Jimmy Carter’s death, announced Sunday, has brought on the expected tributes to a live well lived for 100 years.

His passing, after a year in Hospice care and a little more than a year after his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, left this earth, brought on many exclamations that his post presidency was the most effective and beneficial to humankind ... well, ever, in the history of this democracy.

Also, and not without cause, Carter’s passing has evoked a retelling of the low points of his presidency that led to the landslide election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

I well remember Carter’s ascendency in the mid-’70s, after the downfall and disgrace of Richard Nixon, followed by the well-meaning, but sometimes bumbling tenure, of his successor, Gerald Ford.

Carter came out of nowhere to become a national political figure, campaigning across the nation as a small-town Georgia peanut farmer who happened to be a nuclear engineer.

Playing on the nation’s cynical distrust of politicians (sound familiar?), and weariness over the divisions brought on by the recently concluded disastrous war in Vietnam, and vowing to never tell voters a lie while quoting, among others, from Bob Dylan, Carter won a close election in November of 1976. A few months later he was walking (!) humbly down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day with his wife.

His presidency is remembered for the Iran hostage crisis, the oil/gasoline shortages and his “American malaise” speech to the nation followed by his humbling in a 1980 debate with Reagan, whose “there you go again” and, “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” lines ended any chance of Carter’s reelection.

Without a doubt, Carter was the most pious, in terms of living out his religious faith, of any American president. He taught Bible studies well into old age at Maranatha Baptist Church where he rarely missed a service. He and Rosalynn lived in the same modest house in Plains for most of their adult lives.

He was often ridiculed for his faith – never more so than the infamous interview with Playboy magazine (a busty symbol of the ‘70s Me Decade) where he quoted Matthew 5:27-28, the New Testament passage where, Carter explained, Jesus Christ said that just the looking at a woman with lust was equivalent to consummated adultery, and by that standard, he was in no position to judge a man who “screws lots of women,” because he himself had “looked on many women with lust” and, thus, “committed adultery many times in my heart.”

To say these clumsy statements became a national sensation is to underplay how they became fodder for comedians, editorial cartoonists and for the Ford campaign (the then-President said he would never have consented to an interview with Playboy).

“I was explaining Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount,” Carter wrote in a 2015 memoir. Despite decades of global humanitarian work and a Nobel Peace Prize, Carter still remained frustrated by what he felt was unfair media coverage and the response of critics including other evangelicals.

In 1987, I was able to briefly meet and interview Carter, who was in the Bay Area on behalf of Habitat for Humanity. This was just before Habitat undertook its first housing project in Santa Cruz County.

It was just us, a community newspaper reporter and the former president of the United States. No handlers or press aides. Carter was in the Bay Area on behalf of Habitat for Humanity as the first local Habitat home was announced for Santa Cruz County.

What I remember about Carter were his piercing gaze and steely determination to not fall into journalistic traps. There was nothing of the “aw shucks ... Hello, I’m Jimmy Carter” about him. He was self-possessed in the sense of someone who gave the strong impression he knew who he was – and what was important and what was not. He was not interested in talking about the past, the Playboy interview, the Middle East or American politics, but was just matter of fact about making a difference, whether it was monitoring elections around the world or hammering nails for Habitat projects.

He was resolute. Unique.

He was ... Jimmy Carter.

Don Miller is the Sentinel Opinion Editor.