Jimmy Carter was arguably the most enigmatic president of America’s post-World War II era. He died on Sunday afternoon in Plains, Ga., the Carter Center said.

Leaders who reach the pinnacle of power are usually complicated individuals. But Carter was a man whose outward image was often the opposite of what lay underneath. He strove to convey simplicity and humility, yet he was a highly sophisticated man with ego and ambition that burned hotter than most.

“Don’t pay any attention to that smile. That don’t mean a thing,” said Ben Fortson, Georgia’s secretary of state for a period of 33 years that included Carter’s tenure as governor. “That man is made of steel, determination and stubbornness.”

Carter’s own wife, Rosalynn, once said that her husband “appears kind of meek or something. People always underestimate him.”

Carter has been widely considered an unsuccessful president who was overwhelmed by events. And compared with the presidencies of, say, Johnson, Nixon or Reagan, Carter’s single term is a period that historians and the public showed very little interest in revisiting, though that began to shift in his last few years. Yet he lived a compelling, exemplary life, and he was beset by challenges in office that would have stymied most leaders.

During Carter’s term, he was unable to resolve the major problems that confronted America in the late 1970s. He could not tame inflation or unite the Democratic Party, and he couldn’t free the Americans who were held captive in Iran for more than a year. It’s not well known, however, that the agreement that led to freedom for the 52 American hostages in Tehran was negotiated by Carter and his administration during his final weeks in office. Ronald Reagan had little if anything to do with it, even though he is commonly given credit, since the Iranians released the hostages moments after he was inaugurated.

In 1979 Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve; Volcker’s policies brought down inflation, which was running in double digits by the end of the decade, though it took time for that to happen, and Reagan reaped the political benefits. Some critiques of the Volcker appointment have come from the left, who said his policies benefitted Wall Street at the expense of the working class.

Reagan is also given all the credit for the fall of the Soviet Union and communism. But Carter’s one-two punch — he increased defense spending and made human rights a core plank of American foreign policy — put pressure on the Soviets fiscally and morally, and Carter has been credited for forcing the USSR onto an unsustainable trajectory.

It was Carter’s style that rubbed many Americans the wrong way. When Teddy Kennedy decided to run against him in 1980, challenging the incumbent president of his own party, he made Carter’s lack of leadership his central argument. “Only the president can provide the sense of direction needed by the nation,” Kennedy said when he announced his candidacy in November 1979. “For many months, we have been sinking into crisis, yet we hear no clear summons from the center of power.”

Over the years, Carter has been commonly remembered as a kind of Mister Rogers figure, a soft-spoken man wearing a sweater who was good but not strong. Yet Carter’s strength was on display all his life. He grew up in rural poverty and worked his way into the Naval Academy. He had few political connections in Georgia and yet willed his way to the governorship. And he won the presidency with few insider party credentials.

And then, after a devastating and overwhelming loss to Reagan in 1980, Carter revolutionized what it means to be an ex-president. He won the release of political prisoners around the world, resolved conflicts in war zones, monitored elections in fledgling democracies and helped eradicate disease. He wrote or published more than 30 books in the years after his presidency, including a novel (the first by a U.S. president), a book of poetry, a children’s book, a book on fishing and other outdoor sporting activities, two on making the most of older years (one of which he co-wrote with Rosalynn), a few on the Middle East, a few personal history books focused on different periods of his life, and a handful of religious devotional books. And finally, he remained married to Rosalynn for 77 years — until her death in 2023 — and he lived to the age of 100. Carter’s father and his three siblings had all died in their 50s or early 60s of pancreatic cancer, and yet he overcame brain cancer at age 90. He never lost his intense zeal for life.

He certainly wasn’t overly nice. In fact, one of the biggest criticisms of Carter during the 1980 campaign against Reagan was that Carter was too mean. He consistently, throughout his political career, made the mistake of personally attacking his opponents in ways that backfired with the electorate. He painted Reagan as an unstable warmonger and said that if the Republican were elected, “Americans might be separated, Black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban.”

Carter had, in fact, made a deliberate decision at the beginning of his political career — which consumed less than a fifth of his entire life — that he could participate in the morally nebulous world of campaigns and governance and still retain his personal integrity. He once compared being a state senator to being a pastor with 80,000 parishioners. He was deeply influenced by Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote that “man is the kind of lion who both kills the lamb and dreams of when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together.” Carter called a collection of Niebuhr’s essays his “political bible.”