Jimmy Carter: The man of faith who has made a mockery of his doubters

In 1987, six years after the end of one of the most universally panned presidencies of modern times, Jimmy Carter published a book with his wife Rosalynn on life after the White House. Everything to Gain, it was called, Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life. It was picked over, as such volumes are, for further evidence of the strange ways of the hick and rather preachy Southerner whom a fluke of history had catapulted into the most powerful office on earth. Today the title is a prophecy fulfilled.

In terms of redemption among former Presidents, only Herbert Hoover can match him – and Hoover did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. Carter has remade himself. What were weaknesses in office have become strengths after office.

America is the land of second chances, and in his own individual fashion, Carter has seized his second chance with both hands. The man whose saintliness was mocked when he held power has now achieved the nearest thing to political beatification that America can bestow.

Carter was in many ways the accidental President. Almost certainly neither he nor any other Democrat would have become president in 1976 but for Watergate. But after Nixon's disgrace, Carter caught the national yearning for a candidate who could purify national politics, purging them of conspiracy and corruption. "Trust me," was his slogan (though to the trustworthiness he added a steely, even ruthless, determination that, now as then, is often overlooked – as well as a thoroughness of preparation born of a past training as an engineer).

Starting with his Inauguration Day in 1977, when he walked hand-in-hand with Rosalynn along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, Carter embraced the symbols of a new era. He would run a more open White House that would return the presidency to the people. James Earl Carter would be known as plain "Jimmy". The transparency couldn't last of course, and it didn't. Carter had come to the supreme office in the land with scant political experience. His campaign for it had been a model of assiduity; but his experience of running an administration was limited to a single term as governor of Georgia, in the early 1970s, when it was far from the southern powerhouse it is today. In the White House it soon showed.

As a president, Carter was a compulsive micro-manager. His own insecurity was reflected in the "Georgia mafia" that would surround him, as impenetrable on occasion as the Erlichman/Haldeman "Berlin Wall" of the Nixon era.

His greatest success, of course – as yesterday's citation in Oslo made clear – was the Camp David agreement of 1978, which led to the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that survives to this day. But Carter was an unlucky President too. Even that success was swiftly eclipsed by the fall of the Shah of Iran, the energy crisis, the seizure of hostages in Iran and, finally, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979.

Carter could not put a foot right. His riposte to the Afghan invasion, a US boycott of the following year's Moscow Olympics, was seen as spiteful and, worse still, pointless. The games went ahead anyway, with the participation of most of America's allies, including Britain. His perceived weakness in dealing with the mullahs in Tehran was summed up by the botched rescue mission that came to grief in the Iranian desert in April 1980.

By that time, the hapless 39th President even tripped up on his acronyms. As petrol and fuel prices soared, Carter promoted energy conservation to Americans as the "Moral Equivalent of War" – instantly reduced by his foes to the damning, and undeniably apposite, "Meow". Capping everything was the immortal "killer rabbit" affair, too complicated alas to relate in detail here. It stemmed from a 1979 fishing trip to his native Plains, Georgia, during which Carter encountered a furry rabbit-like beast in a lake. The President himself started the story; and as others embellished it, the tale quickly entered the realm of the absurd. Carter, it was said, tried to defend himself against this dastardly amphibious assault with a paddle – then for fear of offending the animal rights brigade, he issued a clarification, that he had merely splashed water at the aggressor.

Inevitably, the saga became a metaphor for his floundering presidency, which ended with landslide defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan. "It just played up the Carter flake factor," his biographer, Douglas Brinkley, said later, "I mean, he had to deal with Russia and the Ayatollah and here he was supposedly fighting off a rabbit." On January 20 1981, minutes after Carter left office and Reagan became President, the hostages left Iran. Few Americans mourned the change.

But Carter, an ex-President at just 56, did not, unlike most of his successors (not least Bill Clinton, an even younger ex-President), take to the lucrative lecture circuit or vanish to the golf course with his cronies. He went back to Plains to finish building his house, where he wrote a memoir whose proceeds helped pay off his debts. By 1982, he was a professor of Atlanta's Emory University, and soon the Carter Centre was born, the organisation through which, sometimes visibly and sometimes invisibly, he has sought to promote democracy and has mediated in crises on four continents.

In the Middle East, an abiding interest, he has worked behind the scenes to preserve a hope of peace, however minuscule. He persuaded the former dictator of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, to open talks with South Korea and helped to reduce nuclear tensions on the peninsula. In 1994 he went to Haiti to broker the deal to persuade military strongman Raoul Cedras to leave and stave off a US invasion. To the intermittent irritation of the Clinton administration, Carter involved himself in Bosnia, but he did help to arrange a ceasefire that would, in part, pave the way for the 1995 Dayton Accords.

In Bosnia he was held to be too understanding of villains such as Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic. But he led the international observer teams in Panama in 1989 that denounced the rigged election of General Manuel Noriega. The following year in Nicaragua he helped to organise the elections that would see the defeat of Daniel Ortega, one of Washington's left-wing bogeymen of the day. Ethiopia, Southern Africa, the Dominican Republic, East Timor... wherever wars and conflict have flared, Jimmy Carter has usually been trying in some capacity to extinguish them.

By the standards of a country addicted to over-the-top press coverage and shameless self-promotion by politicians, Carter, both as President and in his more inspiring afterlife, has moved with modesty. Bill Quandt, who as the National Security Council pointman for the Middle East was deeply involved in Camp David, once well described his strengths and weaknesses, as seen through the prism of the Israeli/Egyptian negotiations:

"He was most impressive in small groups... but less impressive in handling television or giving speeches to large audiences; his delivery was wooden, the rhetoric stilted... some of us felt he took special pleasure in tackling problems that no one else had been able to solve."

What was true in 1978 remains true today. Carter's public appearances are usually flat, the soft Georgian accent curiously unattractive. He is no back-slapper or glad-hander. But in small groups, unseen, he has done splendid things. On his bad days he can still project a maddening saintliness. But his humility, augmented by his dizzying fall from power, is genuine. That humility has contributed to his refound prestige – which in turn has enabled him to take on the presidents who have followed him – not just Republicans, but as Bill Clinton on occasion could attest, Democrats as well.

The key lies in his unusual background. Carter is a mixture of born-again Southern Baptist, which is not a rare commodity in Georgia, and old-fashioned liberalism, which is. His father was a white segregationist, but his mother Lillian was an indefatigable activist who joined the Peace Corps at 68 and spent two years as a nurse in India. His father died young, and Carter had to leave the navy to take over the family farm at Plains. And the much-derided "peanut farmer" was, in fact, rather good at his new trade, reviving the farm's fortunes and giving himself the financial security to permit his successful run for the governorship of Georgia in 1970.

Percolating everything is his faith. God is frequently invoked from the White House, but never with greater sincerity than by Carter. In office he would preach at Sunday School and always said grace before meals, even state dinners with foreign leaders. He has never sought to impose his religious views on others, and does not come from the most conservative Baptist wing.

Carter's belief was that he should do what was right, and that others would back him for that reason. And frequently, on the big things, he has been right. His commitment to human rights was visible on the very day he took office as Georgia's governor and called for a total end to racial segregation in the state.

Realpolitikers smiled eerily when he chided the Kremlin for its human rights abuses – but in the end that criticism, pursued by Presidents Reagan and Bush, helped to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Meow might have sounded funny back in the 1970s – but how different might a world be in which the US was not dependent on imports for more than half its oil consumption. And if democracy and peace truly are the ideas that are conquering the world, as American optimists believe, then Jimmy Carter surely deserves a tiny part of the credit.

Above all he has proved a truth that must delight the devout Christian he is. The mightiest secular office on earth, the Presidency of the US, is not the be all and end all of a man's career. To be sure, Jimmy Carter has adroitly used its afterglow. But just as the 1987 memoir says, there is everything to gain in the rest of a former President's life: not only a reputation, but the sense of a job well done. Bill Clinton take note.

Life story

Born: 1 October 1924, in Plains, Georgia, to James Earl Carter Sr, a peanut farmer, and Lillian Gordy, a nurse; first American president to be born in a hospital.

Family: Married Eleanor Rosalynn Smith, also of Plains, on 7 July 1946; three sons, one daughter.

Education: Georgia Institute of Technology (1942), US navel Academy (BSc, 1946). Studied nuclear physics at Union College, New York State

Military career: Lieutenant, submarine service, 1946-1953.

Political career: Board of Education chair, Sumter County, 1955-62; Georgia State Senator, 1963-66; Governor of Georgia, 1971-75; US President, 1977-81.

Honours: Ansel Adams Conservation Award, Wilderness Society, 1982; Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism, 1987; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1999; Nobel Peace Prize, 2002.

He says: "Our American values are not luxuries, but necessities – not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself."

"I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times."

They say: "Recession is when your neighbour loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his." – Ronald Reagan