Former president Jimmy Carter has been reborn. Again.
As he begins a four-day visit today with North Korean officials to discuss growing tensions over nuclear inspections, the man whose deep Christian beliefs guided him in the White House has undergone a dramatic secular reincarnation.
Thrown from office after one term marred by an oil embargo, runaway inflation and the humiliating Iran hostage crisis, Carter has transformed himself into a senior statesman and champion of human rights.
"He's a great ex-president," says Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, who admires Carter's work since leaving the White House. "It's a shame he couldn't have gone directly to the ex-presidency."
Carter's high-level visit to North Korea - he had longstanding invitations from both North and South to visit - has the unofficial blessing of the White House, but his role remains unclear.
State Department spokesman Michael McCurry says the former president has been briefed on developments but "is not carrying any formal message from the United States." Still, Carter is accompanied by a career foreign service officer.
Carter has said he was asked two years ago by North and South Korea to help ease tension but that the Bush administration urged him not to get involved.
Then, last September, Carter complained that Clinton officials were ignoring him, even though Secretary of State Warren Christopher and foreign affairs adviser Anthony Lake are old Carter hands.
Until recently, Clinton aides viewed the one-term Democrat as "a political liability," says former Carter chief of staff Jody Powell. "These attitudes have softened (and) other concerns have made this no longer among the top 10 things they have to worry about."
Clinton's own sagging approval ratings could account for the greater empathy toward Carter, who was trounced by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
"The role of mediator in a foreign country is a helluva lot easier than getting the American political system to respond," Mann says. Carter, he says, was "out of sync" with fellow Democrats and Congress.
Also, Mann notes, a president is "constrained enormously by events over which he has no control. In Carter's case, it was the energy shock and hostages."
And malaise, the tired dejection that clung to Americans during the Carter years. Both the nation's and Carter's malaise lifted after he left office. Back home in Georgia, he founded the Carter Center to carry on the work he couldn't complete as president.
"He's quite unusual. Most ex-presidents write their memoirs and retire," says Vanderbilt University political scientist Erwin Hargrove. "But Carter has a tremendous amount of energy and a desire to do good."
At Camp David, where he brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, Carter had "discovered he's good at bringing people together."
"He tells things like they are," says longtime friend Charles Kirbo. "People all over the world have confidence in what he says. They know he doesn't take sides."
Since 1981, Carter, 69, has traveled the world as a private human rights ambassador.
He has mediated civil strife in Somalia and Ethiopia; observed elections in Panama, Nicaragua and Haiti; campaigned against Guinea worm disease in Africa; and quietly implored several countries to release or stop torturing political prisoners.
At home, Carter is best known for wielding hammer and nail for Habitat for Humanity, a group that builds housing for the poor. He's also the driving force behind the Atlanta Project, a model program to tackle urban problems like crime and joblessness.
"He's had no interest in, quote, cashing in on the presidency," Mann says. "Look at his schedule, his effort to build housing in cities and eradicate diseases that have ravaged Third World countries, to monitoring elections. He's been an unusually constructive public figure in his years since the White House."
"He has exemplified the very best in a human rights advocate," says Bill Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International. "He has tried to use the prestige of his office and the contacts which he made through being president" to champion human rights.
Carter's "deep moral sense of what's right," says Michael Posner of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, makes him "willing to call heads of state to say 'I've just learned' that this or that person has been detained or there are reports of torture.
"He has a real willingness to throw himself into difficult, intractable problems. So many other leaders show up at a moment when it's easy or safe. He's willing to take risks."
He can afford to now that he's Citizen Carter.
"He seems to be as happy as I ever remember him being," Powell says. "His chief vexation these days is there's so many things he wants to do and only so much time to do them."
