Memoirs of a President Once again an all too familiar tale of bloodshed and tragedy in the Middle East dominates the world's news. In Lebanon, foreign soldiers troop the streets of Beirut in hopes of keeping that country's feuding factions from one another's throats. In Israel, a nation shaken by the question of its culpability, by omission or commission, for the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut, Prime Minister Menachem Begin faces the greatest challenge yet to his five-year rule. Against this backdrop, TIME begins excerpting on the following pages the memoirs of an American President, who, as he writes, "spent more of my time working for possible solutions to the riddle of Middle East peace than on any other international problem." It was Jimmy Carter who brought Begin and Egypt's President Anwar Sadat together for 13 days of highly charged negotiations that finally produced the Camp David accords of September 1978. That agreement remains the framework for a broader peace settlement now being pushed forcefully by Ronald Reagan.
In Keeping Faith, a 622-page account of his White House tenure to be published on Nov. 2 (Bantam Books; $22.50), Carter presents the most intimate and detailed version to date of the scene behind the scenes at Camp David—the intense arguments, the searing animosities, the repeated near breakdowns before final success. He also illuminates Begin's often infuriating and exasperating behavior today by offering insights gained at Camp David into the Israeli Prime Minister's character.
This week's excerpt is the first of two that TIME will present from the book that, the author notes in his preface, "is my own work, typed by me at home on my trusty word processor. " To produce it, he condensed some 5,000 pages of recollections he had dictated daily while serving in the Oval Office. In Part 1, Carter not only reviews the tumultuous days at Camp David but also comments, in an exclusive four-hour interview with TIME, on current Middle East relations and on the policies, foreign and domestic, of his successor, whom he does not admire.
Prelude to Camp David
Looking back, I find it remarkable how constantly the work for peace in the Middle East was on my mind. I had made an extensive visit through Israel in May 1973, while still Governor of Georgia, invited by Prime Minister Golda Meir to learn at first hand about her nation. This gave Rosalynn, Jody Powell, who was to become my White House press secretary, and me a chance to learn more about the land of the Bible, which we had studied since early childhood. We spent almost a week traveling around the surprisingly tiny country. For three days, before dawn, I was in the streets of Old Jerusalem, and filled each day and night with exciting visits to holy places of ancient history and to sites where history was still being made.
We lunched with the mayor of Nazareth, drove all around the Sea of Galilee, went to Cana, walked the hills around Capernaum, studied the excavations at Jericho, worshiped at Bethlehem and swam in the Dead Sea. Rosalynn and I also walked along the escarpments of the Golan Heights, traveled slowly down the entire length of the Jordan River, rode the torpedo boats at Haifa and viewed a parade at a military training center at Bethel.