THE OUTLIER
The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter
By Kai Bird
Kai Bird’s landmark presidential biography of our 39th president, “The Outlier,” begins, almost lyrically, by recreating the world in which Jimmy Carter grew up. Born in 1924 to Earl and Lillian Carter, virtually the only landowning family in Archery, Ga. (Plains, more famous as Carter’s hometown, is 2.5 miles away), Jimmy Carter certainly enjoyed status despite living in what many Americans would consider poverty. The Carters were the only white family in town. Most of the population of 200 consisted of Earl’s Black tenants. Although considered well off in the rural South of the first decades of the 20th century, the family didn’t have running water until Carter was 11 and didn’t get electricity until three years later. “The greatest day in my life was not being inaugurated president, [and] it wasn’t even marrying Rosalynn — it was when they turned the electricity on,” Carter later recalled.
“The defining mystery of the future president’s childhood was how he nevertheless was molded into something quite alien from his South Georgian racist culture,” Bird notes. Indeed, Carter’s father was a racist. “He believed in the Black man’s inferiority,” Carter’s mother told a journalist in 1976, “but he was no different from all those people around here and all over the country who are now trying to pretend they were never prejudiced.” If structure and local traditions determine attitudes, the person Carter became should never have been. A major part of the answer, Bird suggests, is Lillian Carter, a woman known as “Miss Lillian,” whom Carter later lovingly described as a Southern eccentric. She took meals with Black people, defended Abraham Lincoln and in the 1960s, when John Kennedy started the Peace Corps, a program designed for young Americans, Miss Lillian answered the call, going to India for two years at the age of 67.
For Bird, who won a Pulitzer Prize with Martin Sherwood for a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, this background is the basis for considering Carter a nonconformist, the odd man out — the outlier. Standing athwart the poisonous traditions of the Deep South could have led to a sense of insecurity. But Carter, as Bird repeatedly observes, has always burned with a sense of being right.
And more often than not, Bird argues, Carter was right: “No modern president worked harder at the job and few achieved more than Carter.” Bird blames Carter’s basic honesty for the fact that most Americans missed this about his presidency. He became an especially appealing target for criticism in an era of seemingly insuperable challenges — an oil crisis, high inflation, low growth, apparent Soviet geostrategic gains, the Iran hostage crisis. “For most Americans,” Bird writes, “it was easier to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.”
Yet four decades after leaving office, Jimmy Carter has lived to see a more positive reappraisal of his presidency. A decade ago, Julian E. Zelizer provided a thought-provoking primer on Carter for the American Presidents series; while accepting that Carter’s White House years were “a symbol of failed leadership,” Zelizer anchored some of that failure in the tumult of the 1970s and noted Carter’s achievements. More recently, Stuart E. Eizenstat, Carter’s White House domestic affairs adviser, added a detailed, if wonky, memoir-study that makes a case for a consequential presidency. Last year Jonathan Alter produced a nimble and insightful account, the first cradle-to-old-age biography (surprisingly) ever written of the man. Meanwhile, Bird, with his focus primarily on the presidency, has benefited from some fresh sources, like the records of Carter’s longtime adviser Charles Kirbo. With Bird noting that about 80 percent of Carter’s White House diary is still closed and all of the diary of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser, currently unavailable, there is likely even more to be learned about this pivotal presidency.
Still, Bird is able to build a persuasive case that the Carter presidency deserves this new look. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Carter tried to lead a transitional and corrective presidency. His business experience gave him an intuitive feel for the importance of the marketplace. It was Carter, and not Ronald Reagan, who began the process of opening up the Great Society economy. Carter oversaw the deregulation of oil and gas prices, the airline industry and the trucking industry. Instead of instituting wage and price controls to dampen inflation, as Richard Nixon had done, Carter brought in Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve, knowing he might push for higher interest rates to drain rising prices out of the system. Carter also went after waste, fraud and abuse in government. Concerned that most federal water projects were not only “pork barrel” but a threat to the environment, Carter zeroed 19 of them out (worth $5 billion) in his first budget. And he made clear to congressional liberals like Ted Kennedy that the country didn’t support and couldn’t afford single-payer health care.
But Carter was no proto-Reaganite. This fiscal conservative believed that government could also be part of the solution to social problems. He supported the idea of a comprehensive health care bill and backed, as a first step, a federal program to ensure catastrophic health care for all. With the Social Security system facing imminent collapse — because of Nixon and Congress’s election year decision in 1972 to index benefits — Carter backed the higher taxes that saved it. He imaginatively deployed the dusty 1906 Antiquities Act to keep 56 million acres of Alaska wild. Finally, inspired by the revelations of Ralph Nader’s first generation of consumer advocates, Carter strengthened safety and environmental regulations. It was his administration that required both seatbelts and airbags in cars, measures that saved countless lives but angered many libertarian motorists.
Curiously, Bird’s story of these farsighted domestic decisions does not create an overwhelming sense of Carter as a tragic, misunderstood president. Instead, his narrative engenders as much impatience with Carter as respect. Carter stubbornly, almost reflexively, gored a lot of oxen in the pursuit of what he assumed were the right policies. When you do that as a leader, enduring success depends on either building your own governing coalition or inspiring a hard-core base outside Washington. Carter’s idiosyncratic leadership style achieved neither. Bird shows how Carter’s efforts to deal with the energy crisis and high inflation, for example, undermined his support from traditional Democratic constituencies. Deregulating trucking brought down the cost of delivering goods, but also led to the growth of independent trucking, which weakened unions and depressed truckers’ wages. At the same time, Carter seemed oblivious to ambitious rivals, namely Ted Kennedy, who were ready to pounce.
Indeed, Carter brushed off criticisms that he was too insensitive to the political consequences of what he was doing. “There is not a person” in the administration “who is preoccupied exclusively with the political dimensions of the decision,” Carter’s top aide Hamilton Jordan lamented in December 1977. Without that person, Jordan added, “the high quality of your foreign policy decisions will be undermined unnecessarily by domestic political considerations.” In most administrations it is the president himself who is supposed to balance politics and policy. Not in Carter’s.
Oddly, , given Bird’s mastery of the complexities of international relations in his other works, this book is much less insightful on Carter’s Cold War positions. It is in foreign policy that Carter acts least like a know-it-all from Georgia and more like an uncertain pragmatist. But instead of explicating the evolution of Carter’s thinking, Bird plays favorites in the internal struggle between Carter’s dovish, genteel secretary of state, Cyrus R. Vance, and the hawkish, egotistical Brzezinski. Whenever Carter sides with Vance, Bird praises him. We know now how the Cold War turned out, but Carter couldn’t have. In the second half of the 1970s the Soviets, pushed by the Cubans, were making a bid for new allies in the developing world. In a matter of five years, Havana would send troops to Angola, Ethiopia and Grenada, and train revolutionaries in El Salvador and Nicaragua. And, of course, the Soviet military invaded Afghanistan. In approving Brzezinski’s call for covert action in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, Carter reacted to a world seemingly spinning out of control. Bird seems to think Carter just shouldn’t have listened to his national security adviser.
The narrative is more nuanced when the focus is on the Middle East. The section on the Camp David accord may be too detailed for the general reader, but Bird makes crystal clear that the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, deceived a well-meaning American president. Carter’s diplomacy brought peace to many millions in the region but because of Begin’s double cross, the Palestinians were left out. Regarding Iran, Carter couldn’t really make up his mind on what to do about the shah and his failing regime. After the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, and the United States Embassy was captured, Carter found his focus, which was preserving the lives of the more than 50 American hostages being held by the Iranians. Securing their release proved maddeningly difficult. Moreover, Bird assembles a suggestive, though incomplete, mosaic to argue that fearing a last-minute deal with the Iranians to release the hostages would boost Carter, the Reagan campaign, led by the Nixon alumnus William Casey, further complicated that international diplomacy (as Nixon did, indirectly, in 1968 with the South Vietnamese). “It’s ours to throw away,” Bird quotes a Reagan aide saying just after the Republican National Convention. “If [Carter] does something with the hostages, or pulls something else out of the hat, as only an incumbent president can, we’re in big trouble.” This cold case should remain open.
In 1976, when the inflation rate was 4.9 percent, Jimmy Carter won an improbable presidential victory because he appealed to a sour electorate desperate for change. Carter understood why Americans didn’t trust Congress — he didn’t either — but he thought Americans would trust him. Indeed, he believed, and this was a character flaw, Americans should trust him. By 1980, when the inflation rate was 12.6 percent and the hostage crisis still unresolved, they didn’t — by a long shot — and the one-term Carter presidency became a cautionary tale for future presidents.
In his rhetoric, his approach to Congress, his coupling of environmentalism with job creation and his rejection of short-term fiscal stinginess, our 46th president and longtime Carter political ally, Joe Biden, may be the successor who has taken those lessons most to heart. Kai Bird’s important book intentionally, and inadvertently, explains why American presidents continue to learn as much from President Carter’s mistakes as from his many achievements.
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The Many Successes of Jimmy Carter — and His Ultimate Failure - The New York Times
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