Son of a white supremacist but a Black farmhand gave 'Pee-Wee' faith and purpose

He was a complex and confounding man, says Jimmy Carter's biographer, who looks at the extraordinary life and achievements of this misunderstood American president

- Jonathan Alter

For decades after he was crushed in the 1980 presidential election, Jimmy Carter was defined as a loser. But, by any standard, he won at life. He was the longest-living American president, the longest married (77 years, and happily), and – especially if you look at his whole career – among the most accomplished and productive figures of our era.

Now it’s time for the public to reassess this inspiring, complex, and confounding man. When I first began researching his epic American life in 2015, I was struck by the ubiquity of the easy shorthand on him – bad president; great former president. Even now, everyone from political scientists to the average person on the street will express this idea as if it’s an established fact. The problem is, the widespread conventional wisdom on Carter is mostly wrong.

In His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life, I concluded that Carter was a hugely underrated president – a political failure but a substantive, visionary success. And he was a slightly overrated former president, despite essentially redefining that role. In the four decades since leaving office in 1981, he achieved several important things (especially in global health) but had much less power to change lives than he did while in office.

The Jimmy Carter I got to know – in Atlanta (site of the Carter Library and Carter Centre), Plains (his birthplace and lifelong home), by extensive email exchanges, building a house with him and Rosalynn in Memphis – was a highly intelligent and paradoxical man: by turns, warm and chilly; open and opaque; able and tone deaf.

One day I asked Rosalynn – who shared with me his steamy love letters from the navy – if he was stubborn. She just nodded and laughed. I came to think of her husband as a driven engineer labouring to free the humanist within. He once told me that he could only express his true feelings in his poetry.