(29 of 35)
With the approval of most congressional leaders, at the end of March 1980 I was able to sign and send to them a balanced budget for fiscal year 1982. We congratulated each other on this rare achievement.
Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority lied in Alaska by claiming that he met with me in the Oval Office and that I told him I had to have homosexuals on my staff because there were homosexuals in the U.S. who needed representation in my inner circle. I have never had a private meeting with him. He has never been in the Oval Office. I have never had any such conversation.
I went to Grand Rapids, Mich., and found out later that I had called it "Cedar Rapids." When Gerald Ford went out castigating me for it, he shouted to the TV cameras that apparently I didn't even know that Michigan was one of the 48 states.
The demands for defense expenditures comprise a bottomless pit that we can never fill. One of the most serious problems we have is the inclination on the part of our military leaders to seek more money by constantly denigrating America's formidable military capability. This hurts our own country and our allies' confidence in us, and might lead the Soviet rulers to make a suicidal misjudgment based on the chorus of lamentations from the Pentagon and defense contractors that we are weak and impotent.
The Superfund Legislation set up a system of insurance premiums collected from the chemical industry to clean up toxic wastes. This new program may prove to be as far-reaching and important as any accomplishment of my Administration.
Although American medical skill is among the best in the world, we have an abominable system in this country for the delivery of health care, with gross inequities toward the poor particularly the working poor—and profiteering by many hospitals and some medical doctors, who prey on the vulnerability of the ill.
After all the campaigning was over on the night before the Section, I was not surprised or shaken when Jody gave me the bad news from Pollster Pat Caddell. It hurt me deeply, but I had already accommodated the disappointment that was to come officially the following day. Even so, we did not anticipate the magnitude of our defeat. To lose all but six states and to have our party rejected and the Republicans gain a majority in the Senate were additional embarrassments for me.
Veterans Affairs Administrator Max Cleland came to tell me goodbye. He brought me a plaque with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "I have the consolation to reflect that during the period of my Administration not a drop of the blood of a single citizen was shed by the sword of war." This is something I shall always cherish.
The Man From Plains Sums It Up
With his book ready for publication, Jimmy Carter reviewed his presidency and its aftermath with TIME Assistant Managing Editor Ronald Kriss and Midwest Bureau Chief Christopher Ogden, who covered the Carter Administration as White House and State Department correspondent. The four-hour interview began in his wood-paneled home-town office just off the main street of Plains, Ga., and concluded on the sunny back patio of his modest brick ranch house a few blocks away. Afterward, Carter went right to work polishing up the inaugural lecture he was to present the next day as a professor at Emory University in