I was walking the dog when the news broke: Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, was going into hospice.
My mind raced as I cajoled Pearl, my 2-year-old goldendoodle, into wrapping up her business before I headed home to my desk. It was February 2023, and it seemed possible that Mr. Carter could pass any day. As a writer for The Morning, The New York Times’s flagship email newsletter, I had to be prepared if that were to happen. I also wanted to go deeper.
I’ve been reading presidential biographies since I was a kid. But I had never even heard of a book about Mr. Carter until a few years ago, when I happened to pick up Jonathan Alter’s “His Very Best,” billed as the first full-length Carter biography.
With the former president entering hospice, I set out to read a book by Mr. Carter himself.
I was surprised to find no shortage of options. Mr. Carter, who has dedicated his decades-long postpresidency to humanitarian work, has also published 32 books, including multiple memoirs, a poetry collection, a children’s story illustrated by his daughter, a paean to faith, an ode to his mother and a novel set during the Revolutionary War.
I wondered: Did Mr. Carter have more books to his name than any modern president — and the fewest written about him?
I was about to start a three-month reporting stint for The Upshot, The Times’s data journalism outfit. And trying to answer that question sounded like a story.
It quickly became clear that there was no systematic way to count every book about every president. But there was a way to do so going back to October 1931, when The Times started tracking book sales.
When I asked colleagues on our Books desk for a list of every Times best seller, they sent me a Google spreadsheet that was 123,467 entries long. A little data-cleanup magic erased duplicate works that reached the list for multiple weeks, squeezing that number down to about 14,000 distinct titles. Winnowing out works of fiction left me with around 6,500 to parse through. Much more manageable.
My new shortlist — mostly memoirs, biographies, histories, journalistic accounts and punditry — made it easy to figure out which books were written by presidents.
As expected, Mr. Carter led the pack, with 20 books that made The Times’s best-seller list.
But figuring out which books were about each modern president was trickier. Reading them all seemed impossible. So in the data-driven spirit of The Upshot, I developed a methodology. Using Amazon, Google Books, the Internet Archive, eBay and other online booksellers, I skimmed the books’ jacket materials, tables of contents, indexes and publishers’ summaries to figure out how to code each book.
Some were easy to eliminate: Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” while an affecting read, has nothing to do with presidents. Others were shoo-ins, with a president right there in the title. I rapidly developed an appreciation for those: Shout-out to David McCullough’s “Truman,” Max Boot’s “Reagan” and “Bushworld” by the Times Opinion columnist Maureen Dowd.
Still other books were tougher calls. Is Nancy Pelosi’s latest memoir, which details her time as House speaker, about all four presidents she served under? I decided it was. A former Times executive editor’s book about fly fishing references Mr. Carter — who himself wrote a best seller about the outdoors — but didn’t make the cut. “Thirteen Days in September,” an account by Lawrence Wright of the Carter-brokered Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, did.
In a few weeks’ time, I had a list I was happy with. Scrolling through it felt like taking a tour of presidential history. Books about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal morphed into chronicles of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s World War II campaigns. Biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson followed volumes about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Historians plumbing Richard Nixon’s abuses of power preceded conservatives cheerleading for Ronald Reagan and liberals blasting George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.
As I coded, I often found myself thinking about the limits of presidents’ ability to shape their own legacies.
A few best sellers — including books by Rosalynn Carter, Mr. Carter’s wife, and Hamilton Jordan, his White House chief of staff — dealt squarely with his presidency. But others that I judged to be about him, such as a political satire by the humorist Art Buchwald, treated Mr. Carter like a sideshow or a one-term speed bump between Watergate and Mr. Reagan’s morning in America. History, it sometimes seemed, had relegated Mr. Carter to a bit player.
The Times puts out new best-seller lists weekly, so my roster kept growing. I made the final update last week, the day before Mr. Carter became the first U.S. president to turn 100. My article came out on his birthday.
The story ends with a hope: that Mr. Carter’s extended hospice stay, nearing the 20-month mark, will make Americans want to learn more about him — and spur future authors to more deeply explore Mr. Carter’s presidency and his postpresidency, now in its fifth decade.
But at least for now, that’s a book for someone else to write. I have some reading to catch up on.
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