CARTER'S TRAVELS, CLINTON'S BANE

What role is to be played by our ex-presidents? There is no precise answer and the Constitution is silent on the question. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson functioned as part-time political philosophers exchanging letters back and forth, which are now a rich part of our country's history.

After leaving the White House, John Quincy Adams was elected to the House of Representatives, where he had a distinguished second career contributing to the public good.

Ulysses Grant restored some of his deeply damaged public and financial reputation by writing his brilliant military commentaries on the Civil War.

Theodore Roosevelt, a very young ex-president, was enormously restless out of power. TR was in fact so restless that he ran against his own hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and split the Republican Party in two. Taft himself became a not overly brilliant Chief Justice after becoming a former President.

Herbert Hoover pouted a lot until President Harry Truman called him back into part-time, useful public service.

Richard Nixon, akin to Grant, spent years attempting to restore his reputation and succeeded in some measure.

Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush have decided to relax and await the judgment of history.

That brings us to Jimmy Carter, who tries to keep busy as a global negotiator and peacemaker. Remembering the successful Camp David negotiations with Israel and Egypt, Carter holds himself out as an experienced arbiter. He was confident he could bridge the gap between widely disparate positions on North Korea.

Carter clearly injected himself into the Korean crisis. He implored the White House to allow him to go to North Korea. It would have been unthinkable for him to make the trip without at least the veneer of presidential blessing. Carter was a most public person, publicly briefed by the White House, making a highly public visit to the world's foremost hot spot. North Korea had every reason to consider him as an authoritative spokesman for the United States.

Although Clinton may have hoped that Carter would stick tightly to the official White House script, he knew there was some risk in allowing the free-wheeling Carter to be the "unofficial" representative.

Carter's views on North Korea differed markedly from Clinton's. Carter was adamantly opposed to the use of sanctions in any regard. Carter was in favor of treating Kim Il Sung as venerable elder statesman. Carter openly speculated as to why the Clinton Administration hadn't been negotiating earlier with Kim at a high level. There was no misconception between Carter and Clinton about their disparate views.

When Clinton blessed Carter as an "unofficial" communicator, he was blessing a strong-willed, non-conformist emissary with his own distinct message. Carter went to North Korea determined to solve the crisis his way. When he came home, he announced that the "crisis is over."

The crisis isn't over. The scouting report on Kim Il Sung is replete with 50 years of conflicting statements and broken promises. To Carter's credit, the crisis, for the moment, is diffused.

President Clinton accepts the results of the Carter visit as a basis upon which to build further negotiations with North Korea. The underlying dilemma still exists: How to verify what North Korea has done in the past with reprocessing spent fuel into plutonium and how to verify what it is going to do henceforth. The essential word is "verify." The rhetoric and happy talk from Kim Il Sung do not equate to verification of all vital elements of the North Korean nuclear process.

Jimmy Carter goes back to Atlanta and, in his own view, chalks up another mediation victory. But he leaves the Clinton Administration with the heavy burden of establishing a framework of verifiably implementing the vague agreement.

Carter is a smart man. He knew what he was doing in North Korea and he knew that espousing differing views would put some pressure on Bill Clinton. Within Clinton's camp of foreign policy advisers, the North Korean doves are smiling and the hawks are grousing.