HE'S NO. 19.(Jimmy Carter's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize honors the prize process, as it honors him)

In the hundred and one years since the Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has given it to citizens of the United States eighteen times. When Jimmy Carter travels to Oslo in December to collect his medal and his check, he'll make it nineteen. In Nobel Peace Prizes, as in so much else, America is No. 1.

The Americans are an interesting group. They include five Secretaries of State and one Vice-President, Charles G. Dawes (1925). As was widely noted last week, Carter is the third Peace Prize President, after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. T.R., the boisterous, big-stick Rough Rider, was the first American winner, in 1906, for bringing representatives of Japan and Russia to a retreat in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and keeping them there until they agreed to end the Russo-Japanese War.

T.R.'s feat in New Hampshire foreshadowed Carter's in Maryland, where, in 1978, he wheedled Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin into signing the Camp David Accords. There has been peace, albeit a cold peace, between Egypt and Israel ever since. This, the Norwegian committee said the other day in its announcement of the award to Carter, was "in itself a great enough achievement to qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize." The lands of Israel and Palestine have been anything but peaceful in the past two years; still, as a senior official in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the Times, the treaty Carter brokered "is still the basic building block for any future peace agreement between Israel and the Arab world."

The Nobel Committee did not mention Carter's other great diplomatic achievement as President, the Panama Canal treaties, but it probably should have. In negotiating the transfer of the canal's management to the Panamanians, Carter was taking up a task that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford had regarded as strategically essential but politically toxic. They were right on both counts. Holding on to the canal would have guaranteed an indeterminate future of violence, sabotage, regional instability, and perhaps even guerrilla war. The campaign against Carter's "giveaway" became the organizing and fund-raising engine that propelled its leader, Ronald Reagan, to the forefront of the Republican Party. Reagan insisted that the treaties would be a mortal threat to American security. Once in the White House, he wisely consigned such nonsense to the memory hole. Today, the Panama Canal is about as much of a flash point as the Gowanus Canal.

Carter has as much or more in common with the private citizens among the American laureates as he does with the high officials. Like Jane Addams (1931), the pioneering Chicago social worker, Carter, in his house-building work for Habitat for Humanity, has labored on behalf of the poor, face to face and with his own hands. Like Elihu Root (1912), the first president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carter heads a "non-governmental organization." (But while Carnegie is a think tank, the Carter Center is more of a do tank.) Like Norman E. Borlaug (1970), the agronomist who spurred the "Green Revolution," Carter has made concrete improvements in the lives of the Third World's poorest, via the Carter Center's unglamorous, little-known, and successful programs for the control of river blindness and the eradication of guinea-worm disease.

The ...