Carter, Driven to Do Good, Looks to Bosnia Quagmire : Leadership: Another crisis beckons the ex-President. Why he pursues his altruistic agenda is a mystery to many.

There he goes again. First it was North Korea. Then it was Haiti. Now he’s talking about trying to help negotiate a solution in Bosnia.

What makes Jimmy Carter run?

By now, almost everyone knows that Carter is different. He was different as an obscure state legislator. He was different as governor of Georgia and different as President.

Most of all, he has been different as a former President, joining the tiny band of former chief executives--John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and perhaps a couple of others--whose careers after leaving the Oval Office rivaled or exceeded their records as President.

The mystery is what drives him. At an age and stage in life when others opt for a dignified deceleration, what makes the former peanut farmer and still-active Baptist Sunday School teacher from Plains, Ga., pursue a schedule and an agenda that would exhaust Paul Bunyan?

Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, like nearly all of their predecessors, settled quickly and quietly into comfortable lives of retirement after leaving the Oval Office. But Carter, driven from the White House in 1981 as one of the most unpopular presidents of the 20th Century, immediately went back to what he had done much of his life: pursuing lost and neglected causes with a missionary’s zeal.

In little more than a decade, the 70-year-old former President transformed himself into one of the world’s busiest and--arguably--one of its most successful do-gooders.

He negotiated with ruthless dictators from North Korea to Haiti to mediate international crises. He unhesitatingly met with former guerrilla leaders while monitoring elections in emerging democracies from Central America to Africa.

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Now he hopes to visit Bosnia-Herzegovina at the invitation of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to try to mediate an end to the most intractable of all of today’s bloody regional disputes. Although no plan had been announced as of Friday night, Karadzic’s intermediaries--including Dr. Borko B. Djordjevic, a Santa Barbara plastic surgeon--expected to accompany Carter to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo as early as today.

While rubbing elbows with heads of state around the world, he has laced his schedule with visits to the most wretched corners of Africa to comfort the downtrodden and spur campaigns against river blindness and the Guinea worm--afflictions that strike millions of people in the Third World.

He has astounded friends and infuriated enemies with his flinty persistence and tireless appetite for taking a hand in whatever catches his eye--pressing ahead regardless of the odds against him or the bruised feelings and controversies he may create along the way.

To his critics, the explanation for all this is relatively simple: He is driven by a desire to rehabilitate his image and his place in history after a failed presidency. In that vein, many believe that he is shamelessly seeking the Nobel Peace Prize.

While he may be guided by altruistic ideals, these critics contend that Carter is so thirsty for new achievements that he sometimes puts his own agenda ahead of his government’s. And they say that he can be blind to the true nature of some foreign leaders, as when he imputed honor and Christian principles to Haiti’s murderous dictators.

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Alan Tonelson, research director of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington think tank, dismisses Carter as “a loose cannon whose most proven skill is simply buying time.” In a column in the National Journal, political commentator William Schneider brands the former President “feckless, naive and hopelessly ineffectual.”

Similarly, although he won public praise for serving as a mediator and easing crises with Haiti and North Korea, Carter irritated Clinton Administration officials by criticizing Administration policy toward both countries and--in some cases--forcing them beyond the positions they wanted to occupy.

And many in Washington were indignant when Carter said in an interview that--while serving as Clinton’s special emissary--he had told Haitian dictator Raoul Cedras that he was “ashamed” of the U.S. embargo that had deprived women and children of much-needed food and medicine.

On the other hand, public opinion polls indicate that Carter is now the nation’s most popular living ex-President, with his most recent approval ratings surging to the 60% to 70% range.

His reputation abroad may even exceed his standing at home. African countries receive him with the courtesies accorded a head of state. The Japanese government allocated $1 million for the Carter Center in Atlanta. In the city of Konu, near Hiroshima, the new $18-million Jimmy Carter Civic Center includes a museum devoted to the Carter presidency.

To Stephen E. Ambrose, biographer of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carter is “the greatest living ex-President.” David McCullough, biographer of Harry S. Truman and Theodore Roosevelt, describes him as “an extremely interesting and ethical man whose standing historically is going to increase steadily as time goes on.”

Paradoxically, all the conflicting assessments of Carter contain elements of truth.

He has relentlessly pursued his goals, leaving both admirers and critics in his wake, believing that bruised feelings are part of the price of progress.

Popularity has concerned him only when he has been seeking votes. Once, when he was running for President, an aide told him it was a political mistake to wear his religion on his sleeve. “It’ll get me votes,” snapped Carter, who nonetheless comes across to some people as too preachy and sanctimonious.

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When he left the governor’s office, he was unpopular with the Georgia Legislature and the public. Soon after he arrived in Washington, one of his aides said, “I’m afraid Jimmy will treat Congress like it’s the Georgia Legislature and Congress will treat him like he’s Georgia’s governor.” Essentially, that’s what happened.

Both in Georgia and in Washington, Carter always thought that he was better informed than members of the legislative bodies. As President, he once said that he knew more about the issues than members of Congress did and that they wasted his time wanting to talk to him. That message was not lost on Congress. Despite Democratic majorities, he was thwarted on his legislative goals time after time.

Carter himself now concedes that his approach was arrogant and a political mistake.

Moreover, Carter is so single-minded and in such a hurry to achieve his own goals that he seldom recognizes the good work of others around him.

During his presidency, someone tacked up this sign on a White House bulletin board: “Doing a good job around here is like wetting in your pants in a dark suit. It gives you a warm feeling but nobody pays attention.”

Nevertheless, anyone who has followed his career closely can understand why he has legions of admirers here and abroad who view him not as self-absorbed but as a dedicated political leader who is driven by moral principles and who devotes his life to resolving conflicts and helping the unfortunate.

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In an interview, a longtime friend, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, said that he first “witnessed the mastery” of Carter as a negotiator in 1978. By winning the trust of the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Carter was able to broker the Camp David accords, “paving the way for the peace dynamic we are witnessing today.”

“Diplomacy is a multifaceted art,” Boutros-Ghali said, “and President Carter understands every aspect it requires: psychological, historical, religious, cultural and personal. He achieved success then, in the mountains of Maryland, because above all he conveyed to those he encountered a sense of absolute integrity and conviction.”

A prominent California Republican, Lodwrick M. Cook, who chairs the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, said that, to the unfortunate, Carter-the-helping-hand “is more than a former President, he’s someone they see as genuinely interested in helping resolve problems, whether it’s health or agriculture or resolving conflicts. They know he’s a caring person who can bring help.”

Cook, chairman of Atlantic Richfield Co., and Carter have been friends since November, 1991, when Cook dispatched an Arco plane to Zambia to bring Carter to California in time for the opening ceremonies at the Reagan library in Simi Valley. Carter was monitoring an election in Zambia and would have been unable to arrive in time for the ceremonies using commercial flights.

Cook, an official in the Reagan and Bush campaigns, recently joined the board of the Carter Center, a nonpartisan institution with a $25-million annual budget that brings people and resources together to promote peace and human rights, foster democracy and fight poverty, hunger and disease throughout the world.

For his part, Carter said in an interview that he is motivated by the excitement of combining the worthy goals of peace and bettering humanity with a desire for close personal contact with troubled peoples. He’s excited by the projection that, with the aid of the Carter Center’s Global 2000 program, the Guinea worm, a parasite that has infected as many as 2 million people each year in India, Pakistan and 16 African countries, will be eradicated by 1996.

“It’s an active intrusion into troubled areas to bring a better life to people,” he said. “It’s not just negotiating to end a war. It’s not just supervising an international election to bring about democracy to Haiti or the Dominican Republic or to Panama or to Nicaragua, but it’s helping to alleviate suffering.”

In that way, he said, “we not only reduce the likelihood of civil wars, domestic wars, direct and indirect human rights oppression, but we also get to know people and their families and their villages in a way that I would never have been able to learn while I was an incumbent President.”

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Carter, who turned 70 on Oct.1 , throws himself into a frenetic schedule that also includes building furniture and writing books of nonfiction and even poetry. This past summer associates spotted him tapping out poems on his laptop computer during one flight to Africa and another to Japan, where he and his wife, Rosalynn, climbed Mt. Fuji. He has just completed a book of poetry.

Somehow he also occasionally squeezes in fishing, hunting, hiking, teaching Sunday School, lecturing as a professor at Emory University, building houses for low-income families as part of the Habitat for Humanity volunteer organization and spending time with his four children and nine grandchildren.

Rosalynn Carter recently offered him this poignant birthday wish: “For you to have time to do all the great things you want to do this next year but more time at home to go to the farm and walk in the woods and work on the pond and have more time with the children and grandchildren.”

In the end, some of those closest to him say that what drives the former President is not a desire to rewrite his place in history or be a humanitarian on a grand scale.

What makes Jimmy Carter run, they said, is more personal than that: it is the legacy of his late parents--his stern but caring mother, Lillian, who after being widowed, served in the Peace Corps, and most especially his father, Earl, who lived all his life in the Plains area.

“When Earl died,” said Emily Dolvin, Carter’s Aunt Sissy, “Jimmy was constantly having somebody, either black or white, come up to him and tell him some of the things that Earl had done for them . . . and he thought: ‘My dad had never lived any place else except this one little area of Georgia and look at the lives he’s influenced, the good he’s done in this little area.

“And suppose I died today. What have I done? Who would care?’ ”