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.

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.