The rehabilitation of Jimmy Carter, Southern naf: The US is looking at its former president in a new light, writes David Usborne in Washington

'MR CARTER has a tendency to invent his own reality.' This was the snide observation made by a White House official when first indications of what the former President thought he had achieved were starting to filter back to Washington.

Where at the start of the week, the world had seemed to be sliding irreversibly towards renewed and potentially calamitous conflict with Pyongyang, by the week's end there seemed real hope for some resolution. And it was thanks to Jimmy Carter.

Since leaving the White House in 1981, his life has been one of unceasing 'good works'. But the image of Carter as a Southern naf still endures. The goodwill almost radiates from those glistening eyes, wide-smiling lips and ready-to-clasp hands. But it is tempting also to read in them an uncured gullibility.

The humiliations of the Carter presidency have still not been erased: the Iranian hostage crisis and the botched helicopter rescue operation; the energy crisis when Americans had to queue for petrol; and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. History passed an unflattering judgement on the Carter presidency.

The agitation in the Clinton White House is understandable. After winning a first concession from North Korean President, Kim Il Sung, on Thursday in the stand-off over his nuclear programme - a promise not to eject the last two remaining IAEA inspectors - Mr Carter assured the Korean leader that Washington was suspending its efforts to hurt him with economic sanctions. The White House had agreed no such thing. It was not clear then - still is not - whether the Carter mission would help President Bill Clinton in tackling the crisis.

If it is shown that he has pulled off a diplomatic rescue mission then the White House and the world will thank him. It will also mean the start of a process which in the eyes of some has already started: the rehabilitation of another former president.

Some of Carter's achievements as president are coming back into focus, most notably the Camp David meeting between Sadat and Begin in 1978, seen now as the progenitor of today's Middle East peace process. Appreciation is also growing of what he has done since 1981. With his wife Rosalynn, he has given himself to a web of organisations committed to conciliation, to democracy and human rights around the world and to aiding the poor.

At the 1992 Democratic Convention, Jimmy Carter said he was 'glad' it was not him running for President. Doubtless he meant it. But he also made it clear that were Mr Clinton to win he would help where he could.

The State Department was stunned and grateful at the height of the Somalia debacle last year when Mr Carter confessed to be in almost daily contact with the then fugitive warlord, Mohamed Farah Aideed, and ready to act as go- between between him and Washington. And now there is Korea.

Rehabilitation for Mr Carter is not a big stretch. Richard Nixon managed it and he was impeached. And even if his Korean endeavour proves fruitless, Mr Carter may not be blamed. Kim Il Sung, people will say, was never a person of his word. They might say, though, that the former president should not have tried in the first place.

(Photograph omitted)