Jimmy Carter, who turns 97 on October 1, is often thought of as a failed one-term president whose best work came as an ex-president. But in his new political biography of Carter, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, CUNY’s Kai Bird argues that Carter was a much more consequential president than he’s given credit for — and in ways that illuminate what made him one of our most unlikely, uncommon and least understood presidents. Bird says that Carter’s election in 1976–and his rejection four years later by an electorate that embraced Ronald Reagan–was a tipping point in American politics that adds context to the four decades that led to our current moment.
Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist and the author of six previous books. Since 2017, he’s been been executive director and a distinguished lecturer at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY’s Graduate Center. (Photo above by Stephen Frietch)
Related Links
More about Kai Bird
New York Times review of The Outlier
Leon Levy Center conversation with Bird, interviewed by Sam Roberts
Episode Transcript
Rick Firstman: Welcome to CUNY Book Beat. I’m Rick Firstman. Jimmy Carter, who turns 97 on October 1, is often thought of as a failed one term president whose best work came as an ex-president. But in his new political biography of Carter, CUNY’s Kai Bird argues that Carter’s presidency was actually highly accomplished, and in ways that illuminate what made him one of our most unlikely, uncommon and least understood presidents. The book is called “The Outlier: the Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter,” and it’s been hailed as a landmark of presidential biography that contributes new context to the four decades that led to our current moment. Kai Bird is an historian and journalist and the author of six previous books, including “American Promethean,” a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written with Martin J. Sherwin, that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Since 2017, Bird has been executive director and a distinguished lecturer at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Here’s our conversation.
Kai Bird, welcome to CUNY Book Beat and it’s a real pleasure to talk with you about your new biography of Jimmy Carter, The Outlier. So let me start by asking you a little bit about how you came to the project. I know it was a long road that started some 30 years ago, but you dropped the idea back then, partly because you felt at the time that you weren’t the right person to write this book. So why was that? And what brought you back to it?
Kai Bird: In 1990 I went down to Georgia, and thinking that I wanted to explore the notion of doing a biography of Jimmy Carter and his presidency. And I did a magazine article about all the great things he was doing with his ex presidency at that point with the Carter Center. But this is just about 10 years after he left the White House. And I decided it was too early, partly because his presidential papers were still classified. But also, I realized, in my visit to Georgia, that it was really a foreign country. I didn’t understand it and didn’t understand their religion, Southern Baptists, his religion, his religiosity. I didn’t understand race in the South. And because it was a foreign country, I thought I’d have to move there, like a foreign correspondent and dig into the culture a...
