THE HISTORIANS WHO MAKE a habit of ranking American Presidents are not going to treat Jimmy Carter well. Under the Georgian's stewardship, the U.S. economy went to pot, the nation's self esteem was punctured by repeated humiliations abroad, and--for the first time since George Washington romped on General Cornwallis at Yorktown--the world laughed at America.

How else could it respond to a nation whose chief executive once toasted Mexico's President with a reference to Montezuma's revenge? A country whose leader once billed his energy program as the "moral equivalent of war"--only to realize later that his phrase formed the acronym "meow"? Jimmy Carter could very easily wind up alongside the Franklin Pierces, Millard Fill mores and Herbert Hoovers who dwell uncelebrated in the sewers of history.

In Keeping Faith, Carter generally resists what must be a great temptation to pander to posterity by touching up his White House record That comes as a pleasant surprise: top presidential side Hamilton Jordan has already released a highly defensive account of the Carter Presidency, and in office, Carter always seemed overly worried about outward appearances, Here, however, he owns up to an unexpected number of miscues.

Most of the errors he acknowledges are tactical, rather than substantive Early on, for instance, he allows that he undermined his first-year legislative record by letting loose a flood of proposal to Congress right away, instead of introducing "our legislation in much more careful phases." He regrets, too, "weakening and compromising that first year on some of those worthless dam projects." Such honesty, if unspectacular, leaves one feeling that, for the first time, we can view the Carter Presidency as Carter himself does. The glimpse is compelling, as much for what it shows about the presidency as it does about the flawed world-view of its last Democratic occupant.

CARTER SEES HIMSELF fundamentally as a populist. He invokes that philosophy to explain his lofty goals of bringing harmony, justice and prosperity to the U.S. and the world, but it also accounts for many of his failures. He sprinkles his recollections with selections from a diary he kept during his White House years, the first excerpt, significantly, recounts his decision to walk, not ride, from the Capitol to the White House after his swearing-in. He writes of this symbolic attempt to "return to first principles":

It seemed that a shock wave went through the crowd There were gasps of astonishment and cries of "They're walking' They're walking! The excitement flooded over us, we responded to the people with broad smiles and proud steps. It was bitterly cold, but we felt warm inside.

But the populists ideals Carter had preached on the campaign trail lost much of their utility once his Inauguration ended at the Oval Office. The story of his presidency is one of frustration. He expresses dismay that his well-intended efforts were consistently stymied--on the domestic front by self-interested legislators and (especially) lobbyists, and on the foreign front by uncooperative regimes.

Seeking support for his comprehensive energy package, for instance, he took to the airwaves in 1977 with a series of nationally broadcast fireside chats and town meetings. Although his proposals were well-received, Congress turned much of the energy legislation inside-out: it was not until late in the president's term that the windfall profits tax he had so yearned for was realized.

On numerous other fronts--health insurance, defense spending, tax reform--Carter found himself stranded without Congressional support. At least as he tells it. Congress simply was more interested in keeping special interests happy and getting re-elected than in returning to his "first principles." The White House's unfocused legislative strategy was only slightly to blame:

Ultimately, something will have to be done to control the influence of special interests in the meantime, we will have to suffer as a nation until the abuses become so outrageous that they cannot be ignored any longer.

No doubt Carter honestly believes there was little he could do to fight off the "pack of powerful and ravenous wolves" who preyed on his legislative proposals. But he unwittingly manifests his lingering lack of street smarts when he describes the unusual carrots and sticks he held out to legislators for their votes on key legislation. He proudly reprints the text of a handwritten note sent to all congressmen who backed his controversial--and commendable--treaty ceding the Panama Canal back to Panama. This presidential thank you note, he suggests, exemplifies his efforts to cement relations with the Democratically controlled legislative branch.

Yet he is positively vituperative in describing Congressional pressure to secure small home-state water projects, Carter, it would appear, has yet to learn a fundamental political lesson: dealing with Congress is the art of bargaining. To a legislator hell-bent on re-election, a federal grant to a local industry means a lot more than a handwritten card from an unpopular president on a sensitive issue. This is a harsh realization Carter simply can't understand.

Neither can he comprehend why he had such difficulties dealing with the congressional Democratic leadership. He seems retroactively satisfied with his often-stormy relationship with House Speaker Thomas P O'Neill Jr (D.Mass) "At first, our relationship was somewhat strained because of our different backgrounds and philosophies." Carter recalls, "but eventually I grew to love this big man."

IN THE INTERNATIONAL ARENA, too, Carter suffered from gullibility. Like Woodrow Wilson, who along with Harry Truman seems to have been one of Carter's presidential idols, he demanded a certain brand of morality from those he dealt with abroad. Yet his Administration got burned across the globe by nations less-scrupulous than ours Iran. Afghanistan, and Poland leap to mind as sites of American humiliation between 1977 and 1981. Even today, however, Carter indicates he has no regrets about extending his politics of faith abroad.

I was familiar with the widely accepted arguments that we had to choose between idealism and realism, or between morality and the exertion of power, but I rejected those claims To me the demonstration of American idealism was a practical and realistic approach to foreign affairs, and moral principles were the best foundation for the exertion of American power and influence.

It is enlightening to contrast this ethereal international outlook with Carter's very practical role in what was unquestionably his greatest foreign policy success: the 1978 Camp David treaty. Justifiably proud of bringing Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to the bargaining table for their historic agreement, Carter describes Camp David in far more detail than any other event or issue in the book. And not surprisingly, his account is by far its most captivating and dramatic section.

Carter entitles his lengthy Camp David chapter "Thirteen Days," a name that recalls Robert F. Kennedy '48's identically named and equally breathtaking account of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Day by day, he describes his meetings with Begin and Sadat on the grounds of the presidential retreat: the initial hope, the long period of pessimism, Begin's intransigence, Sadat's frustrated attempt to leave midway through the talks, and the final whirlwind day of settlement.

Although the President's role here was one of referee, it is clear that he was an avid spectator as well. He tells of how Begin and Sadat squared off on the third day of talks:

(Sadat) leaned forward in his chair, pointed his finger at Begin, and exclaimed. "Premier Begin, you want land" Sadat reminded as that the disputed phrase was extracted directly from United Nations Resolution 242, which all of us agreed to be the foundation of our peace efforts. He was fervent in condemning "the Israeli settlements on my land."

All restraint was now gone Their faces were flushed, and the niceties of diplomatic language and protocol were stopped away. They had almost forgotten I was there, and there was nothing to distract me from recording this fascinating debate.

Begin had touched a raw nerve, and I thought Sadat would explode. He pounded the table, shouting that land was not negotiable especially land in the Sinai Golan Heights.

He quotes from his diary an entry just after the historic pact had been struck.

The most emotional time of all was after the agreement was reached I read in the news that Israeli teachers who were out on strike, having heard about the Camp David agreement, voted unanimously to go back to work.

The irony here is rich. The President's immensely practical efforts on the Mideast front had secured an agreement that generated great worldwide hope--yet his reliance on the same hope on the domestic front secured him little in the way of practical results.

WHAT CARTER OMITS from Keeping Faith is as revealing as what he stresses. He pays shockingly little attention to the economy, although the conventional wisdom holds that its travails were principally responsible for his 1980 electoral swamping. Instead, he only alludes to inflation and unemployment here and there, never saying much that's new. Yet this gap is, in a sense, appropriate: one always sensed during the Carter years that economic policy was made on the run, and not carefully thought through.

Carter is also unexpectedly silent on the 1980 campaign, devoting to it one short chapter. Here, one senses that his honesty ebbs. According to Crisis, Hamilton Jordan's account of the last year of the Carter Administration, the President was obsessed with re-election, and deeply bitter throughout at his Democratic challenger, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.). His machinations during the primary race against Kennedy--pumping huge federal grants into states with upcoming primaries--are well-known, yet Cart-here opts for the literary parallel of his 1980 "Rose Garden strategy": he simply refuses to enter the fray at all.

For a political candidate who stresses faith, openness and accountability, such a tactic is questionable; from an author who pledges an accurate depiction of his presidential years, the omission is inexcusable. Yet he is ready to take a dig at Ronald Reagan for the Republican President-elect's behavior during a transition meeting between the men:

Again, he did not comment of ask any questions. Some of the information was quite complex, and I did not see how he could possibly retain all of it merely by listening. I asked him if he wanted a pad so that he could take some notes, but he responded that he could remember what I was saying.

Oddly enough, Carter's treatment of the Iranian hostage crisis, though substantial, is not as complete or as interesting as Jordan's. One can only speculate that, here too, the episode proved so embarrassing and politically fatal that he prefers to forget about it. Instead, he devotes a small chapter to defending Office of Management and Budget head Bert Lance, a personal friend whom he describes as "a good country banker." Lance had been forced to resign his post because of financial improprieties--one wonders why Carter feels compelled to devote so much space to clearing a friend's name.

ON THE WHOLE, Keeping Faith is an honest account of the Carter Presidency. If Carter gives short shrift to some of his weak points, he also shoulders some blame for America's disarray during his Presidency. And he does succeed in reminding us that his administration was not entirely devoid of accomplishments. In addition to Camp David, the former president deserves credit for tangible changes in U.S. affairs, at home and abroad; the Panama Canal Treaty, normalization of relations with China, the energy windfall profits tax, and civil service reform are only the most striking.

Jimmy Carter never did learn how to go about achieving the lofty goals he set for the nation and the world. Even the inevitable tide of revisionist history will almost certainly fail to carry his record beyond mediocrity: Yet his enunciation of populism and a renewed faith in American ideals succeeded in leaving a lasting impression on a nation that was just recovering from Watergate when he assumed its helm.

Carter, to his credit, aimed high. For all his political failures, he did succeed in reinforcing in the American psyche a sense of idealism that may otherwise have been lost. Thanks to his efforts, world-wide human rights are harder to forget about nowadays. In a time when America is being led astray by a politically say atavism, Keeping Faith serves as a reminder that, just may be, his predecessor the bumbling idealist wasn't to bad after all.