Read The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter By Kai Bird
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Ebook About “Important . . . [a] landmark presidential biography . . . Bird is able to build a persuasive case that the Carter presidency deserves this new look.”—The New York Times Book ReviewAn essential re-evaluation of the complex triumphs and tragedies of Jimmy Carter’s presidential legacy—from the expert biographer and Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of American PrometheusFour decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But in retrospect the Carter political odyssey is a rich and human story, marked by both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Kai Bird expertly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history.As president, Carter was not merely an outsider; he was an outlier. He was the only president in a century to grow up in the heart of the Deep South, and his born-again Christianity made him the most openly religious president in memory. This outlier brought to the White House a rare mix of humility, candor, and unnerving self-confidence that neither Washington nor America was ready to embrace. Decades before today’s public reckoning with the vast gulf between America’s ethos and its actions, Carter looked out on a nation torn by race and demoralized by Watergate and Vietnam and prescribed a radical self-examination from which voters recoiled. The cost of his unshakable belief in doing the right thing would be losing his re-election bid—and witnessing the ascendance of Reagan.In these remarkable pages, Bird traces the arc of Carter’s administration, from his aggressive domestic agenda to his controversial foreign policy record, taking readers inside the Oval Office and through Carter’s battles with both a political establishment and a Washington press corps that proved as adversarial as any foreign power. Bird shows how issues still hotly debated today—from national health care to growing inequality and racism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—burned at the heart of Carter’s America, and consumed a president who found a moral duty in solving them.Drawing on interviews with Carter and members of his administration and recently declassified documents, Bird delivers a profound, clear-eyed evaluation of a leader whose legacy has been deeply misunderstood. The Outlier is the definitive account of an enigmatic presidency—both as it really happened and as it is remembered in the American consciousness.Book The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter Review :
Jimmy Carter is enjoying a real renaissance lately, as the subject of several new biographies and documentaries. It could be because enough time has passed that his presidency can now be analyzed as history, it could be because of his sheer longevity and status as the eldest of our elder statesman, or it could be because even a conventional “failed presidency” looks pretty good now compared to what we just lived through.At any rate, it’s difficult not to compare Kai Bird’s biography with Jonathan Alter’s “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life”, the last major Carter biography that came out last year, and even Bird gives a hat tip to Alter’s work in his acknowledgments. And I have to say, beat-by-beat, Bird’s and Alter’s works are substantially the same book, with many of the same emphases, the same anecdotes and the same structure - both offer dialogue-heavy, fly-on-the-wall, chronological, sympathetic portrayals of Carter's public life. There are, however, a few key differences, the main one being that Bird’s book is very good - but Alter’s is much better.The main, obvious difference is that Bird chose to focus mostly on Carter’s presidency while Alter devotes more time to his full life story. To his credit, Bird doesn’t race through Carter’s upbringing and pre-presidency in a brief prologue - he devotes a good 100+ pages to it. While it’s not as satisfying as Alter’s longer treatment of this part of Carter’s life, it does help lay the foundation for the story of Carter’s presidency. That said, Bird looks at Carter’s upbringing mostly through the lens of race relations, which is an important part of his life story and political development, but equally important is his education and experience as an engineer and businessman, which aren’t explored as thoroughly.Bird devotes the bulk of his book to Carter’s presidency, though I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what he did with all this extra space that Alter didn’t also thoroughly cover in 1/3rd fewer pages. Bird does sketch out fuller portraits of many of Carter’s staffers and Cabinet members, and provides more background leading up to major events like the Camp David summit and the Iran hostage crisis. And his telling of those events is excellent, particularly the dramatic, day-by-day tick-tock of the Camp David talks. Carter’s domestic struggles with the economy, the energy crisis and his tense relations with more liberal members of his party and the Democratic Congress are also well-covered (though curiously, Joe Biden only gets a couple of cursory mentions in the book, even though he was the first Senator to endorse Carter in 1976 - even slightly more space devoted to their relationship would have made the book just a little more timely).Two drawbacks about Bird’s book really stood out to me, though. One, he never seems to question or fact-check some of the more colorful anecdotes he uses. Alter takes with a grain of salt some of the stories Carter relates in the many autobiographical books he's written. A story Carter tells in which, as a young businessman, he threatened to flush a $5 bill down the toilet instead of paying it as dues to a local white-supremacist business organization is described as “suspiciously colorful” in Alter’s book, as he notes that Carter included the story in only one of the three books in which he described the incident. But Bird relates the story as fact, with no attribution in the text and no skepticism.Bird also relates without question Carter’s anecdote about his mother being asked after his inauguration if she’s proud of her son, to which she cheekily responds, “Which one?” This question-and-retort has been attributed to many others prior to Miss Lillian, including Dwight Eisenhower’s mother, and I can find no reporting at the time that this exchange really happened on Inauguration Day, or any other time. A 1985 Helen Thomas column claims it happened during the campaign - it’s possible she created this legend and Carter ran with it and elided some of the details (he even tells the same story in slightly different ways in two of his books), but I question whether it happened at all. Bird doesn’t. And Alter, tellingly, doesn’t mention it.Bird also tells the story of Carter getting on stage with Dizzy Gillespie to sing “Salt Peanuts” - but he tells it twice in the book, describing it as happening at two different events at two different times. It only happened once, but Carter conflated the two events in one of his books - so Bird does, too, even though by doing so, he ends up contradicting himself in his own book.And in one of the most memorable parts of Carter's "malaise speech" in which he quoted "a southern governor" as telling him, “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation - you’re just managing the government," Bird misattributes that quote to Bill Clinton instead of South Carolina governor Richard Riley. Not only that, but he somehow combines several different comments from several different people into one long quote and attributes all of it to Clinton!These are all small, relatively unimportant little stories in the grand scheme of things. But they illustrate Bird’s somewhat troubling tendency of taking people’s word for what happened, or picking up some "fact" from somewhere, without considering the source or bothering to double-check whether the accounts are really true. If he didn’t fact-check the small stuff, what are we to make of the more important stuff he writes about?The second drawback of Bird’s book is laid out right in the prologue. “No modern president worked harder at the job and few achieved more than Carter in his one term in office,” he writes gushingly. Carter’s commitment to human rights “contributed more to the disintegration of the Soviet system than did Ronald Reagan’s reckless spending on Star Wars.” Etc., etc. At least Bird shows his hand and expresses his point of view right up front, but he could have been a little less hyperbolic in his praise. Alter’s portrayal of Carter’s presidency is sympathetic but fair - he credits Carter for his tangible achievements, and points out where he deserves credit for initiating programs or reforms that didn’t fully come to fruition until after he left the White House. But he also doesn’t hesitate to point out Carter’s missteps and shortcomings.In Bird’s telling, Carter’s efforts are always underappreciated, his critics are always wrong, the press is always unfair, and everyone who judged his presidency to be a disappointment is simply mistaken. Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is portrayed as a Svengali who was responsible for many of Carter’s biggest missteps, and the irresponsible press was solely to blame for “the public perception of the Carter administration as weak and ineffectual.”But perception is no small thing. Carter’s presidency cannot be dismissed as a complete failure, and both Alter and Bird rightly try to correct that perception. But his presidency also cannot be whitewashed as a great, unheralded success that America just didn’t appreciate at the time. Carter could be a micromanaging technocrat whose actions and words were simply not persuasive or inspirational. The best leaders inspire you to do better, they don’t lecture you about what you’ve done wrong. They are strong in their convictions and don’t vacillate in their responses. And no one can be an effective leader if they can't persuade anyone to follow.Alter acknowledges all of these faults. Bird excuses them. Alter’s book is a balanced biography that celebrates Carter’s successes but also helps you understand why his is not a celebrated presidency. Bird’s book is thorough, well-meaning and well-written but veers too close to hagiography in its conclusions, and he doesn’t really make a case in support of his subtitle describing Carter’s presidency as “unfinished”. Together with his troubling tendency to get simple facts wrong - even little things that an amateur like me was able to spot - these drawbacks keep his book from being excellent. It’s a very good read. But in the final analysis, Alter’s is simply better. I have long been of the view that the perfect time to write history is in that 30-50 year after the events period. This book goes a long way toward confirming that opinion. The author can work with many people who have first hand recollection of events, and enough time has gone by so the results of policies have some clarity. This biography of Jimmy Carter put me in mind of David McCullough's Truman, which seemed to do so much to enhance the legacy of a one (really 1 and 1/2) term president. Bird clearly admires Carter, but he does not look away from his problems as a President and as a politician. While Bird openly acknowledges Carter's failures, he also makes the point that Carter's instincts, particularly his focus on human rights, were often more reasonable approaches than the so-called "realist" school of foreign policy put forward by Henry Kissinger, and Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brezinski. Zbig comes off as underhanded and manipulative, almost evil in this book. Think Iago, with Carter as Othello. Bird said in a forward that his intention was to write a "Presidential" biography, and he does. I would guess about a half of the book is dedicated to the events of the Carter Presidency. There is a also material covering Carter's small town upbringing in Georgia, so different than the background of most presidents and a chapter and epilog was devoted to Carter's remarkable post President career, including his work with Habitat for Humanity and his Nobel Prize. Highly recommended, although I will say I have not yet read Jonathan Alter's effort over the same territory, His Very Best, although I see it was published before Bird's. I chose to go with the Bird book because I was so impressed with American Prometheus, about Robert Oppenheimer, which he co authored, and his biography of Robert Ames, The Good Spy. 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