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
It seemed like he was always in the news for the wrong reasons, and the White House had to deal with it. Billy did create one major headache, though, when He became an agent of the government of Libya. And Muammar Gaddafi was in power then. And after multiple trips, he was paid hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And he became the center of this kind of swirling storm of allegations about influence peddling. And if all of that wasn't enough in the midst of all this, Billy Carter even kind of responded to all of that by using his Libya connections to sell ice cream.
Wait, what? And that kind of sums it up. He was stubborn, and the scandal did create some problems for President Carter, who at one point was in the midst of a difficult campaign, both for renomination and for re-election.
Yeah. And for the record here, Jimmy Carter never used the word malaise in this speech, but he was talking about kind of a malaise that the country was in, a funk that the country was in, right? And again, we keep coming back to the energy crisis. That's what this speech was meant to address. And it was... It was aimed at instilling some urgency on the issue.
But Carter ultimately said he got stuck on this question. He said, why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problems? So he's raising big things there.
Right, and the public, again, did not want to hear that, and they kind of saw a lack of confidence in him as well, as part of that.
This was probably the defining moment in the public's eyes, right, of the Carter presidency. Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and detained more than 50 Americans on staff there. The Iranians held the American diplomats and staff hostage for 444 days.
And again, this spilled over into an American election year, 1980. Diplomatic relations to end the standoff failed. So Carter tried something. He ordered the U.S. military to attempt a rescue mission. That mission failed. and it resulted in the accidental deaths of eight Americans, American service personnel, in the desert after one of the helicopters crashed into another transport aircraft.
And political analysts really did cite that standoff and that moment as a major factor in the ongoing decline and downfall of Carter's presidency.
He did indeed. He lost election to a former Hollywood actor and a former California governor, Ronald Reagan. It was a landslide win. Carter left office, though, I have to say, as graciously as he began his term. You know that defeat really, really affected him. But here he is in his farewell speech. The love of liberty.
It absolutely did. And he was involved in the subsequent years in mediating disputes between the U.S. State Department and some of the most volatile foreign leaders, including Kim Il-sung of North Korea and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. In 1994, he assisted the U.S. government and helped settle a tension-filled nuclear weapons dispute with North Korea.
And Carter, along with his wife, Rosalyn, and she was very much a part of every single bit of this. The two of them regularly monitored election results around the globe to promote democracy.
And Rachel, if I can jump in here, Carter always said his values were instilled in him when he was a child. His mom, Ms. Lillian, she was a nurse by training. She set an example for her son by defying lines of segregation in 1920s Georgia to counsel poor African-American women on matters of health care.
Then another organization Carter worked tirelessly for right up until recently was Habitat for Humanity International, an organization that works worldwide to provide housing for underprivileged people. In 2019, NPR spoke with Linda Fuller-Dagelman. She founded Habitat for Humanity with her husband, Millard. They convinced the Carters to do a work week with them.
And Daigleman has a wonderful story of that first work trip.
Exactly. Just to fill people in, the guinea worm is a parasite that infects people who drink contaminated water. So Carter took up the cause, meeting with government officials, health officials, aid groups around the world, fighting for clean water in developing countries. And under his leadership, this parasite, which infected millions in the 1980s, is today almost, almost eradicated.
In an interview with NPR before his death, the legendary global health worker, Paul Farmer, he's co-founder of Partners in Health, he spoke about the impact that Carter has had.
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