Meanwhile, Carter, who died Sunday at 100, is remembered as a somewhat weak leader, preaching naively about human rights, lamenting energy shortages and malaise in his singsong Georgia accent, and practically being hounded from the White House by the 444-day-long Iranian hostage crisis.

The morning after U.S. presidential candidate Ronald Reagan crushed incumbent President Jimmy Carter with a 44-state landslide in 1980, the New York Times reported that demand for a “tougher American foreign policy” was a big part of the outcome. By almost a 2-1 ratio, voters in exit polls said, “They wanted this country to be more forceful in dealing with the Soviet Union.” Reagan seemed to do just that over the next eight years, with a policy of “peace through strength” and a relentless defense buildup. After the Soviet bloc began to disintegrate on his watch, Reagan was—and still is—mythologized as the primary victor of the Cold War.

The morning after U.S. presidential candidate Ronald Reagan crushed incumbent President Jimmy Carter with a 44-state landslide in 1980, the New York Times reported that demand for a “tougher American foreign policy” was a big part of the outcome. By almost a 2-1 ratio, voters in exit polls said, “They wanted this country to be more forceful in dealing with the Soviet Union.” Reagan seemed to do just that over the next eight years, with a policy of “peace through strength” and a relentless defense buildup. After the Soviet bloc began to disintegrate on his watch, Reagan was—and still is—mythologized as the primary victor of the Cold War.

Meanwhile, Carter, who died Sunday at 100, is remembered as a somewhat weak leader, preaching naively about human rights, lamenting energy shortages and malaise in his singsong Georgia accent, and practically being hounded from the White House by the 444-day-long Iranian hostage crisis.

So, it may seem strange that Carter, even more so than Reagan, is revered to this day among those who fought on the true front lines of the Cold War: the former dissidents of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. “They still see him as the messiah,” Svetlana Savranskaya, a scholar of the Soviet period at George Washington University, told me in an interview. “Their eyes shine when they talk about him.”

Perhaps the least understood dimension of Carter’s much-maligned, one-term presidency was that he dramatically changed the nature of the Cold War, setting the stage for the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse.