Prologue PROLOGUE JUNE 1979 It was just hours before the first day of summer, and the sunny weather in Washington, DC, was perfect for a leisurely drive in the country. But June 20, 1979, was the wrong day for Wednesday golf or a picnic at Bull Run. That week, more than half of the nation''s gas stations were running out of gas. The morning''s Washington Post reported that local authorities were inundated with requests for carpools from angry motorists who couldn''t get to work, yet a small collection of harried reporters and dignitaries managed to find transportation to the White House. There the beleaguered president of the United States was preparing yet another announcement that would lead to eye rolling in the press corps and make little news. The only thing that stood out then about this seemingly minor event was its unusual location: the West Wing roof. The spring and summer gas shortages marked the worst of a depressing 1979, a year that would later see the seizure of American hostages in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. "Gas stations closed up like someone died," John Updike wrote in his novel Rabbit Is Rich.

For a generation bonded to cars the way the next would be to smartphones, this was traumatic. Millions of Americans missed work, canceled vacations, and pointed fingers. Public opinion surveys in June 1979 showed Carter''s approval ratings in the Gallup poll plummeting to 28 percent, the lowest of his presidency and comparable to Richard Nixon''s when he resigned five years earlier. Vice President Walter Mondale later cracked that the Carter White House had gone to the dogs--and become "the nation''s fire hydrant." As usual, the president had few options. A month later, he would offer new, ambitious energy goals as part of his infamous "malaise" speech (though he never used the word), in which Carter delivered a jeremiad against empty materialism. But events all year were largely out of his control, wreaking havoc on the American economy. First came a decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to jack up global oil prices by 14.

5 percent virtually overnight--an effort to exploit strikes in Iranian oil fields against the teetering shah of Iran. After the shah fled into exile and was replaced in February by the radical Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini, Iranian oil exports to the United States ceased altogether. Over the next eighteen months, oil prices doubled to nearly $40 a barrel. This represented an astonishing thirteenfold increase in a decade. "Energy is our Vietnam," a White House aide told Newsweek . By the following year, inflation--driven in large part by energy prices--would pass 12 percent, with unemployment over 7 percent for a combined "misery index" of nearly 20 percent. Yet harder to imagine in the twenty-first century was that interest rates in 1980 hit an eye-popping 19 percent. Even if everything else had gone right for Jimmy Carter in 1979 and 1980--which it most definitely did not--that was a gale-force economic wind blowing in his face as he sought reelection against former California governor Ronald Reagan.

For two years, a clean-energy pioneer named George Szego had been lobbying the Carter White House to take a look at something he''d cobbled together at his little manufacturing company in Warrenton, Virginia. Szego, an engineer who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, was hard to ignore. After some hesitation, Carter--himself an engineer--handwrote a reference to this emerging technology into a 1978 speech. Now, a year later, he was making good on his pledge to install it. At one thirty on June 20, the president climbed an inner staircase to the roof of the West Wing, known as the West Terrace, where he emerged into the bright sunlight for an energy announcement that had nothing directly to do with gas lines. "I''ve arranged for this ceremony to be illuminated by solar power," Carter joked, as the audience squinted into the sun. He proposed $1 billion in federal funding for solar research, a $100 million "solar bank" offering credits to home owners who installed primitive solar units, and a goal of 20 percent of the nation''s energy coming from renewable sources by the year 2000--just one part of his effort to prepare the United States for a greener future. The event was meant to publicize an energy source that for years had been of interest mostly to tinkerers and readers of the counterculture Whole Earth Catalog but was finally beginning to make its way into the liberal mainstream.

To symbolize his commitment to solar, Carter dedicated the rooftop installation of a $28,000 hot water heating system--built by Szego--that would be used for portions of the ground floor of the West Wing. Like so much else about his presidency, placing a solar unit on the White House roof did Carter no political good at the time. His critics, if they noticed at all, saw it as a stunt to deflect blame from the gas crisis. Carter understood this but didn''t care. He meant for the solar panels--visible from Pennsylvania Avenue--to be a symbol of his faith in American ingenuity to tackle the nation''s toughest long-term problems. The president''s goal was to develop clean, nonpolluting energy sources and independence from Arab oil. He didn''t mention combating climate change, though, the following year, his White House would raise the first official warnings about global warming anywhere in the world. Carter mentioned how President Benjamin Harrison (he mistakenly called him William Henry Harrison) introduced electric lightbulbs to the White House in 1891, before they were commercially viable or technologically advanced.

"A generation from now," Carter said, "this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken--or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people: harnessing the power of the sun." As it turned out, the thirty-two solar panels became both museum pieces and inspirations. President Reagan cut research-and-development spending on alternative energy by two-thirds, wrecking Carter''s commitment to clean energy. In 1985 Reagan let Carter''s tax credits for solar expire, bankrupting George Szego''s company and dozens of others and ceding clean-energy leadership to other countries. With oil prices falling, Reagan''s chief of staff, Donald T. Regan, described the roof panels as "just a joke" and ordered them taken down in 1986 as part of a renovation. After languishing in a government warehouse, the panels were rescued by a professor at Unity College in Maine and used on the roof of the school dining hall. Eventually they were sent to the Smithsonian, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, and a museum in China.

It wasn''t until 2010 that President Obama put new-generation panels back on the White House roof and dramatically expanded funding for clean-energy development. Solar power has since become the fastest-growing source of electricity in the United States. It represents just one of many ways a significant American president--buffeted by events--peered over the horizon. Throughout Jimmy Carter''s long life, classmates, colleagues, and friends--even members of his own family--found him hard to read. The enigma deepened in the presidency. He was a disciplined and incorruptible president equipped with a sharp, omnivorous mind; a calm and adult president, dependable in a crisis; a friendless president who, in the 1976 primaries, had defeated or alienated a good portion of the Democratic Party; a stubborn and acerbic president, never demeaning but sometimes cold; a nonideological president who worshipped science along with God and saw governing as a series of engineering problem sets; an austere, even spartan president out of sync with American consumer culture; a focused president whose diamond-cutter attention to detail brought ridicule but also historic results; a charming president in small groups and when speaking off the cuff but awkward in front of a teleprompter and often allergic to small talk and to offering a simple "Thank you"; an insular, all-business president who seemed sometimes to prefer humanity to human beings but prayed for the strength to do better. For some in Carter''s orbit, his impatient and occasionally persnickety style--a few dubbed him "the grammarian in chief" for correcting their memos--would mean that their respect would turn to reverence and love only in later years. Only then did many of those who served in his administration fully understand that he had accomplished much more in office than even they knew.

Carter''s farsighted domestic and foreign policy achievements would be largely forgotten when he shrank in the job and lost the 1980 election. He forged the nation''s first comprehensive energy policy and historic accomplishments on the environment that included strong new pollution controls, the first toxic waste cleanup, and doubling the size of the national park system. He set the bar on consumer protection; signed two major pieces of ethics legislation; carried out the first civil service reform in a century; established two new Cabinet-level departments (Energy and Education); deregulated airlines, trucking, and utilities in ways that served the public interest; and took federal judgeships out of the era of tokenism by selecting more women and blacks for the federal bench than all of his predecessors combined,.