The Real Jimmy Carter reveals a man who has been given a dangerously free pass by historians, but who in reality is not only a failed ex-president, but as vindictive as he is egotistical, and a self-righteous busybody who leaves disaster in his wake.

Jimmy Carter: America's best ex-president? Only if you're not bothered by the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism (which started on his watch), the shamefaced foreign policy of Bill Clinton and John Kerry (ditto), and think that ex-presidents should travel the world coddling dictators and bad-mouthing America à la Jesse Jackson. Jimmy Carter has been given a free ride from the liberal media, liberal historians, and even the American people, who excuse his political delinquencies and disasters on the grounds that he is a "good" man. But as bank robber Willie Sutton said of Carter: "I've never seen a bigger confidence man in my life, and I've been around some of the best in the business." It's time to set the record straight. Finally, an honest historian--Steven F. Hayward, author of The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980--demolishes the myth of "Saint" Jimmy and exposes how he created today's leftist Democratic party of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Jimmy Carter's laundry list of failures aren't just accidents of history: They're rooted in Carter's deeply flawed character and ideology--a smugly pious arrogance matched with a profound distrust of America. The Real Jimmy Carter reveals:

• Carter as meddling ex-president: Why a Time magazine columnist wrote that some of Carter's "Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason"
• How Carter befriended North Korea during the Clinton administration, appeasing the communist regime and giving it cover for its nuclear weapons program
• How Carter made direct contacts with Soviet officials to try to subvert President Reagan's anti-communist policies
• The shocking extent of Carter's clandestine efforts to sabotage the first Gulf War in 1990 and how he used Gulf War II to publicly question the Christian faith of America's commander in chief
• How Carter befriended Yasir Arafat-making himself an enemy of Israel
• Carter as politician: a vicious campaigner--and even race-baiter
• The Carter White House during the disasters of the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua, the energy crisis and stagflation, the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, and the invasion of Afghanistan
• How Carter, the failed president, remade himself as Carter the humanitarian and freelance foreign policy critic of America
• How a Nobel official inadvertently revealed that Carter's Nobel Prize was actually meant as a slap at America

The Real Jimmy Carter is a shocker, showing why the peanut president should never have left his farm.

Steven F. Hayward is the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at AEI.