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A Companion to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter. Edited by Scott Kaufman. Wiley Blackwell Companions to American History. (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. Pp. xii, 594. $195.00, ISBN 978-1-4443-4994-8.)
The 1970s, a decade once considered lost years when "it seemed like nothing happened," are now receiving considerable attention from scholars. Recent notable works by Thomas Borstelmann, Jefferson Cowie, Michael Stewart Foley, Laura Kalman, Rick Perlstein, Daniel T. Rodgers, Dominic Sandbrook, Daniel J. Sargent, Judith Stein, Francis Wheen, and others have examined the 1970s as a decade of profound change in the United States and the larger world. A Companion to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, which joins the magisterial Wiley Blackwell Companions to American History series, examines the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate presidencies of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter through a sweeping collection of essays.
Given their respective political affiliations, Ford and Carter are, at first glance, a strange pairing for a combined volume. Yet both were, as this volume's editor Scott Kaufman argues in his introduction, "unlikely candidates to sit in the Oval Office" (p. 2). Ford remains the only president who was not elected, and Carter was the ultimate Washington, D.C., outsider. The former was an amiable and popular football star who led the University of Michigan Wolverines to back-to-back undefeated seasons and national championships. As a congressman, he aspired to become the Speaker of the House, a goal he was unable to achieve in Democrat-dominated Congresses, and he ascended to...