In Conversation: On The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, a political analyst for MSNBC, and author of Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House and The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton. The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III (Anchor) – co-written with his wife, Susan Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a CNN global affairs analyst – is a study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late 20th-century America. For 25 years, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency or ran the White House without the advice of James Addison Baker III. A child of Texas aristocracy, Baker had never worked in Washington until a family tragedy struck when he was 39. Within a few years, he was leading Gerald Ford’s campaign and would go on to manage a total of five presidential races – and win a sixth for George W. Bush in a Florida recount. Ruthlessly partisan during campaign season but an indispensable dealmaker after the election, Baker ran Ronald Reagan’s White House. The Economist called it a “masterclass in political biography.”

Kai Bird is a historian, journalist, and the author of several biographies, including American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin), winner of the Pulitzer Prize. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure. But in retrospect, his political odyssey is a rich and human story that includes both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter (Crown), Bird offers a reevaluation of the complex triumphs and tragedies of Carter’s legacy. The only president in a century to grow up in the heart of the Deep South, Carter was not merely an outsider; he was an outlier. And he looked out on a nation torn by race and demoralized by Watergate and Vietnam and prescribed a radical self-examination from which voters recoiled. Drawing on interviews with Carter and members of his administration, and recently declassified documents, Bird delivers a profound, clear-eyed evaluation of a leader whose legacy has been deeply misunderstood. The New York Times called it a “landmark presidential biography. … Bird is able to build a persuasive case that the Carter presidency deserves this new look.”