The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

• Author: Camp, Donald

Title: Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

Author: Donald Camp

Text:

Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

By Kai Bird

Crown, June 2021

784 pages

"Outlier" is a well-written and thoroughly-researched history of Jimmy Carter's presidency. Kai Bird's theme is that Carter was not a failed president. His presidency was ultimately hijacked by the Iranian revolution, but his overall achievements, domestic and foreign, were consequential and set a high bar for future presidents.

Although Carter is remembered best for successes like the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David peace accord, and the disaster of the Iran hostage crisis, Bird points out that Carter passed more domestic legislation in one term than other presidents in two. He deregulated the airline and natural gas industries. He pushed through consumer protection regulations such as seat belt and airbag requirements, and fuel economy standards. He passed comprehensive welfare reform. He transformed the judiciary by appointing women and minorities to the bench in numbers never seen before. And he was tantalizingly close to health care reform similar to Obamacare before it was torpedoed by Ted Kennedy for not being sufficiently sweeping.

Carter's political advisors nevertheless warned him periodically that he was spending too much time on foreign policy to the exclusion of domestic issues. I will do much the same in this review.

One of Bird's major themes is the ideological struggle between National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Bird puts his view up front: the appointment of Brzezinski "was the President's first major mistake." Among many examples, he cites Brzezinski's obsession with the Soviets and his consistently poor judgment on the Iran issue.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played right into the Brzezinski-Vance dynamic in Bird's telling. Carter took Brzezinski's more hawkish advice over Vance's advocacy of diplomacy. In his State of the Union address, Carter said the Soviet invasion could pose the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War. He boycotted the Olympics, imposed a grain embargo, and ramped up the covert action program to arm the insurgents. He increased the defense budget and altered long-standing nuclear weapons strategy without consulting the State Department.

Bird outlines a conspiracy theory suggesting that the US supply of arms to the mujahideen earlier in 1979 may have...