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On Friday, May 18, I meet Jimmy Carter in his office at the Carter Centre in Atlanta. With its sleek wood panelling and view on to a careful garden of apparently impenetrable calm, the place seemed sealed off from time. There were three Warhol screenprints of Carter from 1975, when he ran for office, and the ex-President himself, though now a white-haired 82-year-old, spoke with the famously lilting voice that threw one back more than a quarter of a century.
I was there to talk about his controversial book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (the 21st he has written since he left office in 1981), and he was firm in his view that - thanks to the current Administration - the situation in "the most volatile region of the world" is the worst it has ever been. The war in Iraq, he said, had cemented Arab animosity towards the US and Israel, strengthened Iran, and given Hamas and Hizbollah new life.
"This is the first Administration since Israel became a nation that hasn't made any real effort to have peace talks," he told me. "We haven't had a single day of peace talks now in six years and five months. It's left a vacuum there, and vacuums are always filled with increased violence."
I asked whether there had been any response from the White House to his book or his views, and his blue eyes took on an unreadable twinkle - was it triumph or ruefulness at the predictability of it all? "No," he said, "not a word."
The next day in a phone interview with an Arkansas newspaper, Carter was asked to compare Bush's foreign policy with that of Richard Nixon's. He replied that "as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this Administration has been the worst in history". The same day, the BBC's James Naughtie asked what he thought of Tony Blair's relationship with Bush. He said he thought it was "abominable; loyal, blind, apparently subservient".
Bush shrugged off the comments saying this was "just what happens when you are President". But two days after Carter had told me the Administration had said not a word about his criticisms, Deputy White House Press Secretary Tony Fratto said: "I think it's sad that President Carter's reckless and personal criticism is out there." He added for good measure: "I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments."
Is Carter a valiant truth-teller, or a dangerous loose cannon? The New Republic's editor-in-chief, Marty Peretz, said when Carter's Palestine book was published in the US late last year, the former President, who famously brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in the 1970s, would "go down in history as a Jew-hater". Last week he added that "besides his other sins Carter is a downright liar".
Christopher Hitchens, writing in the online news and culture magazine Slate, said that "worst in history" was "a title for which [Carter] has himself been actively contending since 1976".
When I met Carter, he did not seem like a man who was losing his marbles. He was wry, precise, quick to smile, candid and easy. At times he can come across as perhaps intentionally innocent. There are echoes of the method used by the TV detective Columbo in Carter's account of his first meeting with Yasser Arafat in 1990, when he asked Arafat what are the "purposes" of the PLO, and Arafat, dumbfounded, handed Carter a pamphlet.
His former speech-writer Hendrik Hertzberg describes this effect as "creatively naive", and recalls that Carter often asked "back-to-first-principles" questions.
"Early in his administration he asked why we had so many nuclear weapons. You know: 'Why do we need more than a couple of hundred? Isn't that enough to totally destroy the Soviet Union and everyone else?' It was a very good question."
Carter has always been an outsider - a maverick, even. That was why people voted for him. He was a born-again peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, who had been governor of his home state and won the presidency with a huge southern and black vote.
Everyone knew about his close-knit relatives, his moral values, his rural childhood. His strong marriage to his childhood sweetheart Rosalynn and their three boys, Jack, Chip and Jeff, and daughter, Amy - was upheld as a model nuclear family. He stayed in supporters' homes during the campaign; he carried his own luggage.
He understood the military establishment, having graduated from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, yet he was not part of the Washington old boys' club to which Nixon had given such a bad name.
"Carter seems a mystery," the historian Garry Wills wrote in the New York Review of Books in August 1976. "His rise is unprecedented in our modern politics. Yet he is both mysterious and necessary."
That Carter left the White House under a cloud is not disputed, even by his fans. Whether he deserved it, however, is still a subject of debate. Even Henry Kissinger later said he thought Carter had got a bad rap. But in 1980 the economy was a disaster, and - most damningly - the Iran hostage crisis, which had been going on for a year, had suffered from his failed rescue mission.
Carter bade farewell to his people on January 14, 1981, saying, "As I return home to the South where I was born and raised, I am looking forward to the opportunity to reflect and further to assess - I hope with accuracy - the circumstances of our times." And that is exactly what he has done.
Whatever anyone thinks of his time in office, it is widely accepted that Carter has had the most successful post-presidency in the nation's history. The man who lost in 1980 had become, at least by 1994, when he prevented an all-out war in Haiti, an international man of mystery.
In his work at the Carter Centre, now celebrating its 25th year, he has monitored elections all over the world to ensure that democracy is upheld, fought for human rights, for peace, for food, housing, health.
In his memoir, Keeping Faith, Carter wrote that he had spent more of his time in office working towards peace in the Middle East than on any other international problem. I ask whether that has been true of the period since. "Well," he says, "since I left the White House, I've probably spent more time in Sudan than in the Middle East, because we can only go to the Middle East when I'm able to get permission from the White House. And, uh, that permission has been spasmodic." He flashes a faint, wry smile. "To say the least."
He is "immersed in the Mid-East situation constantly and has monitored all three Palestinian elections.
When Carter's book was published, it was both incendiary and a bestseller. The Anti-Defamation League, led by the pro-Israeli Abraham Foxman, ran large ads in all the major US newspapers attacking the book for engaging in anti-Semitism.
Carter says he was not surprised that his use of the word "apartheid" in the title caused such a furore, and defends it: "The word is the most accurate available to describe Palestine. Apartheid is when two different people live in the same land, and they are forcibly segregated, and one dominates or persecutes the other. That's what's happening in Palestine, so the word is very, very accurate."
If the focus on the word itself detracted from some of the issues "it was more than compensated for by the fact that it precipitated national - and even an international - discussion or debate".
But the "ad-hominem attacks on me - people accusing me of being anti-Semitic and anti-Israel", he says, were more of a surprise. Carter says it hurt, but brushes off the criticism, saying: "It's a small group."
"You know," he adds, "there's no possibility in our country of a member of Congress or a candidate for President saying that they're going to take a balanced position between Israel and the Palestinians - or to speak out with concern about Palestinian human rights: that's impossible in this country."
Carter first travelled to Israel in 1973 as Governor of Georgia. He left Israel feeling optimistic, and that the "plight" of the Arabs "seemed of relative insignificance to me". I ask if, in retrospect, that was naive.
"The Arabs were not being persecuted then. There were a total of 1500 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and they had been on kibbutzim - individual farms that they had acquired - for decades. And that was before there was any massive effort by the Israeli Government to colonise the West Bank in order to confiscate it. I met with the top leaders in Israel, and all of them presumed that that land belonged to the Palestinians, and there was no concept at that point, at least by the ones with whom I met, that they would simply take over that land and keep it permanently, as it seems to be now."
In 1977, two months after he took office, Carter made a speech declaring that a homeland needed to be found for Palestinian refugees. From the insignificance they held for him in 1973 to making such a controversial statement four years later was quite a journey, one to which Carter added in 1978, when he negotiated at Camp David for "full autonomy" for the Palestinians.
Professor Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, said Carter "was completely right: he had the right instincts, he had the right advice, he had the courage needed. But Camp David was a terrible step in the wrong direction, in my view. I think it's to his discredit that he then failed to get Begin to do what we all know Begin wasn't intending to do."
There was nothing in the Camp David Accords about the Israeli settlements, and while Carter had Menachem Begin's word that there would be a freeze on any further settlements, it was an "omission", Carter admits with some understatement, not to have got that part of the deal in writing. Five years after they met at Camp David - 10 years after his first trip to Israel - Carter visited Begin, and asked how he could have reneged on what they agreed. Begin did not look at him, and made it clear that the meeting was over.
Carter says now that if he had been in power when that meeting occurred, he would have withheld aid to Israel - something he had threatened to do - in the past, and which Reagan was unwilling to do. He acknowledges that his accords weakened the Palestinians "in a way", but only because they themselves "didn't have a clear voice. Later, when I met Arafat, he said it was a bad mistake for the PLO not to have been fully supportive of the Camp David Accords".
I suggest to Carter that Bill Clinton doesn't come off terribly well in the book. "Well," he sighs, "I've had somewhat of an altercation with Clinton's representatives, who say I don't give Clinton adequate credit in the book.
"You know, I give Clinton credit for making his best effort, but the proposals that Clinton made were never clear. And both the Israelis and the Palestinians accepted the principles that Clinton put forward with enormous caveats. Later, it was politically acceptable for the Israelis and for Washington to say: 'We agreed', but Arafat didn't agree. In fact, neither one of them agreed."
Film-maker Jonathan Demme is making a documentary about Carter and says it is reminiscent of the classic western High Noon. "Carter put his badge on to come forth into the community to talk about justice as it pertains to Palestine, and, as in High Noon, almost everybody fell all over each other in their desire to distance themselves from his message of peace. He soldiered on, without allies, with mounting foes."
"Carter," Demme says, is "a tough son of a bitch. He's got a gorgeous smile, and he'll cry at the drop of a hat if something touches him, but he is one tough dude."
- Observer
Jimmy Carter fact file
Early life: Born James Earl Carter jnr on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, to peanut warehouser Earl Carter and nurse Lillian Gordy Carter. Graduated from US Naval Academy and married Rosalynn Smith in 1946. They have three sons and one daughter.
Presidential highs: Carter, a Democrat, began his four-year term as the 39th US President in 1977. His successful treaties with Panama gave it control of the Panama Canal by 1999. In 1978 Carter's Camp David Accords ended the 30-year state of war between Egypt and Israel. He included women and ethnic minorities in his cabinet.
Presidential lows: Ronald Reagan succeeded Carter, having campaigned on the "misery index" of Carter's failures. Inflation rose more than 6 per cent during his term in office.
Interest rates twice exceeded 20 per cent in 1980. On November 4, 1979, Iranian students stormed the Tehran US embassy and took diplomatic staff hostage. The situation was not resolved during Carter's presidency.
After the White House: Rosalynn and Jimmy established the Carter Presidential Centre in 1982 to "advance human rights and alleviate unnecessary suffering". He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002.
Carter has written books on topics including his presidency, the Middle East and his Christianity.
