Jimmy Carter's story is one of the greatest dramas in American politics. In 1980, he was overwhelmingly voted out of office in a humiliating defeat. Over the subsequent two decades, he became one of the most admired statesmen and humanitarians in America and the world. Through interviews with the people who know him best, Jimmy Carter traces his rapid ascent in politics, dramatic fall from grace, and unexpected resurrection, including Carter family home movies and a rare film sequence of Carter's final hours in the Oval Office, when he and his advisors waited in vain for the release of the Americans who had been held hostage in Tehran for 444 days.

Carter was the first president to confront the challenge of militant Islam, then embodied by the Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian revolution. Carter was also the first president to embark on what would prove to be the excruciating road to peace in the Middle East. But in the end, his presidency was undone by his failure to secure the hostages' release and by a plummeting economy. Yet the memories of his presidency — gas lines, inflation, recession, the Iran hostage crisis, an ineffectual and fractured administration, and the so-called national malaise — would be eclipsed, finally, by his post-presidential successes as a peacemaker in the world's most troubled areas, and his emergence as a champion for the poor in his own country.