BONUS: A biography and a memoir reexamine Jimmy Carter's extraordinary life
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Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Former President Jimmy Carter has died. He had a long life, and he leaves behind a really interesting and complex legacy in both what he accomplished and how we think about him today. Carter wrote a book that came out in 2015 that looked back on his early life and his political career. But before we get into that, let's take a look at a book that he wrote.

But before we hear from the man himself, I want to play you this interview that takes a bird's eye view of his presidency. It's from 2021, and it's between NPR Steve Inskeep and historian Kai Bird, who wrote a book called Jimmy Carter, the Outlier. And in it, he argues that, contrary to popular opinion, Carter actually got a lot accomplished in the short time he was in office. Here it is after the break.

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A biographer of Jimmy Carter would like you to reconsider his presidency. People sort of make a joke of the fact that Jimmy Carter is the only president to have used the Oval Office as a stepping stone to doing greater things. Kai Bird knows Carter is considered the greatest post-president. Since leaving office, Carter has observed elections, spoken for human rights, hammered nails to build houses for Habitat for Humanity, and taught Sunday school far into his 90s.

The conventional wisdom calls Carter's actual presidency a failure. The man from Plains, Georgia, served a single term, elected in 1976, defeated in 1980. Byrd's book, The Outlier, insists on a closer look at those four years. I would argue he was the hardest working president we had in the 20th century, probably the most intelligent and well-read, and without a doubt, the most decent president.

It's forgotten, but he actually got a lot done during his four years in office. What are some of the things that he got done? Well, you think about seatbelts and airbags. That happened during his presidency.

He deregulated the alcohol industry, giving us the opportunity to drink boutique beers in every American city instead of just Budweiser. Deregulated the airlines. He deregulated airlines, which allowed middle class Americans to travel instead of driving long distances. Because the regulated airlines were more limited flights for higher prices. They were out of the range of a lot of people.

Exactly. He deregulated natural gas. He deregulated the trucking industry. He passed a lot of social legislation. He appointed more African-Americans and women to the federal judiciary than all his predecessors put together. His presidency was very consequential. And then on the foreign policy field, it's an incredible record.

You know, he passed the Panama Canal Treaty against strong opposition. He negotiated a SALT II arms treaty. He normalized relations with China, passed immigration reform. He made human rights the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy.

And none of this has been walked back. You know, it's a very clean record. He is portrayed as a big government liberal. That's how Ronald Reagan, who defeated him for the presidency, described him. But you've just been talking about deregulation, about shrinking the role of government in many instances. In what way was he a liberal and in what way was he maybe not at all? Well, this is what attracted me.

me to writing about his life in presidency. He's very complicated. You know, he was a social liberal. He was a white Southern man who was the first Southerner elected to the presidency in 140 years. But he was an anomaly. That's why I call the book The Outlier. He came from the deepest part of segregated South Georgia, and yet he was a liberal on race.

But he was a fiscal conservative on the federal budget and on spending. When people said he was a big government liberal, did they actually just mean that they disagreed with his views on race because he was appointing black people to the judiciary, because he was giving back the Panama Canal, because he was worried about the U.S. image in formerly colonized places? Was that really what it was all about? Well, in the end, I argue that was essentially why he was defeated.

in 1980. He was only a one-term president. And he won in 1976 with the votes of white southerners and evangelical voters and the Jewish vote and the union vote. And in 1980, just four years later, he lost the evangelicals largely because he insisted on a separation of church and state.

and refused to allow white academies in the South to have tax-exempt status. Oh, these are schools that were started after the time of segregation so that white parents could continue to keep their kids away from black students. Exactly. And Carter disapproved of that.

When you talk about the number of people who were formerly supportive of him, who he was willing to upset, you say he was willing to upset labor unions. He's willing to upset white evangelicals. He was willing to upset a lot of progressives. When he did those things, who was he for? Who did he think he was acting for? He thought he was acting in the larger public interest.

To him, that meant lower middle class, poor people. For instance, he was willing to expand food stamps, adding two or three million to the rolls of food stamps that benefited largely African Americans in the South.

He canceled, vetoed the B-1 bomber because he realized it was just too damn expensive and unnecessary. But this alienated a lot of liberal congressmen where the B-1 bomber would have been built in their districts. You know, Carter was willing to alienate a lot of people if he thought what he was doing was in the public good.

Was this part of his political problem also that Americans didn't want to hear that there were problems with America that needed to be fixed? Oh, that was very much an issue. Recall his famous malaise speech in July of 1979. He never actually used the word malaise, but it was an extraordinary speech given after 10 days of retreat in Camp David where he sat down and listened to a lot of criticism of his administration and

and came out with a speech that talked about the limits of American exceptionalism, the limits of finding happiness through material goods. It was a really extraordinary sermon, but he was trying to warn us Americans about the environment, about society,

the limits of our view of ourselves as a nation that could be a shining light on the hill to others. He wanted to tell the American people that we have to be aware that we cannot seek happiness simply in material goods. I have a question about that.

Did he give the wrong speech that hurt him or just lose the argument over what it meant? Because you pointed out at the beginning, he never even used the word that is used to describe the speech, malaise. Well, actually, when he gave the speech, it was most Americans were stunned.

And they could respond to what he was saying. They knew that there was some truth in this. But this came, you know, in the wake of long gas lines all summer long and an energy crisis and inflation rates of 13, 14 percent. And, you know, there was a lot of people were kind of tired of the late 70s. Kai Bird, author of The Outlier, the unfinished presidency of Jimmy Carter.

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Former President Jimmy Carter was 90 when he wrote his book, A Full Life. He spoke to NPR's Eric Westervelt back in 2015 when it came out. And even though that doesn't seem like that long ago, there's still a couple exchanges in here that make it feel like a complete time capsule when you consider how much presidential politics has changed since. In just over 18 months, President Barack Obama will join the ranks of ex-presidents,

He'll be 55 when he leaves office and among the youngest to become former presidents alongside Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. President Carter remains a model of what an active, productive life can look like after leaving the White House. And the 39th president of the United States joins us now from the Carter Center in Atlanta. His new memoir is A Full Life, Reflections at 90. President Carter, thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure to be with you and all your listeners around the world.

In a full life, you write that growing up in archery in southwest Georgia, this was the Jim Crow 1920s and 30s, almost all of your playmates and closest friends were African-American neighbors and children of farmhands. You played and worked together, yet you also went to separate schools and separate churches. As a boy, how did this separateness affect your friendships? Well, I didn't really think much about it because it was just a custom and everybody did it and nobody challenged it.

So it was just life. And when I was at home, I really enjoyed the feeling of being in a deep and penetrating and harmonious community with my African-American friends. And when I went to church or went to school, it was just going into a different and somewhat strange environment for me. I was always glad to get back to archery and to resume my previous life, which I had always enjoyed with my basically black friends.

That was a long time ago. What are your thoughts on race relations today? Well, a good portion of my book describes my relationship with other people around planes because when I went off to the Naval Academy and became a naval officer and stayed in the Navy for a good while and came home, my wife and I were more progressive on the race issue than most of the people around planes. So I described that a good bit.

In the book, after the civil rights movement, there was a kind of a breath of a sigh of relief in the South among many people. Well, the race issue is over and now we're going to be fully equal and the millstone will be removed from the neck of both white people and black people. But I would say that over a period of decades since then, since the Voting Rights Act and so forth has passed,

Both the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the general public in America kind of backed away from that commitment to going out of our way to make sure that everything is equal in a racial relationship. And I think the fact is that we've kind of let down our guard, and there's another kind of a resurrection of the indication that a lot of racial tendencies still exist in our country.

In 1976, you and Gerald Ford ran what many consider respectful, positive, you know, no-attack ad campaigns for the presidency. And both campaigns were financed only with public money.

Today, of course, the campaigns combined will spend several billion dollars and with special interest in corporate super PAC spending additional billions. In your book, you call it legal bribery. What's the impact of this money arms race on American democracy? Well, nowadays, people don't not several million dollars, but several hundred million dollars. And the Supreme Court's ruling on

on citizens of the United States is one of the stupid and most counterproductive decisions that the Supreme Court of the United States has ever made. And I think it has basically taken away a lot of the democratic ideals of elections in the United States that we've enjoyed down through the previous generations. So I think it's completely distorted.

the democratic purity or legitimacy of our elections in the United States. Legitimacy, that's strong words. Well, it's true. And it's legal bribery, as I said, because the rich people, when they give a candidate $100,000 or whatever through various devious means,

They expect something in return, and they also influence, through those major campaign contributions, the outcome of elections that shapes the tax rates and gives special benefits to the major corporations and heavy contributors in a campaign.

You left the White House when you were 56 years old, one of the youngest ex-presidents ever. And you've had a lot of second and third acts, including your work on human rights and voting rights with the Carter Center. President Obama will be 55 when he leaves office. If you had one piece of wisdom to impart to President Obama for life after the White House, what would it be? Well...

Just use the talent and ability you already have that got you in the White House and the experience and knowledge of our country and the world that you've gained in the White House to the utmost benefit of use of other people. And I think since he's an African-American background and race, I think that...

His influence in very poor countries where people have different color skin would be quite invaluable. And whatever he does, I'll respect it. Nobel Peace Prize winner President Jimmy Carter. His new book is A Full Life, Reflections at 90. Thank you so much for speaking with us. I've enjoyed being with you. Thank you very much.

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