President, Peacemaker, Poet : Ideas: Since the White House, Jimmy Carter has been busy helping end wars and suffering. Now, poetry's the thing.

By BETTIJANE LEVINE

Feb. 10, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Want the baseball strike to end?

Jimmy Carter can do it. At least he thinks he can--if only someone would ask.

As sometimes happens with the 39th President of the United States, his earnest offers to help make peace have been ignored.

“No matter,” he says with a chuckle, figuratively turning the other cheek as he flashes the famous toothy grin, which ignites sparklers in his sky blue eyes.

The President-turned-peacemaker-and-poet looks happier, more fit and arguably more handsome now, at 70, than he did 14 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s victory forced him out of the Oval Office--a one-term President dejected by defeat.

In Los Angeles for a few hours on Wednesday to promote his new book of verse, “Always a Reckoning” (out last month from Random House and already in its fifth printing), Carter looked every inch a man who has faced his demons and conquered them.

He answers to a Higher Authority, his beatific demeanor implies. And no amount of earthly rebuffs will dampen his zeal to help end war, disease, hunger, homelessness--or dearth of baseball.

When he left the White House, he admits, “We were discouraged and we were broke.” There was no more peanut business back home in tiny Plains, Ga. “I had to sell all the businesses I’d accumulated for 20 years in order to pay off debts that accumulated while I was President that I had no idea were accumulating.

“We didn’t really know what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. I was quite young compared to other former Presidents. I was 54.”

Back in Plains, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, re-evaluated their lives and their goals. The songbirds still sang. In the small house where their four children were born--and where the Carters still sleep in a four-poster bed built by Jimmy with wood cut from 2,000 acres owned by the Carter family for generations--the world turned right-side-up again.

He says he realized his goals hadn’t changed at all. He was still “the exact same man” as before he went to the White House. Someone who wanted to be good, and to do good. A man who wanted to help others purely “for the joy and pleasure we get out of helping.”

And there were so many opportunities.

“As you can imagine, a former President who is fairly young has an almost unlimited menu of things he can choose to do.”

What he chose was to write prose and poetry (nine books so far), to teach at Emory University in Atlanta, to volunteer time each year building homes for the poor through Habitat for Humanity--and, most important, to create the Carter Center in Atlanta, through which he and Rosalynn work to help alleviate disease, homelessness and conflict in the world.

These are no small goals. Carter is perhaps the only ex-President likely to accomplish as much (or more) after leaving office as he did when he was in it.

“We are obsessed with greatness, but should be pleased enough with goodness,” wrote presidential scholar Thomas E. Cronin, evaluating Carter’s four years in office.

And his post-presidential batting average is pretty good and (he says) getting better.

In December, he waded into war-ravaged Bosnia and patched together a truce that got Muslims and Serbs to begin talking to each other.

In September, he negotiated in Haiti to remove Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras from power, thereby winning for Haitians a last-minute reprieve from a military invasion already under way. (Carter then invited Cedras to address his Sunday school class in Plains.)

In June, Carter persuaded North Korea to modify its nuclear program. In May, he helped cement Panama’s first democratic election. In February, 1990, he persuaded Nicaragua’s Sandinistas to submit to their country’s election results.

No other former President has intervened in so many international disputes and met with such immediate success. It’s remarkable and unprecedented, historians say.

Carter smiles and shrugs. “We do what makes us happy.”

His use of the imperial we has been criticized in the press as mere pomposity--an affectation that perhaps indicates he takes his initials, J.C., too seriously.

But Wednesday, in a brief conversation on a rose-colored couch in a La Cienega Boulevard media office, it became clear that the former peanut farmer uses the plural because he rarely talks about just himself. His wife is almost always included in his remarks.

“Rosalynn and I are full partners in absolutely everything--we just select the project that we find to be exciting and challenging and adventurous and unpredictable. And then we do it.”

Stopping civil wars and building houses for the poor, while high-profile endeavors, account for only 10% of the Carters’ time, he says.

“Most of our work is in the alleviation of suffering. We coordinate the immunization of the world’s children from the Carter Center.”

The center lists among its achievements the dramatic reduction of river blindness among 11 million citizens in the Third World and the near-eradication of Guinea worm disease, which once infected 2 million people a year in parts of India and Africa.

“We have 150,000 small-farm families in Africa whom we’re teaching how to grow better grain to prevent starvation. We deal with human rights cases, too.”

Carter comes up for air, considers his remarks, and worries that he might sound “too preachy”--something he has also been accused of in the press.

“I don’t mean to sound that way,” he says. “We really have fun doing what we do. Some people think we are making sacrifices. But we’re not. It’s very gratifying. It adds enjoyment to our lives. It brings me and Rosalynn closer together. We meet interesting people. We take off plenty of time to be with our (nine) grandchildren. We also climb mountains, go fly fishing and skiing . . . and, you know, we just have a good time.”

It is easy to see, even in a brief meeting, how this unknown man from a Southern town of 650 farming families could win enough votes to become governor of Georgia, then President of the United States. His smile is incandescent, his voice gentle, his words simple and his meanings clear.

Carter graduated Annapolis, studied nuclear physics, signed on with the Navy and aspired to head the fleet, he says. But his father died, the family farm and business were in some disarray and Carter was needed at home. Through church and civic activities, his influence grew until he was catapulted into politics.

Carter is rural and Southern and zealously good--but don’t confuse him for a simple man.

He becomes a consummate student of anything that interests him. His penchant for poetry, for example, began when he read a single line by Dylan Thomas.

Fascinated and moved by the “weird words,” he began to explore how poetry is put together, collected all the written and recorded works of Thomas, visited the dead poet’s home in Wales--and eventually learned that Thomas was not represented in the Poet’s Corner of London’s Westminster Abbey, where the names of great poets are inscribed. Carter’s mission did not end until he had “prevailed upon the Archbishop” to rectify the mistake.

It is also easy to see how the same traits that put Carter in the Oval Office could win him enmity while there. Surrounded by orator-politicians, most of them lawyers, Carter’s humble cerebral style and his economy of words are not the stuff of which scintillating dinner parties are made.

“A lot of people distrusted my motivations (as President) and thought my expressions were not sincere. Others thought that someone who talks about peace, human rights and the environmental quality is weak; that it’s better to be macho and send in troops.” During Carter’s Administration, not one American soldier died in battle, a record of which he is proud. “I have no regrets about who I am or what I did.”

Jimmy and Rosalynn, married in 1946, have three sons and a daughter. The oldest, John, was born in 1947. Their youngest, Amy, was born almost exactly 20 years later. She is now a painter and art student in New Orleans, and hopes to become a museum curator.

Despite Carter’s much publicized remark to a writer during his presidency that he had “lusted in his heart” for other women, his actions and poetry indicate a 50-year love affair with his wife. Of Rosalynn, he writes: “her smile still makes the birds forget to sing / and me to hear their song.”

“I have always found it possible to say things in my poems that would have been impossible to say in prose,” Carter explains.

He was dubbed provincial, a hermit, unfriendly, an unsophisticated outsider and much worse.

Even now, some snipe.

He’s been derided in print for “failing to retire with the quiet dignity that has long been the custom” for U.S. Presidents.

And for ulterior motives: He does good deeds because he wants to win a Nobel prize, some have implied. Carter himself admits that “some in the State Department” are not that enthusiastic about his peace-making missions. For example, “Kim Il Sung urged me frequently, in every possible way, to come to North Korea. But under Presidents Bush and Clinton, we were turned down repeatedly.” It wasn’t until the crisis was boiling over that Carter was permitted to go, he says.

Even his poetry isn’t immune. It “plods earnestly. . . . (It) lacks not only a distinctive authorial voice, but also anything resembling a psychological or historical subtext,” carped a reviewer in the New York Times Book Review.

Say what?

Now it’s Carter’s turn to laugh. They haven’t got a clue, he says. He’s not ashamed to be a novice poet, or to write about the things he knows best: the death of a dog, a pasture gate, or the rapture he feels when he looks at his wife.

“I speak plainly,” he says, “but about profound things.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Sport

Yesterday I killed him. I had known

for months I could not let him live. I might

have paid someone to end it, but I knew

that after fifteen years of sharing life

the bullet ending his must be my own.

Alone, I dug the grave, grieving, knowing

that until the last he trusted me.

I placed him as he’d been some years ago

when lost, he stayed in place until I came