London's Guardian Interviews Jimmy Carter

There can be few jobs in the United States Secret Service as cushy as being one of Jimmy Carter's bodyguards. You get to wear the cool earpiece, and ride in the blacked-out SUV, but, seriously, who's going to want to attack the most decent man to have occupied the White House in living memory? Wherever they go, George Bush, John Kerry and Bill Clinton are surrounded by burly, paranoid-looking men, ready to wrestle you to the ground if you breathe at them wrongly. But on a crisp autumn day at the Carter Centre, a human-rights institute sprawled over 35 leafy acres in Atlanta, Carter's security detail are relaxing near one of the entrances, trading jokes, while their 80-year-old charge works unmonitored within. Nearby, the young researchers showing up for work in jeans exude the happy calm of people whose jobs mesh well with their consciences. As they pass in the pink-walled lobby, they pause, make eye contact, and wish you good morning like they really mean it. All of which makes the question of how to address Carter slightly fraught. The standard practice (though not, I later learn, the official etiquette) is to call all former presidents"Mr President". But somewhere this informal, can that really be appropriate?

Actually, yes. The 39th president of the United States, in shirtsleeves and loafers today, is a man forever caught between niceness and grandeur. One of the two condescending cliches about him is that he was too nice for the White House, and perhaps in defiance, his manner remains somewhat imperious. With its gold-fringed American flag and massive, intricately carved desk, his private workplace seems like a replica Oval Office; the rumour used to be that his laptop still played Hail To The Chief when it was booted up. His use of the first-person plural, meanwhile, can sound decidedly royal."What we did, in our time, was to keep the country at peace," he will say later, in honeyed vowels that combine a lifetime in the political aristocracy with his origins as a Georgia peanut farmer."We had a very good actual record."

But the grandeur vanishes, replaced by beaming smiles, whenever he talks about The Hornet's Nest, the book that recently made him the first former president to publish a novel."Are you familiar with Patrick O'Brian?" he asks with excitement, explaining part of the inspiration for his densely researched tale of the American war of independence. I confess that I haven't read my way through O'Brian's long list of cult seafaring tales."I have," he responds."I've read all the way through them, and I'm reading them for a second time now."

The other Carter cliche is that he is the best former president America has ever had. The fading popular memory of his administration is still dominated by the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran, in which 66 Americans were kidnapped, 52 of them held for months, and eight US servicemen were killed in a botched rescue mission. The Carter"post-presidency", by contrast, has been a marathon of valuable diplomacy in North Korea, the Middle East, Haiti and Cuba, of election-monitoring and Nobel Peace prize-winning. The Carter Centre, besides its conflict resolution work, has helped nearly eliminate several major world diseases. More recently, Carter has broken with ex-presidential etiquette by attacking Bush and Tony Blair for invading Iraq on the basis of"lies or misinterpretations", and savaged Jeb Bush over the potential for a new election fiasco in Florida. In his spare time, he paints. He makes furniture in his workshop in Plains, the Georgia village where he was born in the era of segregation. He studies Native American history. He writes poems. He is, depending on whom you believe, either an exuberant polymath, or a man still flailing to find a secure historical legacy.

If it's the latter, I'm not sure The Hornet's Nest is going to help much. At 465 pages, the detail-laden story of Pratt, a Philadelphian lured to the South to fight for the American cause, is something of a slog, leavened mainly by its unintentionally funny sex scenes. ("He was overwhelmed with a feeling of tenderness," one already much-mocked passage runs,"and was also aroused sexually, which his tight trousers made obvious to both of them.")

Still, one neglected truth about the revolutionary war, deeply ironic today, jumps out from the novel: America owes its independence to the French."I never dreamed that by the time the book went into print, America would be refusing to eat so-called french fries, and things of that category," Carter says."Quite a ridiculous development. We could never have won the revolutionary war had it not been for the French." He smiles."Although the French didn't do it out of altruism, or love of America. They did it out of hatred for Great Britain."

The more Carter talks, the more he gently lectures on the lessons of history and the dangers of the present moment, the more difficult it becomes to accept the idea that he was too nice for the presidency. Now that we know what happens when macho posturing replaces niceness at the White House, Carter's decency - his quiet moralism, his intense but low-key religiosity, his rock-solid marriage to his wife Rosalynn - all come to seem less like unaffordable indulgences and more like urgent necessities. (When it comes to toughness, in any case, there is style and there is substance: Carter, on taking office, had spent more years in the military than any 20th-century president except Eisenhower.)

So why does he think the US electorate punished him so badly over Iran - a crisis that wasn't his choice, and in which relatively few Americans died - while the polls are so split about Bush's arguably far worse, and certainly more deadly, adventure in Iraq?

"I think the basic reason is that our country suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking attack . . . and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack, and he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a heroic commander-in-chief, fighting a global threat against America," Carter says."He's repeatedly played that card, and to some degree quite successfully. I think that success has dissipated. I don't know if it's dissipating fast enough to affect the election. We'll soon know."

The bitter truth seems to be that the Iranian debacle was received so badly precisely because Carter had proven so successful, in other respects, at keeping the peace - whereas now, there's a war on."When your troops go to war, the prime minister or the president change overnight from an administrator, dealing with taxation and welfare and health and deteriorating roads, into the commander-in-chief," he says."And it's just become almost unpatriotic to describe Bush's fallacious and ill-advised and mistaken and sometimes misleading actions. The press have been cowed, because they didn't want to be unpatriotic. There has been a lack of inquisitive journalism. In fact, it's hard to think of a major medium in the United States that has been objective and fair and balanced, and critical when criticism was deserved."

Another hazard of being a former president, it seems, is that you feel the force of your successors' policy reversals with all the acuteness of personal slights."All of those long, tedious negotiations that were done by Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Nixon and me and Reagan, to control the spread of nuclear weapons have been abandoned by Bush," he sighs. Carter praises Kerry for"bringing out the fallacies of Bush's foreign policy", but warns that he must"show consistency in his positions, and that he's a strong leader. That's the only advice I'd give."

Carter rejects the worst criticism that could be made of his administration: that his alleged softness in the face of Islamist terrorism helped nourish the threat that culminated in today's al-Qaida."I don't think that's an accurate assessment."The entire Islamic world condemned Iran. Nowadays, because of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq by Bush and Blair, which was a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements, and the lack of any effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, (there is) massive Islamic condemnation of the United States."

Still, it must be tough, having held the most powerful position in the world, to have so many people continue to believe that everything you've done since has been more impressive. Does the"best former president" line irritate him?"Maybe it did at the beginning. But I don't have any doubt that my post-presidency has made some historians go back and look at the administration with a more benevolent and approving attitude. We promoted human rights, we promoted freedom, we promoted peace between others - peace between Israel and Egypt," in the Camp David accords."I feel quite at ease about the presidential record, and also the post-presidential. But I like to do different things. Last April, I began to paint. . ." And he is smiling again, plunging back into the details of his richly varied life.

Perhaps it is no wonder that Carter is still most aglow when he speaks of Plains, where he will sometimes rise at five, in the morning stillness, and write for five or six hours at a time."And then, when I'm tired of my computer screen, I usually go to my farmland to visit my crops, or to my woodlands, or I build another piece of furniture, or paint a picture. It's a very wonderful opportunity I have. Almost complete isolation."