One afternoon during the Camp David peace summit in September, 1978, U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski walked over to the presidential retreat’s Birch cabin and challenged Israel’s prime minister Menachem Begin to a chess game.
Begin accepted. But to lower expectations, he told Brzezinski he hadn’t played chess since the day in 1940 when Soviet security police arrested him in a crackdown on Zionists.
“It was a highly charged match: two Polish expatriates facing one another, each with a reputation for ruthless strategic brilliance,” Lawrence Wright wrote in his book Thirteen Days in September. “Begin identified Brzezinski with the Polish feudal lords who had made life so miserable for the Jews back in Brisk [Brest-Litovsk]. Brzezinski’s Catholic father had been a Polish diplomat to Germany during the rise of the Nazi Party and then to the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, so the associations were really stark.”
But, as Wright added, “For a man who hadn’t touched a chessboard in nearly four decades, Begin played surprisingly well.”
The prime minister’s narrative of a decades-long absence from chess began to fall apart when Begin’s wife Aliza walked onto the cabin’s porch and, as Ed Luce notes in his superb new book Zbig, “blurted out, Menachem just loves to play chess!”
The Israeli didn’t let the comment rile him. Brzezinski “gambled his queen too soon” and lost the first game. They played three more over the next few days. Luce wrote that the match ended in a 2-2 tie; Wright gave a different account: he said Begin won the match, 3-1 and noted that some believed Brzezinski let him win to heighten the chance the summit would succeed.
In any event, Brzezinski was the Begin whisperer for President Jimmy Carter’s team. The two men shared a language and an enmity for the Soviet Union, according to Luce’s biography of Brzezinski. The Israeli prime minister had done the national security adviser, who was dogged by unfair accusations of anti-semitism, a favor when he publicized the fact that Brzezinski’s father, as a Polish diplomat in Leipzig during the Nazi regime, had issued hundreds of exit visas to Jews.
Camp David
Carter’s relationship with Begin was toxic; he told his wife Rosalynn that Begin was a “psycho.” By contrast, Carter greatly admired Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, whose courageous trip to Israel in 1977 had broken the diplomatic logjam between the two enemy nations.
In a remarkable show of determination, Carter had resolved to achieve peace between Egypt and Israel and to solve the Palestinian issue by bringing Sadat and Begin to Camp David.
The presidential retreat, 140 acres in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, was acquired during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and first dubbed “Shangri-La.” But it was on Carter’s list of unnecessary extravagances to be axed after his 1976 election to the White House. He sold off the presidential yacht but wound up keeping Camp David after he learned that buried beneath its rustic cabins was a huge bunker, built during the Eisenhower administration and designed to protect the president and his advisers in the event of nuclear war. Eisenhower had named the retreat “Camp David” after his grandson.
Carter also grew to enjoy spending time at Camp David and viewed its isolation as the ideal venue for the Mideast summit, a place where the three leaders could reason together.
Once the event began, he quickly realized that he couldn’t make headway in meetings with both leaders, so he chose to approach Sadat and Begin by turns, one-on-one.
Despite several near breakdowns in the talks, Carter pulled off a huge diplomatic coup by getting Israel and Egypt to make peace. The Egyptians agreed to recognize Israel’s existence, a concession that other Arab nations furiously opposed. Begin agreed to return the Sinai peninsula to Egypt, a move which doomed Israeli settlements there.
Nobel-worthy
Sadat and Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the accomplishment; Carter should have been included in that award. (Carter, who would later receive a Nobel Prize for his post-presidential humanitarian work was favored for inclusion in the Camp David award by the Norwegian judges but the Nobel Foundation based in Stockholm said Carter’s nomination missed the deadline.)
So far President Donald Trump hasn’t gotten the Nobel Peace Prize he sought after claiming to have ended eight wars. But if the peace treaty his team has negotiated to conclude the Gaza War stands — and shifts the region toward lasting peace — it is an achievement that ranks up there with Carter’s breakthrough.
Yet the lesson of Camp David is a cautionary tale. The match between the two Polish emigres on that September day 47 years ago is just a symbol of the larger strategic game of chess that major powers constantly play.
Achieving grand objectives, including making a lasting peace among bitter enemies, takes extraordinary knowledge, skill, focus and perseverance. The world has to hope that the key players this time, including Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, the Qatari negotiators and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and their teams, can deploy those qualities.
Reflecting on Camp David, Lawrence Wright observed that only the president of the United States had the power and the standing to bring Egypt and Israel together. “And yet, until Carter, no American president had been willing to risk his prestige and perhaps his office to pursue such a distant goal.”
Carter, who was famously immersed in the trivial detail of White House activities, including who used the tennis courts, applied his formidable intellect to mastering the intricacies of Middle East history and grievances.
Crisis
On the fourth day of the summit, “Carter learned that Sadat was preparing to leave and Begin was drawing up a list of reasons why the summit had failed. Carter had no plan except to stall,” Wright wrote. Carter realized he had to be the go-between who strove to keep Sadat and Begin engaged in the peace process. It wasn’t easy.
Working from Camp David’s Aspen Lodge, Carter made separate visits to Sadat at the Dogwood cabin and Begin at Birch. He warned both leaders that the cost to their countries would be great if the United States lost faith in them.
There was a fundamental problem. “Begin had vowed to Brzezinski, ‘My right eye will fall out, my right hand will fall off, before I ever agree to the dismantling of a single Jewish settlement.’” There was no way Egypt would agree to recognize Israel without the return of the Sinai peninsula, which Israel conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. (That was also when Israel gained control of Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the old city of Jerusalem.)
Begin didn’t promise to remove the Israeli settlements in the Sinai but he did pledge to pose the issue to the Knesset and abide by their decision.
Then “the package nearly came undone at the last minute,” Edward Luce wrote, “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 emotions in Begin. The Israeli leader’s eyes filled with tears as he talked of each of his grandchildren, one by one…. Such are the idiosyncrasies that can bridge the gap between failure and success.”
At Carter’s request, Brzezinski helicoptered to the White House and told the media — and the world — of the agreement reached at Camp David.
But that was not the end of it. In the succeeding months, Begin argued that he had agreed to only a three-month moratorium on new Israeli settlements in the Gaza and West Bank occupied territories. Carter and Sadat thought that Israel had committed to suspend settlements for a five-year period while negotiations would continue over self-government for Palestinians.
In late February and March of the following year, Begin balked at agreeing to any substantial moves toward Palestinian autonomy.
As Luce noted, although Brzezinski “strongly objected to Begin’s vandalism of both the spirit and letter of part two of Camp David, he could not help but admire his iron will. There was something of the Polish cavalry charge in the Israeli leader’s spirit. ‘There is no doubt that in the negotiations, Begin knows exactly what he wants and is quite unyielding in seeking it,’ he observed. ‘Our objectives tend to be vaguer and our determination weaker.’”
After Begin visited the White House, Carter said, “if he wasn’t my guest I would have asked him to get the hell out of my house.”
Last-ditch effort
The president decided to make one last attempt to salvage the peace. He sent Brzezinski to visit Sadat in Egypt, where he offered to increase U.S. military aid to the regime, if Egypt went ahead with establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. Then Carter visited Cairo and Tel Aviv. And finally, Begin, Sadat and Carter signed the peace agreement at the White House.
It didn’t resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, as the recent history of the Middle East makes clear. But it did create a relationship between Egypt and Israel that has survived decades of turmoil.
In Wright’s view, “The failure to make a more explicit link between the comprehensive peace treaty, encompassing the West Bank and Gaza, with the separate peace between Israel and Egypt would essentially doom Palestinian national aspirations. ‘Sadat has sold Jerusalem, Palestine, and the rights of the Palestinian people for a handful of Sinai sand,’ Yasser Arafat commented bitterly.”
Sadat faced significant opposition in his own country over economic and political issues, including the peace treaty. Sadly, members of the Islamic Jihad assassinated him in 1981. Carter and other past and present world leaders attended the funeral. Begin flew to Cairo and walked to the event from his quarters, observing the rules of Shabbat.
In the four decades since Carter’s diplomacy, there have been innumerable attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, including the Oslo Accords of 1993, in which Israel agreed to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced terrorism. As a result of the Abraham Accords, agreed to during Trump’s first term, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco now recognize Israel.
But bigger questions remain: Will Saudi Arabia normalize relations with Israel? And will the new peace agreement that returns the hostages seized in Hamas’ brutal terror attack on October 7, 2023 bring peace between Israel and the people of Gaza after the agony of war?
What it takes
Above everything else, the story of Camp David and the lives of some of its key players speaks to the importance of single-mindedness.
The English intellectual Isaiah Berlin famously divided the great thinkers of western civilization into two camps, in a celebrated essay. He quoted an ancient Greek poet’s remark, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Hedgehogs are little mammals, with spiky quills, and they roll themselves into a ball for defense (not to be confused with porcupines, which are rodents).
There were the hedgehogs like Dante, those who believed in one big thing and the foxes like Shakespeare, who believed in many things.
Berlin, who was born in the Russian empire, was primarily concerned in his essay with the writer Leo Tolstoy’s world view. Tolstoy, he argued, was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. He was a genius at observing everyday life — as he demonstrated in War and Peace and Anna Karenina — who yearned for, but couldn’t formulate one overriding ideology to make sense of the march of history.
Berlin warned readers not to take his dichotomy too seriously, but it’s hard to resist.
Brzezinski and Begin were both hedgehogs.
Carter’s national security adviser was born in Poland and left at the age of 10 when his family moved to Canada. He watched from afar as his native country was conquered twice — by the Nazis and then the Soviets.
Brzezinski’s sharp tongue and sharper elbows were legendary and they help explain why he got so much negative press in Washington. But it was clear by the end of his life in 2017 that he had been right on many things, including one of the biggest strategic issues of his time.
His whole career as a foreign policy analyst and professional was aimed at achieving the dissolution of the Soviet empire, and he lived to see that happen. In fact, he helped bring it about.
Early on, he spotted the Achilles heel of the Soviet Union: its weak grasp on the empire’s many nationalities. He sought to capitalize on that vulnerability by working with Carter to expose Soviet human rights violations, by helping to deepen the quagmire created by Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan, by normalizing U.S. relations with China as a potential counterweight to the Russians, and by working behind-the-scenes with Pope John Paul II to help kindle the flame of democracy in their native Poland.
Begin’s one idea was the desire to recreate what he saw as the biblical land of Israel, including “Judea and Samaria,” the West Bank land inhabited to a great degree by Arabs. That helps explain Begin’s support for the Israeli settlers, whose decades of expansion have vastly complicated the prospect of a permanent peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
A useful contrast to Brzezinski and Begin was Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and later secretary of state. Kissinger had few fixed beliefs; he was fox-like in his ability to move from one position to another opportunistically, depending upon who was in power.
The Sunday school teacher
Carter did have one all-encompassing belief that animated his outlook: his religion. The born-again Christian and Sunday school teacher naturally gravitated to the plan for a Camp David summit, Lawrence Wright observed. The peace talks happened because of Carter’s “unswerving commitment” due to “his religious belief that God had put him in office in part to bring peace to the Holy Land.”
It was perhaps because of Carter’s spiritual bent that he gave the most damaging speech of his presidency. The address to the American people on July 15, 1979 has been called the “malaise” speech, even though Carter didn’t use that word.
The president had spent 10 days at Camp David, consulting with ordinary Americans, religious leaders, business executives, labor leaders, public officials and other experts to try to determine what ailed America.
Instead of focusing his talk on the weak economy and the energy crisis of the time, he broadened the lens.
The speech was “a kind of spiritual diagnosis,” James Poniewozik wrote for The New York Times after Carter’s death last year. “It both rues and exemplifies the inward turning of the times, manifest in America’s culture of self-help, self-discovery or, in the words of the speech, ‘self-indulgence.’ The president describes a crisis in ‘confidence’ — a word he repeats — and says, ‘We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives.’”
Three months after that speech, Carter bowed to pressure from Brzezinski and others to admit the ousted Shah of Iran to the U.S. for medical treatment. That led to the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian students, who took more than 60 Americans hostage. A complex U.S. rescue mission failed. Most of the hostages would remain prisoners for 444 days, until the day Carter’s 1980 presidential rival Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president.
Carter’s huge Mideast diplomatic success at Camp David didn’t win him re-election; it was overshadowed by the hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and, perhaps most significantly, the sorry state of the U.S. economy. In June of 1980, the “misery index” — inflation plus unemployment — exceeded 20 percent. When voters went to the polls in November, 1980, Carter’s approval rate was below 40 percent.
Success in foreign policy, even for the leader of a superpower, is extraordinarily hard. And when it comes, it doesn’t translate to lasting political success. Carter’s failure to win a second term was matched by that of George H.W. Bush, who won a lightning war against Iraq in 1992 and was voted out of office the next year. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill lost his parliamentary majority and his job in 1945, just as the allies were completing their victory in World War II.
A Gaza peace might win Trump his Nobel next year, but it won’t calm the crisis he has created at home with his grab for power beyond the normal limits of a president’s authority.