Don Gagne
speaker
157 appearances
14 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 18 Jun
Don Gagne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 4.
Appearances
You had these countervailing things, right? All the positive nature of the Bicentennial, but the Vietnam War had just wound down literally in the previous year. On top of all of that, the country was in the midst of an energy crisis. There was lots of cynicism among the American people. To take you back to those days, President Gerald Ford was an incumbent president
running for a full term in office. Recall that he'd inherited the presidency two years earlier in 1974 when a disgraced Richard Nixon resigned from office as the Watergate scandal just closed in around him.
Boy, it's an understatement to say he was a relative unknown, right? He was from Plains, Georgia, population 236 back in the 1970s. He had been a state senator. He had been recently governor of Georgia. He was a former peanut farmer. So I found this great tape from December of 1973 when I was working on an obit about Carter and And the tape kind of highlights how unknown he really was.
Here I am introducing that tape in that obit. He was hardly a household name. In fact, as his time in the statehouse wound down, he popped up on the TV game show, What's My Line?
On the show, a panel of celebrities tries to guess the profession of the mystery person sitting right in front of them. So there's Governor Carter on the set, smiling that famous Jimmy Carter smile, and the panelists have no idea who he is.
So what you hear, Rachel, are these celebrity panelists asking Jimmy Carter what he does for a living and trying to figure out. And they go on and on with different questions to him, trying to figure out what his profession is. Again, they had no clue who this guy was.
Right. And he did kind of use that humility. He directly confronted the cynicism that a lot of Americans were feeling at the time. He was modest, and that sounds like a strange thing to say. This is a modest person seeking the White House. But he did portray a certain modesty as a candidate.
He promised the people—again, this is in the wake of Watergate—he promised the people he would never lie to them. He promised to restore basic trust in the nation's institutions. It all sounds so old-fashioned, right? Right, right. It's also important to note that he ran a real grassroots campaign. He kind of embraced the fact that nobody knew him. Listen to this quote. It's from Steve Hockman.
He is from the Carter Center. And he was one of Carter's longtime assistants back then. And he told NPR in an interview that Carter worked hard at that basic retail campaigning.
So that's election night. Months later, he takes the oath of office, and he made his values clear right from the earliest moments of his presidency. In fact, he began his inaugural address by acknowledging the man that he had just defeated, Gerald Ford. For myself.
And then on the very next day, his first full day in office, January 21st, 1977, Carter did something else. He issued a mass pardon for all Vietnam War draft evaders.
It was not an easy time, and these are all difficult things for a new president to inherit. And as he promised he would do, Carter spoke directly about these things and honestly to the nation. He didn't sugarcoat it. And specifically, he told the public something that presidents don't often tell the public, that they need to sacrifice. In this case, he said they need to conserve energy.
So Carter did not lack self-confidence. That's something also worth noting here. And To that end, politically, he did stuff presidents didn't often do. And sometimes it was to his own detriment politically, right? One prominent example, again, this deals with the energy crisis. As president, he tried to get Americans to wear sweaters.
It sounds almost comical now, but he literally encouraged people to wear sweaters so they could turn down the thermostat and save energy. Wow. did that in the White House, turning down the heat of the executive mansion and wearing a sweater and being seen on television wearing a cardigan sweater. But here's the catch. Americans didn't necessarily want to hear this, right?
They wanted him to fix things. They didn't want him to tell them what they needed to do. And I think because he was advising conservation rather than a clear set of policy principles that would offer a solution, people maybe began to think of him as not as strong of a leader as he needed to be.
And some of them even saw him as kind of a scold, telling them how they needed to go about their daily lives.
Oh, he absolutely did. Let's just tick off a few of them. He created the Department of Energy and was the first president to really lay out a national energy policy. He signed on foreign policy the SALT II Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union, and he mediated one of the most difficult
political crises of the time by bringing together Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He brought them to Camp David. He got these two leaders in the Middle East to sign a peace accord that led to Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula
and the establishment of diplomatic relations between these two countries that had long been at odds, at war, in conflict. So that was a very big deal.
Yeah, and we don't want to take too big of a detour here, but it's worth noting his younger brother, his youngest sibling, Benjamin, Billy was a Southern good old boy who had a habit of leveraging his connection to his brother to make a buck. He endorsed a beer bearing his own name, Billy Beer, and that was during Carter's presidential campaign. So it started right away.
Showing 121–140 of 157 · page 7 of 8
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