An essential re-evaluation of the complex triumphs and tragedies of
Jimmy Carter's presidential legacy--from the expert biographer and
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus Ever since
Ronald Reagan's landslide win in November 1980, pundits have
labeled Jimmy Carter's single term in the White House a failed
presidency. But Carter's time as president is a compelling and
underexplored story, marked by accomplishment and adversity. In
this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, the first full
presidential biography of Jimmy Carter, Kai Bird approaches
Carter's presidency with an expert hand, unfolding the story of
Carter's four years with few allies inside Washington and a great
many critics in the media. 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--as it really
happened and as it is remembered in the American consciousness.
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