Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  Being a Navy wife suited Rosalynn. She enjoyed the companionship of other wives; there were always children around for her own to play with; and the postings took them to interesting places. So when Carter’s father died in 1953, Rosalynn wasn’t at all prepared to hear that Jimmy was quitting the Navy and they were moving back to Plains. She cried and screamed. It was the most serious argument of their marriage. She refused to talk to him on the entire drive back. If she needed to stop for the restroom, she would tell Jack, and Jack would tell his dad. When they finally pulled into Plains, Jimmy turned to her with his biggest grin and said, “We’re home!” It was as if the prison doors had closed upon her and the best part of her life was over.

  The first year Jimmy and Rosalynn were back in Plains there was a terrible drought; the crops failed, and their income that year was less than $200. They lived in public housing. Rosalynn took over the bookkeeping in the peanut warehouse, while Jimmy sold seed and fertilizer. The bank turned them down when Jimmy asked for a business loan. Quitting the Navy appeared to be a colossal mistake. Although they were scraping by, living on savings, they buried themselves in community work. Jimmy got involved with the Chamber of Commerce, the Hospital Authority, and the Library Board, while Rosalynn joined the PTA and the Garden Club. She was the den mother for her boys’ Cub Scout pack. The next year the rains finally came and their business began to prosper.

  Jimmy was seen as somewhat exotic in Plains because of his education and his spin in the Navy. He quickly took on the role of a community leader, becoming chairman of the county school board at a time when racial integration was ripping the Deep South into bitter factions. In 1962, he tried to consolidate the three white schools in the county, but the white population saw it as a prelude to school desegregation. A homemade sign was placed in front of the Carter warehouse: COONS AND CARTERS GO TOGETHER. Carter’s initiative was voted down. As would be true at other times in his life, failure was a spur to Carter’s ambition. On the morning of his thirty-eighth birthday, he put on his Sunday pants rather than the work clothes he normally wore to the warehouse. Rosalynn asked where he was going, and he told her he was on his way to Americus, the county seat, to place a notice in the newspaper that he would be a candidate for the state senate. He had not consulted her or anyone else. The election was fifteen days away. Rosalynn was thrilled, although she had never actually met a state senator.

  South Georgia in 1962 was a brutal school for political neophytes. Sumter County, where Plains is located, was the largest in Carter’s district, and he was well known there. However, Quitman County, on the Alabama state line, was ruled by a bootlegger with a reputation for disposing of his enemies in the Chattahoochee River. His name was Joe Hurst. He exercised almost total control, like a feudal lord, handing out patronage and even passing out the welfare checks for the 50 percent of the county residents who were beneficiaries. He used his fiefdom to become one of the most powerful figures in the state. For the Democratic primary, Hurst refused to set up voting booths; instead, he greeted each voter and told them how to vote—against Carter, with his clean-government agenda. Because there was no Republican candidate, the primary was tantamount to election. When one elderly couple tried to sneak their ballots into the box without Hurst’s examination, he threatened to burn down their house.

  Carter was leading by 70 votes until Quitman County finally announced its results: 333 voters had somehow cast 420 votes. Some of the dead had risen from their graves to cast ballots, and more than a hundred had managed to vote in alphabetical order. Carter lost the election. He contested the results, precipitating a convulsion in state politics that wasn’t resolved until the moment he actually raised his hand and took the oath of office on the floor of the state senate in 1963. Joe Hurst sent Rosalynn a message that the last time people crossed him, their businesses burned down. Rosalynn was terrified. While Jimmy was in Atlanta during the legislative session, she left lights on in their house, pushed the couch against the door at night, slept with their children, and nailed the windows shut.

  That year the civil rights movement arrived in Sumter County. Martin Luther King was arrested in Americus. Police beat protesters with billy clubs and shocked them with cattle prods. Hundreds of black marchers were arrested. A white student was killed in one of the demonstrations. Carter was quiet on the subject of race, although in his first substantive speech in the state senate, in his second legislative session, he denounced the thirty questions that were asked of blacks who were attempting to register to vote, which included abstruse matters of law, such as “What do the constitutions of the United States and Georgia provide regarding the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus?” and such nonsense as “How long is a piece of string?” or “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” His maiden speech went unreported, however.

  In the summer of 1965, Carter finally had to face a moment of truth on the race issue. There was a photograph in newspapers all over the world of a mixed group of blacks and whites praying on the steps of the First Baptist Church in Americus while the pastor stood over them with a riot gun and a bandolier of bullets across his chest, barring entry. Soon after that, a resolution was introduced in the Plains Baptist Church, where Carter was a deacon, to exclude “Negroes and other agitators.” Jimmy and Rosalynn were in Atlanta for a wedding, and she begged Jimmy not to return for the vote in the church. She was exhausted by the controversies and the boycotts of their business; moreover, Jimmy was contemplating a run for the U.S. Congress, and racial politics could easily sink him. Jimmy insisted on speaking against the measure, however. When the vote was taken, the ban passed overwhelmingly. Only six parishioners voted against it—five members of the Carter family and a deaf man who may not have understood what he was voting for.

  Carter announced that he was running for the U.S. House of Representatives against Howard “Bo” Callaway, the Republican incumbent, who was a West Point graduate and the heir to a textile fortune. Callaway was popular in the state and had strong support from the extreme-right-wing John Birch Society. However, when the Democratic candidate for governor suffered a heart attack and withdrew from the race, Callaway decided to run for that office instead, leaving Carter with only token opposition for the congressional seat. Carter tried to enlist another candidate to run against Callaway in order to keep the statehouse from going Republican for the first time in a century, but finally decided to do it himself. With only three months before the primary, he dropped out of the congressional race he was nearly certain to win and entered the gubernatorial Democratic primary. His main opponents were a former governor, Ellis Arnall, thought to be too liberal to beat Callaway, and the segregationist and archconservative Lester Maddox. Rosalynn was extremely unhappy with Jimmy’s decision. It meant that they would not be moving to Washington, which she dreamed of, and that they would also be spending a large portion of their savings on a race that was going to be very difficult to win.

  Carter recruited his family and a small circle of friends to travel the state and campaign for him. That included Rosalynn, who was shy and fearful of speaking in public, but she gamely drove all across the state asking people for their vote, sometimes a degrading or humiliating experience. She hated standing in front of Kmarts, for instance, which did not allow soliciting, and she suffered the indignity of being run off from nearly every Kmart in the state. In one small Georgia town she handed a brochure to a man who was standing in the doorway of a shoe shop, chewing tobacco. Rosalynn asked him to vote for her husband. The man responded by spitting on her.

  Carter lost the primary by twenty thousand votes. Maddox went on to win a runoff with Arnall and then faced Callaway in the general election. Because of a write-in campaign for Arnall, neither man received a plurality, and under Georgia law the race was decided by the predominately Democratic General Assembly. Maddox became the new governor. Carter had dropped 22 pounds (down to 130), and was deeply in debt. One month later, he started campaigning for the office again.

  He roa
med the state, meeting people, recording their names on a pocket tape recorder, along with some personal details, such as their job, political philosophy, and likelihood of being a contributor or a worker in the campaign. He kept a running tally of how many hands he shook—600,000 by the end of the campaign. To get the addresses of people he came in contact with he bought every telephone book in Georgia—more than 150—and then Rosalynn followed up with a thank-you note. She kept his files and clipped newspaper articles for him. To save money, he stayed in the homes of his supporters. For the last two years of his second run he was away from home nearly every night.

  As Rosalynn barnstormed through Georgia, she got an intimate education about the problems that her fellow citizens faced. One day at four thirty in the morning, she was standing in front of a cotton mill, waiting for the shift change, when a woman came out, her hair and sweater covered in lint from her labor during the night. Rosalynn asked if she was going home to bed. The woman said she might get a nap, but she had a mentally retarded child at home, and the expenses were more than her husband’s income so she had to work nights to make up the difference. That moment became a turning point for Rosalynn. When she realized that Jimmy was coming to the same town later that day, she stood in line to meet him. He reached for her hand before he even realized who she was. “I want to know what you are going to do about mental health when you are governor,” she said. The startled Carter replied, “We’re going to have the best mental health system in the country, and I’m going to put you in charge of it.”

  On election day, 1970, Carter won 60 percent of the vote. Maddox, unable to succeed himself as governor, was elected lieutenant governor, with 73.5 percent of the vote.

  Carter was seen as a rising figure in Democratic politics, but very few people understood the full scope of his ambition. He gained a reputation as a progressive governor, despite a contentious relationship with the Georgia legislature. Within two years of his election to the statehouse, he decided he would run for president. He would be out of office in 1974, which meant that he could run full-time for the following two years.

  Once again, Rosalynn was making the speeches she hated so much. By the end of the presidential campaign she had visited forty-two states, and more than a hundred communities in Iowa alone. On January 20, 1977, on an icy morning in Washington, D.C., her husband was inaugurated as the thirty-ninth president of the United States, and Rosalynn Carter, the lonely little girl from Plains, became first lady. While Jimmy was taking the oath, their predecessors, Gerald and Betty Ford, stood beside them—a ritual of democracy that is perhaps the most powerful testament to the tradition of nonviolent social change. At that very moment, the closets of the White House were being emptied of the Fords’ belongings and the Carters’ clothes hung there instead.

  Rosalynn proved to be an activist first lady, sponsoring significant legislation for mental health and the elderly, and upsetting many Americans by unapologetically sitting in on cabinet meetings. Those close to the president knew that she was always his most influential adviser, and they came to appreciate her political savvy. In 1979, even as Carter’s own poll numbers plummeted, Rosalynn topped Mother Teresa in Gallup’s poll for the most admired woman in the world.

  Camp David had been her idea. However it turned out, she would bear both credit and responsibility.

  FOREIGN MINISTER KAMEL WAS unable to sleep. He sat on the edge of his bunk talking to his roommate, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, until late at night. Camp David was a strange place to conduct diplomacy, they agreed. They were used to wearing dark suits and meeting in the marbled offices of state, and here they were in the woods in their pajamas. The main problem for the Egyptians, however, was not the setting but their leader. Whenever they met, Sadat sat silently, inscrutably puffing on his pipe, as his delegation fumed. It didn’t seem to trouble him that Carter was not interested in a single principle embodied in the Egyptian project. “And now look where we are!” Kamel exclaimed in his bunk, “Here we have the United States president, without equivocation or ambiguity, coming up with the idea of concluding a strategic American-Egyptian-Israeli alliance, while Sadat does not utter a single word! What can be the matter with him?”

  “Maybe he was only absent-minded or tired,” Boutros-Ghali responded. He added, “It could be that Carter’s aim was to test us by throwing out ideas as trial balloons.”

  “Didn’t you notice Carter’s sly remark to Tohamy, to the effect that rumors had it that President Sadat was moderate while his assistants were hard-liners? He means us, of course.”

  “Anyway, today’s meeting was merely preparatory,” Boutros-Ghali said. “We shan’t know the conclusions they have reached until they finalize their project and submit it to us—then we shall see. So stop worrying until then and let’s get some sleep—it’s almost dawn!”

  Day Four

  Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance

  AT EIGHT THIRTY A.M., the American team met with Carter and Rosalynn in the president’s cabin. They were all deeply pessimistic. Carter now believed that Begin had never intended to agree to anything. The proof was his apparent joy at having Sadat’s harsh proposal to hide behind. It was his alibi. When the talks failed, he could wave it in the air and say, “See, this is what they demand.”

  Jimmy and Rosalynn went to play tennis, but the phone at the court kept ringing with senators on the line, or his defense secretary—there were many other problems in the world demanding the president’s attention. Carter asked Rosalynn to cancel the fly-fishing trip they had planned for the next morning. They had hoped to slip away for a few hours during the Jewish Sabbath, but now he had to do something to rescue the talks.

  When they got back to the presidential cabin Carter learned that Sadat was preparing to leave and Begin was drawing up a list of reasons why the summit had failed. Carter had no plan except to stall. He asked Begin to meet him at two thirty that afternoon, and Sadat an hour and a half later. He was hoping that by putting Sadat off until late in the afternoon he could hold the Egyptians at Camp David for at least another day. Meantime, he invited Cy Vance to join him and Rosalynn for a drink and lunch. It was time to change tactics.

  Vance was often overshadowed by the brash and imaginative national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Vance embodied the “establishment” that Carter had run against: Yale, Wall Street, and years at the upper tier of the Washington bureaucracy, serving as secretary of the army under John F. Kennedy and deputy secretary of defense in the Lyndon Johnson administration. Where Brzezinski was an activist with a fondness for covert operations, Vance’s experience during the Vietnam era had taught him the virtues of patience and diplomacy over military intervention. Brzezinski focused on the big picture, Vance on the small print. Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s political strategist and later chief of staff, analyzed the role each of these men played in the administration. Brzezinski, he decided, was the bold side of Jimmy Carter—the side of him that ran for president when he was still “Jimmy Who?” That was the man who was never afraid to challenge conventional wisdom and to risk everything, just as he was doing now at Camp David. Vance was the more traditional and methodical side of Carter. He got to work before the sun came up, and he was principled to the point of priggishness. His decency earned the trust of everyone he met. According to Jordan’s analysis, Brzezinksi was the thinker, Vance the doer, and Carter the decider.

  So far, however, the decider had avoided putting forward an American proposal. His strategy had been to allow Sadat and Begin to talk face-to-face, expecting that they would struggle toward their own agreement, perhaps with some American nudging. That had proved to be hopelessly misguided. Carter couldn’t even leave them alone together in the same room. The danger of putting forward an American proposal was that, if it failed, both sides could declare that the U.S. had tried to force an agreement on them. Now there was no alternative. “Proceed with the American plan,” Carter told Vance at lunch. It had to be fair to both sides, he specified, but it also had to
be a document that Sadat could accept and that Begin couldn’t use as a foil. “I think we ought to get tough on the Israelis, and the time has come to let them know this,” Carter added.

  Carter really had nothing to say to Begin when they met, except to beg him again for greater flexibility. “You can go down in history as the great leader who brought peace.” But Begin was immune to emotional appeals. He responded by once again taking out Sadat’s proposal, which he kept in his breast pocket close to his heart, and fondly reciting the Egyptian positions. At this point, Carter made a critical mistake. He still had the several concessions Sadat had secretly given him to use at his discretion—points that even Sadat’s own team was unaware of. Carter did not now call upon any of them, but he betrayed Sadat’s confidence by revealing that the Egyptian proposal was by no means Sadat’s final negotiating position. Perhaps this was the only way to persuade Begin to put the Egyptian document back in his pocket; however, Begin now had the important knowledge that concessions had already been made without any corresponding Israeli offers. He could afford to be even more intransigent in his positions and wait to see what was put on the table.

  Carter argued that since Sadat had agreed to demilitarize Sinai there would be 130 miles of empty desert between Egypt and Israel—therefore no need for any Israeli settlements to act as a buffer. Begin responded with a lengthy and, by now, wearyingly familiar diatribe about the need for retaining the settlements, but in the middle of his speech, Begin may also have slipped. “I will never personally recommend that the settlements in the Sinai be dismantled!” he exclaimed. This legalistic formulation caught Carter’s ear. It was one thing to say he would never permit the settlements to be removed, another to say he would never “personally recommend” such action. Perhaps, if another party were to take responsibility, Begin might not stand in the way. It was the first tiny crack of daylight.