I recently completed Jonathan Alter’s mammoth 700+ page biography of Jimmy Carter entitled His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life. Alter concludes that the Carter “presidency was flawed but underrated, and his post-presidency was inspiring and path-breaking but a tad overrated. In office, Carter was a stylistic and political failure, but a substantive and often far-sighted success.” Having attended the 1976 Democratic convention, I became an avid collector of Jimmy Carter campaign memorabilia.  I amassed a collection of more than 1,000+ different Carter political buttons, a large number of which I donated to the Carter Center. I have followed Carter’s career closely and have written various favorable opinion pieces about his successes as president, including the 1978-79 Israel-Egyptian Camp David Accord, the Panama Canal Peace Treaty, the normalization of relations with China, the SALT II arms control agreement, and 14 major pieces of legislation enacted including the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And his appointment of more women, Black Americans and Jewish Americans to positions in his administration and judgeships than all of his predecessors combined. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter chats with former Wilkes University President Dr. Christopher Breiseth at the Mary Stegmaier Mansion in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Tuesday, April 14th, 2015. (FILE) These enormous accomplishments were for decades, overshadowed by various humiliations that occurred during the Carter Presidency, including the 444-day Tehran hostage crisis and the hapless mishandling of the Shah’s fall from power in Iran. As Alter points out these failures, including the “malaise” speech and the swamp rabbit incident (where Carter announced he had been attacked by a “vicious-looking Oversized swamp rabbit” while fishing) were self-inflicted wounds that Alter attributes to Carter being overly enmeshed in day-to-day details and unwilling to delegate tasks to others, out of fear that nobody could do it as well as him. Alter further points out that Carter was not a particularly warm person and was not an expert communicator like Ronald Reagan. He was, writes Alter, an “all business president who seemed sometimes to prefer humanity to human being.” In David Greenberg’s review of Alter’s book in The New York Times, he points out that an “assessment of Carter the man — disciplined, driven, stubborn, detail-oriented, technocratic, and pious — doesn’t break radically from that of other historians.” Where Alter provides some noteworthy and rather unexpected insight is when he looks at positions taken, and concessions made, by saintly Jimmy Carter to become Governor of Georgia. They were far more calculated than I would have expected of the generally highly principled Jimmy Carter. Alter writes that “Jimmy Carter’s moral status around the world began with his willingness to speak up on behalf of human rights. But he didn’t always do so. While a quiet progressive since his experience in the integrated navy in the late 1940s, he failed to oppose racial discrimination in public until sworn in as governor of Georgia in 1971, when, according to historian Heather Cox Richardson “he abandoned his concessions to white racists and took a stand for new race relations in the United States” when he told the assembled crowd at his inauguration in words that would change his life: “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.  Our people have already made this major and difficult decision.  No poor, rural, weak or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.” Alter indicates that Carter by-and-large, avoided any involvement in the civil rights movement, including never meeting with fellow Georgian, Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK).  Surprisingly, Carter did not join with the 150,000 mourners who marched from the MLK funeral at the Ebenezer Baptist Church though the streets of Atlanta in April of 1968. More disappointing, in 1970 Carter ran what Alter calls a class-based populist “code word campaign” for governor against Carl Sander in which he courted working-class white supporters of former Georgia racist Governor Lester Maddox and 1968 Presidential Candidate George Wallace by straddling the issue of desegregation and strongly opposing busing.  “Carter ran a cunning, tireless, and conspicuously negative campaign for governor.  While he didn’t say anything explicitly racist, he figured out how to appeal to racist voters … it was not his finest hour,” indicated Alter. Carter subsequently acknowledged “I never claimed to have been courageous during the civil rights movement.” In an interview with Judy Woodruff, Alter talked about Jimmy Carter after his inauguration as Governor; “he spent half of his life, from that moment on, essentially making up for what he did not do in the first half on civil rights.” On Carter’s post-presidency, Alter is provocatively revisionist. He notes that besides building homes for Habitat for Humanity, eradicating the Guinea worm in Africa, and monitoring various foreign elections, Carter would sometimes infuriate his White House successors by meddling in their foreign affairs efforts. Alter also contends that Carter’s, willingness to sometimes overtly criticize Israel, when he perceived them as being intransient, tarnished his well-earned image as an honest broker in the Middle East, which enabled him to facilitate the historic Camp David Accords that produced lasting peace between Egypt and Israel. President Jimmy Carter announces his friend Bert Lance’s resignation, director of the Office of Management and the Budget, during a press conference in Washington D.C. on Sept. 21, 1977. I believe that Jimmy Carter accomplished far more as President than he was given credit for and he left a legacy of decency and integrity that contrasts sharply with far too many politicians of our time. At a farewell dinner just before the Reagan inauguration, Vice President Walter Mondale toasted all the administration had accomplished with these words: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.”  Carter added, “And we championed human rights.” There was a great deal to admire about Jimmy Carter.  Most of all I admired his humbleness.  He was not full of himself and did wear his humanitarianism on his sleeve. He believed deeply that all people were entitled to basic human rights. In his Farewell Address to the American people on January 14, 1981 he said he was worried about the direction of the country because it appeared to him that the American people had begun to love faith in our government’s ability to deal with our most pressing problems.  He was correctly concerned about the growing focus on individualism as he recognized that our nation’s greatest strength is “our common vision of a free and just society.” As the flag of nation is at half-staff for Jimmy Carter, at the January 20th inauguration of Donald Trump, I hope the incoming President’s message will not again be about American Carnage but rather about America being “the shining city upon a hill” that embraces freedom and justice at home and around the world. Irwin Stoolmacher is president of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofit agencies that serve the truly needy among us.