Mon, Nov. 11, 2002 story:PUB_DESC New insight into Carter White House BY GLENN GARVIN ggarvin@herald.com

• American Experience: Jimmy Carter. 9-10:30 tonight and Tuesday. WPBT-PBS 2.

Forget the award the venomously anti-American Nobel Prize committee just gave him as a backhanded dig at the Bush administration. Jimmy Carter's real place in history was captured last spring on a Saturday Night Live sketch lampooning his visit to Havana.

Fidel Castro shakes Carter's hand, but then confesses: I don't remember you too well. When were you president, anyway? From 1977 to 1981, Carter answers stiffly. Oh yeah, recalls Castro, that's when America had stagflation, right? And an energy crisis. And the Iranians took the hostages. And, hey, weren't you the guy who was attacked by a killer rabbit? On and on Castro drones, reciting disaster after disaster, as Carter shrivels up even faster than a savings account did during his presidency.

However inadvertently, the two-part American Experience biography of Carter that begins tonight on PBS offers new insight on how truly calamitous his administration was. Though it draws almost exclusively on interviews with friendly sources -- family members like wife Rosalyn and son Chip, or cronies like Bert Lance and Peter Bourne -- American Experience offers one damning anecdote after another about Carter's small-mindedness, arrogance and ineptitude.

By the end, pollster Patrick Caddell is explaining that the 1980 Carter re-election campaign had no choice but to try to desperately smear Ronald Reagan as a Strangelovian nuclear cowboy because there was nothing positive to say about Carter's presidency: ``We didn't have any cards to play because there wasn't any cards to play.''

AVOID BASHING

Adriana Bosch, who has done previous PBS documentaries on Reagan, Ulysses S. Grant and the Rockefeller family, wrote, directed and produced this American Experience. She clearly tried to avoid turning it into an orgy of Carter-bashing, interviewing dozens of friends, family members and political allies, and only a single conservative critic (scholar Joshua Muravchik, who appears but briefly). And the first episode, which concentrates on Carter's early life and his first political campaigns in Georgia, is far more genial.

But the equation changes dramatically when Carter sets his eye on the White House. ''Carter came to be regarded as a good and decent man who was in over his head,'' narrator Linda Hunt observes.

For every triumph of the Carter administration, like the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, there were half-a-dozen disasters. Inflation soared to 14 percent, gas lines stretched for blocks, Soviet-backed guerrillas toppled the government in Nicaragua and were on the verge of victory in El Salvador, and the ayatollahs in Iran went on television to mockingly poke the charred bones of the American troops who died in Carter's ill-conceived attempt to rescue the hostages.

RARE INTERVIEW

Bosch grimly documents each new misadventure. Her able archivists have even come up with footage of an interview that Carter for years has denied existed where he confides his surprise, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that Moscow couldn't be trusted (``my opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically the last week'').

This American Experience was 18 months in production, and with Carter's Nobel Peace Prize last month, it couldn't be more timely or topical. If there's a flaw in this lively documentary, it's that the lack of conservative voices allows Carter's apologists to have the last word, claiming that his multiple failures are overshadowed by the fact that he elevated human rights to the top consideration in U.S. foreign policy.

''I think history is going to look at him in a kindlier light than his contemporaries did,'' insists Carter speechwriter Rick Hertzberg in a typical comment. ``His values, his devotion to peace and human rights, keep on resonating in a way that his failures and weaknesses don't.''

A conservative would have pointed out that Carter's devotion to human rights was mostly mythological. He toasted the shah of Iran as a ''great leader,'' negotiated the future of the Panama Canal with a military dictator, restored U.S. aid to the military junta and its death squads in El Salvador, and opened the supply line to the ruthless anti-Soviet mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan.

In the end, Carter made the same moral compromises and followed the same see-no-evil foreign policy as every other American president who governed during the Cold War. But his mushy rhetoric confused both friends and foes about where America drew the lines and encouraged enemies to test us everywhere: in the Middle East, in Africa, in Central America. As we saw on Sept. 11, they are testing us still.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2002