In His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, journalist, documentarian, and historian Jonathan Alter examines an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to United States president to global icon. He’s speaking with fellow author and political scribe Neal Gabler, whose latest, Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975, is an immersive and humanizing look at who many consider to be the lesser Camelot-era brother, and how he became a formidable figure of liberalism. Joining them to help direct the discussion is Gregory Kroger, a professor of political science at the University of Miami and the author of Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate.
In Conversation: On Jimmy Carter & Ted Kennedy
In Conversation: On Jimmy Carter & Ted Kennedy
Author:
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Gregory Koger
Gregory Koger is a professor of political science at the University of Miami. He specializes in legislative politics and political parties. After earning his B.A. at Willamette University, he worked as a legislative assistant in the U.S. House, then earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2002. He is the author of Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate, which was awarded the 2011 Fenno Prize for best book on legislative studies, and Strategic Party Government: Why Winning Trumps Ideology and Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate, written with Matthew Lebo. Both books were published by the University of Chicago Press. Koger has also published research articles on parties, lobbying, and Congress in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, American Political Research, the British Journal of Political Science, PS: Political Science and Politics, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics.
Jonathan Alter
Jonathan Alter is an award-winning historian, columnist, and documentary filmmaker. An MSNBC political analyst and former senior editor at Newsweek, he is also the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies; The Promise: President Obama, Year One; and The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.
Neal Gabler
Neal Gabler is the author of five books, including three biographies: An Empire of Their Own, Winchell, and Walt Disney. which won him his second Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named biography of the year by USA Today. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shorenstein Fellowship from Harvard, and a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy scholarship, and was the chief nonfiction judge of the National Book Awards. Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 (Crown) is the first volume of Neal Gabler’s magisterial two-volume biography of Edward Kennedy. It is at once a human drama, a history of American politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and a study of political morality and the role it played in the tortuous course of liberalism. Though he is often portrayed as a reckless hedonist who rode his father’s fortune and his brothers’ coattails to a Senate seat at the age of thirty, the Ted Kennedy in Catching the Wind is one the public seldom saw—a man both racked by and driven by insecurity. The last and by most contemporary accounts the least of the Kennedys, a lightweight, he entered the Senate with his colleagues’ lowest expectations, but he used deference and comity to become a promising legislator. And with the deaths of his brothers John and Robert, he was compelled to become the custodian of their political mission. He becomes a moving force in the great “liberal hour,” which sees the
