Carter Redux?
GLASS, ANDREW J.
CARTER REDUX? BY ANDREW J. GLASS JIMMY CARTER Washington It is a measure of this town rather than of Jimmy Carter that the same insiders who a few weeks earlier were calling him a hopeless...
...Some people in the President's own inner cicle are noting that peace in the Middle East is well and good, but it has little to do with soaring food prices and falling standards of living—the number one concern of Americans...
...He put that part of it together single-handedly...
...Of course, Carter has his faults—as do Sadat and Begin...
...Whereupon Carter lost his patience and replied, "I'll give you the same consideration you have been giving us...
...That institution has already pushed the cost of money, at retail, above 10 per cent...
...One shrewd American once observed that the Polish-born Israeli leader views Arabs the same way as Poles view Ukrainians...
...The question still being asked is: How did he do it...
...The President must soon make up his mind about his direction on these issues, for when all the cheering in the halls of Congress and in the press dies down, he will have to prove himself by fighting for tough yardage on the domestic front...
...Occasionally, the differing personalities of the three men would bring the tensions of the talks to the surface...
...Labor is equally opposed to expensive money for a different reason: It believes this is just another cost that fuels inflation...
...Even while he was on top of the mountain, Carter's economic staff sent up an option paper on the problem of inflation...
...In large part as a result of his triumph, Carter's ratings in the polls have shot up...
...It was he who decided that the negotiations should proceed on two parallel tracks—West Bank/Palestinians and Sinai/Egyptian peace (with Carter assuming personal responsibility for the Sinai track and supervising trie other one...
...Sadat, a man of wide vision, has been known to lose patience Andrew J. Glass, a frequent New Leader contributor, is head of the Cox Newspapers bureau in Washington...
...and his tenacity can make him a difficult man to work with...
...Spontaneously, the two Mideast leaders invited Carter to the signing ceremony in the Sinai...
...Yet whatever the obstacles he encountered—and it sometimes appeared that the needed breakthrough would elude him completely—Carter persisted in his dogged way for 13 days...
...Not only was the Camp David marathon Carter's idea to begin with, but he surprised the other Americans present with the audacity of his approach...
...But he is no Hercules either, as the last 20 months have repeatedly demonstrated...
...The American President is methodical and meticulous, persistent and patient, well-informed and well-mannered...
...He got to know every little wadi by heart...
...In the end his perseverance and persuasiveness won the day, and the three men left Camp David having achieved considerably more than had been anticipated...
...Having recovered from a heart attack, the Egyptian leader never works before 10 and starts his day with a two-kilometer walk...
...The President deserves neither appellation...
...Although a master of detail, he is capable of making eye-popping exaggerations and speaking imprecisely...
...To keep the ball rolling after the elections, Carter will probably change a face or two in his Cabinet, try hard to wind up a strategic arms accord with the Russians, and perhaps issue a Presidential proclamation on China to end some present ambiguities...
...President, let me finish what I have to say...
...He spent hour after hour with Begin and Sadat poring over maps of the Sinai...
...Carter, watching him go by in the piney woods, would break off from his work and quietly amble along for a while—seeking to reach in the mutual silence an almost mystical rapport with his guest...
...Like a Dickensian ghost, he conjured the grim future that lay ahead for Israel and Egypt in the absence of compromises and peace...
...Carter's economic people, by contrast, want a more restrictive monetary policy, a budget deficit of $30 billion or less in 1979-80, less regulation by government, and other measures that bring to mind the not so distant days when Arthur Burns pulled the economic strings in town from his post at the Fed...
...At the same time, Carter knew when to lay the papers aside to achieve results that only human contact can bring...
...Thus, with the midterm elections only a few weeks away, the newly popular President has been flying off hither and yon on morale-boosting campaign visits...
...They argue that further tightening of the money supply will choke off the housing and capital markets, triggering another recession?just in time for the Presidential elections of 1980...
...He has never been a hick—after all, even 40 years ago, as a determined boy in Plains, Georgia, he had his own tennis court...
...As for Begin, he is capable of piling on refinements and qualifications that can purge the underlying generosity from any concession he makes...
...When it came to dealing with Sadat, the native Israelis, Defense Minister Ezer Weizman and Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, saved the day...
...Carter and Sadat are excellent listeners, Begin is not...
...I'll be there," the President promised...
...The irrepressible Robert Strauss, whose White House tasks include dealing with such matters, wants Carter to go back to Camp David with the American industrial and union elite in tow to hammer out a new accord on prices and wages...
...In the long run, the fate of the voters' pocketbooks may bear more heavily on the future of his presidency than the fate of the Arabs and Israelis...
...The political types contend that much of the good will generated by the success of the summit could vanish, like the South Georgia dew, if the President hitches his wagon to guidelines that will be unpopular with both business and labor and therefore will not work...
...and tear down with one swift blow the work of less mercurial men...
...He used moral arguments without shame and backed them up with a political vision that portrayed Camp David as a crucial turning point in Middle East history...
...The answer, I think, can be found in his personal qualities...
...The Prime Minister began nearly every session by lecturing Carter on Jewish history—a subject that the President, a lifelong Bible student, feels he knows well enough...
...He is the kind of Southerner whom other Southerners, without embarrassment, call "a fine Christian gentleman...
...During that same trip, Sadat and Begin decided to try to sign a separate peace treaty in mid-November, exactly a year after the Egyptian President's historic visit to Jerusalem, and a month before the deadline set for the two nations to conclude a pact...
...Further, he displayed an amazing grasp of detail...
...Congressmen who had snickered through the summer about Bozo Jimmy the Peanut-Eating Clown rush up to the microphones on airport tarmacs to lower their figurative laurus nobili upon the majestic Presidential brow...
...Riding in a helicopter through a thunderstorm on the way back to the White House, Carter generously put through a call to Gerald Ford in California to give him the news of the agreements...
...These virtues helped reconcile, as much as they can ever be reconciled, the proud Anwar Sadat and the tough-minded Menachem Begin...
...Sometimes, Sadat would come strolling by the President's cabin, lost in thought, a pipe clenched between his teeth...
...Some of the political people around Carter, including Strauss, fear that a continued trend in this direction would be ruinous...
...BY ANDREW J. GLASS JIMMY CARTER Washington It is a measure of this town rather than of Jimmy Carter that the same insiders who a few weeks earlier were calling him a hopeless Georgia hayseed were the first to enshrine him as the greatest living statesman in the Western world after he came down from the mountain of Camp David...
...The President, of course, is well aware that he must now focus on inflation...
...Indeed, he pulled off a remarkable diplomatic coup and thereby effectively stilled the incompetency issue...
...Still, it remains to be seen how long successes on the foreign front can overshadow troubles at home...
...Begin did not display much deference to Arab pride either...
...One of the proposals contained in the document called for stricter, albeit still voluntary, wage-and-price guidelines, and has set off a minor behind-the-scenes battle between the economic types and the political types in the Administration...
...A second area of fiscal disagreement involves the Federal Reserve...
...Yet as White House media advisor Gerald Rafshoon has noted: "If Carter had not been such a 'detail man,' the [Egyptian] agreement could never have been reached...
...The President has often been criticized for seeming to know more about a problem than a Chief Executive should decently want to know, and a fondness for paperwork is one of the few traits he shares with Richard Nixon...
...Now the President and his crew are concerned about keeping this political momentum going—a matter they are not about to leave to chance...
...At one point, when Carter sought to interrupt him, the Prime Minister said, "Just a moment, Mr...
...The economists claim, in effect, that specific wage-and-price guidelines may not solve inflation, but they amount to the least objectionable course of action—assuming that something must be done...
...None of this, of course, is to take away from the fact that Carter, working against high odds, performed with great skill at the summit meeting...
...It was he, too, who intelligently decided to keep Begin and Sadat apart, since they detest each other...
...He would arise well before the break of dawn, for instance, and often as not would be dictating to his secretary, SusanClough,at6:15A.M...
Vol. 61 • October 1978 • No. 20
