There can be few jobs in the world more seductive for the ambitious than the presidency of the United States of America. And few can leave a bigger psychological vacuum when full-time is called. Compared to the surviving Republican ex-presidents- Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush senior - Jimmy Carter is exceptional. "Look, this guy is not playing golf every day", says Patt Derian, who ran Carter's human rights policy in the State Department. "He refuses to sit on corporate boards. He is not on the lecture circuit making speeches for high fees. In setting a good image of what an ex-president can do, he's terrific". An American commentator once quipped that Jimmy Carter "used the presidency as a stepping stone to what he really wanted to do in life". Others have developed a special word for his 20 event-filled years out of power. They call it "the postpresidency".
Against powerful odds Carter has turned his presidential after-life into a whirlwind of mediation in international conflicts, defending democracy in preventing controversial foreign elections succumbing to fraud, and in pioneering medical and agricultural programmes in the Third World. "Waging peace", as he calls it, Carter has exploited his prestige to do good. Through his Carter Center he has negotiated with some of the world's most controversial men. As a private citizen who counts himself a friend of Cuba's Fidel Castro and the latest Washington bugbear, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and of North Korea's late dictator Kim Il Sung, Carter reaches parts that no serving American president has ever done.
Three years before the start of the so-called Oslo process, which brought Israel and the Palestinians to their first agreements, Carter met the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and urged him to start negotiations and recognise Israel. When war almost erupted in the Korean peninsula in 1994, Carter brought both sides back from the brink by denouncing US plans for sanctions against North Korea and persuading the North Korean leader to freeze his nuclear programme and resume access for international inspectors. Carter even offered to step into the current Bush-Gore vote-counting crisis. He recognises that as a Democrat he could not act as a lone mediator, but he believes that, "if Gerald Ford agreed and we were invited by a higher authority, we could go to Gore and Bush and suggest a hand count in all of Florida's counties. We could have a Blue Ribbon Commission that spoke with a non-partisan voice".
So could Carter be a role model for Bill Clinton, another (soon to be) ex Democrat president facing life after the White House? Like Carter, Clinton will only be in his mid-50s as he leaves power. Faced with a possible quarter-century of good health, can he even begin to emulate the results of the other Democrat former governor from the Deep South who made it to the presidency?
Today younger Americans tend to know only four things about Jimmy Carter - peanut farmer, big smile, born-again Christian, the Camp David accords (which ended the state of war between Israel and Egypt). He had the ability not just to live by high moral standards but to turn them into a political plus. He promised the American public "never to tell a lie, and to do nothing of which you or I will be ashamed" and campaigned on a clean-up ticket, denouncing the crimes of the CIA, the lies of Watergate, and the folly of the Vietnam war. He attacked the primitive anti-Communism which had led the United States to empower a series of right-wing dictators in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He promoted human rights as a guiding principle of US foreign policy in place of the balance of power cynicism of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Top politicians seem to need a hefty dose of blind self-confidence and Carter certainly had it. It irritated friend and foe alike. "He has no self-criticism. He'll say something self-deprecating with a sunny smile because he doesn't think it's true. He tries to be humble but he doesn't understand what the word means," says Patt Derian. "He's very hard to understand, because he doesn't have any counterparts in literature or the movies for people to compare with. He's wonderful and maddening and quite eccentric."
His many critics may overlook the fact that his laptop still opens to a picture of the Seal of the President of the United States and a few bars from "Hail to the Chief". More difficult is what one former senior employee calls "his regal style". "It's still like the White House in there [in the Carter Center]. It's very hierarchical, and focussed round him. Very few people who work there ever interact with him, or even see him". In the words of another ex-staffer, "He's quite vain about his rightness. He doesn't like to work co-operatively. He likes people to work for him".
Whatever the source of Jimmy Carter's sometimes grandiose manner, it was not evident in his early years. He was born in 1924 on a hardworking farm in Georgia, in the segregated Deep South. His mother was a registered nurse while his ferociously demanding father ran the farm. Carter was the eldest child, and his father expected him to work long hours on the farm and in their shop, which mainly served the 200 black men and women who worked their land, either as hired hands or sharecroppers. "My biggest ambition was to please my father", Carter says.
Home life was austere. With no indoor plumbing, theirs was no stereotypical Southern plantation. The elder Carters had few friends and saw relations rarely. During meals, family members were allowed to read to make up for the taut and limited conversation. When Jimmy Carter married Rosalynn Smith, a local girl, he was surprised by her family's long, lively, and cheerful mealtimes and the frequent visits from relatives.
The Carters' nearest neighbours were their black staff. The young Jimmy played, fished, swam, and hid in the woods with Afro- American children. "I was basically shaped by five people, only two of whom were white", he boasts. While this means that he alone of modern presidents except for Bill Clinton has "a high comfort level with blacks",Carter was slow to champion black political rights.
He accepts he could have done more in the 50s and 60s on civil rights. "I didn't march across the Selma bridge or do things of that kind", he says. "But I don't regret it. If I had done that it would have been absolutely impossible to be elected to office or become governor of Georgia and then president. When I finally became governor in 66 I said in my inaugural speech that the time for racial discrimination was over. Two months later I was on the front cover of Time magazine, which launched me into the national arena."
Andrew Young, Martin Luther King's close aide, who later became Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, defends Carter's initial caution on civil rights. "As governor he intervened privately in some very explosive situations. We had to support him in order to stop George Wallace (the racist Governor of Alabama). Carter was as quiet in his efforts at reconciliation as Wallace was vocal in polarisation."
On Earl Carter's death from pancreatic cancer in his 50s (Jimmy's three younger siblings were later to die at the same age from the same cancer), the future president had abandoned his career in the Navy to return to Georgia to look after what had become a large farm business. Earl Carter had pioneered new seeds and herbicides and, as a recognised local leader, had joined the state legislature. It was natural that Jimmy would later use the family money to follow in his footsteps and run for state office.
His vibrant Christian faith also set Carter apart from other public figures. While church-going is a necessary ritual for most presidents, he was genuinely devout. His "born-again" experience came shortly after he lost the race to become Georgia's governor in 1966. Apparently feeling betrayed by God, he went on a long walk in the woods near Plains with his younger sister, Ruth, who practised faith healing. She persuaded him to make a "total commitment" to Jesus, which he did. His optimism revived. For a time he became a door-to-door salesman for Jesus, handing out Bibles in various parts of the United States and Mexico. Even in the White House he continued to preach at Sunday School. He always said grace before meals, even at state dinners with foreign leaders. A close friend of the evangelist Billy Graham, Carter still regularly runs Bible classes at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains. "His faith is not a department of his life. It is the whole superstructure that holds his life together. Miss that and you miss who he is," says the Reverend Daniel Ariail, the church's pastor.
Nowadays, when he is not travelling or at home in Plains, the ex-president is ensconced in the spacious offices of his Carter Center on a hill overlooking Atlanta. He has almost immediate access to any foreign head of government as well as to multimillionaires like CNN's Ted Turner and Microsoft's Bill Gates, both of whom have financed his work. Thanks to the centre's health programmes, the guinea-worm disease which once afflicted three Asian and 19 sub-Saharan countries is almost eradicated. When the centre - which has also received funding from sources including major drug companies and the British government - took up the issue in 1986 there were 3.5m guinea-worm cases worldwide. Now there are only 86,000.
The centre is also tackling river blindness, which affects around 20m people in Africa and Latin America. Global 2000, Carter's agricultural programme, is trying - with only mixed success - to bring the Green Revolution to Africa.
At 76, and despite regular jogging, Carter's back is a little stooped, but the broad smile still switches on and off like a light. In angry moods, its sudden disappearance becomes a weapon. He is more relaxed and comfortable than he was in the White House, like a man who knows he has accomplished much and finally achieved recognition.
But the pain of his 1980 defeat still hurts. He expected to win a second term. "I was embarrassed to have lost. I was distressed because I felt Reagan was not qualified temperamentally or philosophically to be president. Being defeated as an incumbent is an extreme disappointment," he says. Carter also suffered heavily from 1979's year-long hostage crisis after the American embassy in Iran was blockaded by militant Islamic students. When in 1980 an effort to rescue the US diplomats collapsed after an American helicopter collided with a transport plane in the Iranian desert, killing eight US servicemen, the crisis became a symbol of the "weakness" which Reagan claimed was at the heart of the Carter presidency.
The irony was that, after 11 years in the Navy from 1943 to 1954, Carter had had a longer military career than any 20th-century president except Eisenhower. He also embarked on the massive increase in the US defence budget which Reagan continued. What was remarkable, however, was that no American soldier was killed by enemy fire throughout Carter's presidency, - a record of non-interventionism matched by none of his successors.
In deep depression, Carter and his wife Rosalynn returned to their farm in the tiny town of Plains (population0 600). Like Clinton, who will return to private life heavily in debt, Carter found his peanut-processing warehouse had gone downhill and was close to bankruptcy. But he is a man of many parts. He enjoys fly-fishing, hunting, birdwatching and car pentry, is a fan of Dylan Thomas and writes his own poetry. He picked himself up by laying a tongue-and-groove floor in his attic and liquidating his business. In seclusion, he embarked on his memoirs, "using the very meticulous diary I had kept as a fetish".
The idea for a conflict resolution centre emerged suddenly. "We were begging for money for the presidential library and I decided I didn't want to have a sterile place where people would come and look at the records. I woke up one night and thought we could have a place here in a congenial atmosphere, similar to Camp David, where people who were in dispute and didn't want to go to the UN or the US government could come," he recalls.
Naturally, he started in the Middle East but his first efforts were not very successful. He was invited to Iraq by Saddam Hussein in 1986 but quiet preparations for a role in brokering peace with Iran came to nothing and Carter never went to Baghdad. He did better in Syria, where he opened talks with President Assad, and he started the first overtures to Yasser Arafat. To continue the focus on human rights, Carter decided to add election monitoring to the centre's work. He set up a Council of Freely Elected Heads of Government, including several Latin American presidents, to focus on democracy in the hemisphere.
The breakthrough, which brought him a kind of rehabilitation in the American media after almost a decade in the wilderness, came in General Noriega's Panama in 1989. Carter demanded to be allowed to send observers to the elections, and watched in horror as voting records were changed and falsified in front of him. "Are you honest or are you thieves?", he shouted in secondary-school Spanish before calling a press conference to denounce the election. Noriega ordered Carter and his team to leave the country, declared a state of emergency and repudiated the election as null and void. Carter had shown he could be tough as well as tender. His stock in the United States rose again. But President Bush was planning military intervention against Noriega, and Carter put all his energy into trying to prevent it, hoping that a mediator, backed by powerful political pressure, could persuade Noriega to go into exile. The effort failed and US troops invaded Panama.
Carter's stand persuaded Nicaragua's Sandinista president Daniel Ortega to permit a team from the Carter Center to advise him on organising new election rules. Ortega hoped a fair poll would persuade the US to end its armed support for the Contra rebels. On election night, when shock results showed the Sandinistas were losing, Carter and his wife rushed to Ortega's headquarters to prevent any recourse to force. "I've won an election, Daniel. I've lost an election. I can tell you from my own experience that losing is not the end of the world", he declared.
The arrival in Washington of a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, should have made Carter's life easier, but it had the opposite effect. "Personally I have always gotten on well with Clinton but he has deliberately frozen out, whenever possible, the involvement of the Carter Center in arenas where I was convinced we could help", Carter says bitterly. "I have been to see Clinton about this personally several times. The cause for his attitude I have never understood".
Carter and Clinton could hardly be more different in their private lives. Although Carter once courted ridicule with a remark to Playboy magazine that he occasionally lusted after women "in my heart", he has been faithful to his wife for 54 years. Rosalynn travels with him on almost all his foreign trips, and has developed several mental health programmes at the Carter Center. Though none of their four children has followed in Carter's footsteps, either as farmers, naval officers, or politicians, they remain a close family. His youngest child, Amy, was a student radical and was briefly arrested for protesting against CIA recruiting on college campuses. Now married and the mother of a small child, she and her husband live in Atlanta, close to the centre.
Carter first exhibited his negotiating skills at Camp David in 1978 with Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin. He still uses one of the techniques he developed there. He studies the subject thoroughly, tries to project himself into each protagonist's position, and then draws up "what I think is a reasonable final solution before I even see the parties. Then I use that single document and make sure both sides know I use the same document so that there is no distrust of me". Then he shuttles between them, trying to narrow the gap. He contrasts this technique with Henry Kissinger's. "I don't think he would disagree. He tells one side one thing, and the other something else, and then keeps them apart as he talks", Carter says. The key negotiating quality may be what Peter Bourne, a British doctor and longtime friend who worked in Carter's administration, describes as "his capacity to put aside any moral judgement about people. It goes back to his Baptist background - there is no such thing as bad people, only bad actions."
One of Carter's most successful missions was his trip to North Korea in 1994. He found himself quickly at ease with Kim Il Sung, the Communist leader of the world's most isolated state. "He was 82, but extremely knowledgeable about everything in North Korea. He was congenial and very grateful that I had come. He went out of his way to let me know he had a deep appreciation for Christianity. He claimed Christian missionaries may have saved his life when he was imprisoned during the Japanese wartime occupation", Carter remembers.
Kim Il Sung authorised Carter to invite the president of South Korea to a summit meeting. But three weeks later the dictator died and it took his son, Kim Jong Il, six years to repeat the historic gesture and welcome South Korea's president to Pyongyang.
Carter acknowledges that he likes to seek out people whom no official American will touch, though he gently deflects the idea that he enjoys supping with the devil to see what he is like. "It is intriguing to meet Mobutu, Cedras (the former dictator of Haiti), and Kim Il Sung", he smiles. "They are pariahs, but my knowledge is that they are the key to the problem and without them no progress is possible".
Other leaders he meets are only pariahs in the US view. Carter wants to "de-demonise" them. The Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez was in Atlanta last month (without going to Washington). He admired Carter's willingness, when he was president, to court rightwing anger and prepare the treaties under which the Panama Canal was handed back. Cynics sometimes say Carter is the "soft cop" who can do the delicate work which the "tough cop" in Washington cannot. But his fierce independence and Clinton's manifest hostility and nervousness about the ex-president's role make that impossible.
So is the Carter Center just a way of continuing his presidency and having the second White House term which fate denied him? Andrew Young vigorously denies it. "I get angry with people who say he's been the greatest ex-president, because this interferes with the effort to understand him as president. He sought to implement an almost theological agenda - world peace, controlling nuclear proliferation, and the reconciliation of race and class. Since then, he has demonstrated, like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, that people who are not office-holders can have a moral impact on society, which is very difficult when you're locked into the checks and balances of a politician in power."
Young says his main difference with Carter is the ex-president's relative lack of interest in macroeconomics to reduce poverty and inequalities. "As Martin Luther King said, 'I admire the Good Samaritan but I'm not one myself. I want to change the Jericho road and not just go on picking people up who've been assaulted and robbed'."
Within the growing community of non-governmental organisations which concentrate on conflict resolution in civil wars and failed Third World states, Carter is admired as a pioneer of so-called Track Two diplomacy - the effort by private individuals to broker settlements. But he is criticised for not having developed with time and experience.
"There's always been tension between Carter's role and his centre's ability to stand alone without him. He doesn't consult. He makes rash decisions," says the head of one London-based NGO. "He's given an extra twist to the elder-statesman role and been good at high profile end-game diplomacy. But he has a low threshhold of tolerance for building up a variety of stake-holders and for long-haul activities," says Kevin Clements, head of International Alert, which works in the Sudan, one of the Carter Center's main areas.
Ben Hoffman, director of the centre's conflict resolution programme, recognises the problem, especially as the staff is actually quite small, - only three full-time people and six interns from nearby Emory University. "We need to stay involved longer, and do fewer things but hopefully better. We want to go deeper than a diplomatic inter-state perspective. We don't see the centre coming in and just doing elite-level efforts which achieve an agreement and then leave it to other people on the ground to take it on. We want to bridge the two."
In recent years Carter has cut back his work load and now spends only one week a month in Atlanta. When they are not travelling, he and Rosalynn stay in their single-story ranch-style home in Plains. What the centre will eventually do without him, and his ability to raise funds and get high-level access to world figures, remains a thorny question. A $250m endowment is being built up to ensure the centre's future.
Carter doesn't want the conflict resolution programme to become a mere think-tank. Half-a-dozen studies have been commissioned for new models of the centre. They have all foundered on Carter's unwillingness to decide. "I doubt, and all our top trustee committees also doubt, that we can get one person to take my place. That is the general consensus which I don't challenge - or endorse," he says.
In retrospect, and particularly in light of this year's bland choice of presidential candidates, it seems extraordinary that this complex man could ever have been elected president. But he emerged on the scene at a rare moment of American introspection. With his rigorous rejection of military intervention in office and since - he opposed the Gulf war and the Nato war on Yugoslavia - he almost sounds like a pacifist, yet as a former naval officer he is inordinately proud that the latest American submarine, bristling with nuclear missiles, has been named the USS Jimmy Carter.
At a time when the danger of American unilateralism has never been greater, "Carter has a sense of multilateralism", says Robert White, the president of the Center for International Policy in Washington. "He has a sincere and sophisticated drive to help build a peaceful and orderly world. I don't think his motives are unworthy."
James Earl Carter Junior
Born: October 1 1924, Plains, Georgia.
Education: Plains High School; Georgia Southwestern College; US Naval College, Annapolis.
Married: 1946 Rosalynn Smith (three sons, Jack, Chip, Jeffrey; one daughter, Amy).
Career: US Navy 1943-54; managed family farms and peanut business 1954-62.
Political career: Senator Georgia State Legislature 1962-66; governor of Georgia 1971-74; US president 1976-80.
Some books: Why Not The Best (1975), Keeping Faith, Memoirs Of A President (1982), Everything To Gain: Making The Most Of The Rest Of Your Life (with Rosalynn Carter) (1987), Always A Reckoning (poetry 1995).
