Former President Jimmy Carter receives flowers from a little girl on his arrival at the airport in Goma, Zaire, in November 1995.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter pay respects at the Intarama genocide memorial site, about 20 miles south of Kigali, in November 1995. Carter had visited Rwanda on a fact-finding mission to promote a heads-of-state meeting to negotiate an end to the refugee crisis.

My first big assignment as a journalist was covering President Jimmy Carter’s 1995 visit to Rwanda, a doomed mission that brought him little acclaim.

Carter didn’t fight disease, promote democracy or negotiate peace to make headlines. He did the work quietly and diligently to make the world a better place. His life was a master class in a leadership style firmly out of fashion but will hopefully return.

I was in my third month as the Associated Press and Voice of America stringer in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. A civil war between an ethno-fascist Hutu government and rebels from the Tutsi minority had culminated in the 1994 genocide that slaughtered 1 million people, most of them Tutsi civilians, in 100 days.

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The Tutsi-led rebels drove the Hutu leadership and 1.2 million of their followers into neighboring Zaire, now known as Democratic Republic of the Congo. Insurgents from the Zairian........

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