwartz, “Rethinking the concept of collective memory,” in Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, eds Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen, New York: Routledge, 2016

22 Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” The American Historical Review 102.5 (1997): 1391.

23 Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. H.C. Lawson-Tancred. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Kirt Wilson and the class discussion in our “Race and Public Memory” seminar for drawing out this parallel.

24 For a general look at rhetorical criticism as methodology, see Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964, James Jasinski, “Criticism in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies,” in Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001, 125-144, and James Thorpe, “The Ideal of Textual Criticism” in Principles of Textual Criticism, San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1979, 50-79.

25 Ernest J. Wrage, “Public Address: A Study in Social and Intellectual History,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33 (1947): 451-457 and Barnet Baskerville, “Must We All Be 'Rhetorical Critics'?”, Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (1977): 107-116.

26 For a critique of focusing on only the historical value of a text, see Roderick P. Hart, “Contemporary Scholarship in Public Address: A Research Editorial,” in Western Journal of Speech Communication 50 (1986): 283-295. While I find Hart somewhat dismissive of the value of studying history, I do understand his concern about disregarding theoretical contributions of use to the entire field. In response, I emphasize that building theory and studying history are not mutually exclusive by focusing on the specific strategies being employed to create and use history and the ways in which this can be applied to other texts. For a response to Hart, see James Darsey, “Must we all be rhetorical theorists?: An anti-democratic inquiry,” Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 164-181.

24

27 Betty Glad, Jimmy Carter: In Search of the Great White House, New York: WW Norton, 1980 and Kathy Stroud, How Jimmy Won: The Victory Campaign from Plains to the White House, New York: William Morrow and Co., 1977. Betty Glad’s historical work is prominent in the historiography of Carter and many of my sources rely on her primary research.

28 For a look at the humility of Carter, see Ronald Lee, “Humility and the political servant: Jimmy Carter's post-presidential rhetoric of virtue and power,” Southern Communication Journal 60.2 (1995): 120-130. See also Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, 7-9. For his emphasis on “compassion”, see John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A re-evaluation, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, 1-4. For general biographies of Carter, see Kenneth E. Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, Randall Herbert Balmer, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, New York: Basic Books, 2014, Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency, New York: Scribner, 1997, E. Stanly Godbold Jr., Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: The Georgia Years, 1924-1974, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, and Stuart Eizenstat and Madeleine Korbel Alrbight, President Carter: The White House Years, Thomas Dunne Books, 2018. For the most prominent documentary on Carter, which provides a good (if conventional) overview of the arc of his presidency, see Adriana Bosch, dir., American Experience: The Presidents: Jimmy Carter, PBS, 2002. For another documentary focusing on Carter’s 2006 book tour, see Jonathan Demme, dir., Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains, Armian Pictures, 2008. For a more recent documentary looking at Carter’s use of music and rock stars in the 1976 election, see Mary Wharton, dir., Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President, 2020.

29 Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush, second edition, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1997, 361-406. For Skowronek’s definition of a disjunctive president, see 39-41.

30 For a history of the Carter administration in the Cold War context, see Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Erosion of détente, 1975-1980: Brezhnev and Carter,” in For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War, New York: Hill and Wang, 2007, 234-338. Jerel A. Rosati argues that Carter’s Cold War policy was actually ahead of his time, anticipating a “post- Cold War presidency,” in Jerel A. Rosati, “Jimmy Carter, A Man before His Time? The Emergence and Collapse of the First Post-Cold War Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 23.3 (1993): 459-476. Also see Betty Glad, “Renewal of the Cold War” in An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 219- 263 and Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, Harvard University Press, 2012.

31 Jimmy Carter, “Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals: ‘The Malaise Speech’,” The American Presidency Project, July 15, 1979, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-nation-energy-and-national-goals-the- malaise-speech.

32 See Betty Glad, “Negotiations with Panama,” in An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 88-95. For a look at the Camp David Accords, see Timothy P. Maga, “The ‘First Step:’ Camp David and the Promise of

25

Middle East Peace,” in The World of Jimmy Carter: U.S. Foreign Policy, 1977-1981, 94-127, and Burton I. Kaufman and Scott Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter Jr., 149-154.

33 John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A re-evaluation, 4. For a look at Carter’s portrayal in textbooks, see J. M. Sanchez, “Awaiting rehabilitation: The Carter presidency in political science textbooks,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 27.2 (1997): 284-296.

34 Jim O’Grady, “How Jimmy Carter's Face-Off with a Rabbit Changed the Presidency,” WNYC News, February 17, 2014, retrieved from: http://www.wnyc.org/story/hare-brained-history- curious-case-jimmy-carter-v-rabbit/.

35 For further background on U.S.-Iran relations, see David Patrick Houghton, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, and Russell Leigh Moses, Freeing the Hostages: Reexamining U.S.-Iranian Negotiations and Soviet Policy, 1979-1981, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

36 Denise M. Bostdorff, “Idealism Held Hostage: Jimmy Carter and the Crisis in Iran,” in The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994, 144-175.

37 For a general overview of the 1980 presidential election, see Paul T. David and David H. Evenson eds., The Presidential Election and Transition 1980-1981, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983 and Austin Ranney, ed., The American Elections of 1980, Washington and London: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1981.

38 Craig R. Smith argues that Reagan constituted a “re-invention” of conservatism in Craig R. Smith, “Ronald Reagan’s Rhetorical Re-Invention of Conservatism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103 (2017): 33-65.

39 For a look at how media coverage suggested a causal link between Reagan’s election and the hostages’ release, see Ernest G. Bormann, “A Fantasy Theme Analysis of the Television Coverage of The Hostage Release and The Reagan Inaugural,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982), 133-145.

40 See Rod Troester, Jimmy Carter as Peacemaker: A Post-Presidential Biography, Westport: Praeger, 1996 and Douglas Brinkley, The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey to the Nobel Peace Prize, Penguin Books, 2005.

41 N.a., “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2002,” NobelPrize.org, October 11, 2002, retrieved from: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2002/press-release/

42 Robert A. Strong, “Jimmy Carter: Life After the Presidency,” Miller Center, n.d., retrieved from: https://millercenter.org/president/carter/life-after-the-presidency, David Whitley, “Happy birthday to America’s best ex-president,” Orlando Sentinel, October 1, 2018, retrieved from: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-ae-jimmy-carter-david-whitley-1001-story.html and Stephen Collinson, “Jimmy Carter’s rewarding post-presidency,” CNN, August 20, 2015,

26 retrieved from: https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/20/politics/jimmy-carter-cancer-retirement-post- presidency/index.html.

43 David Zarefsky, “Four Senses of Rhetorical History,” in Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, Kathleen J. Turner ed., Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1998, 20.

44 Denise M. Bostdorff and Steven R. Goldzwig, “History, Collective Memory, and the Appropriation of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Reagan's Rhetorical Legacy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 661-662. For an example of a president crafting their own “rhetorical history,” see John M. Murphy, “Barack Obama and Rhetorical History,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101.1 (2015): 214-215.

45 Bruce E. Gronbeck, “The Rhetorics of the Past: History, Argument, and Collective Memory,” in Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, Kathleen J. Turner ed., Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1998, 49-50.

46 For a broad and more sociologically-oriented look at collective memory, see Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen, eds., Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, New York: Routledge, 2016. For a look at the international contours of memory study with an emphasis on memory-based literature from the Polish tradition, see Kornelia Kończal and Joanna Wawrzyniak, “Provincializing Memory Studies: Polish Approaches in the Past and Present,” Memory Studies 11.4 (2018): 391–404. A more culturally-oriented look at memory studies can be found in Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Sara Young, A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co, 2008.

47 Jennifer Richards, “Introduction,” in Theories of Memory: A Reader, eds Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 21-24

48 Kendall R. Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication 74.2 (2010): 209-215.

49 Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (2000): 127-129.

50 Sociologist Barry Schwartz argues that collective memory is clearly distinct from history because of its focus on groups, with commemoration being understood as specific acts calling on a “society’s conception” of a past event worthy of remembrance. See Barry Schwartz, “Rethinking the concept of collective memory.”

51 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 48-58, 64-69. For another foundational look at memory, see Pierre Nora, Rethinking France: Les lieux de mémoire, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

52 Gronbeck, “The Rhetorics of the Past: History, Argument, and Collective Memory,” 48, 56-57.

27

53 Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remembrance,” 217, Kendall R. Phillips and Mitchell G. Reyes, “Surveying Global Memoryscapes: The Shifting Terrain of Public Memory Studies,” in Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age, Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2011, 1.

54 Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, “Introduction: Mapping Memory,” Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz eds., New York: Fordham University Press, 2010 and James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2.

55 Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian Ott, “Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010, 7, 24. Use of commemoration can create national unity by calling on a shared identity based on a common past, as seen in John Bodnar, “Celebrating the Nation, 1961-1976,” in Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 206-244.

56 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning.

57 Paul Connerton identifies seven types of forgetting, making the case that forgetting is not synonymous with failure in Paul Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Memory Studies 1.1 (2008): 59-71. In particular, Connerton’s third type of forgetting (see 62-64) is “constitutive in the formation of a new identity,” allowing forgetting to rhetorically create in its own right. Also see Brad Vivian, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again, University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010.

58 James Jasinski, “A Constitutive Framework for Rhetorical Historiography: Toward an Understanding of the Discursive Reconstitution of ‘Constitution’ in The Federalist Papers,” in. Doing Rhetorical History : Concepts and Cases. Studies in Rhetoric and Communication, ed. Kathleen J. Turner, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998, 73.

59 James Jasinski, “A Constitutive Framework for Rhetorical Historiography: Toward an Understanding of the Discursive (Reconstitution of ‘Constitution’ in The Federalist Papers,” 74.

60 James Jasinski, “A Constitutive Framework for Rhetorical Historiography: Toward an Understanding of the Discursive (Reconstitution of ‘Constitution’ in The Federalist Papers,” 75.

61 For the president’s ability to “define,” see David Zarefsky, President Johnson’s War on Poverty, Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1986, Vanessa B. Beasley, You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004 and Mary E. Stuckey, Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004, and Tracy Adams and Vered Vinitzky- Seroussi, “‘On Cloud Nine’: Positive Memories in American Presidential Speeches (1945– 2017),” Memory Studies 12.1 (2019): 11–26, Mark West and Chris Carey, “(Re)Enacting Frontier Justice: The Bush Administration’s Tactical Narration of the Old West Fantasy after September 11,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 379-412. For a more general look at narrative, see Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. For the relationship

28 between memory and national identity, see Anthony D Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, New York: Blackwell, 1986, 175, 191-192 and Benedict Anderson, “Memory and Forgetting,” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev ed., London and New York: Verso, 2006, 187-207. See also Rudolf De Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Ruth Wodak, “The Discursive Construction of National Identities,” Discourse & Society 10.2 (1999), 154 and John R. Gillis, “Memory and Identity: the History of a Relationship,” in Commemorations: the Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, 3-7.

62 For an international perspective, the contestation of memory in Eastern Europe provides a clear case study in contested memory. See Ekaterina Haskins, “Russia’s Post-communist Past: The Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Reimagining of National Identity,” History and Memory 21.1 (2009): 25-62.

63 This could be considered “fragmentation” in the sense of Michael McGee. I think of it more as arranging disparate texts to capture a larger conversation. See Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 274-289.

64 Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical rhetoric: Theory and praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91-112.

Chapter 2

Remembering Carter’s Character: Intersections of Race, Religion, and Policy in Carter’s Moral Rhetoric

In the midst of the 1976 presidential election, an interview with Jimmy Carter appeared in Playboy. In support of all those who have ever claimed to read Playboy “for the articles,” the conversation was in-depth and nuanced in its examination of Carter’s personal faith. Interviewer

Robert Scheer asked Carter to elaborate on the intersection of his beliefs and his policy views, which had become a talking point of the election. Unfortunately for Carter, the popular reaction to the article focused on his discussion of sin, in which he said that, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do and God forgives me for it.”1 In addition to the mere presence of a presidential candidate in Playboy, Carter’s confession of sin led to backlash.2 Many were concerned that the topic was unfitting for a president, and one man interviewed by the New York

Times summarized a sense of exasperation by saying, “Oh, Lord, now the President is going to start preaching about lust in your heart.”3 However, the larger discussion of sin and biblical morality is more nuanced in context and revealing of how Carter balanced his personal faith and policy preferences while shaping his perceived moral character.

The Playboy interview is a prominent example of Carter explaining how his faith and morality intersected with his policy preferences as president. Carter discussed how adultery was a sin in Biblical terms, but said that Christians were “taught not to judge other people,” later adding, “You can’t legislate morality.”4 Through statements like these, Carter established a separation between his own personal morality (with its origins in faith) and public policy, even as

30 his evocations of faith helped constitute his moral character. This rhetorical strategy helped establish the constitution of Carter’s character, an important element of how his memory would be evoked in later years, but it also had strategic value for Carter during his political career. To draw out how this strategy operated, I turn to what may at first seem like an unusual point of emphasis for an inquiry into the memory of Jimmy Carter: race and segregation in the South.

Foregrounding race and segregation may seem like an unexpected emphasis for a thesis on public memory and Jimmy Carter, but in fact, the ways Carter approached issues of race and segregation as a white Southerner are foundational to his political rise and representative of the rhetorical constitution of his character. Understanding how Carter navigated his status as a white

Southerner who courted segregationist votes while still being trusted by African American voters adds a rhetorical dimension to his unusual electoral victories while also foregrounding issues of race that are often de-emphasized when considering Carter’s political career.

The role of race and the systems of segregation in the South are not often considered alongside Carter’s political memory, which masks the importance of his biracial Southern coalition in his electoral win. Analyzing Carter’s own rhetoric also offers an explanation for why it is not referenced more often, as the rhetorical strategies Carter used distanced himself from many racial issues. While I will outline the benefits of such strategies (in that they allowed him to still appeal to supporters of segregationist politicians like Lester Maddox or George Wallace), they also lead to the intersections of Carter’s character and his political rhetoric regarding race to be de-emphasized. Beyond the significance to my overall argument, this chapter puts race and segregation back in conversation with the Carter presidency from a rhetorical perspective.

Carter’s moral rhetoric and its separation of his private morality from public policy helped him navigate the unusual context of the South in which his abstract morality allowed him to appeal to African American voters while still courting segregationists, culminating in his good character leading him to a victory against Gerald Ford in 1976. However, his inability to offer

31 policy solutions eventually helped the American public grow tired of his sermonizing, while his less politicized faith created an opening for the Religious Right and Ronald Reagan to directly call for faith-based policies. This left Carter defeated politically, but the moral character he constituted would persist to be used as rhetorical resources for later evocations of his memory both negative (in appeals framing him as weak) and positive (as in his acclaimed post- presidency).

We see the strategic value of these moral appeals by putting them in the larger context of the South in the 1960s and 1970s and the presidential election of 1976. The unusual electoral map of 1976 reveals its significance as a snapshot of a country in transition.5 Carter won as a

Democrat in 1976 by carrying a variety of Southern states that would turn red for decades after

1980, and he did so by running as an openly-religious white Southerner endorsed by pro- segregationist figures like George Wallace. Carter’s performance of his own biography, established by evocations of his faith and morality, showed a level of savvy political strategy not often associated with him. In addition to avoiding the need for policy specifics and providing easy contrasts with so-called “insider” politicians, Carter’s character helped him simultaneously appeal to different demographics while keeping his morality intact. Carter’s simultaneous appeal to segregationists and African Americans alike in the South, along with his general relationship with race, provide representative examples for my analysis, as seen both in policy discourses and the strategic avoidance of policy specifics. These rhetorical appeals drawn on Carter’s own biography and the ways he deployed that in a politically volatile South.

Carter’s own biography of having grown up in the small town of Plains, Georgia was a valuable resource he would draw on his later appeals and is important for understanding the ways he is remembered. Though he deployed it to great strategic effect, the image of an everyman farmer was not necessarily an inaccurate characterization of his childhood.6 Carter also had some exposure to racial inequality as a child; many of his early childhood friends were African

32 Americans, and he was both “immersed” in the community while never fully a part of it. Indeed, despite living within a segregated system of inequality, Carter admitted to not recognizing the extent of inequality until his thirties.7 Still, this gave him some sense of authenticity, and the fact that he was unquestionably Southern could be leveraged in later appeals. Of importance to his post-presidential image, he was also understood as a pious, moral man, established through his sermonizing tone.8

As Carter began his political career with a run for Georgia State Senate in 1962, the

South itself was in a state of transition. While the Civil Rights Movement fought against segregation in the South, white southerners like George Wallace pushed back.9 The presidential campaigns of Wallace in 1968 and 1972 led to fragmentation in the Democratic Party as the

Southern Strategy (a process of using dog whistles and racially-coded appeals) and other efforts by Republicans would help create the more familiar Southern Republican “firewall” of post-1980 presidential elections.10 Carter’s unlikely 1976 victory emerged from constituting an electoral coalition that managed to gain enough support from both rural white voters (many of whom had supported George Wallace) and African American voters to win. This led to an unusual relationship with race, as Carter openly supported civil rights while campaigning with the support of Wallace (which conveniently prevented Wallace from playing spoiler again).11 Perhaps the tenuous nature of such a coalition offers another reason why Carter’s electoral map has not been repeated since, but Carter’s Southern character was an important context in that victory. Southern success aside, 1976 would turn out to be an aberration, and soon Ronald Reagan’s electoral win in 1980 would lead to a Republican dominance through much of the South, as I consider in the chapter’s conclusion.

Carter’s moral character was strategically useful for winning the South in 1976 while also emerging from its Southern biography and context in the first place. Therefore, Carter’s rhetoric must be considered as part of the South’s legacy of segregation, the political realignment

33 beginning with the Southern Strategy that began in the 1960s, and as part of Carter’s own biography as a Southerner. I analyze these intersections of race, religion, and policy to look at how this historical record leaves an “available means of memory” for later rhetorical evocations relying on Carter’s character, arguing that the split between Carter’s personal faith and policy created important resources for remembering. As I detail in the next chapter, critics could actually use Carter’s character to connect him with weakness, but by his post-presidency (which I consider in my conclusion), Carter’s perceived character would lead to his own perceived status as a symbol of morality. The resources for remembering Carter in this way rely on how his character was perceived, and those resources were constituted during his political career as seen in the policy discourses analyzed in this chapter.

I begin by conceptualizing Carter’s moral rhetoric and the way it distinguishes between personal morality and public policy and created rhetorical resources for later acts of remembering. My analysis of Carter’s articulation of this distinction then spans from his earlier career as a local Georgia politician to his campaign and ensuing presidency, looking at how

Carter created his own moral character and how he differentiated that from policy issues like segregation. I conclude by considering how this rhetoric contrasted with the Religious Right and what implications Carter’s constitution of character has for the rest of my thesis and for the U.S. presidency as an institution. Though it is easy to dismiss Carter’s presidency as a failure, doing so also denigrates the emphasis on morality and diplomacy that he tried to bring to the office.

Constituting Character: Personal Morality and Public Policy

As I outlined in the introduction, my overall thesis is an analysis of the ways a presidency shifts into memory and is evoked for political purposes.12 In my introduction I cited Alon

Confino’s definition of memory along with a play on Aristotle’s foundational definition of

34 rhetoric to position history as a kind of “available means” of remembering.13 The rest of my thesis is concerned with those evocations, but in this chapter, I will focus on the rhetorical resources of history. In particular, this chapter looks at how Carter’s own character, an inventional resource often invoked either negatively to suggest weakness or positively in the post-presidency to suggest morality, was constituted in part through Carter’s moral rhetoric.14 I interrogate that moral rhetoric by analyzing its intersections with (and in many cases strategic avoidance of) policy discourses relating to race, religion, and 1970s politics.15 Before using Carter’s relationship with race and segregation as a case study, I will broadly consider how Carter articulated his character and the relationship between his personal beliefs and public policies, which he would use to navigate the complicated contexts of being a white Southerner in 1960s Georgia and to eventually carry the South as a Democrat in 1976.

Religious overtones played a prominent role in 1970s policy discourse. Carter’s own political style was dominated by what Keith V. Erickson calls a “religious-political rhetoric” that sought to restore faith in “America” to a public disillusioned by Watergate.16 Christopher Lyle

Johnstone made a similar argument that Carter’s campaign was concerned most prominently with establishing his own ethos, a vision of moral character shaped by proclamations of faith and trustworthiness.17 As Dan F. Hahn argues, Carter’s religious appeal was a fundamental part of his

1976 victory and was also, on some level, a deliberate political strategy.18 This sermonic rhetoric put more complex issues in a simplified language of faith, rendering the issues facing the United

States as what his later infamous speech would dub a “crisis of confidence,” or a moral crisis.19

Carter’s own character offered a response to the moral crisis of the 1970s, but it did so by creating a split between that public morality and public policy. Erickson argues that “While

Carter believed government should reflect Christian principles… he did not envision God intervening on our behalf in critical moments.”20 In other words, we see Carter’s faith interacting most directly with his own ethos and the character he constituted. Carter relied on what historian

35 Daniel K. Williams identified as “a centuries-old Baptist tradition of church-state separation.”21

While Carter would be increasingly open about his religion and would always foreground morality, he would seldom associate those personal beliefs with specific public policies. Though he was sermonic to a fault, Carter did not want to directly address “religious strategy” himself, avoiding politically-charged religious events.22 Despite his strong religious overtones and frequent theological references, Carter’s own faith-based rhetoric drew a distinction between personal morality and public policy. Carter’s political strategies involving religion and the coalition he built were less overt and politicized than his successor’s would be.

Carter’s reliance on his own character emerged in his first forays into politics as a

Georgia politician. Carter’s political career began in a 1962 election to the Georgia State Senate.

He defeated his opponent Homer Moore, who was backed by the political “boss” Joe Hurst. In this initial campaign, Carter highlighted the corruption of Moore’s benefactor. 23 With few actual issues present in the local race, Carter relied on a good vs. evil narrative. Biographer Kenneth E.

Morris argues that the 1962 election was the initial formation of Carter’s moral image, in which he would stand for “good, fair, universalistic government” while avoiding the constraints of explicit ideology.24 When asked in 1966 if he would identify as a liberal, moderate, or conservative, Carter said that he was “more complicated than that.”25 Carter’s initial campaigns positioned him as a good man who was beyond political ideology. These overarching morals shaped his initial articulation of a moral character, one that he maintained while serving as a state senator from 1963 to 1967.

Carter’s time as governor continued to develop his moral character. Carter used a similar strategy to defeat Carl Sanders in 1970 to win the Democratic nomination and then handily won against Republican Hal Suit to become governor of Georgia.26 In his primary fight against

Sanders, Carter portrayed him as wealthy and out of touch and leveled various accusations of corruption (none of which were ever proven).27 Consistent in his Georgia politics was an

36 avoidance of policy specifics to focus on defeating an “evil” or “corrupt” opponent. As governor, he made many open proclamations of his own faith, while at the same time passing policies that, opposed the “blue laws” outlawing Sunday liquor sales or even authoring a foreword to a book favoring abortion rights. In other words, he wanted to do what was “right,” but that idea of morality was not necessarily seen in specific policies, but in his own character.28 At this point, his faith was as abstract as his ideology.

By the time he started his presidential campaign in December 1974, Carter’s moral tone began to be more linked with his personal faith.29 At the same time, he also moved away from the more polarized good and evil binaries he preferred in the 1960s, focusing less on attacking Ford’s character and more on general morality. Beginning his full embrace of faith-based rhetoric,

Carter’s acceptance speech at the 1976 Democratic National Convention relied on religious metaphors, describing “selfperpetuating alliances” between “money and politics” as “unholy.” He presented the election as a crisis of faith, calling on fresh memories of Watergate when he said,

“Our country has lived through a time of torment. It is now a time for healing. We want to have faith again. We want to be proud again. We just want the truth again.”30 Carter’s speech called for a restoration of American faith understood broadly, given in the style of a more traditional faith- based rhetoric: the sermon.

Carter’s moral focus was a consistent strategy in a campaign that centered on electing the best, most moral man to office instead of offering a detailed series of policies. Carter’s 1975 autobiography was titled Why Not the Best? and centered on his Christianity and the responsibilities that granted him.31 Why Not the Best? was even the title of the Carter campaign song. The faith Carter called for was also for the presidency itself. The same year, a collection of

Carter’s “own words” was titled simply I’ll Never Lie to You, based on a campaign promise.32 (A later compilation of his major campaign speeches would be titled A Government as Good as Its

People.)33 The heart of Carter’s campaign was a promise of morality, and this morality emerged

37 from Carter’s perceived character and his own faith. What was absent in these moral appeals was policy specifics, implying that what the country needed was not a detailed plan, but a moral revival separate from policy.

The 1976 Playboy interview captures Carter’s faith within his presidential campaign.

Beyond the misunderstood discussion of sin, Carter discussed the intersection of his religion and his politics at length. While to some extent this would actually hurt him in that portion of the

1976 election, the interview did help solidify the image of Carter as deeply religious. At one point he tied that directly to a sense of corruption in politics. He said “I don’t think I would ever take on the same frame of mind that Nixon or Johnson did—lying, cheating and distorting the truth.

Not taking into consideration my hope for my strength of character, I think that my religious beliefs alone would prevent that from happening to me.”34 Here, Carter’s faith would shape his own personal morality, protecting against another Nixon. In many ways this character is also framed as, if not apolitical, less aggressive than some may have feared. In another strategic omission, Carter de-emphasized his relationship with faith-healer sister Ruth, but as other documentaries and biographies have noted, it was a conversation with Ruth that led to Carter’s

“born again” conversion.35 This conversion is not mentioned in the interview, which presents a less missionary version of faith.

Playboy interviewer Robert Scheer tried to bring in policy specifics throughout the speech, at one point tying them directly to concerns about whether Carter’s faith would impact his policy preferences. He pressed Carter several times on this point, and while Carter eventually grew frustrated and moved to the next topic, he further elaborated on what seems to be a nebulous but present distinction of Biblical morality and policy legislation. When asked about what

“considering homosexuality a sin” meant in “political terms,” Carter gave a muddled answer, saying that “it’s political, it’s moral, and it’s strange territory for me,” but ultimately said that he would handle it like “other sexual acts outside marriage.”36 Given the full context, this would

38 suggest that he presented it the same as adultery, being a sin that he would not enact a specific policy against. Through these various appeals, Carter had successfully maintained and nationalized a moral image, one that could not have been better-suited to the electoral context of

1976.

As president, Carter continued to separate his own religious faith from specific policies, while still using it to establish his own moral character. He said that while his “own religious convictions” were “deep and personal,” he ultimately believed in the separation of church and state and called for “maximum freedom of religion.”37 Though the Religious Right would often use a similar “freedom of religion” language in their appeals, by 1980, a clear distinction had emerged between Carter and the burgeoning movement. When asked in 1980 about the rise of an apparent “evangelical political movement,” Carter explained that he considered himself an evangelical, but not part of that movement, and in one of his less prescient moments, said that he didn’t think the “religious intrusion into the political process” would be “significant.”38 When outlining his disagreements with the Moral Majority, Carter said, “I have never found anything in the Bible, in the Old or New Testament, that specifies whether or not we should have a

Department of Education in the Federal Government or whether you should have a 13-1 bomber… Those kinds of measuring rods to define what is an acceptable Christian are contrary to my own beliefs.” He closed by warning Falwell that he should “Judge not that ye be judged.”39

This differing sense of the role of religion in politics was well-developed on the campaign trail in the 1980 election, as Carter held to a separation of public policy from his own personal morality.

Of significance to the rest of my thesis, Carter’s moral rhetoric was important for creating his own character, the aspect of Carter’s political career that would be positively remembered most often. However, the constitution of that character through his moral rhetoric and its reliance on a separation from public policy is worth considering further to see how that character was constituted and then used rhetorically. In addition to revealing a nuanced strategy from a

39 president not often praised for his rhetorical prowess, Carter’s moral rhetoric helps us understand how he handled racial issues as a politician. Issues like segregation and the general arc of racial justice defined 1960s Georgia politics, and in 1976 Carter would turn the South blue with the help of George Wallace voters. Analyzing how Carter’s separation of personal belief from specific racial policies helped him in these contexts adds a rhetorical dimension to this history and draws out two elements of Carter’s presidency that are not often considered in detail: Carter’s ability to be a shrewd, strategic politician and the role of race in Carter’s election.

Race, Religion, and Politics: How Carter’s Moral Rhetoric Navigated Race and Segregation in the South

To draw out the arc of Carter’s moral rhetoric over a political career that began in

Georgia in 1962 and ended with his departure from the White House in January 1981 and to show how it interacted with his own faith and the issue of segregation, I divide my analysis into two parts: Carter’s career in Georgia and then his presidential rhetoric both during the 1976 campaign and in the White House. I begin with Carter’s political career in Georgia because that early rhetoric would establish his own biography as a moral white Southerner and shows the strategic use of his personal morality/public policy division. I then illustrate how this character made

Carter the ideal candidate for 1976 and how he began explicitly engaging with his own faith.

The Man from Plains: Constituting Character in Georgia Politics

Carter’s time as a Georgia politician (first as state senator and then as governor) illustrates his complicated relationship with race as a politician. He was elected during the Civil

Rights movement as prominent Southern figures like Lester Maddox and George Wallace openly opposed attempts at integration. Carter’s more abstract, moralistic tone allowed him to avoid

40 taking direct stances on these racial issues. As Morris writes, his morals “could encapsulate civil rights,” but they “were not reducible to them.”40 The perceived authenticity of such claims helped mask the political expediency of his stances.

In many ways, his racial rhetoric as state senator was one of silence, as he rarely addressed race publicly. He did not make overtly racist statements and was understood through his silence and overall disposition to be something of a progressive in temperament, but with fiscally conservative leanings economically. Likewise, while working on education policy, he took no actions toward desegregation. Though Carter’s relative silence as a state senator was in many ways characteristic of his early years holding political office, as biographer Peter G. Bourne notes, his silences on the increasing calls for racial justice and the violence in his own state were calculated choices. Bourne argues that this move helped maintain the “goodwill of many segregationists who shared his views on other matters.”41 His personal morality did lead to one concrete example of Carter opposing segregation. When his church proposed a resolution to ban

“Negroes and other agitators,” Carter ignored his wife’s Rosalynn’s suggestion to avoid further controversy and cast one of only votes against the resolution.42 One of Carter’s only recollections of addressing race as a politician during this period was being taught how to pronounce “Negro” by LeRoy Johnson, who was elected as the first black legislator since reconstruction the same year as Carter.43 This apparently stood out to Carter’s later media consultant Gerald Rafshoon, who said that he “liked” Carter because “he could properly say the word ‘Negro’.”44 In many ways, this was the only concrete overture Carter could offer African American voters, but his overall character suggested that, if nothing else, he was a good man who would not make the kind of overtly racist appeals common in Southern politics at the time.

When Carter moved to state-level politics in his run for governor in 1970 (after a failed run in 1966), handling his relationship with race became more complicated, as he sought to appeal to voters who had supported Lester Maddox in 1966 while also remaining palatable to

41 African American voters.45 To accomplish this, Carter relied on the support of voters who had previously supported pro-segregationist politicians without directly supporting the systems of segregation himself. For example, Carter criticized his primary opponent Carl Sanders for not allowing George Wallace to speak at a rally, saying that he would allow Wallace to speak and promising a platform to one of the most prominent segregationists. He also sought endorsements from other segregations like former governor Marvin Griffin.46 Though his ideology was decidedly neutral and not racialized, he consistently supported men who themselves represented segregation policies and did not seek to directly overturn these policies. His rhetoric may not have been racist, but his actions made symbolic overtures to men like Wallace. Here we see the initial utility of a personal morality/public policy split. Carter could focus on his own perceived character as a generally-respected man who most people assumed was “progressive,” while at the same time making symbolic gestures toward policies that would appeal to white southern voters.

Given this context, Carter’s inaugural address as governor of Georgia was surprising to some white voters, while also consistent with Carter’s presumed morality to others. In many ways, the inaugural address was filled with ordinary appeals to maintain justice, keep taxes low, and reduce governmental waste, with various rather conservative appeals to law and order. But then, Carter proclaimed that “The time for racial discrimination is over… No poor, rural, weak or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.”47 It was a simple statement, but from a white Southern governor, it spoke volumes.

In his inaugural address, Carter had made a direct symbolic denouncement of racism. The statement was the most talked-about element of the speech, frustrating some, like Lieutenant

Governor Lester Maddox and certain white voters, while also being understood as revealing

Carter’s “true” character by many black southerners.48 There was a sense that privately, Carter was able to win the trust of African American voters, with many viewing his policy statements as

42 “strategic” decisions that masked his more liberal sympathies.49 Georgia State senator Leroy

Johnson said that, “He’s done what no other Georgia Governor has ever done… He’s attacked head-on the question of racial discrimination. We are accustomed to hearing this kind of talk from white politicians behind closed doors before an election, but not out in public after an election.”50

Another African American representative was quoted as saying, “I always thought he was a progressive man and had these notions… yet couldn’t say them and get elected.”51 The New York

Times quoted other black southerners with similar opinions, contrasting Carter’s open promise of racial justice (though one without specific policies) with other southern governors.52 When divorced from direct policy talk, Carter’s broader moral gestures allowed him to be read as fundamentally “good” and in support of racial justice, even if political contexts (to some) meant he could not always address it directly. The challenge to the rhetorician is that these impressions do not seem to emerge from any specific texts showing Carter’s own rhetoric. Rather, they cite either unspecified private conversations with Carter, or more generally, a perception of character.

However Carter constituted that character, whether through his faith or moral rhetoric or by other means, it was a clear asset to his construction of tenuous biracial coalitions.

Carter’s time as governor had to perform a similar balancing act, especially as he soon turned to his presidential ambitions. In terms of policy, Carter continued to offer little explicit reference to desegregation, and many of his policies were better defined by a general sense of fiscal conservatism rather than his own personal morality. Carter’s views on busing reflect this.

He said he would support a “constitutional amendment to ban busing” and was guarded in his approach to racial issues, opting for more neutral rhetorical approach.53 In one interview opposing busing, Carter framed it as a more abstract issue, linking it with what he presented as increasing

“conservatism,” saying that Southern conservatism could be successful “now that we have gotten over the racial aspect of conservatism.”54 (The use of conservatism as a positive virtue may raise eyebrows coming from a Democrat, though recall that Carter had long used “liberal” as an

43 insult.)55 However, the move here reflects his larger strategy, just with a different ideal in place of morality or faith. Instead of taking a stronger stance on the issue, Carter retreated to a more abstract sense of unease regarding busing, implying government overreach in a statement that would have appealed to anti-busing advocates while not offering explicit support for segregation.

These overtures toward segregation and white southerners combined with his Georgia upbringing and moralistic rhetoric to form an initial perception of character, but actions taken during his governorship helped suggest that maybe his moral claims also applied to racial justice.

His symbolic overtures were not limited to George Wallace supporters. One tangible effort toward racial justice was Carter’s effort to appoint more African Americans to government positions. Carter hired an African American woman named Rita Samuels who helped him look for potential African American appointees. As Peter G. Bourne recalls, Carter focused on appointing African Americans to “bodies that affected the lives of black citizens,” including “the

Board of Pardons and Paroles,” while also integrating the Georgia State Patrol and having a black state trooper join his security detail.56 Another more symbolic overture occurred in February

1974, when Carter had a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. placed in the Georgia State Capitol. It was the first picture of an African American to ever be placed in the building.57 At the ceremony,

Carter and a “racially mixed audience” sang “We Shall Overcome” as the Ku Klux Klan gathered outside in opposition.58 Through these gestures, Carter’s moral character could be interpreted as being in favor of more explicit moves toward racial justice, even as he paid lip service (if not outright supported) policies more favorable to segregationist views.

Once again, the challenge to the rhetorician is that these are not speeches in the traditional sense. Carter did not make a series of speeches with racial justice as the subject and his statements on policies were usually vague references reprinted in newspapers and not detailed stances. Yet Carter did make rhetorical moves that helped constitute his abstract image of character, and that character is rhetorical. In the same way that promising a platform to George

44 Wallace was a symbolic overture, singing “We Shall Overcome” in the Georgia State Capitol was a persuasive act. By emphasizing these more general symbolic moves, Carter could appeal to different audiences while avoiding the actual policy discourses that could force him to make more controversial statements. However, one speech did show that Carter was capable of more fiery rhetoric.

A final moment regarding his racial rhetoric worth considering, occurring after Carter had decided to run for president, was his “Law Day Speech” given at University of Georgia in

May 1974.59 What most expected to be a simple speech in support of alumni turned into one of

Carter’s most explicit engagements with race. Quoting theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (and also referencing his love of Bob Dylan), Carter said that it was the “sad duty of the political system to establish justice in a sinful world.” Then, in a room full of lawyers and men who were always leery of his appointment, he rattled off systemic injustices against African Americans, discussing the bribery of judges, directly calling out those who did not support Martin Luther King Jr. at the time, and talking about how the law upheld injustice. Though it was a legal speech, Carter centered its foundation on faith, saying that “The structure of law is founded on the Christian ethic that you shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself,” calling out such unjust laws as immoral.60 Carter’s blistering speech even won over reporter and counterculture icon Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote an account of the speech that appeared during the 1976 election. Thompson noted the “anger” in Carter’s tone and called it the “heaviest and most eloquent thing I have ever heard from the mouth of a politician.”61 The speech shows how

Carter’s character could be levied to make a moral crusade for racial justice.

The Law Day Speech is Carter at his most activist, solidifying his moral tone and

Southern character. It also shows that he could be more activist if he wanted to, taking on past injustices in a way that could even win over a cynic like Thompson, but he would walk back these more fiery speeches in time for the presidential election. Just as Carter could choose to

45 break his own distinction and directly apply his morality to activism, so too did he make the choice to move away from his Law Day Speech as a model for his rhetoric.

When Carter officially announced his run for the presidency in December 1974, he was not considered a political insider or known quantity, but his upbringing and time in office had already allowed him to establish his initial character. Through both the circumstances of his birth and the rhetorical choices made in his runs for Georgia State Senate and for Governor of Georgia,

Carter constituted a character that operated on an abstract sense of morality. While he could gesture toward policies that would allow him to gain support from George Wallace voters, his ideals and perception of inherent goodness allowed him to both be read as moral outsider as opposed to Nixon and to be understood, even by African American voters, to be a good man who believed in racial equality. This character would serve him well in his 1976 presidential election as he began to articulate a clearer policy-morality split and adapt his style to the national stage.

Race and Religion in Carter’s Presidential Rhetoric

In many ways, Carter walked a similar tightrope in his run for president as in his earlier

Southern campaigns, reaching out to segregationist leaders but not directly supporting their policies. At a campaign stop at Mississippi in September 1976, Carter accepted the endorsement of two pro-segregation senators, James O. Eastland and John C. Stennis. Carter said that he was

“honored” to campaign with them and described them as “leaders” who were “committed to absolute integrity.” New York Times reporter James T. Wooten described the senators as

“exhilarated by the prospect of sending a fellow Southerner to the White House.”62 Here, Carter used a shared sense of Southern character to unite them. He used a similar strategy with Wallace.

At a campaign event in Alabama, George Wallace called for Southerners to vote for Carter, whose “Georgia background” made him the “best man” to be president. He added that this was

46 the “first opportunity to vote for a Southerner for president on a major party ticket since 1848.”63

(Apparently, Wallace excluded Texas-born Lyndon B. Johnson.) Wallace’s support and campaigning in states like Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi was critical to Carter’s success in the South.64 By relying on a sense of shared origin, Carter was able to deploy Wallace and others as surrogates to carry the South while not alienating African American voters. This is another aspect of how Carter was the right candidate at the right time in 1976, as his ability to bring

Wallace into the fold united North and South for the Democratic ticket and prevented Wallace from playing spoiler as he had done in 1968 and 1972.

Carter’s religiosity helped his appeals to both Wallace supporters and African Americans in 1976. Keeping religion separate from politics allowed it to serve as a more general appeal that could cut across different demographics who responded to the religious themes. Religious themes had been prominent in the freedom struggle in Georgia, and Carter’s use of these themes allowed him to craft a relatable and trustworthy image.65 When Carter visited African American churches in 1976, he “preached” and “appeared to feel at home” when speaking, showing that he was comfortable in those settings and continuing the “political preaching” style he adopted on the campaign trail.66 At the same time, white voters who had supported figures like George Wallace were also religious.67 Not only that, but Carter’s denomination was the one most familiar to these voters: Carter was a Southern Baptist.68 In this way, if kept separate from directly using religion to call for policy, religious overtones could appeal to both voting demographics without alienating either.

For the most part, this was the extent of Carter’s racial rhetoric in 1976, although one incident shows that his position was precarious. When asked about ethnic enclaves in April 1976,

Carter said that he had “nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakian, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods.”69 The remarks led to backlash from various African

47 American mayors and figures like Jesse Jackson, who focused on the word “purity” and saw it as possibly calling for segregated neighborhoods.70 Carter’s apologies for what he called an

“offhand” comment seemed to be somewhat effective, but the incident illustrates one of the more explicit and controversial references to race Carter.71 The incident shows that for Carter, race could be a dangerous topic, and instead of addressing it more directly, he more often opted to not address it at all.

In the end though, despite having the man who once proclaimed “segregation forever” as a surrogate, Carter still carried the majority of African American voters.72 Various explanations were suggested for Carter’s success.73 Some argued that Carter’ style, with its religious overtones, was effective messaging for a broad audience, while others saw Carter’s upbringing among

African Americans in the South as making him more relatable.74 On some level, despite not having many African American surrogates, it was also possible that Carter was still understood to be at heart a racial progressive as he had been in Georgia. Many of these theories verge on the simplistic though, and on some level perhaps African American voters just responded to the morality and change he offered. That is not necessarily surprising, but what is interesting rhetorically is how Carter balanced this constituency with his courtship of Wallace to create a winning electoral coalition not seen since. Buoyed by that coalition and the perception of character he had created, Carter went from small-time Georgia politician to President of the

United States.

African American voters were a major factor in Carter’s victory, and many recognized a sense that he “owed” something to these voters.75 Though not necessarily a direct response to this, on some level Carter did increase his symbolic overtures, with his racial justice rhetoric becoming more overt as president and demonstrating his use of faith as an appeal to morality. We see this shift in his infrequent references to segregation during his presidency.76 Most of his references centered on the stories of men overcoming segregation, such as remarks about how Martin Luther

48 King Jr. “gazed upon the great wall of segregation and saw that the power of love could bring it down” or a reference to how the Tuskegee Airmen (specifically General Daniel “Chappie” James

Jr.) had managed to overcome “segregation at the time” to leave behind “an honorable record.”77

Though told as part of a general tale of national redemption, these presidential addresses did at least address the reality of segregation.

Not long after taking office, Carter made a major symbolic overture to African

Americans by awarding Martin Luther King Jr. the presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, with some viewing the award as an acknowledgment of sorts for their support.78 These recognitions of racial justice may not have been the more activist Carter from the Law Day speech, but they continued a consistent trend throughout the decade of Carter recognizing the importance of

African Americans and the role of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. in a way that established him as different from men like Wallace. Moreover, when Coretta Scott King accepted the presidential Medal of Freedom on her late husband’s behalf, she noted that, “It is highly significant that you, Mr. President, a white Southerner, would become the first American

President to recognize the importance of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s contributions to the human rights movement in this country.”79 Carter’s own positionality as a Southerner added a new dimension to his rhetoric about segregation.

During the presidency, Carter finally began to talk somewhat more openly about segregation in the South. An early opportunity arose when Carter’s Plains, Georgia church finally rescinded a ban on attendance by African Americans in 1976 (one he had never supported), allowing Carter an easy political win of saying that he was “proud” of the decision.80 In another speech, Carter would refer to his own upbringing in a segregated rural Georgia environment, describing “an invisible wall of racial segregation stood between me and my black classmates, schoolmates, playmates.”81 He drew on his own biography to add a personal touch to remembering the legacy of segregation in the South. Occasionally he did directly implicate the

49 South for upholding segregation. In a 1978 speech to the Southern Baptist Brotherhood commission he said that “you and I were not in the forefront of those dedicated to eliminating segregation, racial discrimination among our own neighborhood” and at the National Prayer

Breakfast in 1979 Carter said, “I grew up in a region of the country which has in the past, and still sees quite often—too often—the Christian churches as the last bastion for racial segregation and even discrimination.”82 In this way Carter was willing to implicate religion in having political implications in a broader moral sense, though these evocations were the exception. However, the novelty of a white Southern politician who spoke out against racial inequality would eventually wear off and Carter would be expected to offer more concrete policy proposals.

One example of how Carter handled policy specifics relating to race was his administration’s response to the 1978 Bakke Decision upholding affirmative action.83 Carter’s advisers had a long internal debate about whether they could avoid commenting at all, because they felt that any stance would alienate a part of the country. After many drafts, they settled on releasing a brief (which Carter said in a later interview that he “personally approved”) that supported the decision in principle but also opposed the implementation of specific quotas.84 Here we once again see the moral/policy division, as the Carter administration would broadly support the ideal of a policy for racial justice while actively opposing actual policy specifics of implementing that justice. In this case, the internal documents explicitly establish the vague response as a deliberate strategy to navigate what his staff identified as a possibly contentious issue.

Carter would also rely on bureaucracy and avoiding more explicit political statements to help distance himself from possibly divisive policies, as seen in his use of the Housing,

Education, and Welfare department to handle the enforcement of desegregation orders. When the

Carter administration ordered Chicago to improve their desegregation practices, it was HEW secretary Patricia Roberts Harris who made the public statement on the policy change. Not only

50 did Carter put a level of distance between himself and the policy debate, but he actually made a note on a draft of the statement saying that it was “unnecessarily detailed and provocative.”85

Even when enforcing specific policies, Carter himself avoided direct involvement and wanted to sidestep details that could be too “provocative.”

These policy examples show how the separation of personal morality from his policy discourse, which had served him well in 1976 and had persisted into his presidency, still had strategic value. However, the strategy was becoming less effective. It was not the sole cause of

Carter’s 1980 defeat, but it does help us analyze how his appeals would become less effective outside of their earlier contexts. The strength of Carter’s invocations of faith was how his abstract moral appeals allowed him to avoid policy debates and be viewed as “good” by diverse voters. As president, that abstract morality clashed with his efforts to actually pass policy, leading to legislative struggles and an eventual sense of fatigue by voters tired of endless moralizing. The sense of frustration extended to African American voters.

Chuck Stone, a prominent African American columnist, wrote that while Carter had made

“the usual ritual of symbolic black appointments,” he had failed to improve anything else or offer specific remedies to racial issues. Stone cited rising black unemployment and continued housing inequality. Stone’s criticism reflected a larger sense that Carter had not brought the necessary policy change beyond symbolic gestures. As an example, Stone cited a lone employment bill he described as “so watered down it had become an arid desert of impotence.”86 By 1978, the time for symbolic shifts were over, Stone argued, and tangible, effective policies were needed. Instead,

Carter’s 1979 policy decisions harmed his support further. African American political leaders expressed a feeling of “betrayal” after Carter’s budget cuts to combat inflation in 1979 hurt social programs that they supported.87 Yet in the end, Carter still did well with African American voters in 1980, suggesting that his rhetoric on racial issues was still moderately effective strategically.88

51 While Carter had disappointed some African American voters, his rhetorical strategy of separating his own personal morality from policy specifics helped him in his political overtures to

African American voters during his political career. He would rely on various strategies, such as using appointments or hanging portraits in the state capitol, relying on religion as common ground, and presenting himself as a trustworthy character to assure African American voters in the South (and eventually) the country that he could be trusted. At the same time, his abstract ideals still allowed him to gesture toward segregationist policies and ignore race when it was politically expedient. Drawing out the rhetoric behind these moves reveals a portrait of Carter that is shrewder than he is often given credit for, illuminates the beginning of a moral image beyond policies that would persist into his post-presidency, and provides a rhetorical perspective on the underexplored relationship between race and Carter’s presidency.

Conclusion: The Rise of the Religious Right and the Redemption of Jimmy Carter

There were strategic advantages to Carter’s moral tone, but by 1980, the man Americans had found refreshing and inspiring in 1976 had now become seen as ineffective and grating. On some level, the lack of an immoral opponent hurt his rhetoric; he no longer had a Watergate- tainted Ford or even a corrupt political insider like Joe Hurst with whom to contrast himself.89

The country faced clear economic concerns and Watergate was now more distant. There were tangible issues to address. Yet when Carter returned from a ten-day “exile” at Camp David in

July 1979 to deliver a speech in response to his low approval ratings, he framed the nation’s issues, once again, as moral. He said the United States faced a “crisis of confidence,” a “spiritual” matter of a country that had lost its way. The speech sounded more like a sermon than a blueprint for a way out of the situation.90 Even Carter’s vice president Walter Mondale felt that there were tangible policy issues to address, but Carter persisted with the sermonic approach.91 Ultimately,

52 the speech did not get the Carter presidency back on track, and in many ways it represents a larger failing of Carter’s moral rhetoric; where it once had established a trustworthy character, now it made Carter seem like all talk and no action. His approval ratings would eventually recover in the early days of the Iran Hostage Crisis, but as that dragged into 1980, it was clear that the country did have a crisis of confidence: they had lost faith in Jimmy Carter.92

As the American public lost their faith in Carter, another political alliance, the Religious

Right, was using faith to great effect in the 1980 election. While Carter had increased the number of evangelical Christians voting for a Democrat in 1976, certainly an important factor in the close election, he had not explicitly courted them to constitute a “Religious Left.” 93 Meanwhile, by the late 1970s, a series of various interconnected organizations (including the Moral Majority,

Religious Roundtable, and Christian Voice) had united in applying political pressure on the

Republican Party to change their policy stances.94 Self-identified conservative Christians had long been fairly reliable Republican voters, but they now exerted great influence on the Republican national agenda and in response to overtures by Reagan, they helped him constitute a new conservative coalition with a dominant 1980 electoral victory.95 Members of this new Religious

Right were willing to eschew the division of personal morality and public policy, politicizing various issues under the umbrella of terms like “family values” or “religious freedom.” A general backlash against eroding “family values” often manifested as opposition to gay rights or the removal of prayer in public schools or in Phyllis Schlafly’s crusade against the Equal Rights

Amendment.96

Eventually, early leaders in the Religious Right would coalesce around the politicized issues of tax exemption and abortion, not distancing themselves from public policies as Carter had done. In 1977, after the IRS announced it would be enforcing the 1970 Green v. Kennedy decision denying “segregation academies” tax exempt status (a decision impacting private

Christian schools like Bob Jones University and what would become Liberty University),

53 evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell organized in opposition.97 They positioned Carter, the self- proclaimed born-again Christian, as allowing the IRS to “persecute them.” 98 Soon, Falwell and others would recruit allies like Francis A. Schaeffer to explicitly politicize abortion as a partisan political issue and a key moral crusade.99 By putting Carter on the other side of these policy values and using their own faith and morals to explicitly politicize these issues, the Religious

Right could frame him as attacking traditional “family values.”100 The politicization of these issues was strategically successful, and in 1980, Ronald Reagan ascended to the presidency with a dominant win buoyed by these newly-mobilized conservative Christian voters. The Carter presidency was over, and any resources for remembering him as the first evangelical president (in this newly politicized sense) or as the symbol of a major realignment, as in Reagan’s case, were gone. However, Carter’s articulations of faith and morality would not be forgotten.

I have argued that Carter’s rhetoric in the 1960s and 1970s broadly operated using a distinction between personal morality and public policy. Carter focused on a more abstract sense of morality while avoiding policy specifics. As his statements of faith became more prominent, this separation allowed him to distance his own beliefs from specific policies. This separation is seen in how Carter navigated race and segregation in his political rise in the South, allowing him to court segregationist voters while maintaining his own personal character. In turn, Carter won the presidency by using his moral focus to constitute a trustworthy character to reassure the

American public that he would not be another Nixon. However, by the end of Carter’s term, his inability to deliver policy specifics made his moral focus seem like ineffective preaching, and created an opening for the openly faith-based policies of the Religious Right. Examining this arc of Carter’s rhetoric helped draw out intersections of race, religion, and politics as I looked at a moment of unusual transition in the South and in American politics. Beyond this context, however, Carter’s moral rhetoric is foundational to the rest of my analysis.

54 When Carter returned to Plains, Georgia in January 1981, he had but few policy achievements to remember, most notably the Camp David Accords. What he did have was an image of moral character. Even in the darkest days of 1980, Carter was not perceived as corrupt.

He was simply not a “strong” enough leader, his critics said. He was still understood to be fundamentally good. As Carter began a post-presidency of charitable work, his perceived morality would be established not as an act for the presidency, but as what appeared to be the true essence of his character.

This is the larger implication of Carter’s moral rhetoric. Though often too abstract for performing the presidency, his faith and morality ultimately provided ample resources for a public memory of Carter as a symbol of morality, which is crucial for understanding the later uses of his memory. The moral focus would be remembered differently depending on the rhetor. As I outline in my next chapter, many conservative critics portray Carter’s morality as weakness, using a contrast with the perceived “strength” of Reagan to use Carter as the benchmark for presidential failure. Eventually though, Carter’s character would lead to him becoming a respected moral critic and a symbol of virtue in an exemplary post-presidency. (I consider that post-presidency in my conclusion.) This is the contradictory nature of such rhetoric. The same morality that allowed Carter to navigate the complicated political context of the South and the

1976 election would ultimately fail him by 1980, and the same character deployed as an example of weakness would eventually make him a well-regarded ex-president.

These contradictions animate the analysis of the rest of my thesis, but I conclude this chapter with a consideration of what the moral character of Carter’s presidency means to how we understand the U.S. presidency. Beyond its implications to 1970s politics, race, and the rest of my thesis, the election of 1980 marked, on some level, a turn from morality in presidents. We never stopped caring about presidential character, of course. Reagan’s own optimism or Bill Clinton’s charm certainly mattered, and even Trump’s Apprentice-crafted persona as a deal-making CEO

55 helped his appeal. All presidents create their own images to establish that they have the necessary ethos for the presidency, but since Carter, none have centered that image on a simple claim to goodness. As faith in U.S. government plummets and the U.S. presidency is denigrated as corrupt, impeachable, and immoral from both major parties, perhaps we were (and are) too quick to disparage and forget the lone president in recent memory who was concerned above all else with how to be moral and of good character. There is much to forget about the Carter years, but his character is worth remembering.

56 References

1 Robert Scheer, “A candid conversation with the democratic candidate for the presidency,” November 1, 1976, Playboy, retrieved from: https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview- jimmy-carter. The often misquoted and misunderstood statement was in response to a question about whether his faith would make him a “rigid, unbending President,” with Carter’s response meant to invoke his own fallibility and discuss Christian conceptualizations of sin and forgiveness.

2 The November 1976 issue that the interview appeared in can be found online at n.a., “November 1976,” iplayboy.com, retrieved from: https://www.iplayboy.com/issue/19761101.

3 Lee Dembard, “Carter’s Comments on Sex Cause Concern,” September 23, 1976, The New York Times, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/23/archives/carters-comments-on-sex- cause-concern.html. For a contemporary comparison to Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, see Ted Gup, “On the Subject of Lust, Donald Trump Is No Jimmy Carter,” October 10, 2016, The New Republic, retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/137682/subject-lust-donald-trump-no- jimmy-carter.

4 Robert Scheer, “A candid conversation with the democratic candidate for the presidency.”

5 N.a., “1976 Presidential Election,” 270towin, retrieved from: https://www.270towin.com/1976_Election/.

6 E. Stanly Godbold Jr., Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: The Georgia Years, 1924-1974, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, Adriana Bosch, dir., American Experience: The Presidents: Jimmy Carter, PBS, 2002, and Kenneth E. Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996. Carter’s father was actually a fairly successful landowner, complicating his “everyman” status to an extent, though it is true that Carter did not inherit much of that wealth and was the first president to have lived in public housing. See Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist 115.

7 Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, 89.

8 For a consideration of Carter’s faith, see Niels C. Nielson, Jr., The Religion of President Carter, New York: Thomas Nelson, 1977 and Jimmy Carter, The Spiritual Journey of Jimmy Carter: In His Own Words, Macmillan, 1978. For a more recent autobiographical reflection, see Jimmy Carter, Faith: A Journey for All, Simon & Schuster, 2018.

9 Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics, LSU Press, 2000.

10 For the realignment of 1980 and the transition from Nixon to Reagan, see Jeffrey D. Howison, The 1980 Presidential Election: Ronald Reagan and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement, New York: Routledge, 2014, Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Simon and Schuster, 2014, and Robert Mason, Richard Nixon and the

57

Quest for a New Majority, The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. For a look at the Southern Strategy, see Joshua F. J. Inwood, “Neoliberal Racism: The 'Southern Strategy' and the Expanding Geographies of White Supremacy,” Social & Cultural Geography 16.4 (2015): 407- 423, Angie Maxwell and Todd G. Shields. The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019, and Joseph A. Aistrup, The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South, Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

11Marcus M. Witcher, “President Carter's Southern Strategy: The Importance of Wallace Voters in 1976 and 1980,” Alabama Review 72.3 (2019): 178-190. For a more in-depth look at how the civil rights establishment and African American voters in general supported Carter, see Robert Pratt, “‘Wouldn’t Take Nothing for my Journey Now’,” in We Shall Not Be Moved, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.

12 Bruce E. Gronbeck, “The Rhetorics of the Past: History, Argument, and Collective Memory,” in Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, Kathleen J. Turner ed., Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1998, 48, 56-57.

13 Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” The American Historical Review 102.5 (1997): 1386-1403.

14 Numerous scholars have concluded that a multiplicity of factors may combine to form a particular ethos. For example, see Leonard V. Gordon, “The Image of Political Candidates: Values and Voter Preference,” Journal of Applied Psychology 56 (1972), 382-407, Lynda Lee Kaid and Robert O. Hirsch, “Selective Exposure and Candidate Image Over Time,” Central States Speech Journal, 24 (1973), 48-51, and Dana Anderson, Identity’s Strategy: Rhetorical Selves in Conversion, University of South Carolina Press, 2009.

15 For a general look at the role of rhetoric in policy, see Robert Asen, “Reflections on the Role of Rhetoric in Public Policy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13.1 (2010): 121-144.

16 Keith V. Erickson ,“Jimmy Carter: The Rhetoric of Private and Civic Piety” Western Journal of Communication, 44:3 (1980), 221-235.

17 Christopher Lyle Johnstone, “Electing Ourselves in 1976: Jimmy Carter and the American Faith,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 42 (1978): 214-249.

18 Dan F. Hahn, “One’s Reborn Every Minute: Carter’s Religious Appeal in 1976,” Communication Quarterly 28.3 (1980): 56-62. Though Hahn contributes much to the early communication scholarship on Carter, he does imply a more coordinated religious strategy and targeting of evangelical voters than my other sources indicate. Though understandable given that he was writing in 1980, he also underestimates the full context of evangelical Christian political activism, which he describes as having “shunned” politics until 1976.

19 Jimmy Carter, “Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals: ‘The Malaise Speech’,” The American Presidency Project, July 15, 1979, retrieved from:

58 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-nation-energy-and-national-goals-the- malaise-speech.

20 Erickson, “Jimmy Carter: The Rhetoric of Private and Civic Piety,” 225-226.

21 Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, 134-135.

22 Flippen, Jimmy Carter, The Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 20.

23 Though Carter’s surprise at Hurst’s dealings was likely feigned, his accusations were accurate. Hurst’s ballot-stuffing in the Carter-Moore election ensured Carter’s victory and led to a prison sentence for Hurst. See Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, 139-141.

24 Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, 138-139.

25 Joe Brown, “Sen. Carter Qualifies and Reveals Aims,” Atlanta Constitution, June 14, 1966.

26 For an overview of Carter’s campaign for governor, see Randy Sanders, “‘The Sad Duty of Politics,’: Jimmy Carter and the Issue of Race in his 1970 Gubernatorial Campaign,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 76.3 (1992): 612-638. Sanders highlights an important populist trend in Carter’s rhetoric and his use of class division.

27 Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, 182-189. Carter also ran for governor in 1966, but lost the Democratic primary to segregationist and future lieutenant governor Lester Maddox.

28 Flippen, Jimmy Carter, The Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 25-29.

29 For more, see Jerry F. terHorst, “Carter's Old-Time Religion in a New World,” The Los Angeles Times, April 2, 1976, 13 and Kenneth Briggs, “Carter's Evangelicalism Putting Religion Back Into Politics for First Time Since 1960,” The New York Times, April 11, 1976, 47. 30 Jimmy Carter, “‘Our Nation's Past and Future’: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in New York City,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/244286.

31 James Earl Carter, Why Not the Best?, Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1975. The title was also used for Carter’s campaign song.

32 Rober L. Turner, ed., “I’ll Never Lie to You”: Jimmy Carter in His Own Words, New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

33 Jimmy Carter, ed., A Government as Good as Its People, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.

34 Robert Scheer, “A candid conversation with the democratic candidate for the presidency.”

35 See, for example, Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, 157 and Adriana Bosch, dir., American Experience: The Presidents: Jimmy Carter.

59

36 Robert Scheer, “A candid conversation with the democratic candidate for the presidency.”

37 Jimmy Carter, “The President's News Conference,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/242809.

38 Jimmy Carter, “Perth Amboy, New Jersey Question-and-Answer Session With New Jersey News Editors,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/250808.

39 Jimmy Carter, “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session at a Town Meeting,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/251743.

40 Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, 139.

41 Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency, New York: Scribner, 1997, 132-142.

42 Bourne, Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency, 146-147.

43 Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, 143. According to Johnson, white Southerners had a habit of slurring the word to sound like a racial slur.

44 Gerald Rafhsoon, “Interview with Gerald Rafshoon, Miller Center Interviews,” Carter Presidency Project, vol. 21, April 8, 1983, 1, Jimmy Carter Library.

45 Randy Sanders, “‘The Sad Duty of Politics’: Jimmy Carter and the Issue of Race in his 1970 Gubernatorial Campaign,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 76.3 (1992): 619-621.

46 N.a., “Carter Would Invite Wallace to Georgia,” Atlanta Constitution, August 26, 1970 and Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, 186-187.

47 Jimmy Carter, “Inaugural Address,” Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, January 12, 1971.

48 N.a., “The Guard Changes,” Atlanta Constitution, January 13, 1971, A4, Reg Murphy, “Carter Inaugural Speech Like 1966,” Atlanta Constitution, January 13, 1971, A4, and Bill Shipp, “Carter’s Pledge to End Bias Shows Times Have Changed,” Atlanta Constitution, January 13, 1971, A3.

49 Adriana Bosch, dir., American Experience: The Presidents: Jimmy Carter.

50 Jon Nordheimer, “New Governor of Georgia Urges End of Racial Bias,” The New York Times, January 13, 1971, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1971/01/13/archives/new-governor- of-georgia-urges-end-of-racial-bias-georgia-governor.html.

60

51 Bobby Hill, quoted in Jeff Nesmith, “Maddox-Carter Conflict Seen in Speeches,” Atlanta Constitution, January 13, 1971, A3.

52 Jon Nordheimer, “New Governor of Georgia Urges End of Racial Bias,” The New York Times, January 13, 1971, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1971/01/13/archives/new-governor- of-georgia-urges-end-of-racial-bias-georgia-governor.html.

53 For a look at Carter’s views on busing, see Lawrence J. McAndrews, “Cautious Conviction: Jimmy Carter and School Desegregation,” Griot 18 (1999): 27-39 and Charles Mohr, “Carter on Busing,” May 26, 1976, The New York Times, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/05/26/archives/carter-on-busing.html.

54 N.a., “Governors disagree on school busing,” Rome News-Tribune, April 14, 1972, retrieved from: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=BJbdYPG6LGMC&dat=19730201&printsec=frontpag e.

55 More generally, I would argue that something along the lines “fiscal conservatism” might be one of the most consistent ideological through-lines of Carter’s career.

56 Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency, New York: Scribner, 1997, 212-213.

57 N.a., “Georgia Capitol Gets a Portrait of Dr. King,” The New York Times, February 18, 1974, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/18/archives/georgia-capitol-getsa-portrait-of- dr-king.html.

58 Bourne, Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency, 251. In 2012, a statue of King was also placed at the capitol, prompting a reflection on Carter’s addition back in 1974. See Greg Bluestein, “Long time coming: MLK statue unveiled at Georgia Capitol,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 28, 2017, retrieved from: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/long-time-coming-mlk-statue-unveiled- georgia-capitol/8HzZicjTYH9fwZ18tOlwZK/.

59 Jimmy Carter, “A Message on Justice,” Jimmy Carter Library, May 4, 1974. This speech is commonly known as the “Law Day” address.

60 Jimmy Carter, “A Message on Justice.”

61 Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76,” June 3, 1976, Rolling Stone, retrieved from: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fear-and-loathing-on- the-campaign-trail-76-46121/.

62 James T. Wooten, “Carter Accepts Help of Stennis, Eastland,” The New York Times, September 18, 1976, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/18/archives/carter-accepts-help-of- stennis-eastland-nominee-says-its-a-great.html.

61

63 N.a., “Wallace, Miller for Carter,” Atlanta Daily World, November 2, 1976, 1, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Atlanta Daily World (1932-2003). See also n.a., “Wallace Throws Support Behind Carter Candidacy,” Atlanta Daily World, June 1, 1976, 1, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Atlanta Daily World (1932-2003).

64 James Free, “Exit Interview: James Free, Regional Campaign Manager,” interview by Thomas Soapes, December 16, 1980, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Marcus M. Witcher, “President Carter's Southern Strategy: The Importance of Wallace Voters in 1976 and 1980,” 180-181.

65 Donald L. Tryman and Robert D. Bullard, “Carter’s Campaign Style, Policies, Political Religion, and the Black Vote,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 5.2 (1981): 119-120

66 Chuck Stone, “Black Political Power in the Carter Era,” The Black Scholar, January/February 1977, 11 and Tryman and Bullard, “Carter’s Campaign Style, Policies, Political Religion, and the Black Vote,” 120.

67 For an article on the relationship of the church and segregation and a general consideration of the intersection of religion with segregationist thought, see David L. Chappel, “Religious Ideas of the Segregationists,” Journal of American Studies 32.2 (1998): 237-262.

68 For a consideration of the role of denominations in the intersection of religion and race, see Mark Newman, Getting Right With God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, University of Alabama Press, 2012, Nancy Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention, Rutgers University Press, 1990, and Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, “A Great Divide? Religion and Political Change in U.S. National Elections, 1972-2000, The Sociological Quarterly 45.3 (2004): 421-450.

69 Stuart Eizenstat and Madeleine Korbel Alrbight, President Carter: The White House Years, Thomas Dunne Books, 2018, 50-51

70 For an archival collection of the popular reactions to the comment (along with general reactions to Carter’s reception among African American voters, see Container 89, New Summaries 4/76, Records of the 1976 Campaign Committee to Elect Jimmy Carter, Noel Sterret Subject File, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

71 Eizenstat and Alrbight, President Carter: The White House Years, 51-52

72 For a thesis examining the response to Carter from the African American press, see Marva L. Washington, “The Black Press Views Carter’s Presidential Race: 1976,” MA Thesis, California State University, Northridge.

73 For Wallace’s infamous comment, see George Wallace, “Inaugural address of Governor George Wallace, which was delivered at the Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama,” Alabama Department of Archives & History, retrieved from: http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/collection/voices/id/2952.

62

74 Paul Delaney, “Carter's Vote Success with Blacks Assayed,” The New York Times, April 15 1976, 18, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/15/archives/carters-vote-success- with-blacks-assayed.html. See also Dennis A William, Henry McGee, and Eleanor Clift, “Blacks and Politics,” Newsweek, April 26, 1976 and K. Bode, “Why Carter is Big with Blacks,” New Republic, 10 April 1976.

75 J. E. Oblata, |Black Constituency: How Carter Should Pay His Debt,” Nation, November 27, 1976, V. E. Jordan, Jr., “Blacks Have a Claim on Carter,” Newsweek, November 22, 1976, J. Buchanan, “Does Carter Owe Victory to Blacks?” Human Events, November 27, 1976.

76 I searched The American Presidency Project for mentions of “segregation,” finding 19 results. Many of his references to it were generalized stories of progress, such as remarks at the Medal of Freedom ceremony for Martin Luther King Jr.

77 See Jimmy Carter, “Presidential Medal of Freedom Remarks on Presenting the Medal to Dr. Jonas E. Salk and to Martin Luther King, Jr.,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/244349. Many similar remarks referred to segregation in the context of exemplary men “overcoming” it to achieve greatness. See Jimmy Carter, “Message for Groundbreaking of Air and Industrial Museum,” Container 37, 8/19/77, Office of Staff Secretary, Presidential Files, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

78 Olivia B. Waxman, “Martin Luther King Jr. Got the Presidential Medal of Freedom 40 Years Ago. That Timing Was No Coincidence,” Time, July 11, 2017, retrieved from: https://time.com/4850856/martin-luther-king-medal-freedom/.

79 Jimmy Carter, “Presidential Medal of Freedom Remarks on Presenting the Medal to Dr. Jonas E. Salk and to Martin Luther King, Jr.,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/244349

80 Wayne King, “Carter’s Church to Admit Blacks and Keep Minister,” The New York Times, November 15, 1976, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/11/15/archives/carters- church-to-admit-blacks-and-keep-minister-carters-church-to.html. For more on the desegregation of Southern Churches, see Joseph Kip Kosek, “‘Just a Bunch of Agitators’: Kneel-Ins and the Desegregation of Southern Churches,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 23.2 (2013): 232-261.

81 Jimmy Carter, “New Delhi, India Remarks Before the Indian Parliament,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/244953.

82 Jimmy Carter, |Atlanta, Georgia Remarks to Members of the Southern Baptist Brotherhood Commission,| online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/248736 and Jimmy Carter, “National Prayer Breakfast Remarks at the Annual Breakfast,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/249309. For more on Carter’s thoughts on segregation,

63 see Jimmy Carter, “National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education Remarks at the Association's Annual Dinner.” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/250223.

83 For more on the Bakke Decision, see Howard Ball, The Bakke Case: Race, Education, and Affirmative Action, University Press of Kansas, 2000 and A. Girardeau Spann, The Law of Affirmative Action: Twenty-five Years of Supreme Court Decisions on Race and Remedies, New York University Press, 200.

84 Container 33, Bakke Case, 9/77, Office of the Chief of State Files, Hamilton Jordan’s Confidential Files, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Jimmy Carter, “Interview With the President Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session With Representatives of Black Media Associations,” online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/244454.

85 Statement by Patricia Roberts Harris Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, October 17, 1979, Container 135, Office of Staff Secretary, Presidential Files, 10/17/79 [1], Atlanta, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

86 Chuck Stone, “Carter Paternalistic Racism and the Inept Presidency,” The Black Scholar 9.6 (1978): 39-41.

87 Adriana Bosch, dir., American Experience: The Presidents: Jimmy Carter.

88 N.a., “How Groups Voted in 1976,” Roper Center, Cornell.edu, retrieved from: https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1976 and n.a., “How Groups Voted in 1980,” Roper Center, Cornell.edu, retrieved from: https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted- 1980.

89 Note also that Reagan, who would announce his presidential run in a few months after having planned it for years, was also something of an outsider himself, and he lacked prominent scandals at the time.

90 Jimmy Carter, “Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals: ‘The Malaise Speech’,” The American Presidency Project, July 15, 1979, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-nation-energy-and-national-goals-the- malaise-speech. The word “malaise” is not actually used in the speech, but would later be associated with the end of Carter’s term. For more on the speech, see Dan F. Hahn, “Flailing the Profligate: Carter’s Energy Sermon of 1979,” Presidential Studies Quarterly (1980): 583-587.

91 Walter Mondale, interviewed in Adriana Bosch, dir., American Experience: The Presidents: Jimmy Carter, PBS, 2002.

92 Though documentarians like Adrianna Bosch and many historians often position the speech as Carter hitting rock bottom in public approval, Carter would have a final resurgence as the country rallied around him in the early days of the Iran Hostage Crisis, which I will outline in my fourth

64 chapter. Still, the speech does capture the overall loss of faith in the Carter presidency that would pervade most of his last two years.

93 J. Brooks Flippen, Jimmy Carter, The Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011, Jimmy Carter, The Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 7-8. Major figures of the evangelical Christian movements that would support Reagan in 1980 have given differing accounts on their thoughts toward Carter. For example, Pat Robertson gave conflicting statements over the years on who he actually supported in the 1976 election, but if nothing else, he said that it would be “wonderful” to have a “born again Christian as president.”

94 Flippen, Jimmy Carter, The Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011, 23, Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 2-5, and Michael J. Lee, Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words that Made an American Movement, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014, 7-14, 40-41, Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, eds., Piety & Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World, Lanham: University Press of America, 1987, and Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. See also: Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament, New York: Basic Books, 2006, xvi.

95 Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.

96 Andrew Hartman, War for the Soul of America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, 86-92.

97 Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” May 27, 2014, Politico, retrieved from: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133, Aaron Haberman, “Into the Wilderness: Ronald Reagan, Bob Jones University, and the Political Education of the Christian Right,” The Historian 67.2 (2005): 234-53, and Robert Freedman, “The Religious Right and the Carter Administration, The Historical Journal 48.1 (2005): 231- 260. As we know from Candace Epps-Robertson, the language of “freedom” can be used to mask the racism behind policies of segregation. See Candace Epps-Robertson, “The Race to Erase Brown v. Board of Education: The Virginia Way and the Rhetoric of Massive Resistance,” Rhetoric Review 35.2 (2016): 108-120. For her book-length examination, see Candace Epps- Robertson, Resisting Brown: Race, Literacy & Citizenship in the Heart of Virginia, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. For more on Bob Jones University’s history with race, see Gustav Niebuhr, “Interracial Dating Ban to End at Bob Jones University,” March 4, 2000, The New York Times, retrieved from: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/030400bobjones- edu.html?Partner=iVillage&RefId=LmyyW=jEFnnnnNnwm.

98 Andrew Hartman, War for the Soul of America, 87. See also Flippen, Jimmy Carter, The Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 155-157. The response to the IRS decision coincided with a backlash against Carter’s proposed creation of a Department of Education, which conservative evangelical critics accused of interfering in the education of American

65 families For an overview of Carter’s education policies from his earlier career to his presidency and beyond, see, Deanna Michael, Jimmy Carter as Educational Policymaker: Equal Opportunity and Efficiency, SUNY Press, 2008.

99 Hartman, War for the Soul of America, 91-95. Falwell stated that he did not recall abortion even being discussed as “a reason why we ought to do something” during conversations in the “smoke-filled back room of the Moral Majority.” See Flippen, Jimmy Carter, The Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 19. This is not to say that concerns of eroding family values or abortion were not present, but it was an array of interconnected issues that led to the disperse movement, which eventually would position abortion as a signature moral issue. Conversely, Flint and Porter position abortion as the key issue involved in Carter’s loss of evangelical voters in Andrew R. Flint and Joy Porter, “Jimmy Carter: The Re-emergence of Faith-Based Politics and the Abortion Rights Issue,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 35.1 (2005): 28-51.

100 Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, 139.

Chapter 3

Evoking Presidential Memories: The Carter Presidency as Shorthand for Presidential Weakness

On April 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter was attacked by a “killer rabbit” while fishing on a pond in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. The rabbit swam toward the boat and Carter splashed at it with an oar. The aftermath was immortalized in a single grainy photograph.1 The story did not become popular until months later, when Press Secretary Jody Powell, possibly under the influence of alcohol, mentioned it to the press, who ran the story as headline news for over a week.2 Media outlets re-framed the struggle with a “killer rabbit” to portray Carter as a comical figure of mockery.3 The bizarre encounter quickly spiraled out of the Carter administration’s control, even inspiring a parody folk song that dubbed Carter the “Charlie Brown of politics” who, according to the lyrics, did not want a “bunny-wunny” in his “widdle wow boat.”4 Although the incident reportedly helped inspire the Reagan administration’s tighter media control to avoid its own “bonzai bunny” incident, in the larger scheme of Carter’s presidency, it was not necessarily politically significant.5 Yet I begin this chapter’s analysis here because the rabbit incident and its portrayal reflect an early example of Carter’s transition from current president to historical figure to object of memory. Though Carter was still president at the time, the rabbit incident was an act of memory, an interpretation of a past event that framed and narrativized it in a new light. The rabbit attack reflected the downward trend in public perception

Carter was experiencing in the final years of his presidency. I take the incident and its circulation to be an initial interpretation of Carter as “weak” that would continue through his post-presidency and into his ultimate distillation into a shorthand appeal to presidential failure.

67 Through acts of interpretation like the rabbit incident, Jimmy Carter has become a shorthand for presidential failure relying on a dual rhetorical move that firsts associates Carter with weakness and then uses him as a point of comparison by positioning him as the benchmark for presidential incompetence. Although my examples of these acts of remembering span across decades and various genres, they are all on some level both an interpretation of the past (Carter’s presidency) and an evocation of that interpretation being used as a rhetorical appeal in the present. These evocations simplify the history of an entire presidential administration into a memory to be used as a rhetorical appeal, one that masks larger nuances and upholds the implied masculinity of the presidency in its construction of stereotypical strength as the desired antithesis to Carter’s apparent weakness.

Through the evocations of these memories as rhetorical strategies, Barack Obama can be dubbed the “next Carter” and have that understood as an insulting comparison or Mitt Romney can refer to Reagan releasing the hostages and have his audience understand that the statement implies Carter was too weak to free them himself. It is in these evocations of Carter that we see him most prominently in public memory, and because the overall goal of this thesis is drawing out both the creation and usage of presidential memories, the use of Carter as shorthand provides many primary texts for my analysis. I have already considered my broader theorization of presidential memory and the relationship between history and memory in my introduction, and in the previous chapter, I looked at how Carter’s moral rhetoric established an image of Carter’s character that could be used in remembering. In my next two chapters, I look at how these rhetorical resources of history—the events of the Carter presidency and the articulation of his character—are interpreted and evoked in political discourse. My fourth chapter will use the Iran

Hostage Crisis as a case study, but in this chapter I will assemble a series of texts from both during and after Carter’s presidency to focus on the central concern of my overall argument: the rhetorical creation and strategic function of presidential memories.

68 Whether by referring to his ill-fated fights with a rabbit in Georgia or the government in

Iran, Jimmy Carter is available to be used as a shorthand for presidential weakness. How did this happen? My consideration of this question has twofold implications for rhetoricians and scholars of the presidency. Fundamentally, this chapter is an inquiry into how we remember presidents, not just in public acts of commemorations like statues, monuments, or the stories told in textbooks, but in political discourse about and surrounding the presidency. Beyond explicit acts of commemoration, even offhand references to the past or summaries of previous events are in themselves acts of interpretation. Understanding how presidents are remembered (in this more abstract sense) by their successors and by presidential candidates helps us grapple with how we remember past presidents, and by extension, interpret the history of the institution of the presidency itself. When I say how we remember, I mean not just how the appeals are shaped or distributed, but also what rhetorical strategies are used at a discursive level in these evocations.

On this foundational level, I rely on a methodology of close textual analysis to ask what it means to “remember” a president. Secondly, once we understand the discursive moves present in these evocations of the past, we can dig deeper to take a critical look at the ideologies present under the surface of these evocations of the past that are not neutral, but are in themselves interpretations of the past.

Drawing out these ideologies has critical implications. A closer look at these evocations of Carter reveal how seemingly neutral or offhand references to the past do significant interpretive work and are strategic attempts at persuasion in their own right. The internal logics of these evocations mask ideologies beneath. In the case of remembering Carter, we see that he is associated not just with weakness, but with a portrayal of weakness that operates on a gendered logic. When we go beyond simply noting the association of Carter with weakness to see precisely how that association is made, we also unearth an overriding masculine logic in which Carter is derided for not embodying the more aggressive masculinity of a political figure like Ronald

69 Reagan. To understand how Carter is remembered as weak, we must consider how “weak” is constituted in these memories. It is through a close engagement with evocations of Carter’s memory that I am able to take a critical look at this discourse.

I begin my analysis by considering how memories serve an inherently simplifying and rhetorical function and explain why it is an important topic for understanding the ways we talk about past presidents. Then, I turn to foundational theories of rhetoric from both Aristotle and The

New Rhetoric to understand the textual forms of these memories, highlighting concepts like enthymemes, association/dissociation, and arguments by comparison while also considering the ideological undercurrents of memory. My analysis proceeds with close readings of evocations of public memories of Jimmy Carter to see how they are arranged discursively and how they are used strategically. I begin with early portrayals of Carter during his presidency and then focus on various initial interpretations throughout the 1980s before concluding in the present day to show

Carter’s use as shorthand for presidential failure in contemporary political discourse. I consider the internal logics that allow these discursive moves to be made, arguing that they operate on an understanding of the presidency and presidential policy-making as inherently masculine. I conclude with a consideration of the larger implications of what this understanding of presidential memory means to scholars of the presidency and the American public.

Rhetorics of Presidential Memories

In my introduction, I situated my larger analysis as an investigation into presidential memory, understood as interpretations of past presidencies (and the inventional historical resources they leave behind), with those interpretations often evoked as rhetorical appeals in the present. Beyond their own institutional ability to define memory, a president is an object of memory in their own right, able to be interpreted by later scholars, pundits, and citizens. At its

70 most routine and ritualistic, this includes presidential commemoration, whether in the form of documentaries and memoirs or presidential libraries aiming to tell their stories.6 However, rhetors can also deploy presidents as later examples and reference points by relying on interpretations of their presidencies.

Through repeated evocations of memory, presidents can ultimately become shorthands, or simplified images of themselves. We do not remember a “Founding Father” like George

Washington, for example, but our idea of who we believe Washington to be, just as presidents like Lincoln transform into mythical figures.7 This is not always sinister. By nature, memories simplify. No one could practically refer to an entire presidency consisting of four to eight years of daily policy decisions, complicated contexts, and more speeches than even the most dedicated presidential scholar could sift through. Likewise, we must draw on the existing historical record for resources to remember, and in the absence of access to (or desire to consult, in the case of the average American) archival records, we rely on either the existing interpretations of the historians who wrote our American history textbooks or the portrayals of a president in popular culture.

Simplified by necessity, memory ultimately narrativizes a presidency into an image, idea, or in my analysis, a shorthand.

Of interest to the critic, then, is how a moment in a presidential history becomes a memory. To reiterate the theoretical conceptualization laid out in my introduction, the historical events of a presidency, often known through mediated contexts (such as news coverage or popular culture), history textbooks, or continued references to them, are the available vocabulary

(or “means”) for remembering a president. Certain events are more rhetorically useful than others, and in many cases certain events, decisions, or perceptions begin to stand out from others.

For Jimmy Carter, his electoral defeat of Ford in the wake of the Nixon pardon, the Camp David

Accords, the Panama Canal, malaise, and the Iran Hostage Crisis, as well as his 1980 loss to

Reagan, are the resources most commonly used in remembering. As rhetoricians, we know that

71 references to these events are not neutral and that these events are not necessarily the “definitive” moments of Carter’s presidency, but they reflect deliberate choices about both what to remember and how to remember it.8 In this way, memory draws from the historical record, bringing it into the present to be used as rhetorical appeal, even as evocations of history both transform and preserve certain ways of remembering over time.9 This is how I theorize the larger relationship between history, memory, and its rhetorical usage, but for my analysis, the question is closer to the text: how are presidents remembered discursively? To answer that question, I will focus on three rhetorical concepts: Aristotle’s classical definition of the enthymeme, association/disassociation, and argument by comparison, the latter two developed by Chaïm

Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca in The New Rhetoric.

When I say discursive, I mean looking beyond larger theoretical concerns to a close textual consideration of how evocations of memory function structurally. Recall Jasinski’s analysis from my introduction, which outlined the importance of a text’s “specific discursive strategies and textual dynamics” in working to “shape and reshape the contours of political concepts and ideas,” or for my purposes, memories.10 In my analysis, I focus on explaining the

“discursive strategies” at play in evoking Carter. Broadly, memories of Carter (and many other presidential memories) operate as enthymemes. Aristotle defines the enthymeme as a kind of abbreviated syllogism, one with an unstated premise that the audience “fills in” themselves.11

Kendall R. Phillips argues that through enthymemes, rhetoric constitutes remembrance.12 The audience “fills in” the appeal by remembering Carter in a certain way.

Beyond enthymemes, the discursive moves used when remembering Carter employ discursive strategies of opposition, using a dual strategy of association/dissociation and argument by comparison. According to The New Rhetoric, schemes of association “bring separate elements together and… establish a unity among them,” whereas dissociation (always implied by association) works at “separating and disuniting elements.”13 In presidential rhetoric, one can

72 build associations with a lineage of past presidents that suggest a positive connotation while also moving to disassociate themselves from presidents remembered more negatively. This is then structured around comparative arguments, in which “several objects are considered in order to evaluate them through their relations to each other.” In particular, I turn to comparisons by opposition, relying on binaries like “the heavy and the light,” or in this case, good vs bad.14 The structure of these presidential candidates dissociates a rhetor from a negatively-connotated president (like Carter) by comparing themselves in opposition to them, suggesting that they are the opposite. All of these discursive moves can be employed by a simple enthymeme like stating that “Obama is the next Carter.” The audience fills in that Carter is weak by drawing on existing associations of weakness.

Beyond revealing discursive strategies, the underlying logic behind these rhetorical moves is significant due to the larger power structures they perpetuate. Once we understand how these acts of memory function, we can ask what logic animates the associations within. Indeed, evocations of memories and the ways we choose to remember (and what we opt not to remember) reflect larger social constructions like race and gender.15 Regarding gender specifically, this is co- constitutive with the presidency itself being understood as a masculine institution.16 Presidents are remembered discursively in a masculine manner, focusing on acts of war over diplomacy and valorizing stereotypically masculine figures in a way that renders “feminine” emotions, usually associated with peace or diplomacy, as undesirable and weak positions.17 By unearthing the masculine logic used in evocations of Carter, I reveal the hidden ideologies beneath and see how they limit the ways we understand what a successful presidency looks like. In summary, I understand interpretations of past presidencies (drawing from historical resources) as memories that are used in the present as rhetorical appeals and in many cases as a shorthand. To analyze this process, I return to my text: memories of President Carter. Using this framework, I will draw out

73 how Carter’s presidential past is interpreted, how it is used discursively, and how these evocations render him as a presidential shorthand for failure.

Interpreting the Carter Presidency: From History to Memory

To understand how presidents are remembered as rhetorical shorthands and to continue my larger rhetorical inquiry into the memories of the Carter presidency, I will look at specific evocations of Carter across several decades. Though scattered over the years and across different genres, all of my texts in this section are united in that they offer specific interpretations of who

President Carter was and how his presidency should be remembered. I am not suggesting a linear progression, or that in different eras Carter was always remembered in a single, static way.

However, I am suggesting a general trend in recurring discourses around remembering Carter and commonalities in the ways perceptions of presidents evolve over time.

To begin my analysis, I return to before Carter left office, looking at how initial portrayals of Carter already started to perform interpretive work, framing his decisions and image in ways that would be useful to later rhetors. Then, I look at a series of interpretations across the

1980s, including campaign rhetoric in the 1980 and 1984 elections, as Carter went from president to post-president and his presidency shifted from historical resource to memory. I eventually arrive in Obama era, where I look at how Carter’s memories became useful as a shorthand for presidential failure. Throughout, I focus not just on the similarities and occasional differences of these remembrances over time, but the question of how, discursively, these memories are evoked, what they do rhetorically, and what ideologies they contain.

74 Too Small for the Office: Initial Interpretations of President Carter

Portrayals of Carter during his presidency provided the initial resources for remembering him. Even as a presidency is ongoing, the president and his supporters (and opponents) are already working to interpret a presidential history in real time. In the same way that I started my overall argument in chapter two by considering the constitution of Carter’s character and how that early rhetorical work impacted his later evocations, I begin my analysis here by looking at how the earliest acts of interpreting Carter’s presidency actually began before his presidency ended.

My decision to open with the killer rabbit story reflects a growing sense of dissatisfaction with Carter in the later years of his presidency. The circulation of the story by media outlets suggests that the larger theme of Carter as comically hapless rang true. Being attacked by a rabbit and becoming viewed as weak may not be the major moments in a “correct” narrative of the history of the Carter presidency, but these moments and perceptions serve as rhetorical resources to be called on in later appeals. Initial discourses around a president can provide material for later memories, so portrayals of Carter as comical or weak make it easier for later rhetors to remember him in that way.

The visual rhetoric of portrayals of Carter, especially in the later years of his presidency, worked alongside understandings of his ineffectiveness to craft an image of Carter as small. I mean “small” literally. Cartoonists drew Carter diminutively to suggest that he was not “big” enough for the job of president through their visual arguments. A prominent 1979 cartoon published in The Washington Post portrayed Carter banging on the resolute desk in the Oval

Office, demanding to know “Who’s in charge here?”18 In addition to the caption and frantic fist- banging suggesting a lack of control, the desk, representing the office of the presidency, takes up far more of the image and appears (literally) too big for him to handle. In another cartoon, Carter, dressed as a doctor, tells the apparent wife or relative of a sick man (representing “inflation”) that

75 “I don’t have any idea what I’m doing.” In addition to continuing the theme of incompetence,

Carter also looks up at the woman, the smallest person in the room. Again, the overall positioning also has the furniture (in this case the bed) crowds the diminutive Carter out, taking up most of the space in the image.19 Other images would continue to frame Carter as small and, by implication, not big (or “strong”) enough for the office.20 A cartoon about the Democratic primary framed a much larger Ted Kennedy as lurking behind Carter, while Carter sinks into a too-big chair.21 Even beyond cartoons, real images of Carter’s apparent weakness circulated, including an image of Carter collapsing while running a 10K.22 Taken collectively, these photos represent a theme of portraying Carter as literally and figuratively small, making his inability to deal with major issues a result of his own personal weakness.

More generally, the Iran Hostage Crisis was also a crucial resource for how Carter would be remembered. While the Reagan campaign was actually reluctant to explicitly politicize the crisis, they still indirectly criticized Carter’s handling of it through their larger portrayal of

Carter’s foreign policy as too weak.23 Others, particularly those in the news media, were more explicit in framing the crisis as a personal struggle between Carter and the Iranians, with Carter’s inability to free the hostages trapped in the Tehran embassy positioned as a definitive failure.24 As the crisis persisted, Carter’s approval ratings plummeted and the release of the hostages on the day of his predecessor’s inauguration served as a final insult.25 Again, this does not suggest that the crisis necessarily has to be positioned as the final failure of Carter’s presidency, but that event provided the resources for that interpretation to be made, and as I expand on in my next chapter, it would often be evoked that way in later appeals. In a similar fashion, continued frustration with

Carter’s inability to chart a course out of the economic crisis of his later years would help position him as politically inept. These mediated portrayals of Carter laid the groundwork for later strategies of remembrance by associating him with weakness, while the 1980 election served as the initial referendum on remembering Carter’s presidency.

76 A presidential election for an incumbent president is in many ways a struggle over memory. Implicit in an incumbent’s call for “four more years” is that the last four years were good, or at least showed the potential for a brighter future. From the challenger’s perspective, the common move is to call for a change in course, necessitating a negative interpretation of the existing term.26 Although his presidency was still ongoing, the 1980 presidential campaign, with its referendum on Carter’s first (and soon to be only) term, was an example of interpreting the

Carter era and shifting it into memory. While Carter defended his actions, his opponents,

Republican candidate Ronald Reagan and eventual vice presidential pick George H. W. Bush, worked to frame Carter as weak, especially regarding foreign policy. These attacks laid the groundwork for later recollections of the Carter administration as not being strong enough in foreign policy and built on existing discourses that portrayed Carter as an unimposing figure.

Even before the first general debate of 1980, Carter came under fire from both Reagan and Republican candidate turned vice presidential pick George H. W. Bush at the final

Republican Party debate in 1980, which began to link Carter’s early association with weakness to a militaristic foreign policy paradigm. Bush warned that because Carter “treated Cuba with civility,” a foreign policy Bush called “naive,” Carter had allowed Cuba to continue actively

“exporting” communism. Bush framed Carter’s “civil” diplomacy as “naïve,” calling for him to more aggressively attack Castro.27 This rhetoric from Bush shows that the discursive strategies used in remembering Carter— association/dissociation and compare/contrast—rely on a strong/weak binary. In this binary, not only are diplomatic actions weak, but even treating an enemy with “civility” is undesirable. Instead, Bush contends that the president must always be aggressive to prevent weakness from being taken advantage of by enemies such as Cuba. The association, then, is not just of Carter with weak foreign policy, but also an association of diplomacy with weakness. Carter, diplomacy, weakness, and failed foreign policy are all linked in a negative association. In this way, remembering Carter requires not only the discursive moves of

77 comparison but also the construction of a foreign policy rubric in which civility is associated with weakness. Bush’s criticism in many ways perverts the moral character established by Carter.

While that character would make him a good ex-president, in Bush’s interpretation, that civility and morality made for poor foreign policy.

The association of Carter with presidential weakness would become more explicit in the subsequent (and only) 1980 presidential debate.28 The candidates were asked what they considered to be their opponent’s “greatest weakness.” Carter framed Reagan as a war hawk, while Reagan inverted Carter’s appeals to peace through diplomacy, saying, “We can get into a war by letting events get out of hand, as they have in the last three and a half years under the foreign policies of this administration of Mr. Carter.” Not only was less aggressive foreign policy presented as weak, but Reagan also used the classic presidential appeal to peace through strength, saying, “Good management in preserving the peace requires that we control the events and try to intercept before they become a crisis.”29 Reagan argued that action is needed to prevent a crisis, which would surely have called to mind the hostages to his audience given the frequent use of

“crisis” to describe the ongoing standoff. Weakness, such as failing to proactively take control of events, apparently lead to crisis. Intervention was associated with strength, while Carter’s diplomatic focus was framed as allowing chaos to flourish. In this way, remembering Carter’s foreign policy as weak is to also perpetuate a denigration of diplomatic policy solutions.

The contrast drawn by both candidates reflects the larger rhetoric of weakness that would come to surround Carter, but also shows how the foreign policy expectations linked with the presidency as an institution take on a masculine logic. Reagan framed the country as having a responsibility as the “leader of the Free World,” saying that the country had “the burden of maintaining the peace falls on us.”30 He positioned America as having an almost patriarchal burden to defend the rest of the world, which can only be done through, of course, more strength.

In this metaphor, America, being stronger, must naturally assume a fathering role to the rest of

78 the world, rendered as weaker and child-like. This is problematic, as it renders the rest of the world as children without agency in need of a single leader, with the United States as, in

Reagan’s words, the “only one that can do it.” In his closing statement, he said, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”, going on to ask, “Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were 4 years ago?” Calling for strength, Reagan associated Carter with images of weakness and further associated strength with the idea of safety and with his own potential presidency.31

We must be vigilant of how strength is defined in these associations. In most of the examples, strength is portrayed as aggressive and militaristic foreign policy, working to preclude diplomatic solutions through the contrast with how “civility” apparently allows the “spread” of communism. Willingness to take military action is conflated with being strong, framing diplomatic solutions or economic sanctions as inferior to taking military action. Even in the earlier portrayals of Carter he is coded as a kind of “wimp,” itself a “gendered pejorative” used to imply that a man is not a real man, but is feminized.32 In the same way that un-critically accepting

Carter’s presidency as a general failure can work to denigrate the positive elements of it (like his moral emphasis from the previous chapter), ignoring this gendered rhetoric is to further reify the implied masculinity of the presidency as an institution and works to de-emphasize diplomatic actions from being worthwhile presidential foreign policy decisions.

Through this masculine logic, the major arguments made by Reagan operate in the interplay between two associated groups structured by their rhetoric. The Reagan/Bush tickets associated themselves and more aggressive foreign policy with good presidents, while they associated Carter, diplomacy, and bad presidential leadership together and then compared themselves via opposition to suggest that they were distant from the failure and weakness they had associated with Carter. To be clear, a few elements that I will draw out in later evocations of

Carter are not as prevalent in Reagan’s rhetoric. Reagan’s appeals are not quite shorthand,

79 actually offering specific examples of why he viewed Carter’s policy decisions as negatives. This specificity also makes his appeals less enthymematic. However, it does lay key groundwork for a later way of talking about Carter by establishing the association of Carter with weakness and defining what weakness meant through a praising of masculine strength and military might above all else.

The Shift to Memory: Remembering Carter During the Reagan Administration

The Carter administration officially shifted into memory and into a resource to be used in future appeals when Reagan took office. Throughout their presidency and in their re-election campaigns, presidents must make the case that they have brought the country in a better direction than their predecessor, suggesting a sense of progress while not creating too much nostalgia for their predecessor. In this way, Reagan would provide many of the initial interpretations of

Carter’s presidency. These interpretations added an association with failure to a presidency already linked with weakness.

The initial interpretations of the Carter presidency offered by Reagan were not particularly prevalent or unexpected. In fact, Reagan rarely mentioned Carter by name at all.

(Though this could imply a rhetoric of silence that positioned Carter as not even worth remembering.) I searched the American Presidency Project’s archive of Reagan’s presidential rhetoric for both “Carter” and “predecessor,” only finding references to the latter. These infrequent references were measured, focused more on policy disagreements and expected appeals such as blaming Carter for rising inflation or unemployment.33 Reagan occasionally expressed a desire to avoid sinking back into “malaise,” with which he associated Carter.34 While not relying on Carter as explicit rhetorical shorthand, Reagan still added to a larger framing of

80 Carter as unsuccessful, and with Carter’s presidency now over, the note of definitive failure could be applied.

Historians continued this portrayal and were more overt in their engagement with the

Carter era. Initial historical analyses of Carter skewed negative, with many of the notable histories using sensational titles like “The President Who Failed” that all served to create an association of Carter with failure.35 These histories often contrasted Carter directly with Reagan, creating a comparative rhetoric in which Carter was the inverse of Reagan, a symbol of failure.

Reagan’s rhetoric about moving away from Carter added to this distancing. Initial textbooks created a similar perception of Carter, giving his tenure both little attention and a negative connotation.36 These interpretations of Carter’s presidency positioned it as not worth remembering at all.

The presence of Carter’s vice president Walter Mondale helped make the 1984 presidential election another referendum on the Carter years. The Republican Party Platform of

1984 helped this association by consistently referring to the “Carter-Mondale” years, linking

Mondale with the Carter administration, which it presented as having left America in a poor position (which Reagan, naturally, had remedied in his first four years). However, it did so by citing issues like inflation and unemployment, and actually did not use any unique appeals regarding Carter’s image.37 Mondale obviously offered a more positive memory of Carter than the now-incumbent Reagan administration, calling Carter “an honest, caring man.”38 Mondale’s rhetoric about Carter, and the consistent focus by Reagan on policy disputes over any attacks on

Carter’s character, helped create the signature dual move of remembering Carter as a good man but a poor president. Indeed, the 1984 presidential debates also referred to the Carter-Mondale years primarily in terms of budgetary debates and foreign policy instead of character.39 Perhaps most exemplary of Reagan’s rhetoric against Carter was his famous campaign ad “Prouder,

Stronger, Better,” more commonly remembered as “Morning in America.” Though it actually

81 does not mention Carter, after presenting warm images of an apparently revived America it asked,

“Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”40 This positions the Carter years as undesirable, and implies not re-electing Reagan would be a step back, especially since the country would be electing Carter’s vice president. The key contribution of these interpretations was to associate a feeling of definitive failure with the Carter presidency.

Although these initial interpretations of the Carter presidency ranged from politely implying he was an unsuccessful president to historians outright calling him a failure, opinions of

Carter softened over time. This is not uncommon for presidents, as time and distance work in their favor. Journalists and later politicians began to re-evaluate his presidency, and while he is still not considered among the all-time greats, he is rarely considered one of the worst and often seems to hover around mediocre to average ratings.41 More recent polls have had him around the

26th ranking and also show him as one of the least polarizing presidents.42 Remembering, though, is not just about public opinion and historical rankings, but is about the way the past is talked about. Even as he experienced some rehabilitation, he would still be deployed in presidential discourse as a symbol of failure. Though he would re-invent his public image as a “moral critic” in the 1990s and 2000s along with his philanthropic work, Carter’s presidency remained associated with weakness, and after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, it would provide a useful intentional resource for appeals to presidential failure. These appeals would draw on the earlier existing associations which contrasted Carter (linked with weakness, meaning naive diplomatic foreign policy) with Reagan (linked with strength, meaning aggressive foreign policy) and on a narrative of Carter’s inability to free the hostages, deployed as an enthymeme.

82 Available Means of Presidential Memory: Carter as Shorthand

I move to the presidency of Barack Obama to see how remembering Jimmy Carter can be used as a shorthand for failure. Of course, even in the early 1980s, Carter was already a shorthand in terms of foreign policy, representing what Robert Alexander Kraig called a tragic narrative of failed idealism.43 However, evocations of Carter relying on the association with failure would soon move beyond scholarly and foreign policy discussions. In more contemporary politics, remembering Carter has become the benchmark for presidential failure.

Returning to Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric as the “available means” of persuasion, thinking of past presidential histories as available means of memory helps explain this strategic remembering of Carter. If a rhetor were to choose a shorthand for presidential failure, who would they select? For a Republican, Ronald Reagan or George Bush (Sr. or Jr.), both from their own party, would be poor choices, and Nixon could invite unwanted associations with past Republican corruption. However, Carter provides an example that is already positioned as a failure, a member of the opposing party, and in office recently enough to be popularly remembered. From the opposite perspective, invoking Carter makes little strategic sense for Democrats. In other words,

Carter is an effective available resource to be deployed to represent failure. For examples of these evocations, I look at conservative media outlets and campaign rhetoric from the 2012 and 2016 elections before concluding with the recent exchange between Carter and Trump. My analysis will show how after the cycle of interpretations throughout his post-presidency, Carter has now become a simplified shorthand that can be easily evoked and understood in contemporary presidential politics.

We see the use of Carter as a negative association during the Obama presidency, as conservative media outlets tried to frame Barack Obama as the “new Carter.” When the conservative outlet Fox News asked if Carter was “another Carter,” the rhetorical moves reflect

83 the strategies of memory I have outlined. 44 First, the statement of “another Carter” is enthymematic, relying on remembering Carter’s presidency negatively based on the existing associations with failure. (The article helps the reader by reiterating a negative summation of

Carter’s presidency.) Then, by a comparison with Obama, Carter is used both as a benchmark for what a bad presidency looks like and then associated with Obama to attack the latter’s ongoing presidency. Further comparisons between Carter and Obama within the article (such as both winning the Nobel Peace Prize) work to establish a continuity of failure between the Democratic presidents.45

In 2012, Republican challenger Mitt Romney would also compare Obama to Carter, continuing the association of Obama with Carter’s memory. At one campaign event, Romney referred to Obama as having the “most anti-small business administration I’ve seen probably since Carter,” attempting to connect Obama to the so-called “stagflation” at the end of Carter’s presidency.46 As in the earlier appeals used by Reagan to frame Carter as a bad president and then distance himself from that benchmark of failure, here we see Obama being associated with negative memories of Carter, in this case the economic “malaise” of his later years. The comparison implied that being his successor would carry a negative connotation, positioning

Carter as the benchmark for presidential failure. Others would pick up on this association, writing about the attempt to link Obama with Carter and implicitly framing Carter as the president with which to avoid comparison.47

The Iran Hostage Crisis also demonstrates the enthymematic nature of remembering

Carter as a negative appeal. During the 2012 election, Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan said that “they are burning our flags in capitals all around the world” and “they are storming our embassies,” which reminded him of “1979 Tehran.”48 Relying on an association of Carter with unrest in Iran, Ryan positioned electing Obama as leading to another crisis like in 1979. Romney himself said that if elected, he would offer the “strength, clarity, and resolve” of Reagan, whose

84 election was apparently “why the Iranians released the hostages on the same day and at the same hour that Reagan was sworn in.”49 These evocations by the Romney campaign rely on a simplified narrative in which Reagan’s election and his “strength” lead to the hostages’ release and not Carter’s actual negotiations with the Iranians. (I interrogate this narrative further in my next chapter.) In other words, Carter is positioned as too “weak” to free the hostages, and by placing Obama in the role of Carter, Obama is discredited as weak as well, showing the strategic use of presidential memory. If we remember how the strong/weak binary is being constituted, we also see that this criticism demands that Obama perform the traditional masculinity of the office or risk being painted as weak. Four years later in the 2016 election, Republican Marco Rubio would make a similar appeal, saying that if elected, “it would be like Ronald Reagan where as soon as he took office, the hostages were released from Iran.”50 These appeals show the full extent of Carter’s use as shorthand and the use of memories as enthymemes. Romney, Ryan, and

Rubio do not need to explain what the Crisis was or Carter’s role in it. The audience fills that in themselves by remembering it in a specific way, understanding the reference as a negative comparison.

Memories of Carter (or other presidents) are structured as enthymemes because those who hear them fill in unstated premises by remembering. Discursively, they suggest “remember this?”, but the hearer must then actually remember that event or person, even if led into a specific way of remembering by the framing of the appeal. Critics of Carter do not have to claim that

Carter is weak, or that Carter could not release the hostages. They allow the audience to provide these existing interpretations themselves. Mitt Romney does not have to explain what he means when he says that “There’s a reason why the Iranians released the hostages on the same day and at the same hour that Reagan was sworn in.”51 He does not need to explain the Iran Hostage Crisis or even mention Carter at all for this to evoke a memory of Carter as unable to resolve the crisis.

In this way, references to past presidencies are inherently rhetorical even when not explicit in

85 framing, calling on one of rhetoric’s foundational concepts. Moreover, these evocations make a double move. Even as they associate Carter with failure, they oppose their own presidencies (or potential presidencies for candidates) with that failure, creating a contrast that associates themselves with success.

Consistent in these uses of Carter as shorthand is his positioning as a barometer of failure.

This matters to our understanding of the presidency, because what we remember as the barometer of failure helps define what a “good” president looks like. To see this final distillation to pure shorthand, I return to the criticism from Donald Trump that I used in my introduction. Even before 2016, Trump used Carter as the barometer for presidential failure when he tweeted in 2013 that Carter was “no longer considered the worst President in the history of the United States,” implying that he had been until the election of Barack Obama.52 The following year, Trump would cite Carter’s criticism of then-president Obama as “new low,” continuing to use Carter as a symbol of (Democratic) failure.53

As a final example, the 2019 exchange between Trump and Carter over Trump’s legitimacy shows Trump evoking a memory of Carter that draws on many of the aspects seen in political references to and interpretations of the Carter presidency. Trump’s lack of style or nuance renders them more blatant and we can see the complete distillation of Carter into simplified negative memory. Trump says that,” He was a terrible President. He’s a Democrat.”

Most notably, Trump is blunt in his assessment of Carter as “terrible,” which he repeats later as

Carter being “not a good President.” Here we also see the construction of a “lineage” of failure within the Democratic Party, attempting to remember Carter not just as a failure, but as a specifically Democratic failure. Trump concludes by saying “Look at what happened with Iran.

That was a disaster. What Iran did to him — they tied him up in knots. The reason Ronald

Reagan probably because President.”54 The Iran Hostage Crisis becomes the definitive, final failure caused by Carter’s weakness and used in a dismissive, negative appeal.

86 This is what four years and an entire presidency can be reduced to through the rhetorical evocations of memory over time. The Carter presidency becomes a simple failure, the story of a weak man “tied up in knots” by the Iranians. My analysis is admittedly broad, covering decades and myriad texts. What binds them together is a consistent reference point: the presidency of

Jimmy Carter. In all these rhetorical appeals, we see a presidency being remembered through interpretations of the past, and by looking closely at these evocations, we see how these appeals to the past are made. I have identified a rhetoric of presidential memory in which a president passes from history to memory to rhetorical shorthand. Having looked at what these appeals are doing rhetorically, I now turn to the larger implications of this rhetoric.

Conclusion

The rhetoric of weakness operating in the strategies remembering Carter remains relevant to the ways we understand the presidency as an institution. In contemporary politics, Trump often fixates on a fear of being seen as weak. Months after announcing his run for the presidency,

Trump released a book called Time to Get Tough: Make America Great Again!. In addition to literally calling for “toughness” as the solution to the country’s apparent problems, the front flap of the book also chides outgoing President Obama for “apologizing for America,” framing apology as weakness. Only by “forcing” (not negotiating) China into a “truly fair trade” would

America be made the “world’s leader once again.”55 Trump’s fear of weakness is also used to explain his own foreign policy decisions, such as when he explained that he pulled the country out of the Paris Climate Accords because the deal “weakened” national sovereignty and because he did not want “other countries laughing at us anymore.”56 Here, Trump makes the subtext of the

Carter-Reagan comparison explicit, literally stating that a desire to be “tough” is driving

American foreign policy. Indeed, Trump views weakness as the highest insult, frequently

87 portraying his enemies as weak and physically smaller than him by relying on nicknames like

“Liddle’ Bob Corker,” or “Little Marco Rubio,” recalling the diminutive portrayals of Carter.57

This persistent discourse shows that a rhetoric of weakness still pervades presidential politics, which memories of the Carter presidency help reify by establishing a masculine vision of

“strength” as necessary to avoid the apparent failure of Carter.

More broadly, in these interpretations of the past we see how the nature of memory can erase the contingencies and nuances of the historical record. Not every reference to the Carter presidency could explain the full context and implications of each decision made, so this observation is less about sinister intent and more about the practicality of remembering. There may be no escape from the fundamental distillation of a presidential history into ever-simplifying narratives. Still, as rhetorical critics we can take a closer looks at texts to see what is forgotten and de-emphasized in the ways presidential pasts are talked about. Rendering Carter as a simple story of a failed, weak man too small for the office ignores what he did accomplish, whether that was bringing morality into the presidency, putting human rights on the world stage, or emphasizing the value of diplomacy, which does not have to be remembered as inherently weak, but is perpetuated as such through these evocations of memory. One wonders how the presidency would change if we remembered Carter not just as a shorthand for the post-presidency, but also as a shorthand for a diplomatically-oriented, moral presidency.

I have argued that since he left office, Jimmy Carter’s presidency has become a useful inventional resource for later rhetorical appeals that have continued to deploy his presidency as a shorthand appeal to weakness. I used concepts of the enthymeme, association/dissociation, and comparison to theorize how these memories function discursively in their evocations. I then performed close readings of a variety of interpretations of the Carter presidency, beginning during the presidency itself, looking at initial interpretations during the 1980s, and concluding with a look at contemporary appeals during the Obama and Trump presidencies. I argued that these

88 appeals work to associate Carter with failure and weakness, using him as a barometer of failure, while then positively comparing themselves against that simplified failure. I maintain that in addition to helping understand the ways presidents pass into memory, these specific evocations of

Carter also serve to uphold masculine discourses around the presidency that preclude diplomatic action. In the following chapter, I will focus specifically on the Iran Hostage Crisis, which I argue is the definitive memory of the Carter years and will both further illustrate the discursive strategies developed here and continue to consider the ways Carter is remembered in policy discourse and popular culture.

I have illustrated how simplified memories of Carter function as presidential shorthands, but the methodology of my analysis extends to memories of other presidents, who also are remembered and deployed as strategic symbols. Reagan has become an almost messiah-like figure for modern conservatives, deployed as a shorthand for conservative greatness in an inverse of the strategies for remembering Carter I have summarized. The attempt to link Republican candidate Marco Rubio with Reagan illustrates this, with Rush Limbaugh proclaiming Marco

Rubio to be a “disciple” of Reagan, while another Rubio campaign ad was called “Morning Again in America,” attempting to craft a direct continuity with Reagan’s famous ad.58 A Democratic president or presidential candidate has their own pantheon of presidents. FDR is often invoked in terms of social welfare reform (even by independents like Bernie Sanders), JFK can be used as a comparison youthful or well-spoken candidates, and Barack Obama has seen his own status rise in the post-presidency, not unlike Carter. (His vice president Joe Biden, in particular, often references Obama in debates. 59 Beyond presidents, other prominent political figures also get reduced to shorthand. We only need to look at Martin Luther King Jr., whose more leftist views are often subsumed to a centrist rhetoric of unity to the point that King as a symbol can even be invoked as a politically-neutral shorthand for praising racial progress.60 Political discourse ransacks the past for inventional resources, and through rhetorical analysis, we can see that being

89 referred to as the next Carter or as a disciple of Reagan is in itself an act of interpretation.

Through these acts of remembering the past, we constitute our present.

90 References

1 Chris Cilizza, “Jimmy Carter was once attacked by a rabbit. On a boat.” The Washington Post, March 9, 2017, retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2017/03/09/jimmy-carter-was-once-attacked-by-a-rabbit-on-a-boat/. The retrospective article includes an image of the photograph.

2 Powell was reportedly embarrassed about causing the media response. Carter himself has referred to the story as “humorous” in hindsight. See Cody Combs, “Jimmy Carter explains 'rabbit attack',” CNN Politics Political Ticker, November 21, 2010, retrieved from: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/21/jimmy-carter-explains-rabbit-attack/.

3 N.a., “President survives bunny attack Carter rabbit creates credibility crisis,” The Globe and Mail (Canada), August 31, 1979, date accessed: 2017/10/23, www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic, Miron Chu, “A tale of Carter and the ‘Killer Rabbit’,” The New York Times, August 30, 1979, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/30/archives/a-tale-of-carter-and-the-killer-rabbit-president- orders-photograph.html, and N.a., “Carter Told To Yell 'Shoo' At Rabbits.” The Washington Post. Date Accessed: 2017/10/23. www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic.

4 Tom Paxton, Politics: Live, Flying Fish Records, 1988.

5 Jim O’Grady, “How Jimmy Carter's Face-Off with a Rabbit Changed the Presidency,” WNYC retrieved from: http://www.wnyc.org/story/hare-brained-history-curious-case-jimmy-carter-v- rabbit/.

6 See Bob Clark, “In Defense of Presidential Libraries Why the Failure to Build an Obama Library Is Bad for Democracy,” The Public Historian, 40.2 (2018): 96-103 and Benjamin Hufbauer, Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005.

7 Barry Schwartz and Howard Schuman, “History, Commemoration, and Belief: Abraham Lincoln in American Memory, 1945-2001,” American Sociological Review 70.2 (2005): 183-203 and Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. See also Robert Alexander Kraig, “The Tragic Science: The Uses of Jimmy Carter in Foreign Policy Realism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5.1 (2002), 1-30.

8 Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian Ott, “Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010, 7, 24, Kathleen J. Turner, ed., Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1998, 1-8, David Zarefsky, “Four Senses of Rhetorical History,” in Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, 20. See also John M. Murphy, “Barack Obama and Rhetorical History,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101.1 (2015): 214-215 and Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007.

91

9 Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” The American Historical Review 102.5 (1997): 1386-1403 and Bruce E. Gronbeck, “The Rhetorics of the Past: History, Argument, and Collective Memory,” in Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, 48, 56- 57.

10 James Jasinski, “A Constitutive Framework for Rhetorical Historiography: Toward an Understanding of the Discursive (Re)constitution of ‘Constitution’ in The Federalist Papers, in. Doing Rhetorical History : Concepts and Cases. Studies in Rhetoric and Communication, ed. Kathleen J. Turner, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,1998, 74.

11 Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. H.C. Lawson, Tancred, New York: Penguin Books, 2004. See also Lloyd F. Bitzer, “Aristotle's enthymeme revisited,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 45.4 (1959), 399-408.

12 Kendall R. Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication, 74.2 (2010): 216, 219.

13 Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969, 190.

14 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, 242.

15 Sexuality can also be part of these memories. For a look at queer monumentation, see Thomas R. Dunn, “Whence the Lesbian in Queer Monumentality? Intersections of Gender and Sexuality in Public Memory,” Southern Communication Journal 82.4 (2017): 203-215 and Thomas R. Dunn, Queerly Remembered, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016.

16 Mary E. Stuckey, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Presidency and Presidential Rhetoric,” The Review of Communication 10.1 (2010): 34-39. Though self-perpetuating, this is at least partially a result of all past presidents being male. With no female presidents to remember as of yet, recollections of the presidency are always male, whether dating back to the Founders as “great men” or more recent memories. If we expand presidential memories to include First Ladys, then we could complicate this to an extent, but these women are still remembered in relation to male presidents, or as a separate office.

17 Carol Cohn, “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” in Gendering War Talk, edited by Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, 227-46, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, 240-242.

18 Herbert Block, “Who's in charge here?”, Herblock, July 18, 1979, Photograph, retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2002735861/.

19 Herbert Block, “I'm going to give it to you straight -- I don't have any idea what I'm doing”, Herblock, photograph, retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2008676759/.

20 Edmund S. Valtman, “Inflation / Valtman '78,” November 24, 1978, photograph, retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2010646073/.

92

21 The cartoon’s implied prediction that Kennedy would run, despite comments to the contrary, proved prophetic; Kennedy would eventually offer a primary challenge against Carter. See Bill Garner, “Cheer up, Jimmy ... I'm behind you 1,000%!"”, Garner, 1979, photograph, retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2004679133/.

22 B. Drummond Ayres Jr., “Carter, Exhausted and Pale, Drops Out of 6-Mile Race,” The New York Times, September 16, 1979, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/16/archives/carter-exhausted-and-pale-drops-out-of-6mile- race-still-an.html. See also Sarah Pileggi, “JIMMY CARTER RUNS INTO THE WALL,” Sports Illustrated Vault, September 24, 1979, retrieved from: https://vault.si.com/vault/1979/09/24/jimmy-carter-runs-into-the-wall-it-happens-sudden-utter- exhaustion-to-a-lot-of-inexperienced-road-runners-who-try-too-hard-too-soon-but-when-the- tottering-competitor-happens-to-be-the-president-of-the-united-states-it-can-be-a. For an image of the incident, see an image by Phil Stewart at n.a., “Jimmy Carter,” Time.com, October 1, 1979, retrieved from: http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2025424_2025864_2025986,00.ht ml.

23 Glenn Kessler, “History lesson: What Ronald Reagan said,” September 12, 2012, The Washington Post, retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact- checker/post/history-lesson-what-ronald-reagan-said/2012/09/12/966e5ef4-fcf9-11e1-b153- 218509a954e1_blog.html?utm_term=.3f516ad16432.

24 Denise M. Bostdorff, “Idealism Held Hostage: Jimmy Carter and the Crisis in Iran,” in The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994, 144-175.

25 Ernest G. Bormann, “A Fantasy Theme Analysis of the Television Coverage of The Hostage Release and The Reagan Inaugural,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982), 133-145 and William Daughtery, “The Release: January 20, 1981,” Central Intelligence Agency, 6 Nov. 2014, retrieved from: https://www.cia.gov/news-information/blog/2014/the-release-january-20- 1981.html.

26 To a lesser extent we could apply this to non-incumbents from the same party of the incumbent as well, who have to balance articulating a new vision with not alienating existing party members, even as the incumbent president may be linked with them to some extent in public perception.

27 George H. W. Bush, “1980 Republican Presidential Candidates Debate,” CSPAN, April 23, 1980, retrieved from: https://www.c-span.org/video/?407380-1/1980-republican-presidential- candidates-debate.

28 The debate was held just a week before Election Day. Both candidates maneuvered to gain an advantage in the debates, with Carter refusing to participate in the first debate, which featured third-party candidate John B. Anderson, whom Carter felt would steal votes from him and not Reagan. See N.a., “The Carter/Reagan Debates,” PBS NewsHour, September 24, 2000, retrieved from: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/spc/debatingourdestiny/doc1980.html. In another scandal,

93 the Reagan campaign faced later allegations that it had obtained debate materials belonging to Carter before the debate, though later reporting indicates that the materials may not have been valuable and could have been leaked by a Democrat rather than stolen. See Morton Kondracke, “Debategate,” The New Republic, July 18, 1983, retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/89585/debategate-carter-reagan-debate-scandal and Craig Shirley, “Stefan Halper didn’t steal Carter’s debate prep books for Reagan. A Democrat did,” The Washington Post, May 23, 2018, retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/23/stefan-halper-didnt-steal- carters-debate-prep-books-for-reagan-a-democrat-did/.

29 N.a., “October 28, 1980 Debate Transcript,” 28 Oct. 1980, Commission on Presidential Debates. Transcript, retrieved from: http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-28-1980- debate-transcript

30 N.a., “October 28, 1980 Debate Transcript.”

31 N.a., “October 28, 1980 Debate Transcript.”

32 Carol Cohn, “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” 235.

33 For examples, see Ronald Reagan, “Remarks in Los Angeles at a California Republican Party Fund-raising Dinner,” May 25, 1982, The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/246070 and Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Republican Party Fundraising Dinner in Detroit, Michigan,” October 7, 1988, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/253420.

34 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Senate Campaign Fundraiser for Representative Ken Kramer in Denver, Colorado,” September 8, 1986, The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, retrieved from https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/254105.

35 Clark R. Mollenhoff, The President Who Failed: Carter Out of Control, New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1980 and Donald S. Spencer, The Carter Implosion: Jimmy Carter and the Amateur Style of Diplomacy, New York: Praeger, 1988. See also Gary W. Reichard, “Early Returns: Assessing Jimmy Carter,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 20.3 (1990): 603-620.

36 J. M. Sanchez, “Awaiting rehabilitation: The Carter presidency in political science textbooks,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 27.2 (1997): 284-296.

37 N.a., “Republican Party Platform of 1984,” August 20, 1984, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/273427.

38 Walter F. Mondale, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco,” July 19, 1984, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/216667.

39 “Debate Between the President and Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale in Louisville, Kentucky,” October 7 1984, The American Presidency Project, retrieved from:

94 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/217267, “Debate Between the President and Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale in Kansas City, Missouri,” October 21, 1984, retrieved from: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/debate-between-the-president-and-former-vice- president-walter-f-mondale-kansas-city.

40 Michael Beschloss, “The Ad That Helped Reagan Sell Good Times to an Uncertain Nation,” May 7, 2016, The New York Times, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/business/the-ad-that-helped-reagan-sell-good-times-to-an- uncertain-nation.html and n.a., “Top 10 Campaign Ads,” n.d., Time, retrieved from: http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1842516_1842514_1842575,00.ht ml.

41 John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A re-evaluation, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, 14-15 and Mark T. Rozell, “Carter Rehabilitated: What Caused the 39th President's Press Transformation?”, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 23.2: 317-33.

42 Gregory Eady, Justin S. Vaughn, and Brandon Rottinghaus, “Comparing Trump to the greatest- and the most polarizing-presidents in US history,” Brooking Institution, March 20, 2018, retrieved from: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/03/20/comparing-trump-to-the- greatest-and-the-most-polarizing-presidents-in-u-s-history/.

43 Robert Alexander Kraig, “The Tragic Science: The Uses of Jimmy Carter in Foreign Policy Realism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5.1 (2002), 1-30. In many ways, Bush and Reagan’s rhetoric from 1980 reflects the positioning of Carter, representing idealism, as “naive.”

44 Liz Peek, “Is Obama Another Carter?” Fox News, October 10, 2009, retrieved from: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/is-obama-another-carter. The opinion piece’s characterization of Carter and Obama as having “anemic” resumes is disingenuous, though the author actually picks up on Carter’s avoidance of policy specifics that I outlined in chapter two. See also N.a., “Is Obama the new Jimmy Carter?”, The Independent, October 5, 2010, retrieved from:https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/is-obama-the-new-jimmy-carter- 2097553.html.

45 Though deployed against Obama and further associated with the Democratic Party in a partisan appeal, I was unable to find instances of a Carter/Clinton comparison used as rhetorical strategy. Conservative criticism of Clinton centered more on painting him as corrupt or immoral, neither of which lend themselves to invoking Carter. There were a few defenses of Carter suggesting that he could actually be a positive example. See James Jay Carafano, “Comparing President Obama to Jimmy Carter is an Insult to Carter,” The Heritage Foundation.org, August 6, 2014, retrieved from: https://www.heritage.org/commentary/comparing-president-obama-jimmy-carter-insult- carter and David Skidmore, “Just Like Jimmy,” U.S. News & World Report, October 5, 2015, retrieved from: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2015/10/05/obamas-jimmy- carter-like-foreign-policies-are-his-most-successful.

46 Scott Shane, “Romney Team Tries Hanging a Jimmy Carter Label on Obama,” September 28, 2012, The New York Times, retrieved from:

95 https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/us/politics/romney-compares-obama-presidency-to- carters.html.

47 Charles P. Pierce, “The Carterization of Barack Obama,” July 22, 2015, Esquire, retrieved from: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a11725/obama-jimmy-carter-1211/.

48 Scott Shane, “Romney Team Tries Hanging a Jimmy Carter Label on Obama,” September 28, 2012, The New York Times, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/us/politics/romney-compares-obama-presidency-to- carters.html.

49 Louis Jacobson, “Mitt Romney says the Iranians released hostages in 1981 because they feared Ronald Reagan's approach to foreign policy,” PolitiFact.com, March 7, 2012, retrieved from: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/07/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says- iran-released-hostages-1981-becau/.

50 Marco Rubio, “Meet the Press—January 17, 2016,” Transcript, NBC News.com, January 17, 2016, retrieved from: https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-january-17-2016- n498251.

51 Louis Jacobson, “Mitt Romney says the Iranians released hostages in 1981 because they feared Ronald Reagan’s approach to foreign policy,” PolitiFact.com, March 7, 2012, retrieved from: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/07/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says- iran-released-hostages-1981-becau/.

52 Donald J. Trump, (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter post, 7 Sept. 2013, 5:36 AM, retrieved from: 5 Apr. 2016, 4:25 PM, retrieved from: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/376323127393136641.

53 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter post, 9 Oct. 2014, retrieved from: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/520158785542053888.

54 Donald J. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference | Osaka, Japan,” Whitehouse.gov, June 29, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings- statements/remarks-president-trump-press-conference-osaka-japan/.

55 Donald J. Trump, Time to Get Tough: Make America Great Again!, Regnery Publishing, 2015.

56 Donald J. Trump, “Statement by President Trump on the Paris Climate Accord,” 1 Jun. 2017, Whitehouse.gov, retrieved from: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2017/06/01/statement-president-trump-paris-climate-accord

57 Donald J. Trump, (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter post, 24 Oct. 2017, 7:20 AM, retrieved from: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/922830229525225477 and Donald J. Trump, (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter post. 18 Apr. 2017, 2:39 AM, retrieved from: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/854268119774367745

96

58 Rush Limgbuah, “Reagan Conservatism Dominated Iowa,” February 2, 2016, RushLimgbaugh.com, retrieved from: https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/02/02/reagan_conservatism_dominated_iowa/ and N.a., “Marco Rubio: Morning Again in America,” The New Republic, February 14, 2016, retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/political-ad-database/marco-rubio-morning-again-in- america/Mi8xNC8xNjpNb3JuaW5nIEFnYWluIGluIEFtZXJpY2E.

59 Given that Obama left office after two terms and on a higher note than Carter, he arguably needs less image rehabilitation. For Bernie Sanders’ use of FDR, see Holly Otterbein, “Sanders goes full FDR in defense of democratic socialism,” Politico, June 12, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/12/sanders-democratic-socialism-fdr-1362539 and for Biden’s use of Obama see J.M. Rieger, “Joe Biden’s two-word retort to an array of challenges: Barack Obama,” The Washington Post, September 17, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/17/joe-bidens-two-word-retort-an-array- challenges-barack-obama/.

60 Brandon M. Terry, “MLK Now,” Boston Review, September 10, 2018, retrieved from: http://bostonreview.net/forum/brandon-m-terry-mlk-now, Zaid Jilani, “Martin Luther King Jr. Spent the Last Year of His Life Detested by the Liberal Establishment,” The Intercept, January 15, 2018, retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2018/01/15/martin-luther-king-jr-mlk-day- 2018/. For a look at the “sanitization” of King and the civil rights movement, see Jeanne Theoharris, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, Beacon Press, 2018. For an interview with Theoharris, see Jeremy Scahill, “The Sanitizing of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks,” The Intercept, October 8, 2017, retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2017/10/08/the-sanitizing-of-martin-luther-king-and-rosa-parks/.

Chapter 4

Carter’s Signature Failure: Remembering the Iran Hostage Crisis

After two U.S. Navy boats were captured and the sailors accused of trespassing by Iran on January 12, 2016, it looked like another Iran Hostage Crisis could be developing.1 But like the

Iran Hostage Crisis did in 1981, the incident ended anticlimactically, in this case before it could begin, and the sailors were released the following day.2 Despite its brevity, the incident still returned the Iran Hostage Crisis to public discourse and provided rhetorical resources for

Republican candidates in the midst of their 2016 primary. Republicans used the perceived embarrassment of U.S. sailors (who were held on their knees at gunpoint) as a talking point to attack the “weakness” of incumbent Democratic president Barack Obama. In doing so, they relied on an existing memory of the Iran Hostage Crisis that is emblematic of the way remembering

President Carter is evoked as a rhetorical resource.

As I outlined in the previous chapter, remembering simplifies, and in the case of the Iran

Hostage Crisis, it distills the event into a narrative of failure, one that uses Carter as a shorthand for presidential weakness. Given my previous analysis, the appeals made by Republican candidates like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio during the brief naval incident should sound familiar, relying on an association of weakness with Carter based on a masculine logic of foreign policy and a portrayal of the crisis as a final failure. For example, Cruz mentioned the “weakness” of the

Obama presidency, saying that “The fastest thing that can change with a new president is foreign policy.” He connected that to Carter by adding that during the crisis, Iran released the hostages the day Reagan was sworn into office, implying a causal link.3 Marco Rubio said that Iran captured the sailors to “humiliate them” because of America’s “weakness,” adding that if he were elected, “...The world will know that America is no longer under the command of someone weak

98 like Barack Obama. And it will be like Ronald Reagan where as soon as he took office, the hostages were released from Iran.”4 Both Cruz’s and Rubio’s appeals to Obama’s weakness were made through evoking the memory of the Carter presidency.

In the previous chapter, I broadly considered the question of how a past presidency like

Carter’s is remembered through these evocations as a rhetorical strategy. In this chapter, I narrow my scope to focus on one historical incident in particular— the Iran Hostage Crisis—to both continue my analysis of Carter’s memory and to offer the crisis as a representative case study in how past presidential events can be remembered as shorthand through rhetoric. The Iran Hostage

Crisis is important to understanding Carter’s memory because it is often used in the kinds of enthymematic appeals I have considered and because it structures the way Carter’s presidency

(especially its conclusion) is remembered. As a representative example, in the PBS documentary

American Experience: The Presidents: Jimmy Carter, Carter’s defeat is the framing device for the entire documentary. It begins with the narrator discussing Carter’s “humiliating defeat,” and the second half of the documentary is literally subtitled “Hostage.”5 A negative interpretation of the

Iran Hostage Crisis structures the strategies of remembrance around Carter while further exemplifying the strategies I described in the previous chapter. Likewise, considering the crisis through a rhetorical lens reveals the acts of interpretation behind an often taken for granted way of remembering an important historical event, demonstrating the importance of interrogating public memory. In sum, the crisis is the most evoked memory of the Carter presidency and the one most representative of the format and strategic use of remembering him, making it a fitting final case study for my overall analysis.

I argue in this chapter that the Iran Hostage Crisis is remembered as a simplified narrative that frames the incident as a personalized struggle between Carter and the Iranians and suggests that Carter was unable to rescue the hostages due to his own personal weakness. In this way, it continues to reveal the associations of Carter (and more diplomatic foreign policy) with

99 weakness. This persistent interpretation of the crisis is then deployed as a shorthand that erases the contingencies of a complex historical event and renders state diplomacy as simply the confrontation between two individuals instead of two countries. Even as this interpretation of the past is used as a rhetorical appeal, it also reveals a larger sense of shame created by the crisis. I suggest that the film Argo, about a successful rescue operation adjacent to the crisis, is a piece of cinematic memory that helps illustrate this national shame attached to Carter’s handling of the crisis and perpetuated through later evocations.

I begin with a historical summary of the Iran Hostage Crisis and the crisis framing used by the Carter administration. I preface my analysis with a brief summary of how I understand memory and expanding that conceptualization to include cinematic memory. My analysis then proceeds in two parts. Both sections draw from a variety of mediated-responses from during and after the crisis and on archival research I conducted at the National Archives and Records

Administration in College Park, Maryland, looking at various congressional and popular letters written to Carter during the crisis to see how they framed the ongoing situation. First, I look at how these various portrayals consistently portray the incident not as a complicated diplomatic situation, but as a personal struggle where Carter was directly confronting (and being bested by), the Iranians, or more specifically, Iranian president Ayatollah Khomeini. Second, I look at the rhetoric of weakness present in the overall framing of the crisis, and how weakness is positioned as the most shameful aspect of the Crisis and something to be avoided. I conclude my analysis on a different scale, performing a reading of the film Argo as a piece of cinematic memory. I argue that by telling the story of a daring and successful rescue plan within the larger failure, Argo provides a chance for a satisfying resolution, and by privileging the story of an American agent outsmarting the Iranians through a bold plan, it reveals a larger national shame about the crisis and the country’s failure to resolve it. Argo’s diagnosis of the shame as an inability to take action and outsmart the Iranians reveals a sense that Carter, unlike the film’s protagonist, was unable to

100 provide the Hollywood ending that Americans apparently desired. I conclude by reflecting on how the approach to critiquing memory used throughout my thesis, when applied to a historical event like the Iran Hostage Crisis, helps us more clearly see the ways we interpret our national histories and reminds us that what may seem to be neutral references to the past are often rhetorical evocations awaiting further analysis by rhetorical critics.

Four Hundred and Forty-Four Days: Carter’s Crisis

The Iran Hostage Crisis began on November 4, 1979 when radical Islamic students took fifty-two hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. President Carter’s decision to allow the recently-deposed Shah of Iran in to the United States had angered the students, serving as the immediate catalyst of the events, but the origins of the crisis came much earlier. In 1953, the

United States had intervened to help install a Western-friendly Shah via a coup, the same unpopular Shah deposed in the 1979 revolution.6 As the Iranian revolution peaked in 1978 and

1979, anti-American sentiment boiled over in Tehran, culminating in the storming of the embassy.7

Carter’s rhetoric framed the hostage situation as a crisis, drawing public attention to the actions he took, such as refusing to purchase Iranian oil, deporting Iranian students in the country illegally, and holding a Thanksgiving Day prayer for the hostages. His decision to freeze Iranian assets would later prove important, as they became a key and controversial bargaining chip in the ongoing negotiations. (They were unfrozen as part of the final deal.)8 These moves provided

Carter with initial public support and doubled his approval ratings. Denise M. Bostdorff describes crisis rhetoric as allowing a president to “promote” a crisis to the American public to justify a decisive action in response. A successful resolution of a crisis enhances a president’s perceived

“toughness” and provides the kind of initial boost Carter experienced, but a failure to articulate

101 continued progress or to eventually resolve a crisis eventually leads to a loss of support and an appearance of passivity.9 In Carter’s case, as the negotiations stalemated, his failure to articulate examples of progress ultimately lost him support. An internal White House memo warned that the

U.S. public wanted the Carter administration to “do something,” recognizing that crisis rhetoric demands action.10 His crisis rhetoric had now backfired, making him appear too passive.

Just as Carter’s crisis framing “promoted” the crisis to the public and established its urgency, mediated reports on the crisis dominated headlines.11 The media framed the crisis as a

“showdown” with Iran and praised Carter’s initial decisions.12 Unfortunately for Carter, as the crisis continued, these reports reflected a sense of increasing urgency and unrest. By April 1980, a

U.S. News & World Report article titled “Frustration Boils Over” cited drops in approval rating and growing disapproval over the handling of the Iran Hostage crisis, with even “spokesmen for the hostages’ families” now voicing “disapproval.”13 Carter also faced a re-election campaign during the crisis, leading to more headlines. While Reagan actually did not specifically attack

Crater’s handling of the crisis, he did help frame it as “a humiliation and a disgrace to this country,” continuing a depiction of the crisis as emasculating and shameful.14 The crisis became the defining element of Carter’s first (and ultimately only) term, with The New York Times declaring 1980 “The Year of The Hostage.”15

After four hundred and forty-four days, the hostages were finally released on January 20,

1981, the same day as Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. As Ernest G. Bormann notes, the date itself and the media coverage of the event (which cut back and forth between the hostage release and

Reagan’s inauguration) helped provide resources for later rhetors to interpret the hostage release as being caused by Reagan’s election.16 Historians have suggested that the release date was unrelated to Reagan, but was instead intended to insult Carter, who was viewed by Iranians as the

“great Satan.”17 William Daughtery, one of the hostages, would later argue for this interpretation, saying that the release date was intended as a “final insult” to Carter.18 The more conspiratorially-

102 minded Gary Sick, an admittedly-biased former Carter aide, even accused Reagan’s campaign of contacting the Iranians to ask them to delay the release of the hostages to help Reagan’s election, a provocative but unproven claim.19

The 2012 film Argo confronted this shameful memory of the Iran Hostage Crisis, even if the film is not technically the story of the Iran Hostage Crisis. Instead of the fifty-two people taken hostage, Argo privileges the story of the six people able to escape the embassy and seek refuge with Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor. In 1980, those six officials were rescued as part of a CIA operation that disguised the officials as a film crew. As part of the operation, CIA agent

Tony Mendez went so far as to create a fake company and fake press for a fictional film called

Argo. Titled after the name of the fake movie and drawing from the recollections of Mendez,

Argo portrays this story, directed by and starring Ben Affleck.20 The film reflects the larger Iran

Hostage Crisis while centering its plot on the smaller-scale story of the successful rescue operation. Having established this historical context, I now turn to an analysis of the discourse around the Iran Hostage Crisis.

The Defeat of Jimmy Carter: Remembering the Iran Hostage Crisis as Personal Weakness

The historical events of the Iran Hostage Crisis are the resources that would later be used for remembering, and in turn, as rhetorical appeals by future politicians. I have detailed my thoughts on the rhetorical evocation of memory in detail in the introduction and outlined the specific practice of remembering presidencies (specifically Carter’s) in the previous chapter. I will therefore skip a larger theoretical overview, only reiterating that I will still understand memory as an interpretation of the past, with rhetors choosing to evoke certain historical events with specific framings to serve their present interests.21 These evocations perpetuate their specific interpretations of the past and simplify by nature, helping transform a presidency like Carter’s

103 into a shorthand, or an incident like the Iran Hostage Crisis into an idea or example of failure.22

Politicians like Marco Rubio can then deploy these interpretations as comparisons or enthymemes in the present, drawing on shared collective memories of Carter. The Iran Hostage Crisis can also be interpreted by popular culture, such as by the film Argo.

My expansion of remembering to include not just political evocations, but film as well, is not unusual, given that cinema has long been both concerned with memory and considered as a powerful form of memory in its own right.23 Through films like Argo, cinematic depictions of past events can themselves become part of the national memory, and they can form what Alison

Landsberg calls “prosthetic memories,” which are experienced as though they are a natural part of one’s memory.24 Many Americans may only know of Iran Hostage Crisis through Argo or by politicians using it as an example of Carter’s weakness. Argo holds the unique position of providing the visual resources many Americans will call upon in their memory of the event. It is therefore an intervention into the larger national memory. These types of cinematic memories can address larger traumas or shames, and as Peter Ehrenhaus argues in his analysis of Saving Private

Ryan, they can offer the chance for redemption or for Americans to be more heroic.25 (Indeed,

Argo was literally part of a CIA campaign to improve their image in popular culture.26) The chosen genre of a film is also important, as genres like Argo’s caper have generic conventions that, in their structure, often lead to a satisfying resolution, one apparently not provided in

Carter’s attempt to free the hostages.27

The memorialization seen in Republican evocations and films like Argo emerge from the initial framings of the Iran Hostage Crisis and Carter’s handling of it from 1979 to 1981.

Coverage of the crisis reflected a larger discourse that also encompassed Carter’s interactions with Congress during the crisis. To capture the logic and the rhetorical moves behind this discourse, I analyze not just media coverage of the crisis in my analysis, but congressional correspondence and internal discussions within the Carter administration and the Carter

104 administration’s response to congressional mail sent to them during the early days of the crisis. I

also include the 2012 popular culture portrayal in Argo.

My analysis makes use of archival research to provide additional primary texts that

interpret the Iran Hostage Crisis. In addition to including archival newspaper articles accessed

through the Nexis Uni database, I draw on archival research conducted at the National Archives

and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland (NARA II), in which I searched a

database of State Department files to find congressional mail and telegrams that were sent to

Carter at the beginning of the crisis, including messages from members of Congress and

messages from Americans forwarded and sent directly to the White House. In both cases, I

looked for documents showing how Carter’s administration responded to the crisis and how other

members of Congress and concerned citizens talked about the crisis.28 Though once again

drawing on myriad sources across genres, I remain focused on a particular type of text: pieces of

discourse talking about the Iran Hostage Crisis. In this section, I draw out the rhetorical

implications of this discourse to see how it functions rhetorically reflects ways of discussing the

crisis that ultimately shaped how it would be remembered in later years.

I highlight two interconnected strategies of talking about the crisis. First, I argue that the discourse around the Iran Hostage Crisis framed it as a personal struggle between Carter and the

Iranians, or even more specifically, Carter and Ayatollah Khomeni. (Khomeni did not directly order the storming of the embassy, but he was publicly supportive of the hostage-takers.) This framing turned Carter into a representation of an entire nation and reduced the crisis to a test of strength between two men. Second, operating within this personal struggle framework, much of the discourse focused on a rhetoric of weakness. The underlying logic of the Iran Hostage Crisis operated on a fear of avoiding being seen as “weak” or being “laughed at” by other countries.

Initial discourse expressed a desire for Carter to avoid that weakness, with that discourse shifting to more direct accusations of Carter’s personal failure as the crisis persisted. This discourse

105 perpetuates the same gendered logic I identified in my previous chapter, calling for Carter to more aggressively perform his foreign policy decisions, and its emphasis on Carter’s personal failing helps position the Iran Hostage Crisis as a definitive failing to Carter’s presidency.

The Iran Hostage Crisis as A Personal Struggle

The discourse around the Iran Hostage Crisis, both before and after it, focuses not on a

contest of nations, but on a conflict between two men: Carter and Khomeni.29 It often centers

solely on Carter as the protagonist of its narrative, relegating Khomeni to antagonist. We see this

substitution of Carter for the United States in language that makes statements focusing only on

Carter’s actions, as if he alone controlled the fate of the hostages and not an entire branch of

government as well as forces outside of his control.

Media coverage put an emphasis on the personal character of Carter as he confronted the

crisis. A U.S. News & World Report article called the crisis a “personal struggle,” depicting

Carter as being locked in a “test of wills.”30 The Washington Post concurred, saying that the crisis

was “a test not so much of policy as of character.”31 (In this, we see how Carter’s character could

still be a source of weakness, despite the moral image he constituted.) Other stories framed things

from the perspective of Carter trying to outwit the Iranians, with another U.S. News & World

Report piece talking about Carter’s policy “gamble.”32 The implications were clear: an inability to

free the hostages was a case of personal failure on Carter’s part. If Carter failed to defeat

Khomeni in this “test of wills,” which later politicians would claim that he did, then the

groundwork had been laid for the Iran Hostage Crisis’s positioning as a signature, defining

failure.

This simplification to a single figure and the desire for action from American political

leaders reflects what Carol Cohn calls the “unitary masculine actor problem.” State leaders like

106 Jimmy Carter become representations of an entire state, and foreign policy becomes simplified into a confrontation with a “singular male opponent,” in this case Iran. Taking a later Middle

Eastern conflict as her example, Cohn cites rhetoric from the Gulf War which saw Iraqi forces simplified into the unitary male actor of “Sadaam,” leading to statements like, “Sadaam really took a pounding today.” Sadaam is understood as Iraq, just as Carter is understood as America.33

Through this comparison, we see that remembering Carter is part of a larger foreign policy framework that relies on (and perpetuates) aggressive, gendered war rhetoric. In this framework, the state actors are always male, and they must always be “tougher” than their counterpart. Carter being remembered as a failure in this way shows the consequences of failing to uphold that masculine standard.

The material I analyzed from my archival research at NARA II offers other examples of this tendency to personalize the Crisis. Many members of Congress wrote Carter to call for his direct leadership. Mary Rose Oakar, in a letter of support to Carter, worried that the American public did not understand what he had already done and called for him to “personally address the

American public on this issue” because his “leadership” was needed.34 She emphasized Carter’s personal response. Senator Bill Beaufort sent a pair of telegrams to Carter. The first asked that

Carter, and “not the State Department,” take “affirmative action in the Iranian situation immediately” and called for “strong leadership.”35 Haden G. Greenhalgh and John F. Aylmer, a

Massachusetts state representative and senator, respectively, sent a letter saying that, “We can see no legitimate reason for further delay in bringing this trying moment to a successful conclusion, and this nation looks to the Office of the President for that display of leadership to achieve success.”36 In all of these examples, leadership was demanded, but it was a specific kind of leadership that was both active and presidential. Along those lines, Congressman Julian C. Dixon wrote that “As President and Commander-in-Chief, I acknowledge your exclusive responsibility to conduct negotiations in this sensitive situation.”37 Perhaps some of the discourse about the

107 crisis was a natural result of the continued assertion of executive power. Members of Congress, and the American people as well, they implied, were not looking to the State Department, but to the president himself for leadership. Once again, this was not just any leadership, but “strong,” leadership, and this fear of weakness was the other defining strategy seen in the emerging discourse.

The World “Laughing” at the United States: Rhetoric of Weakness

The second, and connected, element prominent in framing the Iran Hostage Crisis is an obsession with weakness, or more specifically, a desire for Carter, and by extension the United

States, to avoid the appearance of weakness. In this way, the case study of the Iran Hostage Crisis continues to illustrate the strategies relying on appeals to weakness in remembering presidents that I described in my third chapter. It also helps us understand what is positioned as Carter’s main failing: in this discourse, he was too “weak” to free the hostages. We see this discourse not only in direct attacks against Carter, but in a persistent fear of the United States being either

“laughed at” or seen as weak. Congressional correspondence that illustrates this, as does the news stories after the failed rescue attempt. Around that time, the American public was growing increasingly frustrated, and that frustration boiled over after the rescue failed attempt.

My archival research uncovered a consistent theme of Americans concerned about being made out to be fools by the Iranians and a desire for Carter to display traditionally conceptualized strength. Many members of U.S. Congress wrote to Carter through congressional mail, along with concerned members of the public. Though often offering initial support and praise for Carter’s caution, many were concerned that the United States was being too weak and were also clear that if the crisis persisted (which it did), more aggressive action would be needed. One representative example was a letter from Representative William H. Harsha who wrote “the actions of the

108 current Iranian Government against American citizens in that country cannot go unchallenged. I urge you to exert the strongest possible leadership.” He continued, “The time has come for our lily-livered State Department to get off its knees and play hard-ball with the Ayatollah

Khomeini.”38 This message makes several rhetorical moves. It directly portrays American diplomats as “lily-livered,” meaning not only weak but also cowardly, and “on their knees,” indicating a submissiveness toward the enemy.39 That enemy is also not just the Iranians, but

Ayatollah Khomeini specifically, directly personifying the enemy as a unitary state actor.

The idea of weakness was portrayed as an active threat to the country. Congressman

George Hansen “respectfully demanded” that Carter abandon the “disastrous path of accommodation and appeasement” and “adopt simpler and more direct ways to protect our nation.”40 Not only does Hansen frame “accommodation,” which could be understood as inaction, as weak, but he makes it a direct danger to the nation, which must be protected. (The association of accommodation with weakness recalls the rhetoric from George H. W. Bush in 1980 framing

Carter’s diplomatic stance toward Cuba as “naive.”) In other words, it reads as an appeal to peace through strength, operating on the logic that direct action must be taken. Representative

Toby Roth was equally blunt in his assessment. He wrote, “While the leadership of our country is mired in dangerous inaction, innocent Americans are paraded blindfolded and handcuffed around

Tehran. The lawlessness in Iran is a direct result of three years of a foreign policy of appeasement and placation.”41 Roth directly linked “inaction” with “appeasement” and weakness, which in turn had apparently led to the chaos in Iran. J. Kenneth Robinson added an element of concrete physical danger to the crisis, warning that the hostages were “being abused” and that because of that “The United States must act decisively to rescue our people in Iran.”42 These appeals consistently argue that inaction (with that action often connoted as aggressive and military-like) made the country’s position weaker, when what American citizens needed was more “strength” from their leadership.

109 Indeed, “strengthening” the position of the United States was a frequent theme.43 Many of the messages called for decisive, strong action. A telegram from member of Congress Eugene V.

Atkinson said “To hell with worrying about oil or good relations with Iran” and promised support for “positive, decisive actions.”44 Another member of Congress sent a signed petition calling for

“firm and decisive economic action against the Iranian government.” Interestingly, this letter did acknowledge the possibility of aggressive economic action, though it closed with another call for a “strong and resolute approach to any negotiations,” saying that the “American people expect… no less.”45 As the crisis continued, the lack of progress led Senator J. Bennett Johnston and others to call for a “stronger response to this blatant act of terrorism.”46 Many of these messages were concerned about negotiating position, believing that Carter needed show a strong “presence” against the Iranians in a display of strength.47 Others were open to the use of force if needed, calling for the most “stern” or “strong” stances possible by the Carter administration.48

The American public also wrote to Carter, reflecting a similar discourse. Many

Americans seemed impacted by the personal struggles of the hostages. One member of Congress passed along a constituent’s suggestion that perhaps “biographical sketches” should be sent out so that “public sentiment would be worked up for them.”49 Associated Builders and Contractors,

Inc., a trade association, sent a collection of letters from their employees, with their president writing, “We are looking to you, as the elected leader of our nation, to represent the feelings of the majority of Americans that international blackmail is an unacceptable form of diplomacy.”50

Others even called on a direct relationship with the hostages. One letter was on behalf of Barbara

Timm, who was trying to arrange for the government to fly her and her family to Washington to meet with her son after his eventual release, and for reimbursement for long-distance calls made after he was taken hostage.51 Her letter serves as a reminder that the hostages themselves were people with friends and families, and in addition to the material, logistical concerns raised by the crisis, the families of the hostages also helped add to the sense of urgency and helped make it

110 more concrete and in need of resolution by Carter. A letter from the Cobre Valley Junior

Woman’s Club in Arizona claimed that one of the hostages was a resident of their town. The club called for Carter to “make all haste” in freeing the hostages and said that “as a strong and proud country, the United States of America must not allow itself to be cowed and bent by the violence and criminal acts of other nations.”52 A Minnesota senator sent Carter a series of letters from students at Mankato State University.53 These letters were mostly supportive and arguably more nuanced than the congressional mail Carter received. They also articulated a clear sense of identification with the hostages and a strong desire for Carter to free them as soon as possible.

Carter’s inability to meet that desire would add to growing frustration among the American public.

The Carter administration of course replied to these various letters and telegrams.

Responding to a letter from Eugene V. Atkinson, secretary J. Brian Atwood included a response from the Carter administration that, with occasional minor alterations, appears to have been the stock reply for much of the early correspondence. The response describes Carter (“aided by his senior advisers”) as “directing with a calm and firm hand the efforts of the government to secure the safe release of the Americans held hostage there.” The response indicates that Carter has been assured that the hostages were not being harmed and also includes a list of actions already taken, such as not purchasing Iranians oil and freezing of Iranian assets. It closes by reminding its recipient that “the situation is extremely difficult and delicate.”54 This measured response makes the move of both establishing Carter’s place within a larger executive branch (noting the presence of aides) and calling for patience in the face of a delicate situation. It also plays in to larger crisis framings, listing actions already taken. However, as the crisis continued, the response appears to have stayed relatively consistent, with no new actions added, and never did it include more aggressive language that might have performed the more violent, decisive response many

Americans apparently wanted.

111 Even as he was accused of inaction and pressure mounted to avoid this weakness, Carter did take action. Beyond the diplomatic actions and handling of Iranian assets I have already described, Carter also gave the order that many had been demanding for months: he ordered a daring rescue operation. In April 1980, President Carter ordered “Operation Eagle Claw,” a rescue operation that was unsuccessful due to helicopter failure, killing 8 servicemen.55 This was the only rescue attempt, and its failure marked a historical turning point and a growing outpouring of frustration from the American public.

The following day, The Washington Post curated a series of reactions to the failed rescue attempt from the American public that reveals the ongoing concern that the crisis was reflecting

American weakness abroad. The curation of reactions is in itself a crafted response to the Carter administration’s rescue attempt, framing the comments in a way that ultimately creates a feeling of anger toward Carter for the ongoing crisis. I include several of the quotations from the article both to represent a larger trend and turn toward negativity in media coverage of the crisis at that point, and to show the specific discourse being used by the American public. One man interviewed called the rescue attempt, “Too little, too late.” This foreshadows the later sense that

Carter had not done enough. Another interviewee said that, “We’ve been embarrassed in the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam,” and worried that the rest of the world was, “Laughing at us,” illustrating the sense of humiliation. Many wanted a harder line from Carter, with one man saying that the

U.S. should simply take the hostages and warn Iran that, “‘You kill them, fine, and we’ll wipe your country off the map…” Another woman called for action, saying, “We’ve got to do something drastic soon… The Iranians have taken advantage of and made fools of the Americans for too long. The whole life style of the U.S. is jeopardized.” This comment shows that this woman, like others interviewed, had internalized Carter’s own crisis framing (action needs to be taken “soon”), and shared a larger worry that Carter, representing America, looked weak (or like a “fool”) in the face of the Iranians.56 By association with past events like the Bay of Pigs and

112 interpretation of his crisis response as weak, Carter became a distillation of a perception of increasing American ineffectiveness.

The focus on Carter’s inefficacy and weakness after the rescue attempt is interesting, given that he had literally just ordered a rescue operation, one that had not succeeded due to mechanical failure. Unless one blames Carter for mechanical failure, it seemed that Carter had done exactly what his detractors had wanted. (They obviously preferred a successful rescue operation, but it was undeniable that Carter had tried exactly the kind of decisive and possibly risky action many demanded.) One can only speculate how the narrative of the Iran Hostage

Crisis would have changed had the operation led to the dramatic rescue of the hostages.

Unfortunately for Carter, the actual resolution of the Iran Hostage Crisis was an anticlimactic release and not a dramatic rescue, which provided ample rhetorical resources for an unflattering interpretation of his handling of the situation.

The importance of this climax cannot be overstated, as it provided the resources for later interpretations through the timing of the release (on Reagan’s inauguration day) and the unsatisfying nature of it after four hundred and forty-four days. Ultimately, it was not a dramatic rescue that would free the hostages, nor would it happen (technically) within Carter’s administration, and the resolution of the Iran Hostage Crisis only added to the shameful memory around Carter. Coverage of the incident, with its suggestion of a causal link with Reagan’s election positioned the crisis as a signature failure for Carter.57

A Washington Post article at the end of Carter’s presidency called it a “Deep, Painful

Wound” and linked the release of the hostages with Carter leaving the presidency, saying, “As

Carter left the capital as a private citizen, the hostages headed home.”58 The unsatisfying ending of the crisis was linked in the public memory with the end of Carter’s own term. In many ways this narrative is more satisfying than Iran simply releasing the hostages after negotiating with

Carter, as by electing Reagan, the American public’s decisions would play a part in the hostages’

113 release, restoring a sense of agency to the country’s national image and completing the

memorialization of Carter’s role in the crisis as a failure. However, the 2012 film Argo imagined

a more redemptive version of the Iran Hostage Crisis as it adapted a true story to provide the

missing Hollywood ending.

Argo as Redemption

I use an analysis of the film Argo to interrogate the larger memory of the Iran Hostage

Crisis and, by extension, the Carter presidency. I consider Argo significant because it is the most popular representation of the Iran Hostage Crisis, having achieved critical acclaim and box office success. Outside of archival footage of news coverage from the original crisis and later documentaries, Argo is the most prominent attempt to interpret the crisis, and the one that is likely most familiar to many Americans. Yet, the film Argo is actually about the smaller, successful rescue within the crisis, not the long standoff and unsatisfying resolution. I still consider this to be about the Iran Hostage Crisis, however, because the way Argo re-frames the crisis reveals the larger public discourse around it.

The plot of Argo focuses on Tony Mendez’s daring rescue of the six diplomats trapped in the Canadian embassy in Tehran, while the hostage situation at the U.S. embassy frustrates the

U.S. public in the background of the film. I focus on two elements of the plot. First, the use of the

American flag as a kind of metonymy serves to create a feeling that the country’s image is being literally “stepped on” and embarrassed abroad. Second, the protagonist is switched from Carter to

Tony Mendez, a competent spy who successfully completes a caper right under the noses of the

Iranian police and frees the hostages. With this plot, Mendez, representing the country as a member of the CIA, does what Carter could not: defeat the Iranians. Whereas Carter’s rescue attempt failed, Mendez’s succeeds. I take the plot to diagnose the shame of the Iran Hostage

114 Crisis as Carter’s weakness being unable to free the hostages, further supported by what Argo presents as redemption: bold action by a savvy American who wins a decisive, satisfying victory against the Iranians.

Reflecting a sense of national unease, Argo begins with an American flag on fire. An

Iranian protestor waves it back and forth as an angry crowd chants “Magbar Ahmrika!” There are no subtitles. We do not need them. The meaning is clear: “death to America.” The burning flag is an obvious symbol, but effective for the opening sequence. The United States is on fire, attacked and insulted by the Iranians. The crisis and their taking of the embassy insults American identity, represented by the flag. The flag imagery is shown again in a later clip of an Iranian crowd literally walking across the flag to emphasize the point. The flag imagery becomes a kind of metonymy. (Kenneth Burke defines metonymy as a strategy that works “to convey some incorporeal or intangible state in terms of the corporeal or tangible,” in this case making the idea of the nation-state a tangible object.) 59 The flag is a metonym of the United States and its trampling an example of the symbolic violence and humiliation of the country during the crisis.

The flag makes the shame of the Iran Hostage Crisis against the American national memory clear from the film’s beginning.

The flag metonym leads into a feeling of unrest in the Argo’s depiction of the larger

American public. The choice of news clips in the film continues this literal trampling of the flag as a representation of American reaction. Most of the news clips focus on how long the crisis has been going on, creating a sense of frustration that it has not been resolved. Throughout the film, characters wonder why the Americans have not done more. One person interviewed asks why they cannot just “shoot a couple” of the hostage takers. The American public, according to Argo, desired action. The lack of action had become a national humiliation to an impatient and frustrated public.

115 This sense of humiliation is further reflected in the sequence depicting the taking of the embassy, which is chaotic and embarrassing to the Americans. The embassy workers are clearly not in control as the students rush in, taking them at gunpoint. By contrast, the rest of the film portrays the CIA in a more active position and never delves into the chaos of the introduction again. If the Iran Hostage Crisis was a chaotic failure, the Canadian Caper was an orderly CIA rescue plan that was ultimately successful, as revealed by the genre shift after the introduction.

After the flag imagery establishes the shame of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the shift to Mendez’s rescue attempt works toward finding redemption for that humiliation.

The structure of the film offers a direct confrontation between Iran and the United States, with a single man standing in for country, not unlike how Carter was pitted against Khomeini. In this case, however, the United States is represented by CIA agent Tony Mendez. Though the story is real, the plot Mendez uses fits nicely into the generic framework of the caper. His unorthodox plan is to create a fake movie and smuggle out the diplomats by disguising them as a film crew on a location scout. Affleck also adds an invented-for-the-film obstacle to increase tension: the CIA calls to cancel the operation. Mendez is ordered to leave the diplomats behind. However, he refuses, deciding to go through with the plan himself. Here he moves beyond a grounded depiction of a CIA agent to a more typical movie protagonist, one who does not always play by the rules and has to ignore bad orders from his incompetent superiors. This could reflect a larger frustration with the time. The people in charge (whether at the CIA or in the White House) do not know the best course of action, but the bold agent Tony Mendez does.

The film’s desire for Mendez to be the hero is also reflected in the decision to downplay the role of Canadians in the film and to make the escape more dramatic. For the most part, the actual plan did happen, but there were several controversial changes made for the depiction in the film. These changes made to the actual story of the Canadian Caper reveal decisions by Affleck and the screenwriters regarding the ways they portray the memory of the operation. The most

116 striking changes are the downplaying of Canadian assistance and the addition of a dramatic final escape.

Regarding the de-emphasis of the Canadians, I understand the move to re-focus on

Mendez as privileging an American perspective. Given genre convention and the presumably

American target audience, this likely served several functions, but the rhetorical impact of having

the Americans almost solely responsible for freeing the diplomats is clear. The film would be less

cathartic if Mendez only assisted the Canadians. Instead Mendez, also a kind of metonymy of the

United States, needs to be the primary protagonist. Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor is still

heroic in the film, but there is a reason the real-life rescue was known as the Canadian Caper. The

Canadians were involved in most of the plan, whereas Affleck portrays them as heroic sidekicks

to Mendez as the protagonist. Jimmy Carter, while praising the film as a “great drama” that

deserved to win the Academy Award, said “ninety percent of the contributions to the ideas and

the consummation of the plan was Canadian.” He called Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor the

real “hero.”60 These changes were necessary to alter the genre, though, because Affleck needed

his hero to be Mendez.

The dramatic ending also serves a rhetorical function by making the ultimate “victory”

more satisfying. The film’s climatic sequence is almost wholly invented by Affleck and the

screenwriters, intercutting Mendez and the diplomats slowly moving through the airport and

dealing with a suspicious guard with scenes of the Iranians in close pursuit. Eventually, after

Mendez’s friend in Hollywood dramatically answers a phone call at the last minute to confirm

their cover, Mendez and the diplomats board the plane. Even then, the film still has the Iranians

literally chasing the plane down the runway before it reaches safety. It is a fitting end to an

admittedly well-made caper, but unsurprisingly, reality was far less cinematic. The Canadians had

already booked the tickets and Mendez simply went through the airport with the diplomats, the

plan working as intended. The film’s ending reflects a desire not just to win, but to humiliate the

117 Iranians with a daring victory. A simple rescue would not be satisfying enough given the sense of

shame and humiliation established in the introduction. The sense of a dramatic climax also helps

redeem the anticlimactic actual release of the hostages. It both offers something more exciting

than a simple release and makes the release the direct result of American intervention, restoring

agency to the United States.

Having established the sense of shame through its flag imagery and then solved its own smaller-scale crisis through Tony Mendez’s bold, successful caper, the ending of Argo takes on a theme of triumph. One of the diplomats shakes Mendez’s hand as triumphant music plays. After giving them a moment to exhale on the plane, we cut back to the United States. A news clip shows an anchor saying that there is finally some “good news.” The final sequence also provides a feeling of resolution. Mendez returns to his home, where his estranged wife greets him at the door. They embrace, and while their hug is not romantic, there is a feeling of reconciliation. In a striking visual choice that conveys the feeling of redemption, an American flag can be seen in the background of Tony and his wife’s embrace, flying peacefully in the wind. This contrasts with the burning and disrespected flags seen throughout the film. If the opening flag represents disorder and an affront against America, then this ending sequence, with its feelings of warmth from its focus on family, suggests a kind of healing for the country. As Mendez watches television in bed with his son, the only emotion we feel is one of wholeness, even if the larger crisis is unresolved.

The decision to create a feeling of redemption with this conclusion means that Argo recognizes and identifies a national shame in need of healing. Given the focus on an active protagonist outsmarting the Iranians, the film diagnoses the shame as a failure to act. Analyzing

Argo, which address the shame, helps outline the larger contours of public memory around the crisis. If Argo is the story of a crafty American outsmarting the Iranians to free the trapped diplomats with a decisive, successful plan, then the actual memory of the Iran Hostage Crisis is the story of an American public embarrassed by Jimmy Carter, an indecisive American who was

118 unable to rescue the hostages. In its context and framing, Argo reflects but also implicitly takes part in this larger discourse using a simplified memory of the Iran Hostage Crisis. As a film, it offers redemption, and as a text it offers a glimpse of a larger, prevalent discourse about the way we talk about Jimmy Carter and the presidency. This is why I close my analysis not by looking at the discourse directly surrounding Carter, but by providing an examination of a popular film.

Argo shows that ways of remembering Carter have made their way into popular culture, and in turn, popular culture portrayals can help us see the larger ways of remembering the past. If Argo is a redemption, then the Carter presidency’s handling of the Iran Hostage Crisis must be a national shame. And if the crisis is a national shame, it is a shame closely associated with the end of Carter’s presidency.

Conclusion

Argo is a true story, but it functions as a hypothetical of sorts, with its placement adjacent

to the Iran Hostage Crisis giving a glimpse of what a successful rescue operation may have felt

like to a frustrated American public, if only Carter could have done what Mendez (or, in reality,

the Canadians) had done. I conclude with a hypothetical of my own: what would have happened

if Operation Eagle Claw had been successful and Carter’s rescue operation had brought the

hostages home? Carter did order the operation and it was no personal failing on his part that led to

its failure, but unfortunately for Carter, we do not remember hypotheticals. This thought

experiment reveals some interesting points about the presidency and presidential memory. First,

memory is by definition dismissive of contingency. Of course, we could always remember falsely

or imagine a counterfactual, but ultimately, the historical record contains no traces of what could

have been to be used in remembering. In this way, we are left only with results to be used as

rhetorical resources, and unfortunately for Carter, the results were not positive. What is forgotten

119 in this narrative is the actions Carter did take, like the rescue operation or the controversial if arguably successful freezing of Iranian assets.

Moreover, it could be argued that, all things considered, Jimmy Carter did free the hostages. The interpretation of the crisis propagated by Republicans and often implied by textbooks and mediated coverage is that the Iranians were threatened by Reagan’s “stronger presence.” At the risk of wandering in to historical debate: this is not history. This is memory, an editorialized interpretation from the available historical events stringing together a series of what are admittedly failures to remember the past in a specific way for political purposes. One could just as easily offer the following interpretation (which many historians have adopted in recent years): while Khomeini’s hatred of Carter made negotiations difficult, the Carter administration did eventually secure the release of all the hostages without the use of force, even if the symbolic move of releasing the hostages on the day of Reagan’s inaugural clouded this fact. Just as the rescue attempt did not inevitably fail and just as the crisis did not have to happen the way it did, so too is memory not a teleology. The Iran Hostage Crisis did not have to be remembered as a definitive failure for Carter, nor does any historical event have an inevitable or inherent interpretation. Rather, the crisis is remembered in certain ways by certain political actors because of the deliberate interpretive choices made by those who framed and later remembered the event.

This is the rhetoric of remembering past presidents. The use of historical events in the present is not a neutral perpetuation of history, but is in itself a deliberate re-framing of the past. As rhetoricians, we are uniquely well-positioned to question these prevailing interpretations and draw out their consequences.

This re-framing of the Iran Hostage Crisis remains relevant today. The recent death of

Tony Mendez illustrated Argo’s significance, with obituaries describing him as the “Argo” spy.61

Over thirty years later, the crisis was still exigent enough to inspire an Oscar-winning film.

Moreover, the Iran Hostage Crisis has remained a generative historical resource for rhetorical

120 evocations of memory, as we see in the comparisons drawn in the introduction by Cruz and Rubio or by the rhetoric from the Romney campaign highlighted in the previous chapter. Even in 2019,

Trump could conclude a dismissal of Carter by saying “Look at what happened with Iran… they tied him up in knots,” which he said led to Reagan’s election.62 The appeal is a coherent enthymeme. Carter was “tied up in knots,” weakened and beaten by the Iranians. It is positioned as the origin story of Reagan.

I understand the Iran Hostage Crisis as the definitive memory of the Carter presidency because of evocations like these. Carter himself and possibly more favorable historians might make the case for the Camp David Accords as the definitive accomplishment of the Carter presidency. I am not suggesting that these diplomatic successes were not significant, or that the negative reaction to the “malaise” speech and the stagflation of the late 70s is not important either. But these are historical concerns, and my concern is memory and the discourse emerging from it. The discursive elements used in remembering Carter, including the inherent simplification and narrativization of his presidency and the association with weakness and failure, are all seen in the ways that the Iran Hostage Crisis is evoked in the present.

I have argued that the Iran Hostage Crisis is remembered as a simplified narrative drawing on initial framings that emphasized the crisis as a personal struggle revolving around

Carter and positioned the failure as the result of Carter’s personal weakness. I began with a brief historical overview of the crisis and the ways Carter’s crisis rhetoric helped establish its urgency.

Then, I looked at various examples, drawn from media archives and the National Archives, of how members of Congress, the media, and the American public talked about the crisis, which led to persistent interpretations of it that remain in the ways of remembering the Carter presidency.

This way of remembering remains significant as both a case study in presidential remembering and as an emblematic example of how Carter is talked about in political discourse. My larger analysis of this presidential memory complete, I will now turn to the question of Carter’s post-

121 presidency in my conclusion. The very decisions and character traits that have been remembered as “weak” and leading to Carter’s failure have valorized Carter’s post-presidential work. A comparison of the memories of President Carter and Ex-President Carter will interrogate what it is we actually want from our presidents while offering concluding thoughts on the practice of remembering presidencies and the implications of presidential memory for rhetoricians and the

American public.

122 References

1 Helene Cooper and David E. Sanger, “Iran Seizes U.S. Sailors Amid Claims of Spying,” The New York Times, January 12, 2016, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/world/middleeast/iran-holds-us-navy-boats-crew.html

2 Fred Barbash, Missy Ryan, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Iran releases captured U.S. Navy crew members,” The Washington Post, January 13, 2018, retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/13/iran-sends-mixed-message- on-quick-release-of-u-s-navy-crews/?utm_term=.b9484db2562a.

3 Ted Cruz, “Ted Cruz speaks out about his approach to foreign policy; Paul Ryan lays out his party's agenda for 2016,” Fox News, January 17, 2016, Transcript, retrieved from: https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/ted-cruz-speaks-out-about-his-approach-to-foreign-policy- Paul-ryan-lays-out-his-partys-agenda-for-2016.

4 Marco Rubio, “Meet the Press—January 17, 2016,” Transcript, NBC News.com, January 17, 2016, retrieved from: https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-january-17-2016- n498251

5 Adriana Bosch, dir., American Experience: The Presidents: Jimmy Carter, PBS, 2002. Though the Iran Hostage Crisis structures the documentary, it does end on a redemptive note, highlighting Carter’s humanitarian work.

6 For further contextualization of U.S.-Iran relations, see David Patrick Houghton, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, and Russell Leigh Moses, Freeing the Hostages: Reexamining U.S.-Iranian Negotiations and Soviet Policy, 1979-1981, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. For a documentary history taking a longer view of Iran-U.S. relations, also see Yonah Alexander and Allan Nanes eds., The United States and Iran: A Documentary History, Frederick: University Publications of America, Inc., 1980.

7 For an account of the revolution and the subsequent taking of the U.S. embassy in a larger historical context, see David R. Farber, Taken Hostage: the Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Interestingly, despite growing increasingly generic as it progresses, the introduction of Argo actually addresses the context leading up to the embassy in its artistic, animated introduction. See Ben Affleck, dir., Argo, Warner Bros., 2012.

8 Stuart Taylor Jr., “Issue And Debate; Should Reagan Honor Deal With Iran?”, The New York Times, 31 Jan. 1981, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/31/world/issue-and- debate-should-reagan-honor-deal-with-iran.html?pagewanted=all.

9 Denise M. Bostdorff, “Idealism Held Hostage: Jimmy Carter and the Crisis in Iran,” in The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994, 144-175.

123

10 Bostdorff, “Idealism Held Hostage: Jimmy Carter and the Crisis in Iran,” 144-148.

11 Bostdorff, “Idealism Held Hostage: Jimmy Carter and the Crisis in Iran,” 144-175.

12 N.a., “U.S. Builds For a Showdown,” U.S. News & World Report, December 3, 1979, Nexis Uni, accessed 19 Feb. 2019. See also “Iran Countdown,” The Washington Post, November 30, 1979, Nexis Uni, accessed 19 Feb. 2019.

13 N.a., “Frustration Boils Over,” U.S. News & World Report, April 7, 1980, Nexis Uni, accessed 19 Feb. 2019.

14 Douglas E. Kneeland, “Reagan And Carter Attack Each Other Over The Hostages,” The New York Times, October 22, 1980, Nexis Uni, accessed 19 Feb. 2019.

15 Steven V. Roberts, “The Year Of The Hostage,” The New York Times, November 2, 1980, Nexis Uni, accessed 19 Feb. 2019.

16 Ernest G. Bormann, “A Fantasy Theme Analysis of the Television Coverage of The Hostage Release and The Reagan Inaugural,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982), 133-145.

17 Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam, New York: Grove Press, 2006.

18 William Daughtery, “The Release: January 20, 1981,” Central Intelligence Agency, 6 Nov. 2014, retrieved from: https://www.cia.gov/news-information/blog/2014/the-release-january-20- 1981.html.

19 Gary Sick, October Surprise, Three Rivers Press, 1992. For a less conspiratorial take that focuses on internal White House politics and what Sick alleges as an inability to craft a clear policy, see Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran, New York: Penguin Group, 1986.

20 Ben Affleck, Argo, Warner Brothers, 2012. Mendez initially told the story as part of his own memoir, and retold it as part of a 2007 Wired article. Coinciding with the film’s release, he gave a more detailed account. See Antonio J. Mendez and Malcolm McConnel, The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA, New York: William Morrow & Co., 1999, Joshua Bearman, “How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans From Tehran,” WIRED.com, 4 Apr. 2007, retrieved from: https://www.wired.com/2007/04/feat-cia/, and Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio, Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, New York: Penguin Group, 2012.

21 Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian Ott, “Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010, 7, 24, Kathleen J. Turner, ed., Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1998, 1-8, David Zarefsky, “Four Senses of Rhetorical History,” in Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, 20.

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22 Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” 1386-1403, Gronbeck, “The Rhetorics of the Past: History, Argument, and Collective Memory,” in Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, 48, 56-57, and Kraig, “The Tragic Science: The Uses of Jimmy Carter in Foreign Policy Realism,” 1-30.

23 Susannah Radstone, “Cinema and Memory,” in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010, 334, 341- 342.

24 Allison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memories: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 26-28.

25 Peter Ehrenhaus, “Why We Fought: Holocaust Memory in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18.3 (2001), 334.

26 Tony Shaw and Tricia Jenkins, “From Zero to Hero: The CIA and Hollywood Today,” Cinema Journal 56 (2017): 91-113. Perhaps the CIA’s focus on collective memory had some merit, as a study that after watching Argo, viewers expressed a more positive opinion of the CIA. See Michelle C Pautz, “Argo and zero dark thirty: Film, government, and audiences,” PS, Political Science & Politics 48 (2015), 120-128.

27 In my classification of Argo as a caper film, I draw on Stuart M. Kaminsky, “Variations on a Major Genre: The Big Caper Film,” in American Film Genres, Pflaum Publishing, 1974, 75-77. There is disagreement on the exact nuances among thrillers, capers, and heist films, and several good considerations of these genres and their impact in American film culture. See Daryl Lee, The Heist Film: Stealing with Style, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014 and Jeannette Sloniowski and Jim Leach, eds., The Best Laid Plans: Interrogating the Heist Film, Wayne State University Press, 2017, See also Rick Altman, Film/genre, London: BFI Publishing, 1999. For a look at how genre (in this case a “cop action drama”) can impact memories of a past shame, see Kristin Hoerl “Burning Mississippi into memory? Cinematic amnesia as a resource for remembering civil rights,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26 (2009): 54–79.

28 Regarding the National Archives, I found that much of the material on the Iran Hostage Crisis remains classified, including records relating to the negotiations with Iran. Due to this inaccessibility, I focused my efforts on the Central Files of the Department of State, which has most of the 1974 through 1979 materials available. While some of the collection is available online, such as telegrams, NARA II in College Park, Maryland houses a number of P-Reels, which are paper copies of now-declassified documents. Given these parameters, I searched through the declassified P-Reels from the end of 1979, giving me access to initial reactions to the burgeoning crisis, most of which consisted of letters from U.S. Congress and local state representatives as well. In this chapter I draw out several of the responses most emblematic of the rhetorical strategies I found while analyzing my archival data. For a look at one of the initial indexes I used to find my materials (by searching “Iran,” “crisis,” and “hostages,” in the “P-Reel Document Index Entires, 1979” search bar) see N.A., “Wars/ International Relations: Diplomatic Records,” The National Archives.gov, retrieved from: https://aad.archives.gov/aad/series- list.jsp?cat=WR43.

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29 This kind of metonymy that substitutes president for nation is not an uncommon feature of presidential rhetoric and lends itself well to perpetuating the larger rhetoric of weakness.

30 N.a., “TEST OF U.S. RESOLVE,” U.S. News & World Report, November 26, 1979, Nexis Uni, accessed 19 Feb. 2019.

31 N.a., “A Test of Character,” The Washington Post, October 24, 1980, Nexis Uni, accessed 19 Feb. 2019.

32 N.a., “Behind Doubts Over Carter’s Hostage Gamble,” U.S. News & World Report, March 10, 1980, Nexis Uni, accessed 19 Feb. 2019.

33 Carol Cohn, “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” in Gendering War Talk, edited by Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, 227-46, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993, 240-242.

34 Correspondence from Mary Rose Oakar to President Carter, November 8, 1979, Container 171, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

35 Correspondence from Bill Beaufort to Jimmy Carter, November 5, 1979, Container 164, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park Maryland and Correspondence from Bill Beaufort to Jimmy Carter, November 6, 1979, Container 164, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

36 Correspondence from Haden G. Greenhalgh and John F. Aylmer to James Carter, November 9, 1979, Container 179, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

37 Correspondence from Julian C. Dixon to Jimmy Carter,” November 27, 1979, Container 172, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

38 Correspondence from William H. Harsha to Jimmy Carter, November 9, 1979, Container 164, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

39 Merriam-Webster defines “lily-livered” as equivalent to being cowardly or lacking courage, synonymous with various other words for cowardice and perhaps drawing from the more archaic “milk-livered.” See Merriam-Webster, “Definition: lily-livered,” Merriam-Webster.com, retrieved from: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lily-livered.

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40 Correspondence from J. Kenneth Robinson to President Carter, November 9, 1979, Container 171, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

41 Correspondence from Toby Roth to Jimmy Carter, November 9, 1979, Container 169, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

42 Correspondence from George Hansen to Cyrus Vance, November 5, 1979, Container 171, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland. After their release the hostages did describe abusive treatment by their captors. See U.S. News Staff, “From the Archives: The Ordeal of Iran Hostages' Captivity,” U.S. News & World Report, January 21, 2016, originally published February 2, 1981, retrieved from: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/from-the-archives-the-ordeal-of-iran- hostages-captivity.

43 As examples, see correspondence from Larry J. Hopkins to Jimmy Carter,” November 14, 1979, Container 169, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland or correspondence from Stewart B. McKinney to Jimmy Carter,” November 8, 1979, Container 172, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland

44 Correspondence from Eugene V. Atkinson to Jimmy Carter, November 8, 1979, Container 171, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

45 Correspondence from Stewart B. McKinney to Cyrus R. Vance, November 27, 1979, Container 170, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park Maryland. Beyond diplomatic actions, some also called for the arming of Kurdish rebels against the Iranians. See Correspondence from Matthew J. Rinaldo to Jimmy Carter, November 9, 1979, Container 164, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

46 Correspondence from J. Bennett Johnston to Jimmy Carter,” November 15, 1979, Container 169, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

47 Correspondence from William R. Cotter to Jimmy Carter, November 9, 1979, Container 164, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland. Cotter was against an invasion, but felt that Carter needed to “strengthen” the U.S. “bargaining position.” See also: Correspondence from Haden G. Greenhalgh and John F. Aylmer to James Carter, November 9, 1979, Container 179, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of

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State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

48 Correspondence from John Breaux to Jimmy Carter, November 9, 1979, Container 169, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland and Correspondence from Jim Lloyd to Jimmy Carter,” November 6, 1979, Container 169, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

49 Correspondence from Charles E. Bennet to President Carter, December 11, 1979, Container 180, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland. 50 Correspondence from Robert A. Turner to President Carter, November 21, 1979, Container 180, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

51 Correspondence from William Promire, U.S.S. to Brian Atwood, December 17, 1979, Container 180, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland. Her son, Sgt. Kevin J. Hermening, was indeed a Marine guard who was eventually released, but it would not be as soon as his mother apparently hoped.

52 Correspondence from Ruth Southard and Barbara McCreary to James E. Carter, November 15, 1979, Container 179, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

53 Correspondence from Dave Durenberger to President Carter, December 10, 1979, Container 180, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland.

54 Correspondence from J. Brian Attwood and Eugene V. Atkinson, November 10, 1979, Container 171, Central Foreign Policy Files, I-Reel Printouts 1979-1979, Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, College Park, Maryland. An additional paragraph addressing the deportation of Iranian students was added in later drafts.

55 For some narratives of the failed rescue attempt, see James H. Kyle, The Guts to Try: The Untold Story of the Iran Hostage Rescue Mission by the On-Scene Desert Commander, New York: Orion Books, 1990, and Paul B. Ryan, The Iranian Rescue Mission: Why It Failed, Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1985. Houghton also provides an overview in David Patrick Houghton, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis.

56 Phil McCombs, “REACTION; Anger, Sadness at a Failed Mission,” 26 Apr. 1980, The Washington Post, LexisNexis Academic, accessed 30 Oct. 2017.

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57 Ernest G. Bormann, “A Fantasy Theme Analysis of the Television Coverage of The Hostage Release and The Reagan Inaugural,” 133-145.

58 Don Oberdorfer, “The Hostages: Heading Home; From a Period of National Anguish to a Deep, Painful Wound,” The Washington Post, January 21, 1981, Nexis Uni, accessed 19 Feb. 2019.

59 Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” in A Grammar of Motives, Berkeley: U of California Press, 1945, 505-507. As another example, Burke offers the use of referring to “the heart” in place of “emotions.”

60 Jimmy Carter, “Jimmy Carter on Argo,” Video, CNN, 21 Feb. 2013, retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr5XJ8dbJtg.

61 Greg Myre, “Tony Mendez, The 'Argo' Spy Who Rescued Americans In Iran, Dies At 78,” NPR, 19 Jan. 2019, retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/19/686942870/tony-mendezthe- argo-spy-who-rescued-americans-in-iran-dies-at-###. A sampling of the other obituaries follows a similar pattern, all mentioning Argo relatively early: Katharine Q. Seelye, “Tony Mendez, 78, Dies; C.I.A. Officer Celebrated in the Film ‘Argo’,” The New York Times, 21 Jan. 2019, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/obituaries/tony-mendez-dead.html, Harrison Smith, “Tony Mendez, ‘Argo’ spy who smuggled U.S. hostages out of Iran during crisis, dies at 78,” The Washington Post, 19 Jan. 2019, retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/tony-mendez-argo-spy-who-smuggled- ushostages-out-of-iran-during-crisis-dies-at-78/2019/01/19/37e1f9a0-1c22-.

62 Donald J. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference | Osaka, Japan,” Whitehouse.gov, June 29, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings- statements/remarks-president-trump-press-conference-osaka-japan/.

Conclusion

Presidential Memory and The Post-Presidency

On December 10, 2002, twenty-one years after the fateful day that saw the hostages released and his presidency ended, Jimmy Carter accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian

Nobel Committee praised the former president “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”1 Carter took to the podium to give a lecture reflecting on a long career that included, but was not defined by, the presidency, calling for international peace in troubling times. One comment in particular reflected the moral character he had constituted over the years (which I considered in chapter two). Carter said that while president, he “thought often” of “an admonition that we received in our small school in Plains, Georgia, from a beloved teacher, Miss Julia Coleman. She often said: ‘We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.’”2 As he accepted the international award, he called back once more to a humble beginning in Plains, and in the words of a “beloved teacher,” he articulated the moral center he had long cultivated. Times could change, but “principles” should not, and the abstract moral principles he called for and the biography he once again referenced were not so different from his rhetoric as president. But where his presidency had been initially maligned as weak ineffective, it now provided the material for a speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. Just as the

Iran Hostage Crisis is often evoked as the finale of his presidency, so too do histories, popular portrayals, and theses alike use the Nobel Peace Prize as a natural stopping point for describing an exemplary (and as of writing, still ongoing) post-presidency.3

The praise for Carter’s post-presidency is usually accompanied with a separation from his actual presidency, allowing his post-presidency to encompass the most positive aspect of remembering Carter: the good moral character he had constituted. While that character had

130 always been present, the post-presidency now provided specific examples and events outside of a maligned presidency with which to evoke it. In chapter two, we saw how that character could be perverted to appeals to weakness, but even by the 1980s, Carter’s own character was well- regarded. A major moment solidifying that redemption was the opening of the Carter Center in

1986. The Carter Center, Carter’s philanthropic nonprofit founded in 1982, seeks to “improve life for people in more than 80 countries by resolving conflicts; advancing democracy and human rights; preventing diseases; and improving mental health care.”4 When he completed the Carter

Center building in Georgia in 1986, the opening received a warm response and was attended by

Ronald Reagan, who praised Carter’s work and described him as “distinctively and gloriously

American.”5 The Carter Center provided a new point of emphasis for remembering Carter beyond the presidency, and by the 1990s, Jimmy Carter was a well-respected person who occasionally weighed on current presidencies as a moral critic. In contemporary politics, Carter is now a Nobel

Peace Prize winning symbol of international peace who was in the news for building houses for

Habitat for Humanity at age ninety-five.6 This new public memory is a far cry from the inept failure Carter was being remembered as at the end of his presidency.

Carter’s character has always been remembered fondly, and his post-presidency provides new resources for remembering it, but Carter’s actual presidency retains a more complicated reputation. Scholarly evaluations remain mixed, though as I wrote in my introduction, historians did soften on it over time to the point that Carter is usually listed somewhere in the middle of presidential rankings. Within rhetoric, scholars like Mary E. Stuckey have highlighted the human rights emphasis of his presidency as serving a valuable agenda-setting role for the presidency, and the early analysis did recognize the strategic use of Carter’s moral character, showing that rhetoricians have seen some value in his presidency. 7 Public memory has been less forgiving, though, and as I have outlined throughout my thesis, President Carter remains most commonly evoked as a negative shorthand for failure. On the surface this makes sense. Carter’s

131 philanthropic work does not change what he did in office. Yet when we consider the actual rhetoric of remembering Carter, we see troubling implications about what we expect from the

U.S. presidency.

Memories of Carter’s post-presidency praise him for his morality and his focus on human rights and peace… and yet all of these things were also present in his presidency. The very character traits that allow Carter to be viewed and remembered as a good person are also used in remembering his presidency as weak and ineffective. This comparison demonstrates the interpretive nature of memory. The same inventional resources (Carter’s character, for example) can be remembered and evoked in different ways depending on the context. This is the rhetorical nature of memory: we do not merely recall the past, but we actively interpret it. The same critic can praise Carter as a person while relegating his presidency to a forgettable failure, relying on differing interpretations of a character that has remained relatively unchanged since the 1960s.

This raises an important question: why are the traits that make one a good person not desirable for the presidency?

Even positive accounts or evocations of Carter often make the move of separating his moral traits from his performance of the presidency. Think again of the classic “he was a good person but a bad president” style of evocation common in remembering Carter. While separating

Carter’s character and post-presidency from his presidency may help redeem his own reputation, in positioning the entirety of his presidency as worth forgetting, we foreclose the possibility of considering the moral elements of Carter’s presidency as worth remembering. Remembering

Jimmy Carter in this way does nothing to challenge the association between weakness and more diplomatic foreign policy within the presidency that I described in chapter three, because the new associations are between the post-presidency and moral character. The way we separate presidency and post-presidency in Carter’s character maintains the existing gendered logics demanding masculine strength and the simplified narratives of failure in the memories of the Iran

132 Hostage Crisis. It continues the logic of Carter not being “right” for the presidency. But if caring about morality or human rights are undesirable traits in a president, then perhaps the issue is not with Carter, but in our conceptualization of the presidency itself.

In this way, remembering Jimmy Carter is about more than a case study of the ways presidential memories are used strategically or providing a new rhetorical look at the Carter presidency. The ways we remember Carter reflect larger ways of remembering the presidency itself. The parts of Carter’s presidency we lose in perpetuating interpretations of him as a failure, such as his moral focus or character, are further de-emphasized from being part of a “good” president. What we constitute as the bar for presidential failure also creates the expectations for a presidential success, and the continued evocations of Carter as a failure use public memory to necessitate an image of the presidency as “strong” above all else and unconcerned with morality.

If we want a more ethical and moral presidency, then remembering a man constituted as a paragon of virtue as a failure makes that unlikely. This is not necessarily a call to put Carter in the pantheon of greatest presidents, but a warning that the interpretations of past presidencies have consequences for the symbolic constitution of the presidency itself.

While I have tried to consider the larger implications of how presidential memories are created and deployed strategically, the specific argument of my thesis has centered on public memories of Jimmy Carter and their rhetorical evocations. If we return a final time to Trump’s exchange with Carter, we can now see all the elements of how Carter is remembered as shorthand. Trump dismissed Carter as a “terrible” president who was “tied… up in knots” by

Iran, which was “the reason Ronald Reagan probably became President.”8 Carter is used as a benchmark of failure, established by associating him with weakness, with the Iran Hostage Crisis positioned as his final failure. I have argued that through a rhetoric that associates his presidency with weakness, memories of the Carter presidency have become a shorthand for presidential weakness and a benchmark for failure. Every time Donald Trump or another politician interprets

133 the past in this way (often focusing on the Iran Hostage Crisis), they perpetuate this way of remembering Carter. In turn, this way of remembering operates on a masculine logic that limits foreign policy options and de-emphasizes the inherent morality and value of a complex presidency.

Within that broad arc of my analysis, each of my chapters considered the memories of

Jimmy Carter from a different perspective, showing how critiques of memory can also contribute to further rhetorical understandings of valuable case studies in presidential communication.

Chapter two set up the constitution of Carter’s character, which I consider in this conclusion, but it also showed how the rhetorical moves constituting that character intersected with race and segregation in the South. By taking seriously the constitution of Carter’s character, I showed how the rarely-remembered role of race in Carter’s political rise is actually foundational to studying

Carter’s presidential rhetoric. Chapter three’s larger implications were more philosophical, using a close analysis of the discursive functioning of how Carter is evoked in political discourse to ask the broader question of how presidential memories work. Beyond just looking at when a past presidency (in this case Carter’s) is evoked, chapter three showed the structures inherent in actually evoking these memories by relying on classic rhetorical theories. It also implicated larger presidential foreign policy discourses in upholding masculine norms, all perpetuated through the kinds of strategies used in remembering Carter. Finally, chapter four used the Iran Hostage Crisis as a case study in presidential memory. Beyond that case study though, my analysis expanded to provide a new critique of the film Argo, acknowledging the role of cinema and popular culture in public memory. Moreover, my analysis intervened in the public memory of the crisis, looking at how many common understandings of it are in themselves politically-motived interpretations.

Beyond helping us understand its rhetorical uses, studying memory can also provide new rhetorical perspectives on the past.

134 Despite the scope of my analysis, uncovering how presidential memories impact the present is not limited to Jimmy Carter, who is not the first president to find a better reception after leaving office, though he remains the most glaring contrast of president and post-presidency. The passage of time almost always softens perceptions and provides the benefit of hindsight, but understanding the rhetorical processes of presidential memories helps rhetoricians understand how a memory changes over time. Analyzing Carter could help shed light on other presidents seeking post-presidential redemption. For example, George W. Bush has re-branded himself after leaving office, becoming less associated with economic recession and the Iraq War. It is unclear if he has truly found “redemption,” whatever that means, but his image in public memory is softening.9 Instead of philanthropy, Bush’s image has been more like a retired grandpa, established through his hobby of painting.10 He has also been seen being friendly with Michelle

Obama at political functions and has even spent time taking in baseball games with Ellen

Degeneres.11 Through these portrayals, Bush is increasingly disassociated with war at the risk of forgetting the implications of his actions while in office. In the same way that detaching the president from the presidency can forget the moral implications of Carter’s presidency, these strategies of remembering can work to bury the War on Terror waged by Bush in the years before he was simply the nice old man joking with Michelle Obama.

Presidential memory matters because the ways the presidency’s past is remembered works to constitute its future. Interpretations of the past set the limits of the presidency in the present. We need only think of how often Nixon’s impeachment has been evoked and used to provide the language for discussing Trump’s abuses of power. The use of Carter as shorthand appeal and the interpretations of the Iran Hostage Crisis are but two examples of remembering presidential pasts to shape presidential rhetoric in the present. As President Trump makes the

American public and scholars of presidential rhetoric alike question what we thought we knew

135 about the institution and the future of the executive branch, looking to the past helps draw out the role of rhetorical evocations of memory in shaping modern presidential rhetoric.

By now, despite my attempts at objectivity in my analysis, it should be clear that I have a favorable opinion of Jimmy Carter, not just the man, but to some extent his presidency as well. I did not undertake this thesis to go to war with historians or to alter public memory, but in concluding, I will briefly consider why I wrote an entire thesis on Carter. Beyond scholarly implications and the need of a topic, why did I write about a president regarded as a failure, one with whom I have no personal connection to and do not personally remember being in office? I knew little about Carter before college history courses. The only “memories” I have of him are mediated through Republican insults, jokes on The Simpsons, and news clips to set the mood in

Argo. What I do remember is twice seeing a president elected without winning the popular vote, twice seeing a president impeached, and of having no living memory of not being entangled in war in the Middle East. I remember watching Donald Trump brush off affairs with porn stars, distancing himself from a staff filled with convicted felons, and positioning all things not as questions of morality, but as matters of business and deal-making. So perhaps it is not Carter that

I wanted to remember in my scholarship, but a time when the President of the United States was an unquestionably good person and when morality, and not just markets and policies and war, was an issue of the day.

This is of course nostalgia for what never was. Carter was an imperfect man. I do not claim he was secretly one of our best presidents. Rather, as my faith in the U.S. presidency wanes, I think often of the fundamental appeal of Carter: faith. Not just religious faith, though that permeated his rhetoric as I have considered at length, but faith in the morality of the person running for president and a faith that the U.S. president had the best of interests of the country

(and the world) at heart. Beyond complicating historiographies and interrogating presidential memories, on some level this thesis was an exercise in asking why we rarely remember the only

136 president in living memory whose moral character was never brought into question and what that means for American politics. We should not forget the shortcomings of Carter’s presidency, but we should also remember the morality he stood for in his lone term. What I will remember the most from researching President Carter is that morality is not beyond the scope of the U.S. presidency and that a person of high character once held the office. Maybe one day, they will hold it again. Until then, I am left with nostalgia for the man from Plains.

137 References

1 N.a., “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2002,” NobelPrize.org, 11 oct. 2002, retrieved from: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2002/press-release/.

2 Jimmy Carter, “Jimmy Carter Nobel Lecture,” Nobel Prize.org, December 10, 2002, retrieved from: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2002/carter/lecture/.

3 For a look at Carter’s post-presidency, see Rod Troester, Jimmy Carter as Peacemaker: A Post- Presidential Biography, Westport: Praeger, 1996, Douglas Brinkley, The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey to the Nobel Peace Prize, Penguin Books, 2005 and Robert A. Strong, “Jimmy Carter: Life After the Presidency,” Miller Center, n.d., retrieved from: https://millercenter.org/president/carter/life-after-the-presidency.

4 N.a., The Carter Center, CarterCenter.org, accessed April 28, 2020, retrieved from: https://www.cartercenter.org/.

5 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Dedication Ceremony for the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, Georgia,” October 1, 1986, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum and William E. Schmidt, “President Praises Carter at Library,” The New York Times, October 2, 1986, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/02/us/president-praises-carter-at-library.html.

6 Aris Folley, “Jimmy Carter Back to Building Homes for Habitat for Humanity One Day after Fall,” The Hill, October 7, 2019, retrieved from: https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the- know/464705-jimmy-carter-back-to-building-homes-for-habitat-for-humanity and Jessica Bliss, “Former President Jimmy Carter's 'No. 1 priority' is building Habitat homes in Nashville, even after fall,” The Tennessean, October 6, 2019, retrieved from:https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2019/10/06/president-jimmy-carter-habitat- humanity-nashville-opening/2432759001/. For Carter’s long partnership with Habitat for Humanity, see N.a., “Carter Work Project,” Habitat for Humanity, retrieved from: https://www.habitat.org/volunteer/build-events/carter-work-project.

7 John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A re-evaluation, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, 14-15, Mark T. Rozell, “Carter Rehabilitated: What Caused the 39th President's Press Transformation?”, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 23.2: 317-33, and Mary E. Stuckey, Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the National Agenda, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008.

8 Donald J. Trump, “Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference | Osaka, Japan,” Whitehouse.gov, June 29, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings- statements/remarks-president-trump-press-conference-osaka-japan/.

9 Michael L. Butterworth, “George W. Bush as the ‘Man in the Arena’: Baseball, Public Memory, and the Rhetorical Redemption of a President,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 22.1 (2019): 1-31.

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11 James Pasley, “Photos show Michelle Obama and George W. Bush's enduring friendship, built on wisecracks and cough drops,” Business Insider, December 13, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider.com/michelle-obama-george-w-bush-friendship-history-photos- 2019-12, Cydney Henderson, “Michelle Obama defends friendship with George W. Bush: 'Our values are the same',” USA Today, December 12, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2019/12/11/michelle-obama-defends- friendship-george-w-bush/4402339002/, Lisa Respers France, “Ellen DeGeneres explains hanging out with her friend George W. Bush,” CNN, October 8, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/08/entertainment/ellen-degeneres-george-bush/index.html, and Constance Grady, “Ellen DeGeneres, George W. Bush, and the death of uncritical niceness,” Vox, October 9, 2019, retrieved from: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/9/20906371/ellen- degeneres-george-w-bush-controversy.