Jimmy Carter's Unlikely Journey from Defeated One-Term President to Our Best Ex-President: Analysis

For every person, celebrating the 100th anniversary of life is a rare milestone. For Jimmy Carter, the country's 39th president, such longevity is an exclamation point for an unparalleled life of public service.

Some may argue that the presidency itself is the pinnacle of public service. But Carter's departure from the White House after what many critics described as a largely ineffective single term marked the beginning of what would become the most consequential post-presidential term in U.S. history – made all the more remarkable by its inauspicious beginning.

Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid in 1980 by ten percentage points and received only 41 percent of the vote, while his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan received 51 percent. Shortly thereafter, he discovered that the thriving agricultural business he had built early in his career had been bankrupted by a blind trust, leaving him with millions of dollars in debt, adding to the $1.4 million in debt dollars he had amassed as part of his failed re-election campaign, with no cash reserves to pay them off.

Then there was the unresolved issue of the Iran hostage crisis, which had crippled Carter's presidency and led critics to accuse him of weakness and inefficiency. When Reagan succeeded him as president on January 20, 1981, Carter had been awake for more than two days while overseeing negotiations for the release of the 52 American hostages who had been held by the Iranian government for 444 days. One final thumb in Carter's eyes: They would be released in the first minutes of Reagan's presidency.

After leaving the White House, Carter briefly returned to his hometown of Plains, Georgia, which had a population of only 640 at the time, where he was greeted by friends and neighbors with a home dinner in the pouring rain. The rain-soaked return home didn't last long. Just hours later, Carter flew to Wiesbaden, Germany, to greet the freed hostages, but many of them reacted angrily, believing he had failed to secure their release earlier.

On January 22, 1980, Carter returned to Plains, to the ranch-style home he and his wife Rosalynn had built in 1961 but which they had not lived in for ten years. Exhausted and exhausted, the former president slept for 24 hours before waking up to what he called a “completely unwanted life” – and without knowing what he would do next.

Twenty-one years later, Carter was awakened by an early morning phone call in the same house, in the same small town, with the news that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize for, as the Nobel Committee wrote, “his decades” of tireless efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts “To advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development.”

Along the way, Carter reinvented the post-presidency, exposing its possibilities and potential and providing activist former presidents with a guide and a daunting standard. He showed how a president can use “former” presidential status to advance a philanthropic agenda while enhancing his overall legacy and strengthening the American brand.

The unlikely path from newly defeated one-term president to Nobel laureate reflected a pattern in Carter's prolific life in which he realized great ambitions by defying great odds. Carter began his career in politics in 1962 by challenging the political machine in southwest Georgia, successfully contesting a rigged election and winning a seat in the Georgia state legislature. While he lost a race for governor of Georgia four years later, he came back to win the office in 1970, becoming one of the new leaders who ushered in a new post-segregation South.

After leaving the governor's mansion in 1975 because of a state law prohibiting governors from serving consecutive terms, Carter set his sights on the distant presidency, an unremarkable former governor of a deep Southern state with little or no name recognition – even more so than even the newspaper His home state's Atlanta Constitution published an article headlined “Jimmy, who's running for what?”

“Nobody thought I had a chance in God’s world of being nominated,” Carter told me in 2013.

His unlikely nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate and subsequent victory over incumbent President Gerald Ford in the 1976 election demonstrated Carter's tireless drive and preternatural self-assurance.

Those same qualities would come to fruition in his post-White House efforts. Just over a year into his term, as Carter considered his future, he had an epiphany: that he could create a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization that could focus on intractable problems around the world that concern the international community and the United Nations issues were not addressed. The Carter Center, attached to his presidential library in Atlanta, did just that, becoming an outlet for the former president's activism and vision for a better world.

Since its founding in 1982, the Carter Center, diligently directed by Carter himself, has monitored over a hundred elections in 39 countries and contributed to the peaceful resolution of disputes around the world – including in Haiti, Sudan and Bosnia – at the same time worked toward the eradication of Guinea worm disease and river blindness, insidious diseases that have gone largely uncontrolled in the world's poor and developing countries. Recognizing his skills in conflict resolution, President Bill Clinton appointed the former president in the 1990s to represent the United States in negotiations to dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons program and in repelling a US military invasion of Haiti.

As amazing as they were, Carter's activities were not limited to the Carter Center. Shortly after beginning his term as president, Carter picked up the hammer for Habitat for Humanity and, for the next four and a half decades, provided both manpower and inspiration for work projects that bear his name. He also somehow found time to teach Sunday school almost every week at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains—and then pose for photos with church visitors—to do woodworking, fly fishing, painting, and becoming our most prolific presidential author.

Carter sometimes bristled at being referred to as “our best ex-president” – a backhanded compliment that discounted a presidential term he viewed as largely successful. “I don’t know of any decisions I made in the White House that were fundamentally wrong,” he told me in 2005.

But he didn't spend much time worrying about his place in the presidential pantheon. The things Jimmy Carter wanted to be remembered for went beyond any accomplishments he achieved in the White House.

In 2014, in an interview at the LBJ Library, I asked Carter how he would like to be remembered.

“I think a lot of people will say, 'He only served one term and was defeated (for re-election),'” he replied. “I want people to remember that I kept the peace and promoted human rights… That would be my preference.”

He will fulfill his wish.

Mark K. Updegrove is a presidential historian and political contributor to ABC News. He is the president & CEO of the LBJ Foundation and author of “Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House.”