Jimmy Carter was perhaps the most virtuous of all America’s presidents

To their confusion, and often to their regret, Americans seemed faced with two Jimmy Carters. One was the man whose presidency, won by a squeak and relinquished amid the humiliation of the Tehran hostage crisis, seemed an essay in naivety. This was the chief executive who once addressed the nation in a grey cardigan, sitting by a guttering fire; who, at the peak of the energy crisis in 1979, as Americans queued miserably for petrol, wanly criticised their malaise; who, at the peak of the cold war, attempted to effect a thaw by writing a personal letter to the exiled nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov; and whose bid to rescue the hostages ended with a helicopter crash in the desert. This was also the man who, out fishing, was said to have been assailed by a “killer rabbit”; and who admitted to Playboy magazine that he had often committed “adultery in my heart”, inciting a wave of mockery from sophisticates on both coasts.