Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

Historian and journalist Kai Bird's new book, The Outlier, is being acclaimed as a definitive account of President Jimmy Carter's presidency, including how President Carter’s often-controversial policies and initiatives appear in historical perspective.  Carter assisted Bird in his research, giving him exclusive access to the private papers of Charles Kirbo, Carter’s longtime personal lawyer and political adviser, as well as to the unpublished diaries of Carter White House aides Langdon Butler, Tim Kraft and Jerome Doolittle. Bird points out that as president, Jimmy Carter was not merely an outsider: he was an outlier. He was the only president in a century to grow up in the heart of the Deep South, and his born-again Christianity made him the most openly religious president in memory. Bird says this outlier brought to the White House a rare mix of humility, candor and unnerving self-confidence that neither Washington nor America was ready to embrace. Bird traces the arc of Carter’s administration, from his a