President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  The press was allowed into Camp David only once, on the third day for three-quarters of an hour. Drinks were set out for a small social gathering at Laurel Lodge, with the guests serenaded by the Marine Corps band and hopefully distracted by an impressive silent drill: A handpicked Marine squad tossed their bayoneted rifles back and forth. When the time came for the bus to take the press away, there were supposed to be fifty reporters aboard, but the head count was an ominous forty-nine. Rafshoon, the president’s irrepressible and irreverent communications adviser, took the roll call and found that Barbara Walters was missing. He asked Sam Donaldson, ABC’s equally irreverent lead White House correspondent: “Where’s Barbara?” Sam retorted: “Am I my sister’s keeper? I don’t know where the hell she is! Try the ladies’ room.” And that is precisely where they found her. Her plan had been to hide out and hang back to interview Dayan and Weizman. Rafshoon placed his wife, Eden, outside a stall shouting: “Come out, Barbara, come out!” And as Rafshoon recounted with amusement: “She finally came out with a sheepish grin,”

  Decades later, when Rafshoon was producing a play on Camp David, he saw Barbara Walters and she jokingly asked: “Well, who’s playing me?” Rafshoon replied: “Nobody.” She admitted she had been trying to interview the two Israeli heroes and confided: “You know, I had a love affair with both of them.” Was she joking about that? Rafshoon, it seems, took her at face value. It later dawned on him that this might also help explain what was happening when Rafshoon saw Walters with Weizman at the bar of the King David Hotel on the final day of Carter’s trip to Egypt and Israel. According to Rafshoon, Walters said that Weizman had told her that they would meet in her room, but then he called her and reversed course: “We’re on our way down.” “What do you mean?” she asked. Weizman said he meant himself and his wife: “I want her to meet you.” Whether or not she was again joking, she was certainly burnishing her acknowledged reputation as an insider among the world’s statemen. But in any event, she confided to Rafshoon: “I was so mad. I had bought new lingerie.”92

  * * *

  Dayan, who feared from the start that Camp David would collapse and Israel would be blamed, circumvented the blackout but did not actually break it. Zalman Shoval, Dayan’s Knesset ally and de facto deputy in charge of public diplomacy (later twice Israeli ambassador to the United States), was stationed at the Israeli Embassy, and Rubinstein secretly telephoned elliptical hints about each day’s developments. On the next-to-last day Shoval was meeting with John Wallach, the international correspondent for the Hearst newspapers, who told him that the press corps was preparing stories about failure. Shoval warned him away from that theme and said he might be surprised by the outcome. Wallach was grateful for that guidance throughout the rest of his career.93 By contrast, Wilton Wynn, Time’s Cairo bureau chief, had maintained his close contacts with the Egyptian delegation and reflected its warnings of failure in his dispatches. When the reverse proved true in the hours beyond the magazine’s normal Saturday deadline, the story had to be rewritten and the cover replaced on Sunday afternoon at great expense.

  HOW CARTER UNLOCKED THE COMPROMISES

  An unseen but absolutely essential factor was Carter’s remarkably detailed preparation. He studied past negotiations, which gave him deep understanding of each side’s position and a thorough appreciation of (although at times exasperation over) the personalities of Sadat and especially Begin. This was Jimmy Carter at his best, with one goal, a few key actors, and a complex problem to solve. He involved himself in minutiae and negotiated directly with second-level officials, not only his senior counterparts, unprecedented for a major political leader but indispensable for success. He was both a visionary and a detail man, at once a creative lead negotiator and a careful draftsman, and this gave him extraordinary tools to save the process from foundering at a number of what would otherwise have been choke points.

  For a lawyer like Barak, the depth of Carter’s participation was both a marvel and a headache: “Sitting with those fellows from the Middle East for ten days out of a total of two weeks—and he was involved. He was a drafter. It was terrible! In the newspapers and the TV he seemed like a weak person; he was not a weak person at all. He was very tough. I begged him to send me a lawyer. [I said] ‘I want to negotiate with a lawyer. Then it would come before you as a judge. But don’t make it very difficult for me to argue with the president of the United States.’”94 But Carter did not rely on his lawyers. He engaged directly in negotiations with the Israeli and Egyptian staff, often for hours at a time and literally from dawn until midnight.

  Although he was often criticized for excessive attention to minor detail, Carter’s mastery of it was essential to his success. Only the president of the United States, with all the prestige of the office, could forge tough compromises, and to accomplish this he had to know as much as the members of his own delegation, as well as the information that was available to the others. He devoted a great deal of study and said later: “I never did regret it. It was not an onerous chore for me; it was kind of an interesting thing for me to do. At the Camp David discussions with Begin and Sadat, I didn’t have to turn around to Vance or to Quandt or Harold Saunders and say, ‘Would you explain to me the history of this particular issue,’ or ‘Will you show me on the map where the lines run or where is this town located’ because I knew it. And I could negotiate for hours with the subordinates of Begin and Sadat, which I did, with Aharon Barak and with Osama el-Baz.”95

  The two key leaders never actually negotiated face-to-face. Their relationship was so poisonous that Carter quickly realized he had to keep them separated and work through their delegations, where he found flexibility in Begin’s deputies if not in him. With Egypt, the negotiations were more complicated, because Sadat did not wish to engage in them at all. Carter did not simply bury his head in briefing books and CIA profiles of Begin, Sadat, and their aides. He was extensively briefed before going to Camp David by the American ambassadors to Israel and Egypt, Lewis and Eilts, and summoned them to meet not only with him but with Mondale, Vance, Brown, Brzezinski, and Ham. He asked the two ambassadors to gauge the reactions he might expect from Begin and Sadat to various proposals that he ran past them. He even commissioned public opinion polls in Israel to test his proposals so he could defend them in arguments with Begin if the prime minister insisted that his citizens would oppose them.

  The president aimed higher for a broader agreement than his advisers thought possible.96 At the outset of the negotiations, Carter laid out possible solutions to all the major issues and soon discovered that, rather than being a mere facilitator between the two sides by giving legitimacy to deals they made, he would have to draft and introduce his own proposals.97 In this he had the unified support of the American delegation, which left its disagreements inside the Beltway.98

  Years later, perhaps because of anger at Carter’s increasingly anti-Israel positions after he left office, many Israelis deny him the credit he deserves for his historic peacemaking at Camp David, and for sealing it later by midwifing the treaty between Egypt and Israel. Morris Amitay, the executive director of AIPAC, argued that it would have happened anyway. Not one person on the Israeli or Egyptian delegations shared that view.99

  Everyone agreed that it was Jimmy Carter who unlocked the compromises to achieve an improbable agreement, not once but twice—at Camp David, and six months later in the treaty itself. This was Jimmy Carter at his best—his attention to detail, his recognition of the limits to which he could push Begin and Sadat, and his appreciation of their starkly different personalities. In diplomatic midstream he recognized that Begin was too ideologically torn to reach an agreement on his own, and quickly began to work around him through Weizman, Dayan, and particularly the unsung hero, Begin’s own legal adviser, Aharon Barak. He also sensed that Sadat was so far ahead of his own delegation that he risked losing them, so he sought and obtained the Egyptian autocrat’s proxy and thus was accused of being Sadat’s agent.

  C
arter’s success was without precedent in American diplomatic history: No president of the United States was so closely engaged in drafting and negotiating agreements, and not just with his international counterparts but with their specialists and subordinates. Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, but he remained in his summer home while the negotiators wrangled and played a generally encouraging rather than an active role. The only possible exception was Woodrow Wilson’s personal intervention in the Treaty of Versailles to end World War I. He arrived in France after the Armistice with a list of general principles—his Fourteen Points for a new world order—many of which he not only failed to incorporate in a disastrously punitive settlement but were repudiated at home by American isolationists in Congress and the public.

  No president has dedicated himself so exclusively to one project, or taken such a risk to his prestige and standing on a highly uncertain project, or inserted himself so directly in the negotiating minutiae. This saga demonstrates that successful deal-making in the Middle East, perhaps more than anywhere else, demands creative solutions, personal tact, political risks, and above all, tremendous perseverance. President Carter achieved a peace between two former enemies that has lasted into the next century—and without a single violation, as Carter proudly said to me some thirty-five years later.100 The Camp David Accords also opened the way to Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan in 1994 during the Clinton administration, and undergirded the 1993 Oslo Accords for mutual recognition by Israel and the PLO—an agreement that was to fall apart with the assassination of Rabin, the political rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the obduracy of the Palestinians, who, in the famous aphorism of Israel’s eloquent foreign minister Abba Eban, “never lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity,” turning down major Israeli concessions from Prime Ministers Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008.

  20

  A COLD PEACE

  Almost everyone believes that Camp David was the end of the process, but hammering out a framework proved to be only the beginning—or as Winston Churchill said of Britain’s early victories in World War II, “not … the beginning of the end. But … perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Turning the agreed framework into a detailed and legally binding treaty was excruciating and demanded Carter’s commitment in time and travel to the Middle East for more personal diplomacy, grinding away at the president’s attention to his many other priorities.

  It did not take long for the euphoria of Camp David to evaporate. Begin, to protect himself against hard-liners in his own party, as well as skeptical American Jewish leaders, made many bellicose, even defiant, speeches starting the very next day after signing the Camp David Accords. He boasted to them how little he had conceded to Egypt and propounded interpretations that were at wide variance from Carter’s understanding on such key matters as new settlements. He also disregarded Carter’s urgings to put the best face on the accords to help Sadat quell Arab attacks and give U.S. diplomacy room to sell the agreement, at least to moderates in the Arab world.

  One critical ingredient in successful statecraft is to appreciate the internal politics of the nation with whom you are negotiating. In an effort to shore up his own political right-wing, Begin ignored this principle. As Henry Kissinger said after years of negotiating with the Israelis, “Israel has no foreign policy; it only has domestic politics.”1

  Shortly after the signing ceremony in the East Room, I sent the president a memorandum, with copies to Mondale, Brzezinski, and the senior political and congressional advisers, “Regarding the solidification of your Middle East triumph.”2 I recommended that first we try to persuade Sadat and Begin—but “particularly Begin”—to give the agreement as flexible an interpretation as possible. I pointed out that American Jewish leaders had already warned me that Begin would not only crow about what he had obtained, but would give the agreement the narrowest reading possible, as he had done in a nationally televised interview with Barbara Walters. Second, I recommended that we ask Jewish senators and congressmen to convey to Begin a message of moderation and concern for Sadat. Third, and, perhaps most important, I suggested that we quietly organize a group of senators who supported the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia to remind the Saudi ambassador that this was an important moment for the kingdom to show its support for Sadat. The president’s handwritten response was “all done—or better, J.”

  Begin did keep his promise to secure parliamentary approval of the framework within two weeks. It passed 84–19, with seven of his own party members voting no and an abstention by the Knesset speaker, Yitzhak Shamir, who headed the violent Stern Gang in the underground fight for independence from the British, and succeeded Begin as prime minister.

  There was a parallel reaction among the leadership in Egypt. Sadat’s close colleagues in the Egyptian delegation were even more upset at the results because they felt he had gone too far and gotten too little. They had already shown their displeasure by refusing to attend the signing, and they harbored it for years afterward in high positions—el-Reedy as ambassador to Washington and Elaraby as head of the Arab League. Sadat rejected all complaints about his vague promises on Jerusalem and the Palestinians and refused Kamel’s advice for an Arab League emissary to explain to all members what had been accomplished, and to seek cover from criticism. Why not? asked Elaraby. “I don’t need to give you a why,” snapped Sadat, waving off his diplomats as small-minded men.3

  But Sadat was more closely attuned to popular feeling than the sophisticated diplomats in his entourage. When el-Reedy returned to his home near Cairo during Ramadan, a peasant asked if he thought Camp David was a good thing. El-Reedy dutifully replied yes, then asked the villager’s views. The humble fellah replied: “We got our land back. We got our oil fields back, and there will be no war anymore, so what else do you want?” In his wisdom, the man understood that the problems of the Palestinians lay beyond his horizon.

  Sadat intuited this, too, and had told el-Reedy: “We have done for Palestine all that we could, but this problem will never be solved.”4 The Palestinian leadership was predictably unhappy, and in the long run they were the biggest losers. For all the limitations of the autonomy talks, if the Palestinians had been willing to make some compromises and abandon violence, they would have had more leverage on Israeli expansionism in the West Bank.

  STUMBLING OVER THE FINE PRINT

  After the Accords, hardly a day passed that discord did not arise over their interpretation, most importantly over the length of time Israel would freeze the establishment of new settlements. Assistant Secretary of State Saunders had been assigned the task of working out an acceptable side letter on settlements, while the president wrestled with a side agreement on the status of Jerusalem. Neither made progress. Begin did not submit a new draft of the disputed letter on West Bank settlements until Monday, after the dramatic Sunday night White House signing ceremony. During the time that the president was briefing congressional leaders about the five-year freeze he thought he had obtained, Begin went to the press saying he understood it would last only for the three months it would take to turn the Accords into a binding peace treaty.

  In a remarkable backstage scene inside the U.S. Capitol, the president and Sadat berated Begin—to no avail—for the public statements he had just made backing away from Israel’s Camp David commitments to withdraw military forces, freeze settlements, and abide by UN Resolution 242.5 As a beaming Jimmy Carter mounted the historic rostrum of the House of Representatives, the entire Congress burst into cheers. Begin and Sadat, sitting next to each other in the balcony, accepted the acclaim as well. Almost no one knew of the tense confrontation that had just occurred. Carter, although anguished, nevertheless was undeterred and wrote his version of the freeze into the speech.

  But Begin was under intense pressure from his Likud Party colleagues and his former Irgun comrades not to yield an inch of conquered West Bank territory—not after three months, five years, or indeed ever. Ed
Sanders accompanied Begin and the Israeli party from Washington to New York for their flight back to Israel, and at first, he said, “Everybody was feeling terrific.” But then Begin’s mood changed dramatically when he read a Washington Post report on Brzezinski’s statement that the settlement freeze would last five years.6

  To confirm the three-month suspension, Begin’s aides later showed their notes of the Saturday-night meeting to William Brown, the second-ranking American diplomat in Israel, recording a commitment only to signing the treaty when it was formally completed.7 In Jerusalem, Barak phoned Begin from his Supreme Court chambers, confirmed to the prime minister that he was in the right about a three-month freeze, and then cabled his notes to Carter. Even Sadat was reported to have told the press in Alexandria that the settlement freeze would last only three months.8 All to no avail. Carter felt Begin had made a commitment on one day and then backed away from it the next. To this day he has not changed his view of bad faith.

  I viewed this disagreement firsthand in the Oval Office. I happened to be discussing another matter on the very day the three months were up, when Carter received the news that Begin had authorized new West Bank settlements. Jimmy Carter rarely shows anger, but he certainly did then and accused Begin of misleading him. I said: “Mr. President, there are good reasons to oppose Begin’s settlement policy, and I share those reasons with you. However, Begin is an honorable man. I do not believe he would have consciously misled you. There is no way, either philosophically given his views about the West Bank, or politically given his coalition, that he could have agreed to that long a settlement freeze.” Carter then went to his desk, reached into the drawer, pulled out a piece of paper, and showed it to me. “These are my notes from my meeting with Begin, here you can see ‘5-year settlement freeze.’ I have checked with Cy [Vance] and he has the same recollection.” (In his memoirs, Vance concurred that Begin had finally agreed to five years.)9 All I could say, rather lamely, was: “Mr. President, there must be an honest disagreement.” There certainly was, and it lasted for years—in fact for at least thirty-five of them. As he approached ninety years of age, he lashed out: “Begin got cold feet almost immediately after we left Camp David, [and made] speeches to Jewish organizations even before we had the Monday night Joint Session of Congress.… I’m not accusing Begin of lying. But I’ll say he rationalized his position. My belief is [that] until he did, he never would have admitted to himself that he broke his promise. But for me and Sadat and the other people that were there, he broke his promise.”10