The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

 

The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird

I was too young to remember much about the Jimmy Carter presidency.  When I attended college in the late 1980s, I had a professor who sardonically commented that Carter was “the last president who ever died while in office”.  After reading this wonderful, yet somewhat sad, biography of Carter, I now know where such sarcastic sentiments come from when looking at the ill-fated one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Although one could argue that this book is in fact a biography, the vast majority of the book focuses on the four years of 1977-1980.  Author Kai Bird does give us a little bit of Carter’s youth and upbringing, but does so sparingly. This section seems to be included only to emphasize the fact that the deep south was highly racist during Jimmy Carter’s youth, and the only person south of the Mason-Dixon line who was NOT a racist, was Carter himself.  At least that was the feeling one gets while reading this. 

We then make great leaps from Carter the youth to Carter the soldier to Carter the local politician to Carter the governor of Georgia in only a few pages.  In fact, once Carter becomes governor, this book doesn’t really tell us anything he did during his tenure, other than use it as a steppingstone to the White House. There’s not really a whole lot here about the campaign during 1976 either.  It seems like the author is simply trying to quickly get to the presidency since that is where he wants to put the majority of his focus.  I don’t really mean this as a criticism, merely an observation.  I’ll just warn you that if you’re wanting a deep dive into Jimmy Carter before he became president, I’m not sure this book will scratch your itch.  In fact, AFTER the presidency, there’s only one measly chapter dealing with Carter’s life from 1980 to the present.  So doing the math shows you that you get about twenty pages of book detailing forty-plus years of the man’s life.

So this book is really devoted to Carter as President of the U.S.A.  The book is incredibly interesting and captivating.  Sometimes books about political figures draw you too deep into the weeds and bore the helpless reader.  I felt this way at times when I read Stu Eizenstat’s (Carter’s Domestic Affairs Advisor) book on The Carter administration, which included an entire 77-page chapter on stagflation. Oy. This isn’t the case with Kai Bird’s account.  This book moves swiftly from event to event and each chapter is told in the exact amount of detail that is required.  Obviously, such chapters that deal with the Camp David Accord and the Iranian hostage crisis go into far more detail, but it’s all necessary and never boring.  In fact, there were times when I would be so enraptured when reading about the politics of Iran before the Shah was deposed, I forgot that I was actually reading a book about a presidency and not the event itself. When a chapter such as this ended, I felt rocked and jarred upon arriving at the next chapter.  I simply didn’t want the former narrative to end.

Kai Bird’s underlying theme here is that Jimmy Carter was ahead of his time.  Carter had great initiatives (human rights, energy conservation, environmentalism, etc.), but they weren’t really at the forefront of most voters minds back in the 1970s.  The author focuses on this at the beginning, and at the end, of this book.  He definitely is an apologist for Carter and is obviously a fan.  Fortunately, though, this opinion isn’t tainted throughout the whole narrative.  He doesn’t make excuses for Carter’s gaffes as president, and there were sadly tons.  The main theme here is that Carter was (and is) a great human being, but he simply wasn’t that great of a president. In fact, we come to the conclusion that the only reason a man like Jimmy Carter could get elected president, was because the country was in more turmoil than it had ever been due to Watergate.  Voters were so sick of politics as usual, that they were very eager to welcome an unheard of, fresh, smiling face into the office; even if he was a peanut farmer from the deep south.  It couldn’t be worse than what they had gone through during the last four years. Could it?

Well, here is where we see the warts of Carter.  The man simply doesn’t understand politics and/or how to get things done in Washington.  He inherits a legislative branch that is highly tilted in the Democratic party’s favor, yet Carter seems to alienate his own base far more often than the minority party on the other side.  We constantly read about conflicts with Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, and a host of other liberal democrats.  Even Ed Koch, the Democratic mayor of New York City, can’t stand him. Carter, it seems, simply doesn’t want to play their politics game. He also manages to alienate the high-profile Washington press corps by avoiding silly things such as cocktail parties and refusing dinner invitations.  He made a lot of enemies in Washington awfully quick.  If you want to be successful in Washington, you just can’t do these things.

We then must admit that he wasn’t a terribly exciting leader.  Whenever Carter gave a speech or appeared on television, he always looked and sounded like a cat suffering from indigestion after eating a sour mouse.  It seems like the man could never catch a break.  We read about how he disappeared to Camp David for about ten days with no explanation as to why (presidents really aren’t supposed to do this), and when he comes back, delivers his infamous “malaise” speech, and then fires roughly half of his cabinet.  And on and on and on.

When it comes time for the 1980 presidential race, all I could think of was “Why on this Earth would this man WANT to run again after all he’s been through??”.  So this is overall a sad account, yet incredibly truthful.   It says an awful lot when an author such as Kai Bird who honestly thinks highly of his subject matter, is brutally honest when revealing his subject’s multitude of shortcomings.

I loved this book.  This was about 630 pages of reading material (not including sources, indices, etc.), yet I gobbled it up in less than a week.  It greatly held my attention and I learned an awful lot about this particular time of history.  In fact, there’s so much more I want to say about this book, but my review that I’m writing is already rather long.  So I’ll conclude by saying: read this book.  If you love history, you’ll love it.