I have run across very few professions in life in which the old anchorman's credo of "frequently in error, but never in doubt" could also so aptly apply. But President of the United States is likely the leading contender. It takes a lot of ego to assume you are the best man (or someday woman) to lead a continental nation now totaling more than 300 million people, not to mention the largest economy and most potent military the world has ever known. The feeling of most who occupy the Oval Office is to save the reflection for the memoir - even then it rarely comes. And that's what makes an afternoon I spent at the White House in the late 1970s so indelibly etched in my mind. This scene hit anew like a record shifting to play in an old jukebox when I heard the news of President Jimmy Carter's grave cancer diagnosis.

I cannot count the times I have entered the White House to go to work, intent on getting the answers that I felt my viewers needed to hear from their elected officials. Most often I knew that whether I would be talking to a press secretary, a "senior government official" or the president himself, candor was a card he would hold close to the vest. But this time was remarkably different. I was in my mid-40s and a correspondent for 60 Minutes. As a reporter I had already had a charmed career, but I still felt myself on the make. The man I had come to interview was only 7 years my senior - the first president of roughly my generation. In age we felt like peers. I was coming to the interview with the full force and weight of CBS News, which at that moment felt formidable. He had the full force and weight of the United States, which felt far more formidable. But there was a sense at the time that his administration was foundering.

The piece I was reporting would be built around this interview and so midway through I asked him to grade his presidency on a series of foreign and domestic matters. I knew President Carter prided himself on being a truth teller but when he started to give a very harsh assessment I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Didn't he know that the cameras were rolling? Didn't he know all this was on the record? I could see his press secretary turn the shade of a freshly bleached bed sheet flapping in the summer sun, but President Carter seemed completely unfazed. When I told him that by my rough arithmetic that came out to be about a C average, he didn't flinch.

I wonder how he would answer that same question today, but he probably would say those temporal concerns aren't important. The tremendous grace and dignity with which President Carter has led his life since leaving the White House has received ample discourse in the press, especially as the terms of his mortality have come into sharper focus. And the grace with which he has announced his illness is a further testimony to his character. In those oh-so-not scientific polls of best presidents, Carter has seen a resurgence lately. Although I assume it has to do as much with Carter the ex-president as with Carter the president.

Dan Rather interviewing President Jimmy Carter. Image: CBS

Many of the errors of the Carter Presidency are well documented. He was a micromanager who had difficulty prioritizing. His administration seemed often to be caught unprepared. There was a yawning chasm between rhetoric and execution. And yet if any of you reading this is a historian, I suggest that his four years in office are ripe for reinterpretation, much like the treatment President Truman received several years back in David McCullough' superb biography. There is his triumph in establishing some semblance of peace in the Middle East and his clairvoyance on matters of energy and the environment. But he doesn't get nearly enough credit for his pioneering work on military matters. He came to the White House as a proud graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a protege of Admiral Hyman Rickover, "the father of nuclear navy." Many of the innovations behind the hi-tech hardware of our current armed forces were conceived during the Carter Administration.

If you gave modern presidents some equivalent of an SAT test, I think Jimmy Carter might score the highest. That's partly because he had such a background in high math and science, much more than most presidents. The Naval Academy was basically an engineering school, and Carter graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. And yet he also had a lifelong love of reading and had the ability to write well, and clearly.

I first met Jimmy Carter in 1975 or '76, very early in what seemed to be a quixotic presidential campaign. He was then a long-shot underdog and I knew little about him. He was completely new on the national stage and I can confess here that I hadn't done my homework. My very first impression was that he had a firm handshake, as you would expect from a former military officer. His Southern drawl was deeper than I'd expected; too deep, I thought at the time, for becoming much of a candidate. No U.S. President in the 20th or 21st centuries that I could think of —and, as far as I know, none ever—has had a drawl as strong as Carter's was when he began his presidential bid. It's important to note how rare it has been for a Southerner to become president. After the Founding Fathers generation, only a handful of sons from Dixie have made it to the White House. But whatever regional sense one got from his speech, Carter's quick, broad, toothy smile had universal appeal.

There also was something about the man, on first meeting, that conveyed a combination of confidence and persistence - a certain steadiness. He struck me, even then, as someone deeply rooted. It is hard to put one's finger on exactly how or why those characteristics came through, but they did.

I also noted that among several of his close aides — all young and untested in national politics — there was the ever-so-faint but unmistakable whiff of bourbon. As a Texan I knew the smell well. It was an aroma not all that unexpected of Southern "Good Ole' Boys", but it didn't square with reports that Carter was a deep-faithed Southern Baptist who taught Sunday School and was a tee-totaler. I noted the apparent contradiction then. Turned out, of course, that the reports on Carter were true. But it was also true that the young good ole boys continued nipping right on into and through their top White House jobs. None of them had a drinking problem, so far as I ever knew. They just knew and liked good bourbon from time to time.

See also: Jimmy Carter reveals cancer has spread to his brain

In a day of celebrity-fueled politics, of big-money, big-city donors, and teams of "media handlers," it is difficult imagining a candidate emerging like Carter and the team around him. Perhaps Bernie Sanders may seem in many ways like an heir, but that is more in terms of style and substance than personal biography. Jimmy Carter served his state before he served his nation, but he was also a serviceman and a peanut farmer. When his tenure in Washington D.C. had run its course, he returned to Georgia and went on to change the world, perhaps to even a greater degree than when he was president.

As I sit here and reflect on his life, I have the strong sense that many of the Founding Fathers would see in Jimmy Carter their own most lofty ideals. Here was a common, decent man who through intellect, hard work, and grit became president. And yet the presidency is not royalty. And you never got the sense that President Carter forgot that. Now his good work and example as an ex-president reminds us anew that we should be, at our best, a society of equal citizens. Each of us should have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And we should not horde those rights, but should share them with peoples around the globe. That is what it should mean to be an American, and in those respects Jimmy Carter was, whatever one thinks of his politics, one of the finest citizens this nation has ever produced.