Jimmy Carter's Art of the Deal

Early one morning in spring 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s sharp-elbowed national security adviser, walked into the Oval Office to find the U.S. president pensively spinning a vast globe. He was trying to figure out the best historical site to hold a make-or-break Middle East peace summit with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat.

To the surprise of many of Carter’s advisers (though not Brzezinski, nor his secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, who knew their president too well), Carter was willing to stake his presidency on such a gamble. He had already taken a huge political risk over the preceding year hammering out a deal with Panama to give it sovereignty over the U.S.-built and owned Panama Canal — a move that provoked outrage on the Republican right. In spite of the steep odds against Carter securing the necessary two-thirds Senate vote for ratification, he somehow managed to get it through.

Weeks after his Panama victory, Carter was now threatening to cause a whole new wave of ulcers among his staff on an even bigger gamble. The goal of Middle East peace had been a core part of Carter’s 1976 campaign — as had the promise of Palestinian self-determination. Brzezinski had co-authored a controversial 1975 Brookings paper that recommended the outlines of such a settlement that would include Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. Though the two men were radically different — Carter, a peanut farmer and former one-term governor of Georgia, Brzezinski a Polish-born Sovietologist with a Machiavellian streak and an acute rivalry with Henry Kissinger — they saw eye-to-eye on the Israel-Arab dispute. But they had different reasons. To Carter, who was a regular Sunday school preacher even during the early parts of his presidency, this was his chance at curing the deep enmity besetting the Biblical Holy Lands. To Brzezinski, such a deal would be key to reducing the Soviet Union’s Cold War influence over large parts of the Arab world. The first piece of any Israeli-Arab deal would have to include Egypt’s recognition of Israel, which would remove the region’s largest Arab military force as a threat to Israel. To convince Egypt’s Sadat, Palestinian autonomy would have to be included.

Ultimately, of course, Carter chose Camp David, and what followed was a master class in presidential deal-making of the most direct kind. Brzezinski and his colleagues often complained that Carter read too much. One of the president’s internal nicknames was “grammarian-in-chief.” But by the end of the improbably successful 13-day Camp David peace talks that September, they realized that Carter’s obsessive reading in this case had been indispensable. His knowledge of every topographical quirk, and geographic line, in the disputed Sinai desert, was critical to the marathon process that resulted in the first ever Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist. The Camp David accords didn’t fix the Middle East, but they set the template for every attempt to forge a lasting peace ever since.

As President Donald Trump eyes an equivalent deal — one that has eluded all of the presidents between America’s 39th and its 47th (though President Bill Clinton came close to delivering a Palestinian homeland at Camp David in 2000) — he would do well to study how Carter pulled it off.

All of the pieces are there for an agreement. In today’s Middle East, Trump’s key leverage over Israel would be Saudi Arabia-Israel normalization. To secure Riyadh’s buy-in, a deal to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program would also have to be included in any broader settlement. The Saudis will also insist, like Sadat, on a deal for the Palestinians.

Carter was America’s first president to take Palestinian aspirations seriously, and that was key to the Camp David deal-making.

Going in, the odds were poor that he would get Sadat and Begin to agree on anything. Yet his mind was set to try; the only question was about the location. He and Brzezinski discussed Spain, Morocco, Portugal and Norway. Each had pros and cons. Casablanca had a particular resonance. After several days of back-and-forth, Carter finally settled on Camp David, the president’s official Maryland retreat. That would give Americans full control over the logistics.

Brzezinski and Vance both saw Carter’s move as the right thing to do. If it failed, however, it could be politically suicidal. On this issue, at least, the two advisers were in agreement. Going for broke in the Middle East had not been their idea. But both admired Carter for his courage.

Carter had already provoked pro-Israeli U.S. groups, including the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, over his decision to link arms sales to Egypt and Saudi Arabia with Israel’s own military transfers. AIPAC’s executive director, Morris Amitay, Brzezinski’s bête noire, had pulled out all the stops to delink Israel’s plane deliveries from those to its big Arab neighbors — fighter jets that Begin said could be turned against Israel. Neither Carter’s nor Vance’s protestations that they would be used for defensive purposes swayed the pro-Israel lobby. They knew that the real reason Carter was traducing his own strict rules on arms sales was Cold War-related. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia needed to be kept inside the American camp. Since an alliance of conservative Republicans and Ted Kennedy liberals would doubtless defeat the Arab military transfers in a standalone vote, the White House lumped all the sales into one package. Carter was daring Congress to vote against sending arms to Israel. The campaign against the bill targeted Brzezinski as its main culprit.

Brzezinski kept up his usual bravado but suffered inner turmoil over the torrent of accusations, often seeking counsel from Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic policy director and the most senior Jewish American on his staff. He even wrote Eizenstat a long memo detailing his history of encounters in the Middle East. The invective hit a nadir in May when a Republican senator, Lowell Weicker, seemed to compare Brzezinski to Hitler. “We know from history that time and time again, when national leaders ran into difficulties, they found it convenient to blame their problems on the Jews,” Weicker told the AIPAC conference in Washington. “If there is a meaningful distinction between those historical proclivities, and the signals which Brzezinski is sending today, I don’t know what it is. I can tell you if I were president, and I had a national security adviser who singled out American Jews as an impediment to my policies, I would have his resignation before sundown, and his reputation for breakfast.”

This was the most scurrilous attack on Brzezinski to date. But its outlandishness was almost helpful. Weicker was widely viewed as having miscued. His remarks triggered revulsion from Jewish organizations and condemnatory editorials in The New York Times and Washington Post. Carter also went out of his way to say that Brzezinski was being unfairly targeted by “special interests.” In reality, he was a useful decoy.

Against that backdrop, Carter’s ambitions for the Camp David talks were beyond extravagant. He would either achieve a sweeping deal or preside over a collapse. In preparation for the summit, he studied theories of negotiation, ordered in-house psychological profiles of Begin and Sadat and devoured histories of the Middle East conflict. For a change, Vance and Brzezinski’s teams worked seamlessly, using the Virginia retreat of Averell Harriman, one of the grandest of post-war foreign policy WASPs, for preparatory sessions. Carter’s plan was to lock the two leaders and their teams into his wooded retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park until he had brokered a deal or failed. He limited each delegation to principals plus a handful of aides and a few family members.

Apart from one brief photo-op, the media were kept off-site. Outside communications were impossible except via the phones in the cabins, which both the Israelis and the Egyptians wrongly assumed were bugged. In that fashion, Carter maintained silence about the state of the talks for almost two weeks. The delegations totaled 44 people with another 80 or so support staff. They were all packed into the complex, sleeping on hastily assembled cots in rooms designed for one or two. Brzezinski shared a room with Carter chief-of-staff Hamilton Jordan. Brzezinski’s daughter, Mika, 11 at the time, bunked with the president’s daughter, Amy Carter. The girls spent the first few days of the summit swimming, biking and watching movies. To them it was a holiday camp. By contrast, to the recalcitrant Begin, the accommodation was “concentration camp deluxe.” After several days, everyone started complaining of cabin fever.

Carter saw the Israeli and Egyptian delegations as mirror images of each other. Begin was by far the most obdurate and legally hairsplitting member of his team. Carter often turned to Moshe Dayan, the Israeli foreign minister, and Ezer Weizman, the defense minister, to find ways around their leader.

They often obliged. At one fraught moment, Weizman and Dayan telephoned Ariel Sharon, Begin’s tough agriculture minister, to get his support for dismantling Israeli settlements in the Sinai Desert. Sharon agreed to the move as long as it was put to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Only then did Begin accede.

Sadat’s team, conversely, was filled with hawks. Sadat himself was poetic, emotional and serially impulsive, the opposite of Begin in terms of personality; frequently, however, his flexibility and willingness to be swayed by Carter’s appeals to history alienated him from his own delegation in a way that worried the president.

At 4:15 a.m. one morning, Carter woke Brzezinski on his cabin phone and asked him to come over. The president was paranoid about Sadat’s security fearing that he could have been assassinated by one of his own aides. Carter had inadvertently disclosed to one of Sadat’s most hawkish negotiators a big concession the Egyptian leader had made to him in a private meeting. At 10 o’clock the previous evening when Carter walked over to Sadat’s cabin, he was told the Egyptian leader was asleep even though the lights were still on. Since Sadat was a famous night bird, he feared the worst. “Zbig, I am very much concerned for Sadat’s life,” said Carter, who had awakened with a terrible premonition. Brzezinski quickly tightened security and had all the comings and goings from Sadat’s cabin monitored.

During a post-dinner chat Brzezinski had one evening with Weizman and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Egypt’s deputy foreign minister, the latter disclosed his view that Sadat should not sign the draft deal being hammered out. Its provisions for Palestinian autonomy were too vaguely worded and could easily be re-interpreted by Begin; Sadat would be putting himself at severe risk both in the Arab world and at home. His forebodings were prophetic; Sadat would later be assassinated amid the backlash. For the same reason, Boutros-Ghali’s boss, Mohammed Ibrahim Kamel, resigned before the summit was over (though he agreed to keep it private until afterward). Kamel had been in place only a few months; his predecessor had quit in protest at Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem. Most of the business with Sadat was conducted privately by Carter.

After three days, Carter concluded that nothing would be achieved with the Israelis and Egyptians in one room. They were too far apart and an atmosphere of mistrust was pervasive. At their supposedly collective meals, the Egyptian and Israeli delegations sat at separate tables. The only exception was when Weizman shifted ostentatiously to the Egyptian table to prove a point. “There was a lot of bantering, laughing, exchanges of anecdotes,” Brzezinski observed in his diary entry for that day. (Brzezinski’s Tolstoyan-length White House diaries were shared with me by his family without strings attached.) “Dayan sat at the other table sulking, obviously irritated by Weizman’s little coup.” Begin ate kosher food prepared by the camp’s Filipino cooks, alone in his cabin.

Carter therefore switched from playing broker to taking charge of parallel bilateral talks. He himself drafted many of the outlined texts. Neither before nor since has a U.S. president involved himself in a negotiation so closely and over such a long period of time.

Brzezinski’s contemporaneous jottings during the Carter years were often critical of the president, although rarely scathing. Throughout the Camp David summit, however, his admiration of Carter’s mastery of detail and refusal to give up is striking. “His textual criticisms are as good as by any expert,” he thought. Carter’s voracious reading appetite was in other contexts a handicap; at Camp David it was indispensable. One morning, Carter spent almost four hours alone with the Israeli and Egyptian legal experts reviewing the document he had drawn up. “I am immensely impressed by the amount of determination and concentration on detail that the president has been displaying,” Brzezinski wrote.

For the most part, Brzezinski and Vance worked well together, although the latter’s tendency to agree with everything Carter said was an annoyance. Vance was too much of a yes-man for Brzezinski’s taste.

Carter’s relationship with the other key figures varied greatly. To First Lady Rosalynn Carter, the president described Begin as a “psycho.” The coldness between them was tangible.

Toward Sadat, on the other hand, Carter had deep affection. At one U.S.-only gathering, Carter was elaborating on the vast differences between the two leaders. His praise for Sadat was emphatic. “My chemistry with him is good,” he said. “I feel with him the way I feel with Cy Vance.” Vance replied, “Yes, because Cy accommodates you the way Sadat does, isn’t that right?” Everyone laughed. Pointing at Brzezinski, Carter added, “Yes and you’re just like Begin.” Brzezinski took that as a compliment. “I think this remark was in some respects quite true,” he noted.

When Carter could no longer face talking to Begin, he sent Vance. But he insisted that Brzezinski accompany the secretary of State to ensure a tough line was upheld. Brzezinski was the chief Begin handler, helped by their shared Polish background and love of chess. One afternoon, he challenged Begin to a game on his cabin porch. Begin grumbled that he had not played since he was interrupted in the middle of a game in 1940 when he was arrested by the Soviet NKVD. During his first encounter with Brzezinski, Mrs. Begin inconveniently turned up and blurted out, “Menachem just loves to play chess!” Brzezinski lost the first game after he gambled his queen too soon. In the second he took a page from Begin’s playbook and consolidated his defense first. He equalized. Over the following days, they played twice more, ending at two games apiece.

At one tense stage of the talks, Begin asked Brzezinski to accompany him on a walk. He said he had always defended Brzezinski from unfair attacks in the Israeli and U.S. media. He therefore felt wounded to hear that Brzezinski was referring to the Israeli West Bank settlements as “a form of colonialism.” He also heard that Carter had been using the same vocabulary. Begin described the idea that the settlements could be dismantled as “fantasmorphic [sic].”

If Begin could not be moved on the Israeli settlements, the whole endeavor would come to naught. Sadat’s readiness to risk being the first Arab leader to recognize Israel was predicated on Begin’s willingness to agree to eventual Palestinian self-determination, even if the timeline stretched to several years. Though the term “two-state solution” was never used, that was Carter and Sadat’s implicit goal. Sadat made it clear that the first part of the deal, in which Israel would gradually withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for Egypt’s diplomatic recognition, had to be linked to an agreed-upon mechanism that would result in a Palestinian homeland. In spite of Carter’s best efforts and various runarounds via his Israeli colleagues, Begin would not budge.

He and Carter spent hours arguing about UN Resolution 242, which stated the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” Carter took the mainstream view that the language applied to the West Bank, which Israel had occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War. Begin insisted that the UN wording should not apply to the territories of what he called Judea and Samaria. Carter privately began to question the Israeli leader’s sanity.

Unbeknownst to him, Sadat had already decided to quit the negotiations. On day 11, Vance rushed in ashen-faced with the news that Sadat had ordered a chopper to take him to Dulles International Airport. The Egyptians were packed and ready to go. It was the second time Sadat had decided to bolt; on the first, Carter had physically blocked him from leaving the room. This time, Carter had to think of something more drastic; he threatened to downgrade relations with Egypt, which would risk pushing the country back into the Soviet orbit. Their friendship, and possibly even Carter’s presidency, would come to an end if Sadat quit. “I was dead serious and he knew it,” Carter wrote in his memoirs.

Sadat wanted to know how Carter would ensure that Israel would commit itself to genuine substance on Palestinian autonomy, including language on East Jerusalem’s sovereign status. Carter improvised a novel pledge; he told Sadat that if any part of the deal was abrogated, the whole package would unravel — an all-or-nothing promise to stop Israel from backsliding that he vowed he would publicize were it to happen.

That pledge was enough for Sadat. After a lengthy pause, he promised to stick with Carter to the end. It is hard to imagine the two Middle Eastern leaders enduring 24 hours of negotiation with each other in Carter’s absence.

The final documents were a master class in linguistic sleight of hand. The Egypt-Israel part of the deal was relatively straightforward since both leaders wanted it. Carter nevertheless had to sweeten the pot by offering Sadat a large consignment of wheat and corn; with Begin, he agreed that the United States would finance two new airstrips inside Israel in exchange for Israel’s giving up the two it had built in the Sinai.

Carter’s jujitsu lay in the second part of the deal. The wording on Palestinian autonomy was so imprecise that it would be child’s play for a legal hairsplitter such as Begin to reinterpret. The package nearly came undone at the last minute when Begin objected to the provision on Jerusalem that had been part of Sadat’s price for not quitting. Carter rushed over to Begin’s cabin with pictures of himself for each of the Israeli leader’s grandchildren. On each he had written, “With love and best wishes.” To Carter’s concealed delight, his gesture triggered deep emotion in Begin. The Israeli leader’s eyes filled with tears as he talked of each of his grandchildren, one by one.

He waved through the next draft of the Jerusalem side letter, which was only slightly more anodyne than the one he had so adamantly rejected. Such are the idiosyncrasies that can bridge the gap between failure and success.

When it became clear the deal was done, Carter sent Brzezinski back to Washington ahead of the others to brief the media. The final deal had two parts. The first was Israel-Egypt normalization. The second, which was Sadat’s precondition for the first, was to start a longer process that would result in an autonomous Palestinian entity, though not a fully independent state. Most of the last-minute hitches and technicalities were handled by Vance and Carter. Though he had ably played the role of lieutenant, Brzezinski was a strategic thinker, much happier sketching out grander themes than haggling over legal terminology.

The details came more naturally to Vance the lawyer and Carter the engineer. At about 5:30 p.m. on Monday, September 18, Vance told Carter, “I think you have it.” Carter reclined in his chair with a wistful smile. “No one spoke up, no one cheered, there was a sense of genuine admiration for what Carter had achieved,” Brzezinski wrote. At that moment a great storm hit Camp David. Flashes of lightning and thunderclaps added to the sense that history was being made. Once the winds abated, Brzezinski was the one who unveiled the deal to the world. He took a chopper to the White House and then briefed the media. Only then did he realize what a coup Carter had pulled off. Having been sealed off from the outside world for so long, he had forgotten that almost no one had a clue about what had been going on.

“There was an audible gasp when I announced the conditions of the Egyptian-Israeli agreement,” Brzezinski wrote later. “The sense of excitement mounted steadily as the briefing went on.”

What followed were essentially parallel movies. In the first movie, Washington, both houses of Congress and the world’s media feted Carter as a master negotiator. Blessed are the peacemakers, Carter said, pointing at Begin and Sadat to bipartisan whoops and applause. Brzezinski’s wife, Muska, had joined Rosalynn Carter and Gay Vance next to them in the congressional gallery.

In the other movie, meanwhile, Begin was celebrating only the Egypt-Israel portion of the deal. He put his own stamp on a clause in which Israel promised that no new Israeli settlements would be built in the West Bank and Gaza Strip “during the negotiations.” Carter and everyone else had taken that pledge to cover the upcoming five years of talks on Palestinian autonomy. But Begin declared that the freeze would hold only for the three months of negotiations needed to wrap up the final details of the Egypt-Israel treaty. His switch was a blow to Carter and especially to Sadat. It was an act of bad faith that Carter never forgave. A few weeks later, Sadat and Begin won a joint Nobel Peace Prize. “Sadat deserved it,” wrote Carter. “Begin did not.” Dayan and Weizman both expressed embarrassment to Carter and Brzezinski about Begin’s actions.

For the time being, however, all bitterness was set aside. At a celebratory cocktail party at Vice President Walter Mondale’s official residence, Brzezinski was the toast of the American Jewish community. Though his role had been secondary, he took undisguised pleasure in his newfound popularity. Amitay, the smiling AIPAC leader, told Brzezinski that if Begin and Sadat could shake hands, they surely could, too. Brzezinski laughed, and they made peace.

The following day, the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief Scotty Reston called Brzezinski to confirm a story going around town that Sadat had been packed and ready to go and had been dissuaded from leaving by secret promises from Carter. Having no idea what Carter had promised to Sadat, Brzezinski told Reston he had to hang up as the president was calling. Carter then called him over to his office and related the details of his conversation with Sadat. He had told only Rosalynn and Vance about its content. Brzezinski was moved by Sadat’s readiness to place his trust in Carter. “You know the implication of this is that you have to be very steadfast on the settlements,” he told Carter. The president replied, “I hadn’t thought of that but that is true.”

Three years later, Sadat was assassinated. Tragically, Carter’s inability to enforce part two of Camp David fed into his brutal demise.