Not long after Jimmy Carter left the White House, Frye Gaillard became one of the first American journalists to write a serious retrospective on his presidency. Gaillard’s groundbreaking series in the Charlotte Observer, published in the summer of 1985, drew praise from a wide variety of sources. Jack Nelson, Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, called it “a great contribution to the literature of the presidency.” The songwriter and novelist Tom T. Hall, a close Carter friend, called it “near genius.” And James Wall, editor of the Christian Century magazine, in a letter to Gaillard, summarized the series...

The first time I saw Jimmy Carter was on a February night in North Carolina. The weather was terrible—a cold north wind whistling down from the mountains, carrying a mixture of sleet and freezing rain. I wondered what kind of crowd there would be, or if there would be a crowd at all, for this didn’t seem like Carter country.

He was speaking that night at Wingate College, the alma mater of Senator Jesse Helms, in the rolling farmlands southeast of Charlotte. I was startled to find, when I made it to the campus, that the Wingate auditorium was...

He came from Sumter County, which is like a lot of southern Georgia—a land of row crops and cornfields and brambly pine forests springing from the clay. Andersonville is only a few miles away: an American Dachau, where Union soldiers were held with no shelter during the rainy Georgia winters, where rotten meat was a luxury, and where the bodies—12,912 of them by one official count—were dumped shoulder to shoulder into shallow trench graves, a number pinned to each uniform so that the deaths could be recorded.

The meanness was not confined to the nineteenth century. In...

Jacobo Timerman was probably too important to kill outright, so his captors put him in prison for two and a half years and tortured him periodically, according to their whim. But he survived the intimidations of his Argentinean wardens, and if courage and eloquence are the measure of his craft, he established himself as one of the world’s finest journalists.

The agony of his country had seen many stages, but arguably the worst began in 1976, when the military seized control of the government and, in trying to combat terrorism, became terrorist itself. Depending on whose estimate one accepts, somewhere...

On a January day in 1980, Kurt Waldheim found himself surrounded by a screaming mob in the streets of Tehran, and the UN secretary general—a man accustomed to a certain diplomatic immunity—thought for a moment that the crowd was going to kill him. The taunts of the protestors were a jumble—and would have been even if he had understood Farsi—but then came a sudden, horrifying gesture that gave a strange clarity to the moment’s insanity. They lifted a child, maybe five years old, from the middle of the crowd. The child had no arms. When he...

The hostage crisis was a tragedy for Iran as well as America. In fourteen months it brought down two Iranian heads of state—Mehdi Bazargan and Abol Hassan Bani Sadr—and Iran’s foreign minister, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, found himself on a path of resistance that eventually led to his execution.

But the price Iran paid in political turmoil, kangaroo justice, economic wreckage, and the loss of world esteem was of little consolation in the United States. It was hard, in fact, to see the big picture then, to understand that in the changing face of global politics this was merely a...

It was 1985, a Norman Rockwell scene on a Baptist Sunday morning in Plains, Georgia: the church nestled in a grove of pecan trees, and the cars, many of them symbols of small-town affluence, parked beneath the shade, filling the parking lot and spilling onto the lawn; across the road, a John Deere tractor, standing idle in a field of corn, its tires stained red, the chunks of Georgia clay still clinging to the treads.

The Reverend Dan Ariail arrived at nine-thirty. He was the minister at Maranatha Baptist, and he looked the part—stocky, red haired, with an easy...

Carter was never very interested in medals, at least not as much as his critics seemed to think. There were always the doubters, the pundits who inevitably questioned his motives and speculated, among other things, that he was driven by the hunger for a Nobel Prize. Probably he should have won it already, back in 1978, when he faced off at Camp David with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. Both Sadat and Begin had been awarded the prize on that occasion, but as anyone familiar with the summit would attest, the biggest step ever toward a Middle East peace would...

As the Carter Center continued to evolve, Carter was pleased with the way its mission was developing. In the beginning he had seen it as a kind of “mini Camp David,” a place where people could come and talk—scholars, diplomats, world leaders—searching for a resolution to conflicts. Democracy building was more hands-on; it was “field work,” as one staffer put it, and Carter couldn’t have been more delighted.

It was a perfect match for his range of abilities that the people around him talked about with amazement. “He has the capacity to focus like a laser on an...

Sometimes Carter skated where the ice was thin.

In his book The Unfinished Presidency historian Douglas Brinkley tells of a trip that Carter made to Nigeria. In March 1995 the former president was in Africa on one of many visits to call attention to the guinea wormproblem. He and Rosalynn decided to travel to the village of Enugu, where many people were suffering from the disease, and the Carters were treated quite literally as saviors. Amid the flood of good will Nigeria’s head of state Sani Abacha acceded to a Carter request that he free a prominent political prisoner.

It...

In 2006, as this book was going to press, Jimmy Carter was approaching his eighty-second birthday. On many different fronts it was a busy time. For one thing Carter was looking for a way to reenter what was for him an old, familiar fray: the elusive pursuit of a Middle East peace.

As always he didn’t shy away from controversy. In the early spring of 2006 he wrote a series of op-ed pieces, published in more than seventy newspapers, including USA Today and the International Herald Tribune. He criticized Israel for its expansionist policies in the West Bank and Gaza...