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.

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Updated at 10:17 a.m. ET on December 1, 2024

For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics. A new president might choose a political ally as attorney general, but the FBI director was different. An FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s choice remained on the job deep into Reagan’s second term, when Reagan moved him to head the CIA. Reagan’s FBI appointee served through the George H. W. Bush presidency and into the Bill Clinton administration. Clinton fired the inherited official—the first time a president ever fired an FBI director—only because the outgoing Bush administration had left behind a Department of Justice report accusing the director of ethical lapses. (Clinton tried to coax the tainted director into resigning of his own volition. Only after the coaxing failed did Clinton act.)

And so it continued into the 21st century. Except in a single case of serious scandal, Senate-confirmed FBI directors stayed in their post until they quit or until their 10-year term expired. Never, never, never was a Senate-confirmed FBI director fired so that the president could replace him with a loyalist. Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that there must be no return to the days when J. Edgar Hoover did special favors for presidents who perpetuated his power.

Even Donald Trump grudgingly submitted to this rule during his first term, as the Mueller Report later detailed. Trump wanted to fire FBI Director James Comey to shut down the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. Trump’s advisers convinced Trump that admitting his true motive would spark an enormous scandal. Instead, the new administration inveigled the deputy attorney general to write a letter offering a more neutral-seeming explanation: that Comey had mishandled the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton. That deceptive rationalization—the Mueller Report authoritatively disproved the cover story—did not calm the uproar over Trump’s scheme to install a henchman as FBI director. At the time, even Trump supporters still professed that the FBI director must be more than a presidential yes-man. Things were quieted only when Trump chose a politically independent candidate to replace Comey: Christopher Wray, who holds the job to this day, retained through all four years of the Biden administration.

Yesterday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he intended to fire Wray to replace him with Kash Patel, a person notorious for his cringing deference to Trump’s wishes. How bad a choice is Patel? My colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported that when President Trump “entertained naming Patel deputy director of the FBI, Attorney General Bill Barr confronted the White House chief of staff and said, ‘Over my dead body.’”

But before getting to Patel’s demerits, we should stay for a minute longer on the ominous danger of Trump’s wish to fire Wray.

[Read: The Kash Patel principle]

FBI directors wield awesome powers over the liberties of Americans. The unwritten rule governing their appointment—no dismissal except for compelling cause—bulwarked American law and freedom for half a century. Even first-term Trump dared not openly defy it. But second-term Trump is opening with a bid to junk it altogether. Much of the reporting on Trump’s announcement reveals a society already bending to Trump’s will: Something that was regarded as outrageously unacceptable in 2017—treating an FBI director as just another Trump aide—has been semi-normalized even before President-Elect Trump takes office.

The firing of Wray is the real outrage. The obnoxious nomination of Patel slathers frosting and sprinkles on the outrage.

Maybe the Patel nomination will fail, as Trump’s attempt to install Matt Gaetz as attorney general failed. If Patel falters, maybe Trump will fall back on a somewhat more respectable candidate. That second candidate may be greeted with relief. But the essential harm will be done by the firing of Wray, not the hiring of Patel (or whoever ultimately gets the job). Already, not a month since the closest election by popular-vote margin in two generations, we are witnessing, throughout law-enforcement and the national-security agencies, a pattern of Trump’s trashing institutions and replacing them with whim. Trump is declaring his intention to reinvent the FBI as something it has never been before: an instrument of personal presidential power, which will investigate (or refrain from investigating) and lay charges (or refrain from laying charges) as the president wishes.

For secretary of defense, Trump has chosen an ideological crank whose own mother accused him in writing of repeatedly abusing women. (She subsequently disavowed the statements.) At the CIA, Trump wants a hyper-partisan who, as Trump’s first-term director of national intelligence, selectively declassified information to discredit Trump’s political opponents. For his second-term director of national intelligence, Trump wants a longtime apologist for Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

Merit, competence, integrity—none of that matters. Or rather, those good qualities seem to be active disqualifiers. Trump’s picks are selected for obedience only.

[Read: The man who will do anything for Trump]

Now comes the great test: Is the American constitutional system as fragile as Trump hopes? Will Wray meekly accept termination or will he defend the bureau from Trump’s second and bolder attempt to pervert it? Will Senate Republicans ratify Trump’s attack on the separation of law enforcement from politics? Will federal courts grant warrants to an FBI that seeks warrants and makes arrests because the president told it to? Will the tiny Republican majority in the House endorse or resist Trump’s attempt to create a personal police force? Does enough of an independent press survive outside the control of Trump-friendly oligarchs to explain what is happening and why it matters? Will enough of the public care? Will enough of the public react?

The American people voted for cheaper eggs. They’re going to get only noise, conflict, and chaos. What Trump is trying will, if successful, be a constitutional scandal far greater than Watergate. If he succeeds, the seizure of power he unsuccessfully attempted in 2021 could be under way in 2025.