President Jimmy Carter is depressed. The White House switchboard wake-up call has not made his real-life nightmare disappear. In fact, it’s getting worse. Having his press secretary leak the horrible news to the media in the dead of night was bad enough, but the weight of what he must do now feels like a heavy stone upon his chest. Carter is a man who likes to micromanage. He dresses quickly, in a dark suit, light blue shirt, and yellow-and-blue tie. The president then picks up the bedroom phone to call his press secretary, Jody Powell. Throughout the last four years, Powell has been very busy, as Carter’s presidency has seen one setback after another. Catastrophic inflation has weakened the dollar. Skyrocketing oil prices and long lines to purchase gasoline have shocked and angered the public.1 And now there is humiliation overseas. Jimmy Carter and Jody Powell talk intensely about what the president will say on television in just one hour. An anonymous scheduler keeps track of the president’s calls, inserting a P next to this moment in the president’s daily worksheet, indicating that it was Carter who placed the call to Powell.
