With the recent news about Jimmy Carter on what may likely be his last days, it does seem rather timely to discuss the man and his legacy. So, I got myself this biography of the former president written by Kai Bird and it must be said that The Outlier paints an entirely different picture of Jimmy Carter. Instead of viewing the Carter presidency as a failure, Bird sees the Carter presidency as an anomaly: the president did not spend any time in the glitz and glamor of Washington DC and yet spent his entire four years in office constantly working, and it was all with a personality and a deeply religious outlook of life coming from Georgia (the deep south), Baptist Christianity, and an unorthodox education. All of this make Carter not just an outsider of Washington politics, but an outlier.

Like all biographies, it all starts with Carter’s pre-presidential life in a rather uneventful town in Plains, Georgia. He was never raised with a silver spoon like the other presidents, but as a poor [white] peanut farmer in the segregationist south. He was never rich, nor certainly poor (when compared to the other residents in Plains). The young Carter was most unorthodox compared to his contemporaries: his playmates were usually African Americans, he never harbored any racist views, and was always reading books on his free time. Life would have been different had his father not died in 1953. Carter would have had an illustrious career in the Navy and its nuclear capabilities, but his time in the Navy stood out from other presidents after him. Carter did not see combat, but he has gained knowledge of nuclear engineering. That and working as a modest peanut farmer who got rich in the 50s and early 60s. The tumultuous 1960s got Carter interested in politics and from there, Carter would win the 1976 presidential elections.

With such an outlook, belief, and relevant experience outside of politics, it is no surprise that the Carter experience was so unorthodox even by today’s standards (Trump notwithstanding). It would have been appropriate to say that Carter ran his first term as his second term, but even then Carter went against the mainstream in 1970s Democratic party politics. Compared to the Nixon days, Carter’s presidency did not have any major scandals or corrupt practices. He advanced environmental policies such as expanding nature preserves and stimulating the growth of green energy. Consumer protection, most famously in automobiles and clean air & rivers, was expanded, although automobile protection was probably more the legacy of Ralph Nader (whose supporters Carter promoted to Washington). His economic policies were against the Roosevelt New Deal policies. It was certainly neoliberal, but such policies were made sure to not harm the American people. Such policies were made to curb inflation, but Carter’s (and his Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s) contribution would only pay off after he was out of office. What went wrong? Carter’s personality might have some blame. Maybe it was his National Security advisor, the hawkish cold warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski whose foreign policy outlook constantly clashed with Carter’s pacifist ideas for foreign policy. Or perhaps Carter came it at a bad time: a sluggish economy coupled with inflation, the Iranian Revolution and the Hostage Crisis put Carter in a stressful situation. It was probably all of these problems that plagued the Carter presidency and gave it a bad name.

The Outlier uses a collection of primary and secondary sources, but there is more reliance on primary sources to explain the personalities and thoughts of the figures in the Carter presidency and those around him (including the former President himself). This biography is structured in a way that anyone can read it without having any significant background knowledge of Jimmy Carter, his presidency, or the 1970s. Put it simply, you don’t need a degree to understand this book, and that is a good thing. In any other time, you could say that Kai Bird is too sympathetic to Carter. But in this peculiar time, where the past string of presidencies were considered lackluster (or in this current presidency, downright awful), people are now starting to look back to the Carter presidency as rather decent by comparison. After reading this book, I am given the impression that Carter was a president that the US needed during a time when the US had an existential crisis, but Americans were not ready for a humble man like Carter. Now, in the year 2023 the US faces such similar crises at a far worse intensity when compared to the 1970s, perhaps we should have listened to Carter and given him a chance. His “Malaise speech” was poorly received at the time, but he was telling the truth, whether we liked it or not.

The Outlier is probably one of the best biographies of Carter that truly explain the man and his presidency. It has a very convincing argument and is very well written and it can be very hard to put the book down. I would say that it is worth reading to get a new perspective about Carter and finally judge his presidency differently.

Kai Bird's biography of Jimmy Carter is excellent. It covers Carter's early life, his political career, and his presidency. The book is very well written and very readable.

Carter's presidency (1977-1981) took place during a tumultuous period. The author puts a very positive spin on Carter's presidency. Carter was a competent, decent, and caring person. From my perspective, he was simply faced with a series of very trying challenges.

The bottom line is that The Outlier is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in modern American history.

The book has extensive notes, but they're primarily for sourcing purposes. There are relatively few notes that contain an ample amount of additional information. There's also a bibliography.

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.

Awesome book! Highly recommended in this silly political climate. Doubt we will ever have such a common human being in the White House again.

Bird has written an extremely well written and researched biography of Jimmy Carter. I was attracted to it in the wake of Rosalynn's recent death and with the knowledge that we will be losing her husband, who is now in hospice, fairly soon.

Having grown up in Texas and lived my adult life there and in North Carolina and Kentucky, I related to Kai Bird's approach to Carter as a product of his Southern upbringing--that it was pivotal to his religious faith and his understanding of race. But in his case, being raised playing with mostly black children and by a mother who had little if any racial prejudice, he grew up with the better parts of being Southern, absent the racism that was all around most of us. He was smart enough not to mention that in his gubernatorial campaign, but then quickly announced that the time for racial discrimination in Georgia was over after he had been elected.

The book is mostly about his presidency, and there is so much to tell there. "Scandals" that wouldn't even pass for the hint of a scandal today. Real accomplishments that people have forgotten about, but were often unpopular at the time. Carter's flaws are covered just as thoroughly as his virtues. For example, while he took care to listen to everyone and be polite, he generally thought of himself as the smartest person in the room. And Bird writes that he often was.

I remember the night Jimmy Carter got elected. It was a squeaker. Late in the night, the returns came in. It was the only time in history that Mississippi was a SWiNG state: enough of the white vote went for Carter to carry it for him when added to the black vote. Four years later, he was first challenged by Edward Kennedy for the nomination (Ted never conceded), and then he was soundly defeated by Ronald Reagan.

But reading about how hard he worked to get an agreement at Camp David between Anwar Sadat (with whom he got along very well) and Menachem Begin (same cannot be said there) that resulted in the first peace and recognition between Israel and any of its Arab neighbors (Egypt) is inspiring. In fact, Carter worked hard at everything.

The most maddening part for me was the year-long Iran hostage crisis. Network coverage that year was a precursor to what we have now with 24 hour "news" networks that demand that everything get done NOW. Carter bowed to pressure to let the Shah enter the US in the first place, which started the crisis. Then he was patient about negotiating for their release, but finally gave into the pressure and authorized an ill-fated and ill-conceived rescue attempt. Servicemen died in that effort, but it is even more ridiculous when you read that those who insisted on doing it acknowledged that servicemen, hostages, and Iranians would all lose lives if it succeeded. Carter's national security advisor Brzezinski was pushing all these moves.

But none of that negates the accomplishments people have forgotten: the Panama Canal treaty, normalization of relations with China, putting human rights into the forefront of our international relations, among others.

Rosalynn plays a big part, and she herself is surprisingly influential--not just with her mental health campaign, but also weighing in on policy decisions.

The last chapter is on the post-presidency, and Carter continued to be a work-horse there. Starting as a writer and fostering the Carter Center to be more than just a presidential library, then moving on to working with Habitat for Humanity, eradicating diseases in Africa, and other causes. He also remained involved in foreign affairs, especially in the Middle East, sometimes to the displeasure of whoever was president at the time.

It is a long book, but it is broken down into chapters, and each chapter has sections. For those of you who, like me, read for only a given time each day, this works out really well. I highly recommend the book. It will remind you of things you lived through (if you lived back then), but also tell you about things you never knew. I, for instance, never knew how cold the Washington crowd was toward the Georgians. But I am not surprised.

Excellent book. Well written! 700 page book and that’s fine!

I have long considered Carter a much underrated statesman and president. Camp David accords, the appointment of Paul Volker as Fed chairman, his efforts to end dependence on fossil fuels and his promotion of alternatives clearly make Carter a visionary, particularly seen in the light of the breakdown of Republicanism, the economic collapses of the 21st century and his promotion of peace and the willingness to engage in high-pressure diplomacy to achieve his goals. Kai Bird finally offers a warts-and-all portrait of a president who will receive much fairer evaluations by historians in comparison to most of his successors, including GOP's St. Reagan. Telling people what they don't want to hear but need to hear is the mark of true leadership, and ``The Outlier'' demonstrates the truth of this statement. It will also begin the process of historical revisionism desperately needed to counter the opportunistic cynicism of post- Reagan America.

I believe this will be the definitive book, if there is such a thing, on the Carter presidency. All biographers use the diaries and letters of their subjects when doing their work. Kai Bird had the biographer's luxury of having so many of the characters in the Carter story still living and able to be interviewed. And, even more wonderfully, he had access to their diaries too. Bird left no stone unturned. It was outstandingly done.

I admit to being furious at Carter for not going to war with Iran who had committed an act of war against us, but, of course, he was right, and I was wrong - which I realized years ago. Over the years I had forgotten the very many good things he managed to do in his four short years in office.

I thought this hugely long book could have used some cutting in the first 200 pages, but, by the end I was understanding why it was all needed. The book belongs on every American History reading list.

A fascinating insight into the wall to wall decision-making and endless challenges of a very proactive, principled President.He makes UK politicians look like lightweight, posturing incompetents

Wonderful - almost as good as his more famous biography of Oppenheimer.

Will be studying this book with my presidential bios class - will be most interested as to what the group thinks.

A clear picture of the struggles of a good man leading America at a challenging time.

Personal knowledge