New Book
Four 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, Kai Bird expertly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history. As president, Carter was not merely an outsider, but indeed an outlier. He was the only president in a century to grow up in the heart of the old confederacy, and though he held strongly to the separation of church and state, his born-again Christianity made him the most openly religious president in memory. As Bird shows, this background manifested itself in an unusual complex of arrogance, humility, and candor that neither Washington nor America was prepared to embrace. Forty years before today’s broad public reckoning with the vast gulf between America’s creed and its actions, Carter looked out over a nation torn by race, crippled by stagflation, and demoralized by both Watergate and Vietnam and prescribed a radical self-examination from which voters ultimately recoiled. The cost of Carter’s unshakeable belief in doing the right thing would be a second term–and the ascendance of Reagan. The issues that Carter contended with in the late 1970s are still hotly debated today: national health care, growing inequality, energy independence, racism, immigration, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forty years after voters turned him out of the White House, Carter appears remarkably prescient on the major issues facing the country in the twenty-first century, even if in his own time he was a prophet scorned. Drawing on interviews with members of Carter’s administration as well as recently unclassified documents from his presidential library, Bird delivers a profoundly thorough, clear-eyed evaluation of a president whose legacy has been debated, dismissed, and misunderstood. The Outlier is this generation’s definitive account of an enigmatic presidency–both as it really happened and as it is remembered in the American consciousness.
About the Author:
Kai Bird is the author of The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment and The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms. He coedited with Lawrence Lifschultz Hiroshima?s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy. A contributing editor of The Nation, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.
Kai Bird Jimmy Carter Biography
Reviews of The Outlier: THE UNFINISHED PRESIDENCY OF JIMMY CARTER By KAI BIRD:
“This beautifully written book will take its place alongside other superb one-volume biographies of American presidents. The Outlier will raise readers’ estimates of Jimmy Carter’s term in office.” Robert Dallek, New York Times bestselling author of Franklin D. Roosevelt and An Unfinished Life
“Kai Bird’s brilliant biography doesn’t just capture Jimmy Carter’s decency and courage. It reminds us what America can still learn from him today.” Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism
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