Acclaimed historian, journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Kai Bird will be giving a series of lectures the first week of August at the Center for Life Enrichment.
Bird will be hosting a total of three lectures, each of which will focus on one of his books. The first of the three lectures will be held at the Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, Aug 2 from 10 a.m. until 12 p.m. and will be on Bird’s most recent biography The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.
“I’d always had a fascination with [Jimmy Carter], ‘’ Bird said. “He was a tipping point between the old-time FDR kind of Democrat and the Ronald Reagan [neo-conservatives] that came in the 80s. I wondered why he had not gotten reelected. I actually had an interest in him and after finishing my first book, I went down to Georgia and did a magazine profile of him, thinking I might want to do a biography and in the course of writing the magazine story, I decided I was the wrong guy to do it because I didn’t understand the South or Southern Baptists or race. And, I realized it was also too early because his presidential papers were still partially closed. So that was 1990. And then, you know, jump ahead 25 years, I sort of came back to the subject after reading some other books. By then, his papers were largely open, and you know, I’m glad I did it. It was a lot of fun.”
Bird was raised in the Middle East by his U.S. Diplomatic parents and entered into the journalism career in his early 20s. This led him to eventually writing his first biography, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment.
After the publication of his first few biographies, Bird began to toy with the idea of writing about President Carter but decided that it was too early in his career. By the time he circled back around to Carter, it was 2021 and Carter’s southern roots and values would still prove to be a tricky part of Bird’s endeavor to highlight the former Georgia Govenor’s “unfinished” presidency.
“It was only one term, and he was very ambitious, and people forget, but he was actually quite effective. He passed a lot of legislation, and not only controlled the White House, but the Democrats controlled the Senate and the house. He was quite effective in passing all sorts of quite momentous legislation. He persuaded Congress to pass laws requiring safety belts, airbags in all automobiles, which save nine or 10,000 lives a year. He eventually tackled inflation by hiring and appointing Paul Volcker as head of the Federal Reserve and knowing quite well that Volcker was going to jack up interest rates and restrict the money supply and put the economy into a recession, just as Carter was heading into a reelection campaign. So, it was a fact of real political courage to do this. His political advisors were telling him not to appoint Volcker, but he did anyway, because he thought inflation was a very severe problem and had to be addressed. And, it was Volcker’s policies that were successful, but it took two years and Ronald Reagan actually ironically gets credit for beating inflation when it was actually Carter who started the process.”
While Bird has written a handful of other biographies, The Outlier is his first attempt at writing about the life and work of a former American President.
“The hardest part, you know I’ve done any number of other biographies, but this is the first full presidential biography, and it was difficult in a way that the others were not. When you’re dealing with the life of a president, he’s grappling with so many issues every day. So, you have to figure out a way to write a narrative that isn’t overwhelming that reflects what the President is doing on a day to day basis and conveys the larger story at the same time. So, that was the challenge.”
Despite the challenges, Bird said that writing the book was like a historical treasure hunt and gave him the access to information that had yet to be seen or read by anyone outside of Carter himself.
“I asked Carter about the whereabouts of the papers of his personal lawyer, a guy named Charlie Kirbo,” Bird said. “Three days later, I got a phone call saying that they discovered them in the attic of Kirbo’s widow. And about six months later, I was given access to four or five boxes of these papers, and they proved to be a whole new window into Carter and his really cool odyssey and his thinking, because Kirbo was very close to him, and these papers had never been seen by any historian or anyone else besides Carter. And they really became the backbone, the skeleton of my entire narrative.”
Bird will also be giving lectures on The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames on Wednesday, Aug. 3 from 10 a.m. until 12 p.m. and American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer on Thursday, Aug. 4 from 10 a.m. until 12 p.m. Both of these lectures will be held in the CLE lecture hall.
Registration for all three of the lectures is currently open and costs $35. Bird’s books will be available for purchase at the lectures and attendees will have the opportunity to get the books signed by Bird. For more information visit the CLE website at www.clehighlands.com.
- By Kaylee Cook