Jimmy Carter couldn’t keep his hands still. As he began to speak to the nation on the evening of July 15, 1979, one hand lay on top of another on the Resolute Desk. But soon he was pumping his fist, chopping the air in front of his chest. He had a confession of sorts to make: He had been planning something else, yet another speech about the energy crisis, his fifth, when he realized that he just couldn’t do it. He changed his plans, he ripped the script up, and he would now speak to a “deeper” problem, “deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.”

The news of Carter’s death today at the age of 100 will no doubt resurrect the memory of this infamous address, the “malaise” speech as it came to be known—though Carter himself never used the word. America was down. Its people were losing the ability to connect with one another and commit to causes bigger than themselves, like overcoming their dependence on foreign oil. This moment, in which Carter’s preacherly tendencies took over, would become—after the loss of his re-election bid—emblematic of all that was doomed about his presidency: voters’ impression of him as a moralizing man and a weak leader, a pessimist who was pointing an accusing finger at Americans. “I find no national malaise,” Ronald Reagan responded when accepting the Republican nomination for president a year later. “I find nothing wrong with the American people.”

The lore about Carter’s speech is not all true; for one thing, it was very well received—his approval went up an incredible 11 points immediately after it. And with great distance from his presidency, the speech now seems less like an encapsulation of what made Carter a bad president, than what made him a strange one. In his words that night was a yearning for his leadership to mean more than passing laws or commanding an army. He wanted to speak to people’s souls, genuinely, and not just in hazy, disingenuous bromides. He wanted to push Americans to think about who they were and what they hoped for out of life.

In the beginning of the speech, he read from “a notebook of comments and advice,” offering quotes from people he had spoken with after he decided to abandon his planned speech. The quotes are filled with criticism—of him. “You don’t see the people enough anymore,” he read, smiling sadly to himself, then looking back up sheepishly at the camera. He went on like this, telegraphing not just his own humility—can we imagine Donald Trump sharing his concerns about being out of touch with the American people?—but the need to listen to others.

Then came Carter’s conclusion: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

Our longing for meaning. The emptiness of lives.

Carter set aside the policy proposals—which he would get to—and instead spoke in a different register, one that American presidents do not usually reach for. Beneath the energy crisis, he saw human beings who had lost the ability to think beyond their own needs, and it was damaging them. Was this moralizing? Yes, but why shouldn’t a leader talk about morality?

He was also asking for specific sacrifices, the kinds Americans had not been asked to make in the postwar era: to carpool or take public transportation, to obey the speed limit, to set their thermostats at a lower temperature. You can just put on a sweater, he was saying.

“Every gallon of oil each one of us saves is a new form of production,” Carter said, “It gives us more freedom, more confidence, that much more control over our own lives.”

What made this speech so unusual was Carter’s explicit linking of the work of government with the granular existence of everyday people. Americans had heard this kind of language in wartime, but Carter now applied it not to weapons production, but to freedom, both personal freedom for individuals who had been reduced to consumers and national freedom from a thirst for oil from abroad. His vision was one in which the government and its citizens had to work in tandem.

Carter looked the country in the eye and said “all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America.” The problem was “nearly invisible,” and it could be solved only by confronting “the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives.” This was not Carter avoiding responsibility. It was a president doing the hardest thing: admitting that in the end he was just a citizen among citizens, and that all he had to offer, when it came to this deeper problem, were his words and his empathy.

Much can be said, and will be said, in the coming days about Carter’s presidency. Despite how it's remembered, this speech did not doom his re-election chances. That had to do with inflation and high unemployment, and a hostage crisis in Iran that dragged down his campaign—only in retrospect did the speech come to seem like a cherry on top. In many ways Carter was unlucky, dealt a bad hand as presidents sometimes are. But he should also be remembered for trying to speak to Americans not just as an abstract and disembodied whole, as “Americans,” but in existential and individual terms, as the small and seeking human beings we are. It made him seem vulnerable, but that was a risk he took—the kind of risk we should hope that any true leader would take.

His four years in office were fraught, bedeviled from the start by double-digit inflation and a post-Vietnam-and-Watergate bad mood. His fractious staff was dominated by the inexperienced “Georgia Mafia” from his home state. His micromanagement of the White House tennis court drew widespread derision, and his toothy, smiling campaign promise that he would “never lie” to the country somehow curdled into disappointment and defeat after one rocky term.

Yet James Earl Carter Jr., who died today at his home in Plains, Georgia, surely has a fair claim to being the most effective former president his country ever had. In part that’s because his post-presidency was the lengthiest on record—more than four decades—and his life span of 100 richly crowded years was the longest of any president, period. But it’s also because the strain of basic decency and integrity that helped get Carter elected in the first place, in 1976, never deserted him, even as his country devolved into ever greater incivility and division.

[James Fallows: Jimmy Carter was a lucky man]

During his presidency, Carter was a kind of walking shorthand for ineffectual leadership—a reputation that was probably always overblown and has been undercut in recent years by revisionist historians such as Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird, who argue that Carter was a visionary if impolitic leader. But his career after leaving the White House offers an indisputable object lesson in how ex-presidents might best conduct themselves, with dignity and a due humility about the honor of the office they once held.

Not for Carter was the lucrative service on corporate boards, or the easy money of paid speeches, or the palling around on private jets with rich (and sometimes unsavory) friends that other ex-presidents have indulged in. After leaving office at age 56, he earned a living with a series of books on politics, faith, the Middle East, and morality—plus several volumes of memoirs and another of poetry. With his wife, Rosalynn, he continued to live modestly in Plains, Georgia. He forged what both participants described as a genuine and enduring friendship with the man he beat, Gerald Ford. (In his eulogy at Ford’s funeral, in 2007, Carter recalled the first words he had spoken upon taking office 30 years earlier: “For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.” He added, “I still hate to admit that they received more applause than any other words in my inaugural address.” It was a typically gracious tribute, and a typically rueful acknowledgment of wounded ego.)

Carter promoted democracy, conducted informal diplomacy, and monitored elections around the globe as a special American envoy or at the invitation of foreign governments. He taught Sunday school at his hometown Baptist church, and worked for economic justice one hammer and nail at a time with Habitat for Humanity, the Christian home-building charity for which he volunteered as long as his health permitted. In 2002, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work “to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

True, he sometimes irritated his successors with public pronouncements that struck them as unhelpful meddling in affairs of state. He backed the cause of Palestinian statehood with a consistency and fervor that led to accusations of anti-Semitism. He retained a self-righteous, judgmental streak that led him to declare Donald Trump’s election illegitimate. His fundamental faith in his country was sometimes undercut by peevishness regarding the ways he thought its leaders had strayed. But he never seemed particularly troubled by the critiques.

[Read: The record-setting ex-presidency of Jimmy Carter]

Indeed, one of his most criticized comments seems prescient, even brave, with the hindsight of history—not so much impolitic and defeatist, as it was seen at the time. In the summer of 1979, Carter argued that his country was suffering from “a crisis of confidence” that threatened “to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” That pronouncement seems to have predicted the smoldering decades of political resentment, tribal anger, and structural collapse of institutions that followed it.

“As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions,” Carter said then. “This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.” Weeks later, the New York Times correspondent Francis X. Clines forever tagged Carter’s diagnosis with an epithet that helped doom his reelection: Clines called it the president’s “cross-of-malaise” speech, a reference to William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 warning that the gold currency standard risked mankind’s crucifixion “upon a cross of gold.”

Just how much Carter’s own missteps contributed to the problems he cited is a legitimate question. His communication skills left a lot to be desired; he could be prickly and prone to overexplaining. His 1977 televised “fireside chat,” in which he urged Americans to conserve energy by turning their thermostats down, was politically ham-handed: It seemed stagy and forced, with Carter speaking from the White House library in a beige cardigan sweater. But his focus on the environment (he installed solar panels on the White House roof) was forward-looking and justified, given what we now know about climate change. His insistence on the consideration of human rights in foreign policy may have struck some as naive in the aftermath of Henry Kissinger’s relentless realpolitik during the Nixon and Ford years, but few could doubt his convictions. It was a bitter blow that his atypically hawkish effort to rescue the diplomats held hostage in the American embassy in Iran failed so miserably that it helped ensure Ronald Reagan’s election. (In the fall of 1980, when it seemed unlikely that the hostages would ever be released on Carter’s watch, undecided voters fled to the former California governor.)

But Carter clocked substantial achievements too: the peaceful transfer of ownership of the Panama Canal; the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt; full normalization of relations with China; and moves toward deregulation of transportation, communication, and banking that were considered a welcome response to changing economic and industrial realities.

“One reason his substantial victories are discounted is that he sought such broad and sweeping measures that what he gained in return often looked paltry,” Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s former chief domestic-policy adviser, wrote in October 2018. “Winning was often ugly: He dissipated the political capital that presidents must constantly nourish and replenish for the next battle. He was too unbending while simultaneously tackling too many important issues without clear priorities, venturing where other presidents felt blocked because of the very same political considerations that he dismissed as unworthy of any president. As he told me, ‘Whenever I felt an issue was important to the country and needed to be addressed, my inclination was to go ahead and do it.’’’

In his post-presidency, Carter went ahead and did it, again and again, with a will that his successors would do well to emulate—and that, to one degree or another, some of them have. Carter tackled the big problems and pursued the ambitious goals that had so often eluded him in office. He worked to control or eradicate diseases, including Guinea worm and river blindness. His nonprofit Carter Center, in Atlanta, continues to advance the causes of conflict resolution and human rights, and has monitored almost 100 elections in nearly 40 countries over the past 30 years. And he never stopped trying to live out the values that his Christian faith impelled him to embrace.

Carter’s model of post–White House service almost certainly served as a guide for the bipartisan disaster-relief work of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and for Clinton’s global fight against AIDS. George W. Bush works to help post-9/11 veterans through the Bush Institute. In many ways, Barack Obama is still establishing just what his post-presidential identity will be, though his My Brother’s Keeper initiative promotes opportunities for boys and young men of color. Carter showed the country that presidents’ duty to serve extends well beyond their years in office.

During his presidency, Carter kept Harry Truman’s The Buck Stops Here sign on his desk as a reminder of his ultimate responsibility. Truman left office with a job-approval rating of just 32 percent, close to George W. Bush’s, Trump’s, and Carter’s last ratings—the four worst in modern times. Truman lived for almost 20 years after leaving office, but he still did not live long enough to see the full redemption of his reputation as a plainspoken straight shooter who did his best in troubled times. Carter, who left office a virtual laughingstock but left this earthly life a model of moral leadership, did.