The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

This book “The Outlier” by Kai Bird is an excellent and interesting and searching biography of a president whose contributions are undervalued.  Though Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) has been perceived as a weak or hapless executive, that view, writes Pulitzer winner author, is “a simplistic caricature.”

Carter’s single term in office was “consequential.” Bracketed between the Nixon/Ford and Reagan/Bush eras, it marked such matters as the beginnings of corporate deregulation and the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Carter is also remembered as a scolding moralist.

He earns the rubric “outlier” for being a Washington outsider, a former governor swept into higher office largely because he was not a Republican but also, by author’s sharp account, for taking his own path, often against the counsel of his advisers.

For example, he was urged not to hire economist Paul Volcker to lead the fight against inflation, knowing that Volcker “intended to make the economy scream as he faced reelection.”

Carter’s failures, the author suggests, were often not of his doing: A deeply split Democratic legislature made up then of Southern conservatives, who would soon defect to the GOP and Northern liberals hampered him and he had the likes of Edward Kennedy dogging him constantly.

The author’s sprawling study is sometimes repetitious—e.g., he repeats the observation that Carter made more minority appointments to the federal judiciary than any other president before him. Nonetheless, the author is a keen biographer of political figures and he offers a welcome reminder that Carter’s liberal impulses were correct while his missteps were often the result of events he could not fully control, as when the Reagan campaign, in a “treasonous caper,” putatively met with the Iranian regime to delay release of the Tehran hostages and “scuttle Carter’s second-term presidency.”

Overall, this book is a laudable study to date of the Carter era and a substantial contribution to the history of the 1970s.