“I will never lie to you.” So went the plain-spoken refrain of Jimmy Carter, the man from Plains, whose improbable century-long journey came to an end on Sunday. Carter became the 39th president in no small part because voters felt that simple offer of honesty was sufficient after the turmoil of the Richard Nixon era. Unfortunately for Carter and the country, it was never quite enough.

Carter’s life spanned 10 decades of dizzying change. He was the first president born in a hospital and will surely be the last to remember life before electricity. His childhood farm in Georgia had been decimated by the Depression, then revived by the New Deal. He graduated from the Naval Academy the year before the Cold War began, and he took office shortly before the final Soviet invasion. His presidency bridged the end of FDR’s majority with the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. It also prefigured some of the defining challenges — energy dependence, climate change, partisan polarization — of the decades to come.

Historians have generally ranked Carter in the middle-lower tier of U.S. presidents, amid the Garfields and Hayeses and Van Burens. They’ve at times overstated the case against him. Even so, at the center of Carter’s long life and short presidency lurked an enigma: How did this formidable man — widely considered tough, judicious, intelligent — end up by most accounts a disappointment in office?

He wasn’t much of a politician, for one thing. Walter Mondale, his vice president, once said that Carter “thought politics was sinful.” The talent for trading favors, stroking egos, balancing coalitions — it eluded him entirely. Carter compounded this weakness by surrounding himself with loyalists and outsiders, fatally unwise to the ways of Washington.

One result was that much of his ambitious agenda was thwarted. Although Democrats held huge majorities throughout his term, Carter struggled mightily to advance his goals. On taking office, he named Frank Moore, an obscure 41-year-old campaign hand, as his liaison to Congress; Moore soon became known as the “most maligned man” in Washington. Carter’s habit of dumping fully formed proposals on Congress routinely backfired. His tax reform of 1978, a major priority, was dead on arrival even among notional allies. (“He didn’t consult me when he was writing this bill,” recalled Democratic Sen. Russell Long, “so why should I consult him when I’m gutting it?”)

There were successes, too. Carter secured peace between Egypt and Israel at Camp David, a historic feat that helped end decades of violence. He agreed to an arms-limitation deal with Russia and came to support increased defense spending at a key moment in the Cold War. He normalized diplomatic relations with China, making the world safer and richer for decades. His efforts to deregulate industry — including the airlines, freight railroads and interstate trucking — helped lay the groundwork for the miraculous consumer economy of the 21st century.

Yet it was Carter’s inability to effectively wield the powers of the presidency that would be his undoing. His failure to free 52 American hostages in Iran for more than a year became a microcosm of U.S. impotence. His response to the 1979 energy crisis — going on prime time, warning of the perils of “self-indulgence and consumption” — proved irresistible to his foes. In announcing his intention to challenge Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination, Sen. Ted Kennedy said: “Now, the people are blamed for every national ill, scolded as greedy, wasteful, and mired in malaise.” (Thus did Carter’s address become the “malaise speech,” although he never uttered the word.)

A year on, Ronald Reagan was asking voters two simple questions: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and “Is America as respected throughout the world?” He would defeat the incumbent in a landslide.

It is generally held that Carter was a better former president than president. Opinions may vary on his overseas activism or his tendency to criticize his successors. Undeniably, he was an energetic force for democracy and public service. More to the point: Who could deny the evocative power of an aging former president, stooped but vibrant, building homes for the poor, teaching Sunday school, simply getting on with the business of life after so many often-brutal setbacks? That, too, was Carter. That was no lie.

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