President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  I bundled up the expressions of concern I had received from Jewish leaders and took them to Ham. He was my friend on this issue, because he fully understood the importance of political support from the Jewish community when the president was launching a risky diplomatic venture in the Middle East. He also had confided that his family had learned his maternal grandmother was Jewish. In an extraordinary memorandum of June 6, 1977,69 Ham told his boss in no uncertain terms of his concerns about the political impact of Carter’s broad foreign-policy initiatives, and in words so direct that he typed the memo himself and locked the only other copy in his office safe. He first warned the president that his foreign policy initiatives were criticized as “consistently ‘liberal’” (Carter commented in a written note: “To challenge the Soviets for influence is ‘conservative’”). But, focusing on Carter’s Middle East initiatives, he tried to take the president’s head out of the clouds to face the political implications.

  Ham began by pointing out that American Jews vote in greater proportion to their size than any other group; they are predominantly Democratic and have remained so despite economic and educational advances that traditionally lead other groups to change parties. And in key states like New York, the influence of Jews in primaries is often decisive. He noted that Jews also had a tradition of “using one’s material wealth for the benefit of others”—in 1976 alone Jewish charities had raised $3.6 billion compared with $200 million by the American Red Cross. More pertinent to politics than charity, 70 of the 125 members of the Democratic National Finance Council were Jews who constituted more than 60 percent of the large donors to the Democratic Party. Then he described the importance of AIPAC—“a strong but paranoid lobby”—in concentrating the political force of all major Jewish organizations on Congress in defense of Israeli interests: “Their collective mobilizing ability is unsurpassed in terms of the quality and quantity of political communications that can be triggered on specific issues perceived to be critical to Israel [and without a] political counterforce that opposes the specific goals of the Jewish lobby.” He also ranked the one hundred members of the Senate according to their support for Israel—only three were “generally negative.”

  In the bluntest terms he discussed the Israeli election and what it meant: Begin’s philosophy differed sharply from the past, and for the first time they feared “losing American public support for Israel if the new government and its leaders proved to be unreasonable in its positions.” For the president to further his own goals, he would need the support of American Jews. He warned Carter that he had publicly used terms like “defensible borders” and “homeland for the Palestinians” without reassuring elaborations about what he really meant. Most important: “The cumulative effect of your statements on the Middle East and the various bilateral meetings with the heads of state has been generally pleasing to the Arabs and displeasing to the Israelis and the American Jewish community.” In fact, Ham said, the press reports on his meetings with four Arab leaders were uniformly described as positive, while his talks with Rabin were reported as unsuccessful and “very cool.”

  His recommendations followed logically—coordinated consultation with the American Jewish community and the Begin government to emphasize that the Carter administration was not seeking to “impose a U.S. settlement nor attempting any quick-fix solution,” and then to lay out the key issues that would be part of a settlement, with concessions on both sides. Then followed recommendations for a detailed outreach program to key members of Congress, the American Jewish press, and Jewish leaders, with Carter personally participating where appropriate.

  The president agreed with the program and insisted that his secretary of state join in forging an essential link between foreign policy and domestic politics. The problem was that the policy did not change, and there was no real effort to take into account American Jewish concerns. I sensed that Brzezinski, Vance, and, to a degree, Carter himself saw domestic outreach as a nuisance, and felt that foreign policy in general, and the Middle East in particular, should be insulated from domestic politics. Major decisions were sometimes made without anyone even informing Ham. And the president’s lack of political sensitivity was sometimes breathtaking.

  SUNDAY SCHOOL

  Jimmy Carter had been teaching Sunday school in Georgia since he was eighteen, and he saw no reason to discontinue this fulfilling activity when he arrived in the White House. On the morning of inauguration day, I accompanied him and Rosalynn to a prayer service at the First Baptist Church of Washington, a few blocks north of the White House. There the pastor offered a prayer for him to be blessed with divine strength and wisdom. The president became a communicant and decided to give sermons of his own at the church’s couples Bible class until they became an embarrassment. His first mistake was giving a sermon at all, since everything a president says is public, regardless of how private the occasion. The second was his topic: Christ driving the moneylenders from the Temple, leading to his crucifixion. An Associated Press reporter, Casper Nannes, wrote a story innocently headlined “Learning the Bible with the President.” He reported that the president had taught that the confrontation at the Temple was “a turning point in Christ’s life. He had directly challenged in a fatal way the existing church, and there was no possible way for the Jewish leaders to avoid the challenge. So they decided to kill Jesus.” The article went on to note that Jesus’ trial did not provide him with such protections of Jewish law as two witnesses, and it closed by noting: “Carter is the first President to teach a Bible class while in office.” He might have added that this sermon persuasively demonstrated why no previous sitting president had ever done so.

  It is hard to think of a more remarkable letter written to a president of the United States than the one on May 6, 1977, by the Reverend John F. Steinbruck, pastor of Washington’s Luther Place Memorial Church and an ardent participant in interfaith activities. His anguished letter lamented that those Bible class remarks “will undermine progress that has been made in the Christian world removing the basis of deicide charges against the Jewish people.” He said that the Catholic Church and other mainstream Christian denominations had long since exonerated the Jews from collective guilt for Jesus’ death and urged the president to “reinforce this direction that the Christian world has at long last taken to end false witness against our Jewish neighbors.”

  Within the week Carter replied with a detailed biblical exegesis that also expressed his thankfulness that Christian denominations “have totally and decisively rejected the charge that the Jewish people as a whole were then or are now responsible for the death of Christ,” noting that his own Southern Baptist Convention had declared “anti-Semitism [to be] un-Christian.”

  Not content with avoiding further damage from this high-wire exercise, the president delivered another sermon at a pre-Christmas Bible class at the First Baptist Church. Again the AP reporter was on the job. This time the president took as his text the raising of Lazarus from the dead and said that Jesus, by revealing himself as the Messiah, knew he was risking death “as quickly as [it] could be arranged by the Jewish leaders, who were very powerful.” A second letter soon arrived from Rev. Steinbruck to White House Counsel Bob Lipshutz, renewing his “plea for Presidential sensitivity on this matter by gently recalling the President’s just and forthright declaration on this historically false notion of Jewish responsibility for deicide.” When Lipshutz forwarded it to me, I penned a handwritten note: “Bob (1) We’ve got to write the President a memo & beg him to stay away from this. (2) Can we talk?”70

  More complaints kept arriving about Carter’s explorations of the New Testament. One anguished handwritten note from Bookbinder of the American Jewish Committee asked me why Carter approached the question of the Jews’ role in Jesus’ death twice. Another, from Benjamin Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League, reported a “flood of calls from persons of the Jewish faith from around the country expressing deep concern.”71 I was apoplectic. Why would the president of the Unit
ed States even address such a topic at a time like this—indeed, why at all? All we could do was to forward Epstein’s letter to the president and urge him to stay off the subject. He did, but it was simply inexplicable to me that someone who did not have an anti-Semitic thought in his head could be so insensitive to the way his impolitic Bible lessons would be received.

  American Jewish leaders began looking for reassurance about Carter. After meeting twice with Begin, Rabbi Shindler stressed the need for the new prime minister to form a government quickly and make it “broadly representative, so most American Jews could support him.” Shindler nevertheless promised that even with Begin as prime minister “there won’t be an erosion of American Jewish support for Israel.” But he also said ominously: “The American Jewish community is now bothered about Jimmy Carter.”72 Yet he did not indicate that the American Jewish establishment had any concerns about the new prime minister.

  With all his obduracy and legalisms, his Revisionist philosophy, his habit of lecturing and not seeming to listen, Begin was an enigma to the president and his foreign-policy advisers, who did not fully appreciate that the prime minister with whom they would have to interact for most of his presidency embodied a history of oppression in his own life. Imprisoned by the Soviets, a fugitive from Nazi oppression, with an almost mystical commitment to Israel’s rebirth, Begin craved acceptance and respect from the president of the United States. He was no longer the shadowy underground Irgun commander derided as a terrorist or a political loser in more than a half-dozen elections, but the prime minister of the Third Jewish Commonwealth. More understanding of Jewish history and of Begin’s own suffering might not have fully overcome his inflexibility, nor could it have fully won over the American Jewish community. But it would have helped Jimmy Carter in dealing with American Jewish leaders and Israel, whom he saw through the filter of the Bible, more the New than the Old Testament.

  CONFRONTATION WITH AMERICAN JEWISH LEADERSHIP

  Nor did Begin help in easing the way to understanding him. To reassure nervous American Jews about the stiff, scholarly new prime minister, who seemed the exact opposite of the self-confident, bronzed sabra who had reshaped the image of the beleaguered shtetl Jew into an admired kibbutz fighter, Begin dispatched his close friend and former Irgun comrade Shmuel Katz. There has probably never before or since been such a provocative advance man for a visit by a head of government. Justice Department lawyers at first wanted him to register as a foreign agent, but we dissuaded them from insisting.

  Katz’s meeting with Reform rabbis at the legendary Jewish resort of Grossinger’s was captured in a New York Times article that Ham forwarded to the president, titled “Katz in the Mountains.” It recalled that Katz had first come to the United States to buy arms for the Irgun in April 1948, just days after the organization had been condemned—not only by the Arabs and the British but by Ben-Gurion and even the chief rabbi—for destroying the Arab village of Deir Yassin and allegedly massacring 229 Arab men, women, and children. In answer to a reporter’s question if the Irgun had been retaliating against Arab violence to the Jews, Katz answered, “Not enough.”73

  That set the tone for Katz’s visit. He turned aside criticism of Begin as a former terrorist as “lurid attacks.” But he directed one of his strongest broadsides against the Carter administration only days before Begin was to meet with the president. With Carter pushing for a peace agreement that would envision an Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank in return for peace, Katz dismissed it as “recipes for war.” When it was suggested that Israel might make peace with the Arabs as the French did by withdrawing from embattled Algeria, Katz told the rabbis: “De Gaulle made peace in Algeria, Nixon went to China, so Begin is the man to commit suicide—he’ll give the country away. Never!”

  But Katz was just warming up with the liberal Reform rabbis, whom he felt he could eat for breakfast: “I was told I would have a rough time with them. But you see, they’re just weak.” Moving to a more friendly group of Orthodox rabbis at another borscht belt hotel, Katz was in his element. He invited American Jews to take on their own president: “We are confident that the Jewish community in America will stand out courageously and challenge its government if it becomes necessary.” Shmuel Katz may not have been diplomatic, but he was right about American Jews standing up for Israel and accurate in advancing his version of the new prime minister’s policies.

  Katz’s rhetoric—straight out of the Irgun manual—was one reason why Brzezinski and others thought the administration should lay down the law to Begin when he arrived in mid-July.74 Senator Humphrey suggested a less abrupt approach and proposed that American Jewish leaders try to moderate Begin’s views. Carter was more practical. In order to help raise trust, he decided to approve shipments of military equipment to Israel that were caught in a Pentagon bottleneck. Ironically, it was during this time of tension that he signed a landmark Anti-Arab Boycott bill through negotiations that I helped facilitate between American Jewish groups and the Business Roundtable to ban American companies from boycotting Israel, which he had championed since the campaign. We followed up with tough implementing regulations, for which he was given little credit. And Brzezinski informed me that the president had just approved TOW antitank missiles and other military items Israel had wanted.75

  Thankfully, Carter was also his idealistic self, insisting at a meeting with Mondale, Vance, Brzezinski, Ham, Jody Powell, and me that the Arabs would agree for Israel to deviate from withdrawing back to pre-1967 borders, and opposed an independent Palestinian state. Jody replied that what we tell Israel is “only bad news for them.” But Carter was undeterred: There was a “chance for peace, and we can’t let this chance get past.”76

  It dramatized for me that for all his public mistakes in rhetoric—both diplomatic and religious—his determination to achieve peace for Israel regardless of political cost was admirable, and essential. It is even clearer in the decades since, that progress on the same intractable issues with which Carter was struggling forty years ago can come only with a president willing to take enormous domestic political heat and plow ahead. None have done so since with the same combination of his grit and determination—indeed, perhaps because of the political wounds he suffered.

  But even as we tried to calm the Jewish community, it was not clear that the president had fully internalized the domestic political dangers. Mondale called me to his office on June 10. Unlike Carter, Vance, and Brzezinski, the vice president believed that foreign policy and domestic politics could not be separated, because the former required support of the latter to be effective. “Stu, we will be in bad shape politically if he gets on the outs with the Jewish community, which is about to blow up over the president’s position on Israel,” he said, pouring out his frustrations. He felt that Carter had been too public with his positions and “hasn’t brought along the Jewish community.” I replied that we must try to build support within the Jewish community and Capitol Hill. But apparently Carter did not see the danger Mondale observed, because he had been angered by what he saw as the Jewish leadership’s “irrational lobbying.”77

  We were literally besieged with well-intentioned and self-serving advice, warnings, occasionally wise counsel, misunderstandings, and self-inflicted wounds weakening Carter’s hand against Begin and further alienating him from the American Jewish community. We first tried to build support among American Jewry with a letter to be signed by senators supporting Carter. But Senator Ribicoff phoned me at home warning against it because Republicans would not sign it “and neither will a lot of Democrats.” He warned that Jewish leaders and AIPAC were poisoning the atmosphere for Begin and reiterated: “Be tough! Don’t let them think they have the president on the run; tell them off.” This was easier said than done.78

  I passed on the gist of this remarkable outburst from a Jewish senator to Ham, communications director Jerry Rafshoon, and Frank Moore, our congressional liaison. But I feared that confrontation by the president would badly backfi
re politically. And as it happened, the supportive senatorial initiative died quietly after Humphrey withdrew as a signatory to the proposed letter: AIPAC’s lobbying had succeeded. The intensity of feeling increased with each passing day. Rabbi Morris Sherer, president of the Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, an organization with a hundred thousand members and direct ties to the Agudat Israel Party with four seats in the Knesset, assured me he had no connection with Shindler’s Conference of Presidents and that his party would be a moderating influence on the Begin government, because “We put life above land.”

  Shortly after Rabbi Sherer left with his encouraging message, I was informed that George Sherman, the spokesman for the Near East Bureau of the State Department, had been quoted in Israeli papers saying that the administration was trying either to “topple Begin” or to persuade the moderate general and famed archaeologist Yigal Yadin, who led a small center party in Begin’s coalition, to become prime minister.79

  This intrusion, not only on the politics of a friendly country but on our own policies, prompted me to dash off a handwritten note to Ham asking if he could take over responsibility for clearing all official statements on the Middle East: “Statement this week has almost put us to point of no return with American Jewish community. Now we look like the heavies and Begin the good guy.” He replied that the week had been “disastrous, we have galvanized public opinion in Israel against us and—I am afraid—alienated in a permanent way the American Jewish community.” He confirmed that Sherman’s remarks had not been approved by the White House, although they had been presented and accepted as a major statement of U.S. foreign policy. “Hell, I view the statement this week as a self-inflicted wound that serves no good purpose and makes every dimension of this problem more difficult,” Ham told me. When the president called, I asked him to contradict the statement, but he only said he knew nothing about it, and we were not supposed to comment anyway. To Carter the incident was “over and done with now, but I’m sorry about it.”80