But Mondale was a politician’s politician. He enjoyed working the cabin, bantering, chatting, schmoozing with the Jewish leaders as we flew across the Atlantic, and then turning serious during a refueling stop in the Azores by trying to comfort them about the president’s intentions toward Israel and the peace process. It was a political performance to behold.83
The effect of this extraordinary visit on the Jewish leaders was mixed. They were surprised at the depth of feeling against the administration that they encountered in the Israeli leaders they met separately from the vice president’s official gatherings. Rabbi Saul Teplitz, president of the Synagogue Council of America, told Ambassador Lewis during a private briefing: “For the first time in 30 years, I got the feeling here that as an American I am somewhat in the enemy camp.”84
Despite the extensive outreach to the Jewish community, the administration’s persistent efforts to wrest concessions from Israel were having a corrosive impact on American Jewish opinion, even though they would be a necessary part of any Middle East peace agreement. A prominent Jewish businessman and campaign supporter of the president warned the White House that unless conditions changed for the better by 1980, “Jewish resources would be used to support a challenge to the President’s nomination.”85
With Jewish leaders lobbying for a stronger voice inside the White House, Ed Sanders, a former president of AIPAC and Los Angeles lawyer, joined the staff, although Carter would have preferred to have him at a distance in the State Department. Sanders demanded a role in launching Middle East policy as opposed to just helping to minimize the damage from the crash landings. He proved a wise colleague, but he was never seriously involved in policy making.86
Behind the public imbroglios stood major White House policy disputes that Mondale managed at first to conceal. He had sent the president a draft of his speech to the Knesset, and Carter wrote a tough note in the margins reading in part: “Fritz, be firm on speech points and talking points.” At one point in the draft speech, Carter wrote, “Don’t weaken these paragraphs, and if questioned, be sure West Bank and Gaza are mentioned.” So here at the very start of a goodwill visit to mend a frayed relationship, Mondale received stern presidential instructions not to be accommodating. And just as Mondale was boarding Air Force Two, he received a handwritten message instructing him to include in his speech a declaration that Israel would have to give up almost all of the West Bank as a price of peace. While the note was signed by the president, Mondale was sure that Brzezinski had recommended it, because the same thing had happened to Strauss, another presidential envoy, just as he boarded his flight to Israel. Mondale concluded that that was how Brzezinski avoided debates and got his way on an issue.
The fact of the matter is that Carter was receiving conflicting tactical advice and passing it on to Mondale, and the vice president realized it. He told me later: “Zbig’s theory was that in order to get Israel to negotiate, you have to soften them up, you have to weaken them.” As for Vance, he had the “traditional State Department feeling that somehow Israel had gotten away with too much.”87
* * *
For me personally the trip was an epiphany. I vividly remembered my first visit to Israel in 1965 at the end of my first year at Harvard Law School. I had come to see my grandfather, then over 90; he’s now buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, near his father, my great-grandfather. Coming off of Air Force Two with a giant American flag on its tail and the insignia of the vice president on its fuselage, and then being greeted by no less than the prime minister of Israel, gave me an indescribable feeling of how improbable and miraculous it was to have the honor of representing my own country while landing on the sacred soil of my ancestors. But it was no easy task. The tensions within the president’s inner circle, and indeed between his own diplomatic goals and political pressures, often pulled us this way and that—rarely more so than on this trip with a planeload of Jewish leaders and a vice president politically committed to Israel who had been sent to soften up Begin.
We were received by Begin and his cabinet in a red-carpet welcome at Ben-Gurion Airport. On the long drive to Jerusalem, Mondale and Begin sat together, and the vice president delivered a personal letter from the president suggesting a foreign ministers meeting at Leeds Castle in England; he later delivered a similar letter to Sadat. His meetings with Begin and Dayan went well in convincing them that they could trust the president to protect Israel’s security. And as a guest at a cabinet meeting, an unusual honor for a foreign official, Mondale announced the formal approval of an Israeli sale to Taiwan of Kfir jets with their General Electric jet engines, though a year earlier a similar sale to Ecuador had been scuttled. He asked that America’s approval be kept quiet to avoid charges of favoritism to Israel, but privately he told Begin it would be “okay to leak it” to help draw positive attention in the American Jewish community when its distrust of the administration was rising.
But then the president made a remarkably ill-timed statement, restating all his conditions for the Geneva conference. Mondale was beside himself with anger and frustration that this occurred in the midst of his fence-mending visit. As we were getting off an Israeli helicopter at Sde Boker, the desert kibbutz where Ben-Gurion had retired and was buried, Mondale told me he felt that he was beginning to quiet Israeli suspicions, only to be undercut by Carter. He added bitterly: “I think we’re finished and we can’t recoup.”88
Normally ebullient and upbeat, Mondale turned all his anger on Brzezinski and blamed him for the president’s remarks. Brzezinski, and perhaps the president as well, were concerned that Mondale might somehow deviate from administration policy; but whatever misgivings he had about our position—and he shared my own—Mondale was deeply loyal. When he addressed the Knesset, he was forced to add language about Israeli withdrawal, and hated doing it. “They made my life miserable.… Just another gratuitous shot across my bow, and I think it was Zbig,” he said later.89 But years after the administration he felt Carter was also influenced by his reading of the Bible as a devout Baptist.90
In his private report to Carter on the Middle East trip, Mondale wrote: “In our first meetings, Begin was unanimated, unsmiling, and without his usual verve or responsiveness to humor. Although fully in command, he is not in good health. By the end of the visit, however, he had begun to smile in response to a steady effort to show respect and warmth toward him. He may be the only man, as Sadat [later] told me, who can deliver Israel on the compromises that would be crucial to peace. I suspect that Begin wants to be a man of peace and there is some possibility of flexibility if we work in a respectful way toward him.”91
I believe that the trip helped lay the groundwork for a successful Camp David summit, because it helped relieve Begin’s suspicions of the president. Mondale recalled that “Begin had lost all confidence in Carter, and I think one thing that I did for Camp David was to spend that time alone with him, nearly three hours explaining Carter to him.”92 But his blunt, handwritten report to the president on the trip reflected his starkly different way of approaching Israel, as a sympathetic supporter rather than someone coming armed with the tough position of Carter and Brzezinski, which they believed would eventually bend Begin’s hard line. Mondale concluded: “Our direct confrontation with the Israelis has tended to drive the Israelis together rather than apart. There is a deep feeling in Israel that we have been one-sided in our public statements and Israel is the object of frequent criticism while Sadat isn’t.”93
Despite the vice president’s advice, the confrontational approach continued. Yet every president since the Six-Day War has often had to stand firm on America’s policy toward Israel, while remaining irrevocably committed to Israel’s security. Jimmy Carter was emphatically no exception, because the United States also has broader interests in a region with almost two dozen Arab states.
For all their tough talk, Carter, Brzezinski, and Vance never threatened to reassess policy or cut off American funds, as future presidents would do. Begin
was certainly a tough customer, and without Carter’s steely determination to push ahead, it is doubtful that as much progress would have been made. But at the same time, Mondale’s words ring true. A better mixture of support and empathy, the avoidance of gratuitous insults, and a more balanced view about Sadat and Begin would have been helpful.
One last time, Egyptian and Israeli leaders tried to make progress on their own at Leeds Castle southeast of London, a Norman landmark so beautiful and storied that it is a choice British government venue for high-level conferences. The baronial dining room had been restored with a table about fifty feet long, which occasioned an initial negotiation about whether the Egyptians would eat separately or join the rest on the first night. It became the first time within memory that Israelis and Egyptian officials had dined together. The seating was arranged so that an American was placed next to an Egyptian, and then an Israeli, the alternation of nationalities repeating itself around the table. The group, numbering about 25 or 30, started out very stiffly, but normal human interaction loosened conversation. From then on there was no question of separate tables, but that did little to bridge differences between Israel and Egypt, which remained as wide as the Sinai itself, including the settlements in Sinai under Israeli jurisdiction.94 Leeds was so unproductive, and Sadat so fed up, that he refused the administration’s request for another tripartite meeting and decreed there would be no more of them.
We had reached what appeared to be a dead end to Carter’s Middle East diplomacy. He then turned it around in a successful act of personal diplomacy unprecedented in the American presidency.
19
CARTER’S TRIUMPH AT CAMP DAVID
With Sadat angry and Begin intransigent, the president was nevertheless determined to press on with a process in which he had invested so much time and energy. Much of that determination was grounded in Carter’s own resolute character as well as his loyalty to Sadat. He did not want to humiliate the man who had risked his office and perhaps his life by opening the path to change in the Middle East. Failing to capitalize on the momentum created by Sadat could have opened the way for the Soviets to return to the region, and Carter believed that events could spin out of control: “Israel was embedded in obdurate positions … and Sadat was talking to other Arab leaders about military action.”1
Once he understood that the peace process was heading toward failure, Carter explained later: “I couldn’t see any alternative to bringing Sadat and Begin together.” And since he refused to admit failure of such a high-profile project, he also had to jump into it for personal reasons: “Once I had made a decision, I was awfully stubborn about it. I think if I could have one political attribute as a cause of my success to begin with, it would be tenacity. And that may also be a cause of some of my political failures. I just can’t say for sure. Stubbornness is never an attractive attribute.”2
This time, however, it served him well. Against the counsel of his principal administration advisers and the handful of Washington Wise Men he consulted, the staff reluctantly set up a meeting with the modest goal of reintroducing Begin and Sadat to each other and reviewing their positions. Mondale argued that the odds were stacked against success and told Carter: “If you fail, we’re done … we will sap our stature as national leaders. We’ve got to find some less risky way of trying to find peace there.” Carter replied that he would take the risk.3
Carter checked with Ham, Jody, and Rafshoon, and as Rafshoon recounted, Carter reasoned: “If I don’t do it there will be a war, because Sadat has told me if his peace initiative fails, he will have to go to war to bring the Israelis back to the negotiating table. If I do it and fail, there will be a war. But I won’t fail, because if I can get them together, they won’t let me fail.”4 So the president of the United States wrote out personal invitations in his own hand to Sadat and Begin to join him at Camp David, and sent Vance to deliver them in person. That, said Carter, “kind of put them on the spot not to turn it down.”5
It also put the two Middle East leaders on separate tracks because of their different expectations: Begin envisioned an agenda-setting conference that would demand little commitment, while Sadat calculated that regaining the Sinai and gaining some leverage for the Palestinians would raise his stature in the Arab world and justify his gestures to Israel.
The U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Hermann Eilts, felt that Sadat came to Camp David in a confrontational mood because he felt Begin had shown no appreciation for what he had done.6 Carter, ever the problem-solving engineer, thought he could bridge their differences in perhaps three or four days by making the two very different leaders see reason. He never imagined it would take almost two weeks to overcome—and then only partly—the suspicions on both sides that were compounded by Begin’s searing memories of the European pogroms and the rigid ideology they engendered.7
Carter and his wife, who after more than seventy years of marriage disagree on remarkably few things, do not agree on which of them came up with the idea of meeting at Camp David. But each wants to give the other the credit for the brilliant but daring idea of isolating the principals far from the ministrations of officialdom to negotiate an improbable peace agreement. Rosalynn8 recounted that on a July afternoon when they were walking through the beautiful woods at Camp David, he told her he had an idea: “It’s so beautiful here, I don’t believe anybody could stay in the place, close to nature, peaceful and isolated from the world, and still carry a grudge. I believe I could get Sadat and Begin both here together, and we could work out some of the problems between them, or at least we could learn to understand each other better and maybe make some progress. Everything’s going backward now.”
But she told me years later9 that “I wrote in my book that Jimmy suggested it, but he argues with me still about that, because he said I was the one. And after he said that, I remember walking around Camp David one day, and I said, ‘I don’t see if you brought Begin and Sadat up here—I don’t see how they could do anything [but make progress] it’s so peaceful and quiet and nice up here.” Their partnership is so strong that they have often thought alike.
Whatever the genesis of the decision, once it was made, Carter and his wife took a boat trip down Idaho’s appropriately named River of No Return, then on to the nearby Grand Tetons for a vacation. He was worn out and needed the break. But he was sent thick State Department briefing books containing extensive analyses of his two interlocutors—“their psychological background, their philosophical background, the history of their parents, what obligations they had made to their friends and allies, what public statements they had made.”
When he returned to the White House and read his staff’s briefing book for what they envisioned as an unambitious meeting, he admitted he was “really pissed off” at the “very timid approach” his advisers wanted him to take at Camp David. He summoned them angrily to the White House. “I wanted for them to present to me a maximum possible settlement that we might reach at Camp David. So I told them to completely revise it.”10
It cannot be overemphasized how unprecedented this conduct was for an American president. Time-honored practice is to test the waters before inviting another head of state—never mind two who so thoroughly distrusted each other—without even knowing whether he or she would accept. Kissinger called the president11 to warn that a head of state should never go into a negotiation with a foreign leader unless he knew in advance how it would come out. He suggested that perhaps someone outside the administration—read Dr. Kissinger—could negotiate, so a failure would not hurt the president.
Summits almost always follow a tight script prepared well in advance, with an agreement or joint statement carefully negotiated during weeks or months by trusted aides to avoid the possibility of a failure. None of this existed at Camp David, not even an agreed process for this unique three-way negotiation. It was all done on the fly—a high-wire act of the first order without a net, with uncertain results, and the likelihood of failure far greater than the chance of succe
ss. Indeed there was no common understanding even of what success meant, since the leaders of the three countries had different goals. Nevertheless, Carter plunged ahead, and on August 8, 1978, made his surprise announcement to the world convening the meeting.
Sadat jumped at the offer and told Vance he had already realized that a summit meeting was necessary; Begin was also positive but showed no signs of flexibility.12 For Sadat, failure would bring dangerous repudiation in the Arab world; for Begin, failure could undermine Israel’s irreplaceable military and diplomatic support by the United States; for Carter, failure would further damage his already shaky presidency.
Before leaving for Camp David, the president told me to hold down the home front and essentially run the government with the vice president, thinking he would be away for only a few days. This was less grandiose than it might seem. It meant keeping the policy process moving forward on all our issues inside the administration and with Congress, until he could return to make final decisions. Still, it was an unusual time, and I did not want to bother him with anything beyond what he was concentrating on at Camp David day and night.
The issues he faced were staggering: first, securing a withdrawal of all Israeli military forces, bases, and settlements from the Egyptian Sinai in return for full recognition of Israel; second, defining the interim status of the Palestinians in the West Bank in a way that would allow Sadat to present a victory for his Arab brethren. Two others were almost insoluble dilemmas: satisfying Begin’s restrictive conditions for controlling what he considered biblical Israel, while limiting Israeli settlement enlargement on the West Bank and Gaza; and, finally, settling the status of Jerusalem—a holy city for the three different religions of the principal participants, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
SETTING THE STAGE
Carter deliberately set an informal air to encourage interaction between the delegations and a greater willingness to compromise. Protocol was ignored for seating in the dining room, as was dress and even the manner of speech.13 Every member of each delegation received a blue Windbreaker with “Camp David” emblazoned in gold letters. Begin maintained his characteristic formality in suit and tie, although occasionally he wore an open-collared shirt. Carter favored faded blue jeans, which some in the Egyptian delegation found improper and unnerving for a president of the United States. The Egyptians in general dressed more formally, and while Sadat usually did not wear a tie, his sports clothes were impeccable, and his aides followed his lead with clothes of studied elegance.14 This informality did not succeed in breaking down barriers of historical enmity, dating back more than three millennia, when the Jews fled Egyptian slavery in their exodus to the Promised Land. Dayan recorded that “the leaders did not get closer to each other and found no common language.”15 So solutions had to be floated by the Americans shuttling back and forth along the lovely paths connecting the two delegations, and not from the two Middle East leaders working out their problems in concert.
President Carter Page 61