Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  It was a characteristic moment for the Egyptian leader. Under stress, his idealism spread its wide wings. He became emotional and took any setback extremely personally. Begin, his opposite in so many ways, became colder and more analytical, marshaling data to try to win debating points while dismissing the broader perspective that Sadat tried to place on the table. “Anyone observing the two men could not have overlooked the profound divergence in their attitudes,” Weizman later recalled. “Both desired peace. But whereas Sadat wanted to take it by storm … Begin preferred to creep forward inch by inch. He took the dream of peace and ground it down into the fine, dry powder of details, legal clauses, and quotes from international law.”

  Ignoring Sadat’s dream, Begin said that there were only about two thousand Israelis in thirteen settlements in Sinai—so why couldn’t Sadat just convince the Egyptian people to accept them as permanent residents who posed no military threat to Egypt and no infringement of their sovereignty?

  Sadat had had enough. He said he saw no reason for the talks to continue. He stood and stared sternly at Carter.

  Carter was desperate. He had gambled his career on Camp David, but more than that, he had placed a bet on human nature. He firmly believed that men of goodwill, representing the interests of their people and with history looking over their shoulders, would acknowledge that the benefits of peace were so great that they must find a way to achieve it. But war makes its own compelling argument. Hatred is so much easier than reconciliation; no sacrifices or compromises are required. War holds out the promise of victory, and with it the enticing prospect of redemption from the humiliation of the past. Revenge always wants to be satisfied before peace can come to the table. There is a natural human tendency to inflict on others the indignity one has had to endure. Israel and the Arab world were two anguished cultures that could only be healed by making peace with each other; but their wounds preoccupied them. The anger and willful misunderstanding that had characterized the talks so far were the language of war, not peace.

  Carter temporized. He outlined areas of agreement, but there were few to point to. He warned that failure at Camp David could lead to a world war. He said he couldn’t believe that the Israeli people would prefer settlements in Sinai to peace with Egypt. He suggested to Begin that, if he couldn’t bring himself to make the sacrifice, he should go to the Knesset and ask that they make the decision about dismantling the settlements. “I’m sure you will get an overwhelming majority,” he said.

  The Israeli people would never accept it, Begin replied; moreover, it would spell the end of his government. He would be willing to accept the consequences if he believed that it was the right thing to do, but he absolutely did not believe it.

  By now both Begin and Sadat were heading toward the door. Carter physically blocked their path. He begged them for one more day so that he could devise a compromise. Begin agreed. Carter looked at Sadat, who finally nodded his head. Then the two men left without speaking to each other.

  THAT EVENING the Carters had arranged a party. They had thought that by now the delegations would be hammering out the final details of an agreement, and this would be a kind of celebratory break. Bleachers were erected around the helicopter landing field, and Marines conducted their famous Silent Drill—marching in close order, with bayonets on their rifles, and performing their intricate movements in total silence. The grim-faced audience in the bleachers also sat in total silence. There was a light mist in the air, which made the blades gleam as the rifles twirled. Moshe Dayan, who had written the training manual for the Israeli army, watched the display with quiet contempt. Such a display belonged in a circus, he thought, not on a military parade ground.

  Since the start of the summit, the press had been shuttered miles away from the grounds. Daily press conferences were held at the American Legion Hall in nearby Thurmont, Maryland, which boasted the tenuous claim of being the “goldfish capital of the world.” Hundreds of journalists had commandeered every available room in the region. ABC News had secured an entire motel, turning it into a remote bureau, complete with a blimp carrying a satellite dish several hundred feet above the scene. Each day, White House press secretary Jody Powell fed hundreds of journalists little more information than what the delegates had for breakfast and the precise times that they met. The reporters were ravenous for real news. For this one occasion, they were bused to the Camp David grounds and allowed to observe the delegates from a distance. What they saw were the three leaders with fixed expressions, not exchanging a single word, watching a military pantomime. It seemed clear that the talks had broken down.

  After the drill, as the Marine Band struck up a medley of patriotic songs from the three countries, the press was ushered back to the buses. Gerald Rafshoon, Carter’s media adviser, was checking to make sure everyone was aboard, but he discovered that Barbara Walters was missing. She was finally located, lurking in the ladies’ room.

  When the press departed, there was a reception with a string quartet for the delegates. The Carters had made a great effort to get the Egyptians and the Israelis to mingle. A buffet was spread on different tables inside Laurel Lodge and on the patio in order to encourage people to circulate. Rosalynn sat with Sadat on the low brick wall around the patio. She had noticed how forlorn he appeared, especially as the patriotic music was playing. Sadat couldn’t even bring himself to mention Begin’s name. “I’ve given so much and ‘that man’ acts as though I have done nothing,” he told her. “I have given up all the past to start anew, but ‘that man’ will not let go of the past.” Rosalynn tried to reassure him, reminding him that the whole world admired his courage and was watching Camp David hoping for a breakthrough. She added that sometimes when healing words such as his are said it takes a little time for them to soak in. Sadat was inconsolable. “I would do anything to bring peace to our two countries,” he said. “But I feel it is no use.”

  Carter and his top advisers met with the Egyptian delegation later that evening. It was clear that they were on the verge of leaving. “I know you are all very discouraged,” Carter said. The Sinai settlements seemed to be an insurmountable issue. “Our position is that they are illegal and should be removed,” he continued. “On this, your views and ours are the same.” He admitted that he did not have a solution. He only wanted a little more time.

  “My good friend Jimmy, we have already had three long sessions,” Sadat replied. “I cannot yield conquered land to Israel, and if sovereignty is to mean anything to Egyptians, all the Israelis must leave our territory. That man Begin is not saying anything that he might not have said prior to my Jerusalem initiative.” Sadat pointed out numerous areas where he had been willing to compromise, whereas Begin “haggles over every word, and is making his withdrawal conditional on keeping land. Begin is not ready for peace.”

  Carter defended Begin as “a tough and honest man.” He analyzed the situation from Begin’s perspective. “His present control over Sinai was derived from wars which Israel did not start,” Carter observed. He reminded the Egyptians of America’s special relationship with Israel and stressed that the Israelis really did want peace.

  Sadat, annoyed, lit his pipe and exhaled a river of smoke from his nostrils. “It was I who made the peace initiative,” he said. “If Begin had really desired peace, we would have had it for some time now.” He said he was willing to be flexible, but not on Sinai. “I must have also a resolution of the West Bank and Gaza,” he added.

  As the Americans auditioned various ideas for the discouraged Egyptians, Carter mentioned the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, a famous document in the annals of diplomacy, which was crafted by Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s national security advisor at the time, and Chou En-lai, the Chinese prime minister. Both the U.S. and China had sought to normalize relations, but they could not find a way to agree on the language that would resolve the central issue, which was China’s claim to Taiwan, an American ally. Finally, Kissinger resorted to what he later termed “constructive ambiguity
,” by inserting the sentence “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a province of China,” but avoiding the question of who should govern it. The agreement opened the way for China and the U.S. to overcome decades of hostility. As Carter explained it to the Egyptians, “We both agreed that there was one China, but we did not destroy the agreement by trying to define ‘one China’ too specifically.”

  Carter might have employed another famous example of constructive ambiguity with which the delegates were more familiar: UN Resolution 242. The language that had been proposed by the Arab states and the Soviet Union demanded that Israel withdraw from “all the territories occupied during the hostilities of June 1967.” That was modified to read as just “the territories.” To further fudge the matter, the definite article was finally removed from the English-language version of the text but was retained in the French version. Since both were official UN documents, the Arabs could say that the resolution bound Israel to withdraw from the lands it had conquered and Israel could say that it agreed to withdraw from some, while not committing to which ones. Of course, finally resolving that ambiguity was one reason for the summit at Camp David.

  “Stalemate here would just provide an opportunity for the most radical elements to take over in the Middle East,” Carter warned as the meeting broke up. “We simply must find a formula that Egypt and Israel can accept. If you give me a chance, I don’t intend to fail.”

  It was one in the morning when Carter came to bed. For all practical purposes, the summit was over, he admitted to Rosalynn. “There must be a way,” he said, again and again. “We haven’t found it yet, but there must be a way.”

  Rosalynn watched him struggle. “When Jimmy’s pondering, he gets quiet,” she noted in her memoirs, “and there’s a vein in his temple that I can see pounding. Tonight it was pounding.”

  ROSALYNN HAD KNOWN Jimmy all her life; she was actually born in the house next door to his, although Jimmy’s family moved to a farm three miles away while she was still a baby. Her father, Edgar Smith, an auto mechanic, a handsome man with dark, curly hair and a prominent dimpled chin, had met Rosalynn’s mother, Allie Murray, a strikingly lovely girl, when she was still in high school and he was driving the school bus. They didn’t marry until Allie finished college, getting a teacher’s diploma from Georgia State College for Women. Eleanor Rosalynn Smith was born the next year, on August 18, 1927. Except for her three younger siblings, Rosalynn grew up very much alone. There was no movie theater or library in Plains, which had a population of about six hundred and no other girls her age. Rosalynn spent much of her time playing dolls, sewing, reading, and cutting paper dolls out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

  Her parents were romantic in a way that other adults in Plains didn’t seem to be. When Edgar came back from working at his garage, he would whirl Allie around the kitchen and kiss her. Other parents didn’t act that way. Edgar was strict with the children, however, and they lived in awe of him. Rosalynn responded by being perfect. Her greatest infraction was “running away”—crossing the street to play with friends. Edgar would spank her and then command her not to cry. She would hold her emotions in check until she got to the outdoor privy so she could weep unseen. She couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t let her cry. She supposed he only wanted her to be strong, but she also thought that maybe he didn’t really love her. “Just having these thoughts troubled me and gave me a guilty conscience for years,” she admitted.

  In 1939, her parents allowed her to go to summer camp, the first time she had ever been away from home. When she returned, she discovered the reason she had been sent away. Her father had been in the hospital for tests. He was gravely ill. Although Edgar assured Rosalynn he was going to get better, he never did. Assuming that his suffering was because of the mean thoughts she had had about him in the past, Rosalynn did everything possible to show him how much she loved him. She brushed his hair and read the Bible and detective stories to him hour after hour, even as his face grew paler and he fought for breath. In October, he called the children to his bedside. “The time has come to tell you that I can’t get well and you’re going to have to look after Mother for me,” he told them. “You are good children and I’m depending on you to be strong.” He said that he had always wanted to go to college, but hadn’t been able to. Now he instructed his wife to sell the farm if she needed money for the children’s education. His greatest sorrow was that he wasn’t going to be around to make sure they all had good lives and opportunities he didn’t have. Once again, he commanded them not to shed tears. Afterward, Rosalynn rushed to the privy to cry and cry. “My childhood really ended at that moment,” she realized. Later, critics took note of her stoicism, calling her the “Steel Magnolia,” but her childhood had hardened her to the blows that life inflicted.

  Most of the medical care in Sumter County was embodied in the indomitable figure of Lillian Carter, a registered nurse, who made a practice of treating both the black and the white citizens of Plains and dared anyone to tell her different. When Edgar Smith first contracted leukemia, Miss Lillian checked on him every day, and when the end came she took Rosalynn home and let her spend the night with her daughter Ruth. Rosalynn was thirteen years old.

  Rosalynn’s mother took in sewing to support her four children and her elderly father. Eventually she got a job as a postmistress. Rosalynn worked as a part-time shampooer in a beauty parlor. She helped as well with her two younger brothers, and her little sister, who was only four when their father died. At night, Allie would read the Bible to her children and assure them that God really did love them. Rosalynn had her doubts. She was haunted by the specter of an angry, vengeful God. She was an outstanding student, always getting As, and graduated as the class valedictorian and the May Queen. She prayed; she went to church practically every time the doors opened; she achieved everything her strict and pious father would have asked of her, except the one, most important thing—to keep him alive.

  Rosalynn grew into an attractive young woman, but she was sober and unsmiling. She saw herself as ordinary and painfully shy. She had her mother’s wide-set eyes and high cheekbones and her father’s dimpled chin—to which was added a small scar when she fell out of a sitting-room window as a child and landed in a rose bush. Ruth Carter, who was two years younger than Rosalynn, became her best friend; and it was in Ruth’s bedroom that Rosalynn fell in love with a photograph of a young man with slicked-back hair and a dark, burning gaze that seemed full of intelligence and ambition, looking “so glamorous and out of reach.” It was Ruth’s older brother, Jimmy. Rosalynn knew him—everybody in Plains knew everybody else—but she rarely saw him. By now she was following her father’s last dictate and attending a nearby junior college, hoping to become an interior designer, and Jimmy was off at Annapolis, another universe away. The only time Rosalynn could remember speaking to him was when she bought an ice cream cone from him one summer on Main Street. The photograph in Ruth’s bedroom filled her with longing. Jimmy had escaped Plains. He had what it took. Surely her father would have approved of him.

  Ruth cooked up the idea of a romance between her idolized older brother and her best friend. She would call Rosalynn whenever Jimmy came home at Christmas or during summer leave, but Rosalynn was so intimidated by the boy in the photograph that she couldn’t imagine what she would say to him. Finally, in the summer of 1945, the year the world war ended, Ruth invited Rosalynn to a picnic. Jimmy was there. He teased her about the exotic way she made her sandwich, on mismatched slices of bread, using salad dressing instead of mayonnaise. He was obviously a perfectionist. After the picnic, the Carters dropped her off at her house, and she thought to herself, “That’s that.”

  Later that afternoon, after church, she was standing with friends when a car drove up and Jimmy got out. He asked if she’d like to go to a movie—a double-date with Ruth and her boyfriend. Jimmy and Rosalynn rode in the rumble seat, and on the way ho
me, under a full moon, he kissed her. That very night he told his mother he was going to marry Rosalynn. He was twenty; she was seventeen. They were married a year later. Jimmy presented her with a manual, called A Navy Wife.

  She felt liberated the moment she left Plains, although some of their early postings were dreadful. Jimmy was often at sea, leaving Rosalynn to take care of their first child, Jack. In 1948, the year the State of Israel was created, Jimmy was accepted to submarine school in New London, Connecticut. For the first time in their married life, Jimmy had regular hours. They studied Spanish and took an art class together. When Jimmy finished sub school, they got the best news: he was being posted to the USS Pomfret, based in Hawaii. Rosalynn sewed aloha shirts and took hula lessons. Jimmy learned to play the ukulele and Rosalynn would dance to “My Little Grass Shack” and “Lovely Hula Hands.” Another son, James Earl Carter III, called Chip, was born. Plains, thankfully, was very far away.

  Jimmy Carter, in his Navy uniform, and Rosalynn Carter, on their wedding day, July 7, 1946, in Plains, Georgia

  The submarines of the era had to surface every twenty-four hours to recharge their batteries, and during Carter’s first cruise aboard the Pomfret, as an electronics officer, the ship ran into one of the most violent storms ever to strike the Pacific Ocean. Seven ships went down that night, and the Pomfret itself was so badly battered that it was reported missing. Carter was violently sick during the tempest, but he was dutifully standing his watch in the middle of the night when a gigantic wave rolled over the ship and swept him out to sea. He floundered inside the wave in utter darkness. In an instant, he had been subtracted from the world he knew and plunged into an obscure and inky grave. Suddenly he was slammed against the five-inch gun behind the conning tower, about thirty feet from where he had been standing. He held on to the cannon with everything he had. It was eerie; no one on the ship had even known he was missing. Fortunately, Rosalynn was visiting in Plains and did not hear the false report that the ship had been lost at sea.