'North star': By promoting peace and justice, Jimmy Carter elevated the role of ex-president

WASHINGTON – Jimmy Carter could have been tossed off as little more than a failed one-term president who presided over rampant inflation, a gas shortage and the Iran hostage crisis.

Instead, he turned the more than four decades after leaving the White House into a mission to save the planet – monitoring foreign elections, eradicating disease in Africa, addressing homelessness in America – and, in the process, redefined both how Americans viewed him and how the nation measures its ex-presidents. Carter died last month in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, at the age of 100.

For Carter, a man of deep faith and humility, there was really no other path but to continue the humanitarian work he laid out as president, said Douglas Brinkley, author of "The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey to the Nobel Peace Prize."

"He raised the bar on what the next president could do so high that it's going to be hard for anybody to reach because he did it without joining boards of trustees of corporations, or in any way seeming to monetize his presidency," Brinkley said. "The Carter standard is a North Star that future ex-presidents – that are willing – can aim for.”

Roosevelt, Taft, Quincy Adams: Ex-presidents with second careers

Several other presidents kept serving the nation in a variety of pivotal roles after they left the White House:

? John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, was elected to  Congress after his term and became a forceful voice in the anti-slavery movement.

? Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president, made his mark by creating the Bull Moose Party, which promoted progressive policies.

? William Howard Taft, the 27th president, served on the U.S. Supreme Court for nearly a decade after he served his four years as commander in chief.

But Carter, a peanut farmer who later became governor, has two traits that set him apart from many of his forbearers: his vigor – he was both the oldest ex-president ever and lived the longest since leaving the White House – and an unrelenting drive to improve the world around him, historians said.

"Before God, we’re all the same," Carter said in a 2020 interview. "And we should treat everybody equally and try to help those who are in need.”

Ending disease, promoting peace: How Carter won the Nobel prize

Through the Carter Center, the former president worked to end disease, particularly Guinea worm disease in sub-Saharan Africa. He monitored elections in Latin America. He mediated conflict in North Korea and Haiti. In what was probably his most visible post-presidential role, he and his wife, Rosalynn, toured the country to help build houses for Habitat for Humanity.

In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."

"He has always been a hard worker. He has always been committed to acts of charity. He's always been committed to peacemaking," said Robert Strong, the William Lyne Wilson Professor in Political Economy at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. "He's often been a risk-taker in connection with those endeavors."

Once he opened the Carter Center in the early 1980s, Brinkley said, the former president "started taking what were his successes as president and parlaying them into a post-presidency."

Carter's efforts as president to transfer control of the Panama Canal from the U.S. to the Latin American country in 1978 meant few questioned his credibility when serving as an elections observer in 1989, he denounced the legitimacy of Manuel Noriega's victory as president of Panama.

Setting an example for Clinton, Obama and the presidents who came after him

Carter's work had an effect beyond helping the world's needy. It raised expectations for the ex-presidents who came after him.

George H.W. Bush, who helped inspire the creation of the civic-minded Points of Light Foundation as president, became a fierce advocate for cancer research after he left the White House. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton worked together to mobilize global response to help Haiti recover from a devastating earthquake in 2010. Clinton's own foundation has tackled climate change, third-world poverty and HIV/AIDS. Barack Obama's work has focused on social justice, including voting rights.

"I think the other people who left the White House after he did felt an obligation to engage in some public service activities," Strong said.

Brinkley said Carter winning the Nobel Peace Prize was a catalyst of sorts.

"They recognized ... that you have power as an ex-president and that you can use it wisely to pursue things that you dealt with as president but do it now in a new way," he said. "Since Carter left office, most ex-presidents, particularly Bill Clinton, tried to out-Carter Carter with the Clinton Foundation. You see Obama trying to do this now with getting young people registered to vote and going back to some of his grassroots work. All of them have Carter in mind.”

Carter's work presidency elevated his legacy in the White House

Carter's efforts as a private citizen helped to raise Americans' perception of him, Strong said. Historians and the public generally rate his presidential tenure as "middling" at best.

Gallup's compilation of presidential poll numbers for every president while they were in office since Harry S. Truman found that Carter's average approval rating of 45.5% is ahead of only Truman (45.4%) and Donald Trump (41.1%) among the 13 presidents following Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"But the public respect for him as a person has risen," Strong said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jimmy Carter redefined what it meant to be an ex-president by service.