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Irish Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Irish Times
‘There's a menace, an edge to life in America that wasn't there before. And the possibility of dark stuff'
Night after night on the drive from the White House to the family home in McLean, across the Potomac in Virginia, Zbigniew Brzezinski would recall the events of the day into a recorder as he watched the city slip by from the rear window. He couldn't have known it then, but he was speaking to an unlikely future lunch companion and a collaboration he would not live to see. Edward Luce, now the Financial Times' US national editor and columnist, was a schoolboy in England when Brzezinski was at the peak of his influence as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter during the crowded, significant four years between 1977 and 1981 of international crisis and diplomacy. 'I got a radio for Christmas in 1979,' recalls Luce when we meet. 'And I remember running into my parents' bedroom on Boxing Day and telling them the Russians invaded Afghanistan. I had a pretty bad impression then of Brzezinski as an ultra-hawk, which was not a rounded impression of him. I knew of him, but not in the way people knew about Kissinger. I mean, John Cleese was referencing Kissinger in Fawlty Towers.' Brzezinski was a counterweight to Henry Kissinger in the fraught cold war decades: never as famous, not as quotable, but just as consequential. He and Kissinger passed through Ellis Island within six weeks of one another, as adolescents, in 1938. It was the beginning of what Luce describes as a 'frenemyship', with a cinematic arc covering seven decades. The Brzezinski family gave Luce the transcriptions of those recordings when their father died, in 2017, aged 89. To the end, Brzezinski, a precocious Polish emigrant who arrived in Washington via Harvard to become the pre-eminent Sovietologist of the era, remained a fiercely independent thinker – and a Washington outsider. READ MORE Edward Luce. Photograph: Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan via Getty Fortunately for Luce, he was an immaculate keeper of records. Part of him always mourned his Warsaw childhood, and he developed an intense friendship with Pope John Paul II. Brzezinski's children also gave Luce full access to their father's letters and papers and their blessing to write an unauthorised biography. Luce was hooked, and understood that as well as immersing himself in contemporary histories, he was, as he writes, in 'a race against the actuarial clock' with Madeleine Albright and president Carter among the 100-odd interviewees he sat with in the twilight of their lives. 'It is obsessional,' says Luce, hopping on to the couch in his livingroom on a dazzling Saturday afternoon. Luce is a sprightly 56, quick to find humour and slightly bleary from a Friday evening book-publishing party held in his honour. His wife, Niamh King, who is Irish and director of the Aspen Strategy Group, says the most dedicated guests drifted back here, to their home in Georgetown, to prolong the night. She makes coffee and sets down a plate of Cadbury's Fingers, a treat she correctly predicts an Irish guest will appreciate – and shares the name of the store that stocks them. In the acknowledgments, Luce includes an exchange that became an in-joke during his four years spent on the book: at the dinner table, Niamh asks him to pass the salt. 'SALT 1 or SALT 2?″ comes the absent-minded reply. The term – referencing the strategic arms limitations talks – is a useful metaphor for the vanished world of high geostrategy to which Luce returned. 'It is apocryphal,' he says of the dinner table story. 'But what does Trump call it? Truthful hyperbole. Yeah, it is obsessional. Any other reading is an opportunity lost. It is a vast subject covering about 90 years. You need to include the rivals to Brzezinski and what their Sovietology was: you can't understand him without understanding his context. But it is inexhaustible. You either write a biography properly or not at all. And I felt it was not irrelevant to what happens today.' Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski arrives to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters The subtitle to Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski is America's Cold War Prophet. Brzezinski's steadfast view- that the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of its distinct internal nationalities – was borne out. But his reputation was welded to that of Jimmy Carter. The men could hardly have been more different – the laconic southern Baptist and the bright, abrasive son of Polish aristocrats. They shared an intellectual hunger, a thriftiness that one reviewer described as 'comical tightfistedness' and, perhaps, too, an aloofness that did not go down well in Washington. 'That was a big mistake,' says Luce of the Carters' decision to keep their distance from Washington society events. 'Carter thought the people he was shunning were snobs – but they thought he was being snobbish by spurning them. And there was a sort of preachiness about Carter that really rubbed them up the wrong way. Carter was the first real modern outsider president. The way to fix that was to dive in and immerse yourself. There was a bit of Obama there, too – an impression of being supercilious and above-you-people. Which is not good politics.' After losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, Carter found himself, as Luce writes, 'an orphan of history, disavowed by his party'. But Brzezinski also found himself in the wilderness through the 1980s. 'Yeah. He was really cast out. And he did a lot to get himself cast out. He was extremely rude to people. And his memoirs were ill-advised. He really did lionise himself and take down everybody else – except for Carter,' says Luce, laughing. 'And it was strange – he was actually very generous intellectually with people he thought were worth it. He usually attacked arguments, not people. But that memoir did him an enormous amount of damage. And he was a pariah amongst Democrats for years. The fall of the Soviet Union redeemed him. He was a superstar again. But he was a very restless soul. He was at his best having battles. So he didn't bask in any glory. In the 1990s he got very involved in Bosnia, and that is where Clinton used him. He was very pro-Nato. He really saw through Putin post-9/11 and was a really incisive critic of what was the establishment view. He was not part of the establishment – even in his grandest, most vindicated autumn years, he never was. And I think that is a good thing.' By then, Luce had moved from India, where he was a correspondent with the Financial Times, to Washington, where his weekly columns are frequently scathing of the current administration. He occasionally met Brzezinski for lunch in various haunts and came to like the senior man, who was generous with what Luce calls a 'deep fund of historical memory'. [ No limits? Why the United States could be on the verge of a constitutional crisis Opens in new window ] So Luce has had a busy May, double-jobbing as both guest at the recent FT Spring Festival, where he spoke with the newspaper's editor, Roula Khalaf, about his biography, before turning public interviewer to Steve Bannon. That event closed the show in front of a packed auditorium. The crowd was giddy: evening drinks loomed and Bannon excels at provocation, drawing murmurs of polite outrage when he cheerfully declared the recent papal conclave rigged and predicted that Trump would run for – and win – a third term (the constitutional limit is two terms). Luce has lived in the US for two decades and has travelled enough of the country to understand the reasons why the Maga faithful have come to see Trump as a messianic figure. 'Yes, I can. And as I said to Bannon: I agree with half of what you are saying. The diagnosis is good. But ... habeas corpus being suspended does not follow 'this is a plutocracy'. He is correct. It is a plutocracy. And the Left is too much a part of it. They are the cognitive and managerial elites who don't want to upset their part in the firmament. And until they get fire in their belly – and it has to be populist – then Trump or Trump-like figures are going to win or have a really good chance, assuming the system is free and fair next time. But Bannon understands that people hate the establishment in America and have pretty good reason to. And with Trump, it is not that people believe what he says. It is that him lying to them sounds more authentic and truthful than the Democrat blow-dried, focus group-tested, risk-averse talking points that so many of them campaign on.' Recently, Luce and Niamh found themselves chatting about the sense of unease they both detect in Washington now. His first experience of the city was as a speechwriter for Larry Summers, who was an avid FT reader, in the carefree 1990s. 'Summers and Greenspan and Rubin and these people – what were they called? 'Masters of the Universe' by Time magazine. When I came back here, the Pentagon was the department, not the treasury. It was a fortress mentality, and a very different town to the one I left. Less pleasant. But nothing like today. Trump has been the real change. Ten years ago, when your plane touched down in Dulles or DCA [Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport], you were coming home. Because we had been here for so long. And you would relax. Now I just tense up wherever I am coming in from. There is a menace, an edge to life. Not just in Washington, but in America, that just wasn't there before. And the possibility of dark stuff. I guess what schoolkids must feel when they do shooting drills. You are suddenly aware of something.' If Kamala Harris won ... in some ways it would have been darker than what we are going through now. I think the country would have broken down For the first time, he finds his 'heart skips a beat' going through emigration as a green-card holder. It is just six months into the new administration. It is impossible to predict the state of the nation in 2028. And there are no heavyweight strategic thinkers of Brzezinski's ilk to be found in government in Washington any more. Luce's biography, which has received uniformly dazzling notices, is a salute to a vanished age of intellectual and moral rigour. Luce's daughter Mimi, in a welter of school exam study, pops in to say hello. Luce describes his family background as 'privileged, quite posh ... not moneyed'. His father, Baron Richard Luce, was lord chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth. During the royal funeral, Ed and his father were guests on the popular MSNBC show Morning Joe, co-hosted by Joe Scarborough and Brzezinski's daughter, Mika: the hosts are a couple. Luce walks across to the bookcase and finds a photo-still of the television appearance. He had advised his father about video-link decorum. 'Just: please don't put the iPad up your nose.' His father paid no heed and then delighted in telling the hosts that Ed had been expelled from school in his younger days. 'It was excruciating,' says Luce cheerfully. 'But it was good television.' Then US vice-president Kamala Harris shakes hands with her presidential rival Donald Trump during a debate last September. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty London will always be home, even if Britain, post-Brexit, feels 'very Lilliputian and kind of grey'. But still, there were times last year, with the political atmosphere truly poisonous and the election forecasts see-sawing between Trump and Kamala Harris, that the family 'were seriously considering, if Kamala Harris won, we could actually move to London'. 'In practice, it would have been the Weimar Republic on steroids,' he explains. 'In some ways it would have been darker than what we are going through now. I think the country would have broken down. So, the Trump victory was the least-bad outcome in terms of social stability and the worst in governance. There would have been violence.' Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Cold War Prophet is published by Simon & Schuster in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK. Ed Luce will appear at the Dalkey Book Festival on Friday and Saturday, June 13th and 14th
BBC News
6 days ago
- Business
- BBC News
The foreign policy titan who saw this moment coming
Ever since World War Two, the United States has boasted a storied bench of foreign policy titans – primarily men – who more or less managed to stay above partisan politics to focus on shaping the world order. Think of people like Henry Kissinger. George Kennan. Robert McNamara. Jim Baker. Among them is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish immigrant who worked his way up from escaping World War Two, to becoming the US National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski's life has as much history in it as just about anyone I can think of. His earliest memories were of living as a child in Germany and watching the Nazis rise to power. He spearheaded normalisation of US ties with China. He advised Jimmy Carter on how to handle the Iran Hostage Crisis. He was a key broker during the Camp David Accords. And he always believed the Soviet Union, the US's great foe, could be defeated, not just contained. Near the end of his life, Brzezinski had a warning for his adopted country. The Soviet Union was gone. The economy was strong. The US seemed invincible. But Brzezinski feared that a decline in US leadership was coming – and that it would be disastrous for both the US and the rest of the world. Ed Luce is a journalist at the Financial Times and author of the new book, Zbig. We spoke about why Brzezinski was such a prophetic figure in US foreign policy – and what he would have made of the current state of the world. It was a really eye-opening conversation; you can watch (or read) more of it below. Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. Katty Kay: Why choose Zbigniew Brzezinski? Why, in this moment, write about that person? Edward Luce: I was given tonnes of primary material, including the diaries he kept as national security adviser, where he would sort of speak paragraphs into his dictaphone every night, going home from the White House. I think his life was mostly dominated by the Cold War. So, when the Cold War ended, at a time when everyone else, or most other people, were triumphalist about the victory of the West and particularly of America, Brzezinski began warning that the rot now, from within, was America's major challenge. He accused Americans of hubris and of not understanding how quickly they could alienate Russia, Iran, China and fellow travellers. And that was quite prescient. And that's why the subtitle of my book is "America's great power prophet". He had a very good predictive record. KK: Was there something you learned writing this book, Ed, that made you think that this man seems relevant in 2025? EL: With a biography, you really need to get into the crucible where that character was made – and for Brzezinski, clearly it was interwar Poland, ending in this horrible conflagration where the Nazis and the Soviets divide the country and then raze it, essentially. In odd ways, it's not dissimilar to Henry Kissinger, whose Jewish extended family mostly died in the Holocaust and he coincidentally left Europe in the same year as Brzezinski: 1938. I think in both cases, but in very different ways, this shaped how they viewed the world, but one very similar way – which is that civilisation is inherently fragile; it's inherently unstable. I think that is something that both men, although they disagreed on so much, agreed on about America. It's that America somehow sees itself as standing apart from history and is not subject to its tragic laws. In 2025, with us living through what some people call the "revenge of geopolitics" that's going on around the world, it's very good for Americans to be reminded of the importance of understanding the value of what we have – and what we could be losing. A little bit like good health: you only rate it when you lose it. KK: As I went through the book, you keep coming across these issues around the world that America is still dealing with. There's Russia, there's the problems with Europe, there's the Middle East, of course the Iran hostage case, China – and it's the same issues, most of which have not been resolved. I wonder if there's anything in Brzezinski that would look at where we are today and say: "Maybe we didn't get it right". EL: I did a lot of interviews with Henry Kissinger for this book, and he said, "Look, I think what we don't understand so well in America is that history never stops. It goes on and on and on". If you look at how they both dealt with China, bringing China more into the American camp and breaking it away from the Soviets in the '70s. This was a brilliant strategic chessboard move, but of course it also seeded the rise of China, which is now a problem that America is indefinitely going to have to grapple with. Another is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: a perfectly sensible, although controversial, decision by Brzezinski to fund the Mujahideen rebellion against the Soviets. It helped contribute to the demise of the Soviet Union, but that then creates problems down the line of Islamism and worldwide terrorism. History does go on and on. And it does require solutions for the short and medium term, but there is never a permanent solution to anything. I think that sort of grit and pessimism at the heart of these strategic thinkers is something that's quite valuable. It schools us to realise you have to deal with what's in front of you and if you aim to an unrealistic height, you're going to fall flat on your face. KK: Are there any of those big strategic thinkers today? EL: Look, I think America is full of the most extraordinary scholarship of all regions of the world. But you don't see any scholar who's able to become a scholar practitioner in the way that Brezenski or Kissinger or George Kennan were. It's not because they're not there, but I think the demand for them has decreased. Foreign policy has become much, much more political. It's become domestic politics. Politics doesn't stop at the water's edge, as people used to say. KK: In his later years, Brzezinski felt that America lacked a kind of grand, overarching strategy. But you look at the Trump administration now and whatever you might say about the tactics and the implementation, Trump does have an overall grand vision for America, doesn't he? EL: I think it's a grand series of impulses. I don't think it has a real strategy behind it. The core of the Trump vision is essentially that we live in a jungle and big predators are more powerful than small predators. Trump sees the Western Hemisphere as America's backyard – and therefore we can do what we like, even to Canada, even to friends. Ukraine is Russia's backyard. And Taiwan, I think by implication, is China's. I don't think Brzezinski would have agreed – well, I know he disagreed with that. He would probably be looking to stoke Russian paranoia about China just to keep them a little bit suspicious of each other so that they don't unite. Things like Russian fears that China wants the territory back that the czars seized from it in the 19th Century. The fact that Russia is probably going to be the biggest beneficiary of climate change and you'll see the Siberian tundra unfreezing and becoming agricultural. China has acute population pressures. There's a lot of material to play with there, if you want to be Machiavellian and to pry Russia and China apart. I think he – and probably Kissinger, too – would be looking at that kind of strategy. I think Trump's policies are pushing Russia and China closer together which, again, just in terms of chessboard logic, it's not smart to unite your enemies. Try and keep them divided. Try and stoke mutual suspicion. --
New York Times
24-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Frank Moore, a Top Aide to Jimmy Carter, Is Dead at 89
Frank Moore, who as President Jimmy Carter's congressional liaison toiled with mixed results to sell the agenda of a self-professed outsider to veterans of Washington, died on Thursday at his home in St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 89. His son Brian confirmed the death. Mr. Carter was known for having a 'Georgia Mafia' around him during his presidency. Mr. Moore was a leading member of that group, and the two men remained close until Mr. Carter's death. According to the Georgia newspaper The Gainesville Times, Mr. Moore was the last living person to have worked for Mr. Carter for the entirety of his political career: as an aide from his days as a Georgia state senator all the way through his presidency. In Washington, the two men had what might have seemed like an ideal chance for legislative achievements. For all four years of the Carter administration, the Democrats controlled every branch of government, and from January 1977 to January 1979 they had supermajorities in the House and the Senate. Yet it was a less ideologically homogenous era for the party. The Democratic caucus in the Senate, for example, encompassed liberals like Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, staunch anti-Communists like Henry Jackson of Washington and conservative segregationists like John C. Stennis of Mississippi. These separate factions and their wily tacticians were relatively unfamiliar to Mr. Carter and Mr. Moore, who had first met far away from the nation's capital — on a local planning panel in Georgia in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s, after Mr. Carter had been elected governor, he made Mr. Moore his chief of staff. During Mr. Carter's presidential run, Mr. Moore, a soft-voiced 40-year-old who held the title of national finance chairman, was one of a few of Mr. Carter's Georgia allies to set up his campaign office in Washington. By the standards of Mr. Carter and his allies, that made Mr. Moore a Washington expert. Mr. Carter made him the White House's liaison to Congress immediately upon taking office. Mr. Moore set about introducing himself to all 535 members of Congress and their roughly 15,000 staffers. In February 1977, The New York Times reported that he met with Mr. Carter up to four times a day, signed off on almost all the memorandums that reached the president's desk, and helped formulate most official policy. 'I think I know about everything that's going on,' Mr. Moore told The Times. 'People are willing to give me more information than I can keep up with.' He worked so tirelessly that even after he slipped on ice and broke his wrist, he declined to see a doctor for a week, The Times reported in a profile. He stopped attending his family's dinners, leaving home before his children woke up and returning after they had gone to bed. It was not enough. Members of Congress complained that Mr. Moore failed to consult them when necessary, neglected to return their calls, did not have experienced aides and could not speak credibly on behalf of the new administration. 'Each cabinet officer is operating under his own ground rules,' Benjamin S. Rosenthal, a veteran House Democrat from Queens, complained to The Times in 1977, adding, 'Moore presumably is not strong enough to turn that around.' The Times called Mr. Moore 'the most maligned man in the Carter administration.' Mr. Carter himself was gaining the reputation of a political novice and micromanager. Responding to criticism, the administration issued ambitious new domestic policy proposals: welfare overhaul, energy reform, inflation reduction, budget balancing and measures that would reverse the decline of cities. With Mr. Moore's help, Mr. Carter passed legislation cutting taxes, reorganizing the Civil Service and creating new cabinet departments for energy and education. But many other administration proposals, like urban aid and welfare reform, gained little traction. During the summer of 1979, Mr. Carter asked his entire cabinet to submit resignations. 'Speculation about possible staff changes,' The Times reported, 'has centered on Frank B. Moore, the president's congressional liaison, who has been blamed for many of his difficulties with Congress.' In the end, Mr. Carter accepted resignations from five cabinet officials, but Mr. Moore remained in his role. Mr. Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. 'They ran against Washington, then became part of Washington, and were neither psychologically nor mechanically equipped to deal with that,' Representative Rosenthal told The Times. Francis Boyd Moore was born on July 27, 1935, in Dahlonega, a Georgia mining town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. His father, Charles, ran a small Ford dealership and hardware store. His mother, Elizabeth (Boyd) Moore, was a teacher. He studied accounting at the University of Georgia and earned a bachelor's degree there in 1960. He also met a fellow student, Nancy Wofford. They married in 1962. Before working with Mr. Carter on the Georgia planning panel, Mr. Moore tested the cereal market in Georgia as an employee of Quaker Oats. After Mr. Carter's presidency, Mr. Moore was vice president for government affairs at Waste Management, a leading garbage removal company. An avid reader of World War II history, he was also involved in the planning of war memorials in the United States and abroad. In addition to his son Brian, Mr. Moore is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth and Courtney Moore; another son, Henry; a sister, Ann Wimpy; and five grandchildren. His wife died of cancer in 2024. In 2023, Mr. Moore told The Gainesville Times that he spoke to Mr. Carter on the phone every week. In spite of their four years together in Washington, they hardly ever spoke about the White House. Their favorite topics, Mr. Moore said, were hunting, family and their recollections of characters of yore from the Georgia state legislature. But Mr. Moore did discuss his record in Washington at length in a retrospective oral history interview with the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, which focuses on presidential scholarship. Mr. Carter, in his analysis, was an 'activist president,' which meant that fighting with Congress was unavoidable. 'The way to have good congressional relations,' Mr. Moore said, 'is not to send any controversial legislation.'
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump-aligned legal group fights to restore merit-based federal hiring
FIRST ON FOX — A legal group closely aligned with President Donald Trump is joining a federal court battle in Washington, D.C., to overturn a Carter-era consent decree that bars the government from using merit-based hiring, a resolution that, if overturned, would dissolve one of the most influential civil service decisions of the last 40 years. The America First Legal Foundation (AFL), a group aligned with Trump, has filed a federal complaint in Washington, D.C., that aims to dismantle what it calls a dated and illegal effort to promote diversity in federal hiring that sidelines more qualified candidates. "America is missing out on top talent because of an illegal, 44-year-old consent decree," Nick Barry, senior counsel at AFL, told Fox News Digital. "We must move back to merit-based evaluations. Race and other immutable traits have no place in that process." Judge On Warpath Presses Trump Doj On Abrego Garcia Deportation, Answers Leave Courtroom In Stunned Silence The lawsuit targets the Luevano consent decree, an agreement that Black and Hispanic plaintiffs struck with the government under President Jimmy Carter in 1981. The settlement ended merit-based hiring practices for federal government agencies and required written tests to be replaced with alternative assessments. Critics of these alternative assessments, including AFL and the firm Boyden Gray, PLLC, which joined the complaint, argue they are clunky and outdated solutions that illegally promote an unfair system of race-based hiring. Read On The Fox News App "We must move back to merit-based evaluations," Barry added. "Race, color and other immutable characteristics have no place in that evaluation." The Office of Personnel Management had previously asked the court to end the Carter-era system, an effort that AFL and Boyden Gray now join, arguing it violates Supreme Court precedent. "Being able to recruit the best and brightest to work in Washington returns dividends for the country by doing more with less," AFL Vice President Dan Epstein told Fox News Digital. "That is what all Americans deserve from their government." AFL's backing could bring new momentum to OPM's attempt to end these hiring practices in the federal government. But it's also likely to be met with a fair degree of criticism. Though efforts to end or replace the 40-year-old alternative assessment systems aren't exactly radical, the filing comes as the Trump administration continues to clash with government employees over agency budget cuts and workforce reductions. The case, if heard in court, could reignite debate across the country over race-conscious hiring practices. 100 Days Of Injunctions, Trials And 'Teflon Don': Trump Second Term Meets Its Biggest Tests In Court America First Legal, though not officially part of the Trump administration, was founded by longtime Trump advisor Stephen Miller, one of Trump's most vocal advocates for tougher immigration enforcement, dismantling DEI programs and ending affirmative action in public education. Miller stepped down from AFL before rejoining the White House in 2025. The effort also comes at a time when many federal agencies have struggled to cope with a massive loss of personnel and institutional knowledge due to funding cuts and other orders from DOGE, the quasi-government efficiency agency headed up by billionaire Elon Musk. Still, AFL sees its effort as supporting OPM and ending what it argues is a virtually "impossible" standard to create a broadly used merit-based civil service exam. Click To Get The Fox News App "Public service is a public trust," Epstein said. "Presidential administrations from both parties have long advocated ending unaccountable bureaucracies that fail to do a good turn for the American people." Neither OPM nor the White House immediately responded to Fox News's request for comment on the new court filing or on their views on the existing hiring article source: Trump-aligned legal group fights to restore merit-based federal hiring
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
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. Going in, the odds were poor that he would get Sadat and Begin to agree on anything. Yet his mind was set to try; the only question was about the location. He and Brzezinski discussed Spain, Morocco, Portugal and Norway. Each had pros and cons. Casablanca had a particular resonance. After several days of back-and-forth, Carter finally settled on Camp David, the president's official Maryland retreat. That would give Americans full control over the logistics. Brzezinski and Vance both saw Carter's move as the right thing to do. If it failed, however, it could be politically suicidal. On this issue, at least, the two advisers were in agreement. Going for broke in the Middle East had not been their idea. But both admired Carter for his courage. Carter had already provoked pro-Israeli U.S. groups, including the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, over his decision to link arms sales to Egypt and Saudi Arabia with Israel's own military transfers. AIPAC's executive director, Morris Amitay, Brzezinski's bête noire, had pulled out all the stops to delink Israel's plane deliveries from those to its big Arab neighbors — fighter jets that Begin said could be turned against Israel. Neither Carter's nor Vance's protestations that they would be used for defensive purposes swayed the pro-Israel lobby. They knew that the real reason Carter was traducing his own strict rules on arms sales was Cold War-related. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia needed to be kept inside the American camp. Since an alliance of conservative Republicans and Ted Kennedy liberals would doubtless defeat the Arab military transfers in a standalone vote, the White House lumped all the sales into one package. Carter was daring Congress to vote against sending arms to Israel. The campaign against the bill targeted Brzezinski as its main culprit. 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. Apart from one brief photo-op, the media were kept off-site. Outside communications were impossible except via the phones in the cabins, which both the Israelis and the Egyptians wrongly assumed were bugged. In that fashion, Carter maintained silence about the state of the talks for almost two weeks. The delegations totaled 44 people with another 80 or so support staff. They were all packed into the complex, sleeping on hastily assembled cots in rooms designed for one or two. Brzezinski shared a room with Carter chief-of-staff Hamilton Jordan. Brzezinski's daughter, Mika, 11 at the time, bunked with the president's daughter, Amy Carter. The girls spent the first few days of the summit swimming, biking and watching movies. To them it was a holiday camp. By contrast, to the recalcitrant Begin, the accommodation was 'concentration camp deluxe.' After several days, everyone started complaining of cabin fever. Carter saw the Israeli and Egyptian delegations as mirror images of each other. Begin was by far the most obdurate and legally hairsplitting member of his team. Carter often turned to Moshe Dayan, the Israeli foreign minister, and Ezer Weizman, the defense minister, to find ways around their leader. They often obliged. At one fraught moment, Weizman and Dayan telephoned Ariel Sharon, Begin's tough agriculture minister, to get his support for dismantling Israeli settlements in the Sinai Desert. Sharon agreed to the move as long as it was put to the Knesset, Israel's parliament. Only then did Begin accede. Sadat's team, conversely, was filled with hawks. Sadat himself was poetic, emotional and serially impulsive, the opposite of Begin in terms of personality; frequently, however, his flexibility and willingness to be swayed by Carter's appeals to history alienated him from his own delegation in a way that worried the president. At 4:15 a.m. one morning, Carter woke Brzezinski on his cabin phone and asked him to come over. The president was paranoid about Sadat's security fearing that he could have been assassinated by one of his own aides. Carter had inadvertently disclosed to one of Sadat's most hawkish negotiators a big concession the Egyptian leader had made to him in a private meeting. At 10 o'clock the previous evening when Carter walked over to Sadat's cabin, he was told the Egyptian leader was asleep even though the lights were still on. Since Sadat was a famous night bird, he feared the worst. 'Zbig, I am very much concerned for Sadat's life,' said Carter, who had awakened with a terrible premonition. Brzezinski quickly tightened security and had all the comings and goings from Sadat's cabin monitored. During a post-dinner chat Brzezinski had one evening with Weizman and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Egypt's deputy foreign minister, the latter disclosed his view that Sadat should not sign the draft deal being hammered out. Its provisions for Palestinian autonomy were too vaguely worded and could easily be re-interpreted by Begin; Sadat would be putting himself at severe risk both in the Arab world and at home. His forebodings were prophetic; Sadat would later be assassinated amid the backlash. For the same reason, Boutros-Ghali's boss, Mohammed Ibrahim Kamel, resigned before the summit was over (though he agreed to keep it private until afterward). Kamel had been in place only a few months; his predecessor had quit in protest at Sadat's trip to Jerusalem. Most of the business with Sadat was conducted privately by Carter. After three days, Carter concluded that nothing would be achieved with the Israelis and Egyptians in one room. They were too far apart and an atmosphere of mistrust was pervasive. At their supposedly collective meals, the Egyptian and Israeli delegations sat at separate tables. The only exception was when Weizman shifted ostentatiously to the Egyptian table to prove a point. 'There was a lot of bantering, laughing, exchanges of anecdotes,' Brzezinski observed in his diary entry for that day. (Brzezinski's Tolstoyan-length White House diaries were shared with me by his family without strings attached.) 'Dayan sat at the other table sulking, obviously irritated by Weizman's little coup.' Begin ate kosher food prepared by the camp's Filipino cooks, alone in his cabin. Carter therefore switched from playing broker to taking charge of parallel bilateral talks. He himself drafted many of the outlined texts. Neither before nor since has a U.S. president involved himself in a negotiation so closely and over such a long period of time. Brzezinski's contemporaneous jottings during the Carter years were often critical of the president, although rarely scathing. Throughout the Camp David summit, however, his admiration of Carter's mastery of detail and refusal to give up is striking. 'His textual criticisms are as good as by any expert,' he thought. Carter's voracious reading appetite was in other contexts a handicap; at Camp David it was indispensable. One morning, Carter spent almost four hours alone with the Israeli and Egyptian legal experts reviewing the document he had drawn up. 'I am immensely impressed by the amount of determination and concentration on detail that the president has been displaying,' Brzezinski wrote. For the most part, Brzezinski and Vance worked well together, although the latter's tendency to agree with everything Carter said was an annoyance. Vance was too much of a yes-man for Brzezinski's taste. Carter's relationship with the other key figures varied greatly. To First Lady Rosalynn Carter, the president described Begin as a 'psycho.' The coldness between them was tangible. Toward Sadat, on the other hand, Carter had deep affection. At one U.S.-only gathering, Carter was elaborating on the vast differences between the two leaders. His praise for Sadat was emphatic. 'My chemistry with him is good,' he said. 'I feel with him the way I feel with Cy Vance.' Vance replied, 'Yes, because Cy accommodates you the way Sadat does, isn't that right?' Everyone laughed. Pointing at Brzezinski, Carter added, 'Yes and you're just like Begin.' Brzezinski took that as a compliment. 'I think this remark was in some respects quite true,' he noted. When Carter could no longer face talking to Begin, he sent Vance. But he insisted that Brzezinski accompany the secretary of State to ensure a tough line was upheld. Brzezinski was the chief Begin handler, helped by their shared Polish background and love of chess. One afternoon, he challenged Begin to a game on his cabin porch. Begin grumbled that he had not played since he was interrupted in the middle of a game in 1940 when he was arrested by the Soviet NKVD. During his first encounter with Brzezinski, Mrs. Begin inconveniently turned up and blurted out, 'Menachem just loves to play chess!' Brzezinski lost the first game after he gambled his queen too soon. In the second he took a page from Begin's playbook and consolidated his defense first. He equalized. Over the following days, they played twice more, ending at two games apiece. At one tense stage of the talks, Begin asked Brzezinski to accompany him on a walk. He said he had always defended Brzezinski from unfair attacks in the Israeli and U.S. media. He therefore felt wounded to hear that Brzezinski was referring to the Israeli West Bank settlements as 'a form of colonialism.' He also heard that Carter had been using the same vocabulary. Begin described the idea that the settlements could be dismantled as 'fantasmorphic [sic].' If Begin could not be moved on the Israeli settlements, the whole endeavor would come to naught. Sadat's readiness to risk being the first Arab leader to recognize Israel was predicated on Begin's willingness to agree to eventual Palestinian self-determination, even if the timeline stretched to several years. Though the term 'two-state solution' was never used, that was Carter and Sadat's implicit goal. Sadat made it clear that the first part of the deal, in which Israel would gradually withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for Egypt's diplomatic recognition, had to be linked to an agreed-upon mechanism that would result in a Palestinian homeland. In spite of Carter's best efforts and various runarounds via his Israeli colleagues, Begin would not budge. He and Carter spent hours arguing about UN Resolution 242, which stated the 'inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.' Carter took the mainstream view that the language applied to the West Bank, which Israel had occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War. Begin insisted that the UN wording should not apply to the territories of what he called Judea and Samaria. Carter privately began to question the Israeli leader's sanity. Unbeknownst to him, Sadat had already decided to quit the negotiations. On day 11, Vance rushed in ashen-faced with the news that Sadat had ordered a chopper to take him to Dulles International Airport. The Egyptians were packed and ready to go. It was the second time Sadat had decided to bolt; on the first, Carter had physically blocked him from leaving the room. This time, Carter had to think of something more drastic; he threatened to downgrade relations with Egypt, which would risk pushing the country back into the Soviet orbit. Their friendship, and possibly even Carter's presidency, would come to an end if Sadat quit. 'I was dead serious and he knew it,' Carter wrote in his memoirs. Sadat wanted to know how Carter would ensure that Israel would commit itself to genuine substance on Palestinian autonomy, including language on East Jerusalem's sovereign status. Carter improvised a novel pledge; he told Sadat that if any part of the deal was abrogated, the whole package would unravel — an all-or-nothing promise to stop Israel from backsliding that he vowed he would publicize were it to happen. That pledge was enough for Sadat. After a lengthy pause, he promised to stick with Carter to the end. It is hard to imagine the two Middle Eastern leaders enduring 24 hours of negotiation with each other in Carter's absence. The final documents were a master class in linguistic sleight of hand. The Egypt-Israel part of the deal was relatively straightforward since both leaders wanted it. Carter nevertheless had to sweeten the pot by offering Sadat a large consignment of wheat and corn; with Begin, he agreed that the United States would finance two new airstrips inside Israel in exchange for Israel's giving up the two it had built in the Sinai. Carter's jujitsu lay in the second part of the deal. The wording on Palestinian autonomy was so imprecise that it would be child's play for a legal hairsplitter such as Begin to reinterpret. The package nearly came undone at the last minute 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 emotion in Begin. The Israeli leader's eyes filled with tears as he talked of each of his grandchildren, one by one. He waved through the next draft of the Jerusalem side letter, which was only slightly more anodyne than the one he had so adamantly rejected. Such are the idiosyncrasies that can bridge the gap between failure and success. When it became clear the deal was done, Carter sent Brzezinski back to Washington ahead of the others to brief the media. The final deal had two parts. The first was Israel-Egypt normalization. The second, which was Sadat's precondition for the first, was to start a longer process that would result in an autonomous Palestinian entity, though not a fully independent state. Most of the last-minute hitches and technicalities were handled by Vance and Carter. Though he had ably played the role of lieutenant, Brzezinski was a strategic thinker, much happier sketching out grander themes than haggling over legal terminology. The details came more naturally to Vance the lawyer and Carter the engineer. At about 5:30 p.m. on Monday, September 18, Vance told Carter, 'I think you have it.' Carter reclined in his chair with a wistful smile. 'No one spoke up, no one cheered, there was a sense of genuine admiration for what Carter had achieved,' Brzezinski wrote. At that moment a great storm hit Camp David. Flashes of lightning and thunderclaps added to the sense that history was being made. Once the winds abated, Brzezinski was the one who unveiled the deal to the world. He took a chopper to the White House and then briefed the media. Only then did he realize what a coup Carter had pulled off. Having been sealed off from the outside world for so long, he had forgotten that almost no one had a clue about what had been going on. 'There was an audible gasp when I announced the conditions of the Egyptian-Israeli agreement,' Brzezinski wrote later. 'The sense of excitement mounted steadily as the briefing went on.' What followed were essentially parallel movies. In the first movie, Washington, both houses of Congress and the world's media feted Carter as a master negotiator. Blessed are the peacemakers, Carter said, pointing at Begin and Sadat to bipartisan whoops and applause. Brzezinski's wife, Muska, had joined Rosalynn Carter and Gay Vance next to them in the congressional gallery. In the other movie, meanwhile, Begin was celebrating only the Egypt-Israel portion of the deal. He put his own stamp on a clause in which Israel promised that no new Israeli settlements would be built in the West Bank and Gaza Strip 'during the negotiations.' Carter and everyone else had taken that pledge to cover the upcoming five years of talks on Palestinian autonomy. But Begin declared that the freeze would hold only for the three months of negotiations needed to wrap up the final details of the Egypt-Israel treaty. His switch was a blow to Carter and especially to Sadat. It was an act of bad faith that Carter never forgave. A few weeks later, Sadat and Begin won a joint Nobel Peace Prize. 'Sadat deserved it,' wrote Carter. 'Begin did not.' Dayan and Weizman both expressed embarrassment to Carter and Brzezinski about Begin's actions. For the time being, however, all bitterness was set aside. At a celebratory cocktail party at Vice President Walter Mondale's official residence, Brzezinski was the toast of the American Jewish community. Though his role had been secondary, he took undisguised pleasure in his newfound popularity. Amitay, the smiling AIPAC leader, told Brzezinski that if Begin and Sadat could shake hands, they surely could, too. Brzezinski laughed, and they made peace. The following day, the New York Times' Washington bureau chief Scotty Reston called Brzezinski to confirm a story going around town that Sadat had been packed and ready to go and had been dissuaded from leaving by secret promises from Carter. Having no idea what Carter had promised to Sadat, Brzezinski told Reston he had to hang up as the president was calling. Carter then called him over to his office and related the details of his conversation with Sadat. He had told only Rosalynn and Vance about its content. Brzezinski was moved by Sadat's readiness to place his trust in Carter. 'You know the implication of this is that you have to be very steadfast on the settlements,' he told Carter. The president replied, 'I hadn't thought of that but that is true.' Three years later, Sadat was assassinated. Tragically, Carter's inability to enforce part two of Camp David fed into his brutal demise.
