President Carter's Handling of the Iranian Revolution and Hostage Crisis: Discussion with Kai Bird

Stanford Iranian Studies Program

July 18, 2021 Kai Bird discusses President Jimmy Carter's interaction with Iran as a part of his new book, "The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter" (Crown, 2021). More about the book: "Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But in retrospect the Carter political odyssey is a rich and human story, marked by both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Kai Bird expertly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history." Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who has published biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Ames—and now "The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter." He has also authored a memoir about his childhood in the Middle East. He is the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.