Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  What made them leaders? What was the original root of their ambition?

  What were their goals?

  What previous events had shaped their characters?

  What were their religious beliefs? Were they sincere?

  Who was important to them? What were their family relations?

  How was their health?

  What promises and obligations had they made?

  How did they react under pressure?

  What were their strengths and weaknesses?

  What were their attitudes toward the U.S. and Carter personally?

  What did they think of each other?

  Whom did they trust, especially within their delegations?

  The resulting profiles of Begin and Sadat drew sharply opposing portraits. Sadat was a visionary—bold, reckless, and willing to be flexible as long as he believed his overall goals were being achieved. He saw himself as a grand strategic thinker blazing like a comet through the skies of history. The CIA noted his penchant for publicity, terming it his “Barbara Walters Syndrome,” after the famous television personality, but by the time the profile was prepared for Carter that category had been upgraded to Sadat’s “Nobel Prize Complex.” Begin, on the other hand, was secretive, legalistic, and leery of radical change. History, for Begin, was a box full of tragedy; one shouldn’t expect to open it without remorse. When put under stress, Sadat drifted into generalities and Begin clung to minutiae. Clashes and misunderstandings were bound to occur. There was some doubt among the analysts preparing the dossiers whether two such opposing personalities should ever be put into the same room together. The two leaders seemed alike only in unpromising ways. Both men had blood on their hands. They had each spent long stretches in prison and in hiding and were deeply schooled in conspiracy. They were not the kind of men Carter had ever known before.

  Carter believed he instinctively understood Sadat, however, even though they came from distant cultures. Part of their bond was the fact that they had both been farmers. As a boy, Carter had plowed the red clay of southwest Georgia behind a mule, feeling the damp cool of the freshly turned earth between his toes. He was struck by the observation that Jesus and Moses would have felt at home on a farm in the Deep South during the first part of the twentieth century. Around the globe but on the same meridian as Plains, Georgia, there is a village of mud huts in Egypt called Mit Abul Kum, where Sadat spent his early years. Farmers in the black alluvial soil of the Nile Delta irrigated their fields using an Archimedes screw, which the Greek sage reputedly invented when he visited Egypt in the third century BCE. One could see painted in the tombs of the pharaohs scenes of village life that were still being lived three thousand years later.

  Changelessness is the essential feature of such rural childhoods—a feeling of being cocooned, at once protected and entrapped. And yet, even as a child, a dark-skinned peasant from a small village in the Nile Delta, Sadat sensed his unique role in Egyptian society. Once, when he was playing with some other children near an irrigation canal, they jumped into the water and Anwar leaped in after them. Only then did he remember that he couldn’t swim. He thought, “If I drown, Egypt will have lost Anwar Sadat!”

  Although he rarely talked about his race, Sadat was only two generations away from slavery—his maternal grandfather, an African man called Kheirallah, had been brought as a slave to Egypt and was emancipated only after the British occupiers demanded the practice be abolished. Kheirallah’s daughter, Sitt el-Barrein (woman of two banks), was also a black African. She was chosen as a wife for Mohamed el-Sadaty, an interpreter for a British medical group.1 She covered herself in traditional black clothing, with long sleeves and a skirt that reached the floor. She was Mohamed’s sixth wife; the first five bore him no children, so he divorced them one after another. Sitt el-Barrein would bear him three sons and a daughter. Anwar was her second child.

  The racial dynamics in the Sadaty family were highly charged, as they were in Egyptian society as a whole. Mohamed el-Sadaty’s mother, called by custom Umm Mohamed (mother of Mohamed), was an overbearing figure who had arranged the match with Sitt el-Barrein. It’s a bit of a mystery why she made such a choice, since Umm Mohamed was of Turkish lineage, with fair features, and she despised her dark-skinned daughter-in-law. Mohamed inherited his mother’s Turkish features; he had blue eyes and blond hair. In Islam, a man is permitted four wives at a time, and Mohamed would eventually marry twice more when the family moved to Cairo. In addition to his three wives and his formidable mother, Mohamed’s vast household grew to thirteen children. Sitt el-Barrein occupied the lowliest place because of her race. She was little more than a maid, occasionally beaten by her husband in front of her children. Sadat rarely spoke of her.

  It was his grandmother, Umm Mohamed, the strongest figure in the family, who made the biggest impression on Sadat. “How I loved that woman!” he recalls in his autobiography. She was illiterate, but she insisted that her children and grandchildren become educated. Anwar often spent summers in Umm Mohamed’s mud-walled hut in Mit Abul Kum, where her influence was unequivocal. From an early age he began to imagine himself as a figure of destiny, his imagination fired by the stories his grandmother would tell.

  His favorite was the legend of Zahran. It is a tale of martyrdom. In June 1906, several years before Anwar was born, a party of British soldiers was pigeon hunting in a nearby village called Denshawi. They shot some domesticated fowl, infuriating the villagers. Total chaos followed. One of the soldiers accidentally shot and wounded the wife of the local imam. The villagers responded with a hail of stones. The soldiers fired into the mob, injuring five people. A local silo caught on fire, perhaps because of a stray bullet. Two soldiers raced back to camp to get help, but the other members of the hunting party surrendered to the villagers. One soldier who escaped died of sunstroke in the intense heat, although he may also have suffered a concussion from the stoning. British soldiers who came to the rescue killed an elderly peasant who was trying to assist the dying man, wrongly assuming that he had murdered their comrade. The British occupiers decided to make an example of Denshawi. Fifty-two villagers were rounded up and quickly brought before a tribunal. Most of the villagers were flogged or sentenced to long prison sentences. Four were hanged.

  This confused and tragic incident marked a turning point in the British occupation, inflaming nationalist sentiments in Egypt and stirring outrage even in Great Britain. Denshawi became a byword for the inevitable clumsy by-products of imperialism. No one embodied the face of Denshawi more than the young man named Zahran, the first of the condemned to be hanged. According to the oral ballad that Sadat’s grandmother told to him, Zahran was the son of a dark mother and a father of mixed blood—just like Anwar. “The ballad dwells on Zahran’s courage and doggedness in the battle, how he walked with his head high to the scaffold, feeling proud that he had stood up to the aggressors and killed one of them,” Sadat writes. He heard this legend night after night, and it worked its way deep into his imagination. “I often saw Zahran,” he writes, “and lived his heroism in dream and reverie—I wished I were Zahran.”

  It was in Cairo that Anwar first actually encountered the hated occupiers. He recalls “the odious sight of the typical British constable on his motorcycle, tearing through the city streets day and night like a madman—with a tomato-colored complexion, bulging eyes, and an open mouth—looking like an idiot, with his huge head covered in a long crimson fez reaching down to his ears. Everybody feared him. I simply hated the sight of him.”

  In 1931, when Anwar was twelve, Mahatma Gandhi passed through the Suez Canal on his way to London to negotiate the fate of India. The ship stopped in Port Said, whereupon Egyptian journalists besieged the ascetic leader. The correspondent for Al-Ahram marveled that Gandhi was wearing “nothing but a scrap of cloth worth five piasters, wire rim glasses worth three piasters and the simplest thong sandals worth a mere two piasters. These ten piasters of clothing tell Great Britain volumes.” The example of this poor, dar
k-skinned man who turned the empire upside-down made a deep impression on the young Sadat. “I began to imitate him,” he writes. “I took off all my clothes, covered myself from the waist down with an apron, made myself a spindle, and withdrew to a solitary nook on the roof of our house in Cairo. I stayed there for a few days until my father persuaded me to give it up. What I was doing would not, he argued, benefit me or Egypt; on the contrary, it would certainly have given me pneumonia.” Sadat’s obsession with great men must have seemed comical, especially when he imitated Gandhi by sitting under a tree, pretending he didn’t want to eat, or dressing in an apron and leading a goat. He was consciously shopping for the qualities of greatness, trying on attributes and opinions. It wasn’t just Gandhi’s asceticism that appealed to him; he was drawn to the autocratic side of Gandhi’s nature, which favored action over deliberation and cared nothing for consensus.

  Despite Sadat’s hatred of the British, it was through an English doctor who knew Sadat’s father that he was able to enter the Royal Military Academy. Sadat was rescued from the menial destiny he had been born to. The academy had been the exclusive province of the Egyptian aristocracy until 1936, when the British allowed the Egyptian Army to expand. During this period, Sadat read books on the Turkish Revolution and became increasingly devoted to Kemal Atatürk, the creator of modern Turkey. Sadat was already beginning to see himself as a transformational figure whose iron will would rearrange his society into a new paradigm. In that way, he and Begin were much alike.

  Paradoxically, those were the same qualities that drew him to Hitler. “I was in our village for the summer vacation when Hitler marched forth from Munich to Berlin, to wipe out the consequences of Germany’s defeat in World War I and rebuild his country,” Sadat recounts. “I gathered my friends and told them we ought to follow Hitler’s example by marching forth from Mit Abul Kum to Cairo. I was twelve. They laughed and ran away.” Two decades later, after Germany was in ruins and sixty million people were dead, Sadat and other prominent Egyptians were asked by a Cairo magazine to write a letter to Hitler as if he were still alive. “My Dear Hitler,” Sadat wrote,

  I admire you from the bottom of my heart. Even if you appear to have been defeated, in reality you are the victor. You have succeeded in creating dissension between the old man Churchill and his allies, the sons of Satan.… Germany will be reborn in spite of the Western and Eastern powers.… You did some mistakes … but our faith in your nation has more than compensated for them. You must be proud to have become an immortal leader of Germany. We will not be surprised if you showed up anew in Germany or if a new Hitler should rise to replace you.

  THE FACT THAT Sadat was black may have awakened protective and fraternal feelings in Carter. When Jimmy was four years old, his family had moved to the little hamlet of Archery, two miles west of Plains. They were the only whites in a community of fifty-five black families. Jimmy’s main playmates were the sons of these black tenant farmers; in fact, his dialect at the time was indistinguishable from theirs. Jimmy and his best friend, Alonzo Davis, would occasionally be given the chance to ride the train to the nearby town of Americus to watch a movie together, although they had to separate into the “white” and “colored” sections both on the train and in the theater. At the time, Carter simply accepted such practices as natural features of a society in which whites were the owners and blacks the renters.

  Anwar Sadat in military uniform in Egypt, 1954

  Jimmy Carter with his dog, Bozo, 1937

  From the age of five Jimmy began selling peanuts that he picked, boiled, and bagged himself, then carried in a wagon to downtown Plains, where he sold them to the disabled veterans and loafers who played checkers in front of the livery stable. In 1932, at the peak of the Great Depression, the price of cotton plummeted to five cents a pound. By then, Jimmy, age eight, had accumulated enough savings from peanut sales to buy five bales for twenty-five dollars each; then, when cotton went back up to eighteen cents several years later, he sold the cotton and bought five tenant houses, which he rented by the month, joining the landlord class while still a child. It was about this time that two of his black friends opened a gate and then stood back and let Jimmy pass through. He thought it must be a trick they were playing, but this symbolic action signaled a powerful social change. “The constant struggle for leadership among our small group was resolved, but a precious sense of equality had gone out of our personal relationship,” Carter writes, “and things were never again the same between them and me.”

  Religion was the elixir that both Carter and Sadat drank in excess. Sadat had gone to the Islamic school in his village, where he memorized the Quran as a young child. Later, he sported the dark callus on his forehead that is the imprint of endless hours of prayerful prostration. This was well before such outward displays of religious zeal were fashionable in cosmopolitan Cairo. He called himself the “Believer President.” Although Carter didn’t advertise it, that’s how people thought of him as well. He had begun memorizing Bible verses at the age of three and publicly declared his faith at a revival meeting when he was eleven. He was baptized into the Plains Baptist Church, where the pastor, Royall Callaway, preached that the Jews would soon return to Palestine and bring on the return of Christ and the rapture of true Christians into Heaven—a doctrine known as premillennialism.

  As with Sadat, the military had also provided a means of escape for Jimmy Carter. He had an uncle in the Navy whom he idolized, and he spent his entire childhood obsessed with the goal of entering the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. That would require a congressional appointment. Carter’s father continually lobbied their local congressman, but it wasn’t until two years after Jimmy graduated from high school that the precious appointment came through. Carter started teaching Sunday school as an eighteen-year-old midshipman at Annapolis, a practice he would continue for the rest of his life. Even on submarines, he held services in the cramped spaces between torpedoes.

  Because of his southern background, Carter’s classmates at Annapolis made assumptions about his racial attitudes. And yet when the academy finally admitted a black cadet, Wesley Brown, Carter shielded him from the harassment and bigotry that was the fate of so many civil rights pioneers. Carter was called a “nigger lover” and treated, as another classmate reacalled, “as if he was a traitor.”

  In 1949, Carter studied nuclear physics and reactor technology at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Admiral Hyman Rickover, known as the “Father of the Nuclear Navy,” had chosen him to be the chief officer of the USS Seawolf, one of two nuclear submarine prototypes under development. Rickover was—like Menachem Begin—a Polish Jew, as renowned for his impatience as he was for his intelligence. At their first meeting, Rickover offered Carter the opportunity to talk about any subject he chose. Carter was a relentless autodidact, but with each topic he brought up—current events, literature, electronics, gunnery, tactics, seamanship—Rickover would ask a series of questions of increasing difficulty, showing his own superior knowledge of the subject. When Carter discussed classical music, for instance, Rickover dissected nuances of particular pieces that Carter said he admired, such as “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Throughout the interview, an unsmiling Rickover stared directly into Carter’s eyes. His goal was to see how an applicant behaved under pressure. By the end, Carter was soaking in sweat and humiliation.

  Finally, Rickover asked how Carter ranked in his class at the Naval Academy. “Sir, I stood 59th in a class of 820!” Carter said proudly.

  “Did you do your best?” Rickover asked.

  Carter started to answer in the affirmative, but then he gulped and admitted that he had not always done his best.

  Rickover just stared at him, and then turned his chair away, ending the interview. “Why not?” he asked in parting.

  Carter was unable to answer. He sat quietly for a moment, shaken by the frankness of the question and the cool dismissal, then he stood and left the room. “He would ask me quest
ions until he proved that I didn’t know anything about anything,” Carter complained to Rosalynn afterward. She would note that, years later, when Carter was governor, he would still break into a cold sweat if he was told that Admiral Rickover was on the line.

  As one of Rickover’s protégés, Carter was on track toward a significant military career. But in 1953, Carter’s father was diagnosed with cancer and Jimmy went home to say good-bye. He had been away for eleven years. He was deeply moved by the procession of hundreds of people who came to pay tribute to Mr. Earl as he lay on his deathbed, so many of whom had been aided by his quiet charity over the years. Even though Carter had a secure job with an important future, it seemed to him that his own life would never be so meaningful as the one his father had lived in this small community. There was the additional fact that no one else in the family could take over the farm and the peanut warehouse business that his father had built. Jimmy’s younger brother, Billy, was still in high school, and harvest season would soon begin. As he mulled his decision, Carter concluded, “God did not intend for me to spend my life working on instruments of destruction to kill people.” He resigned his commission and returned to Plains.

  Southwest Georgia was Ku Klux Klan country, and Carter became a target because of his progressive views. He was not an activist, but he was the only white man in Sumter County who refused to join the White Citizens’ Council, a segregationist organization that held Dixie in its thrall. His business was boycotted. When he ran for governor the first time, in 1966, he hoped that Georgia was ready to step away from its racist past. He lost to Lester Maddox, who made his reputation by chasing black customers out of his Atlanta restaurant with a pistol and an ax handle. Carter was despondent. “I could not believe that God, or the Georgia voters, would let this person beat me and become the governor of our state,” he lamented. His loss to Maddox prompted a crisis in his lifelong faith. His sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, an author and evangelist, had a talk with him. She quoted some scripture from the Epistle of James that advised believers to take joy in their failures because they can lead to wisdom. Carter wasn’t ready to hear her advice at the time, but he would later say it was a turning point—what was referred to as his “born again” experience. He announced for governor once more, this time determined to do whatever it took to win.