Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp DavidBy Lawrence WrightKnopf, 2014The news out of the Middle East - whether it be August's horrifying drama of Israel and Hamas shelling each other with rocket fire or some fresh hell from this morning's front page - has a sempiternal feel to it, a doleful cast of unbreakable futility in which the only landmarks are charnel pits. There are reactions, counter-reactions, furious op-eds and frantic retrenchments, but all conducted in a fog of utter frustration. It all feels like the latest production of a long-running show nobody wants to see, a morass in which there are no new initiatives, no brave thinkers, and no honest brokers.Which makes Lawrence Wright's new book Thirteen Days in September all the more startling as a reading experience. Wright, the bestselling author of the 9-11 study The Looming Tower and last year's expose of Scientology, Going Clear, focuses his attention now on the thirteen-day 1978 Middle East peace summit hosted by American President Jimmy Carter at Camp David (a thirty-minute helicopter ride from the lawn of the White House) and attended by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and there flickers throughout these pages the last thing our traumatized modern eyes expect to see: hope.There was certainly always legal groundwork for some kind of hope. In the long and tangled history of Israel's relations with the Arab world, there had been internationally-reached agreements for decades, earnest discussions, a United Nations resolution (242) adopted in 1967 in the wake of the Six-Day War, a conference in Geneva in 1973 (also in the wake of a war) - all striving either to calm age-old Arab rages against Israel or to force Israel to honor its many agreements regarding Palestinian land, rights, and nationhood.But all of it ended up disappearing into what Wright calls "the wasteland of good intentions.""The actors by now were playing out their roles in a trance," he tells us, a "spell of enchantment that had taken over the Middle East, in which violence could only be answered by greater violence."That spell was abruptly broken in November 1977 when Anwar Sadat, Egypt's charismatic and autocratic ruler (and, as Wright aptly puts it, "a master of the unexpected"), decided to risk everything - his nation, his standing in the Arab world, even his life - in order to travel to Israel, meet Prime Minister Begin, and address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and to try the inimitable one-two trick of both admonishing Israel for its land-greed in Gaza and the Sinai and extending to Israel the hand of Arab friendship. Wright is stirring on the psychological earthquake this represented:

Few Israelis had ever met an Egyptian, except for the Jews who had emigrated from there, so the shock of having Sadat himself in their midst was compounded by curiosity and wonder. The same was true for the Egyptians watching the event on television. To see Sadat staring into the faces of the enemy - until now, figures of legend - suddenly and unsettlingly humanized the Israelis in the Egyptian mind.

Sadat's sunny impression of his success in Israel was sharply at odds with the dark reactions of the Israelis themselves, especially Begin himself, who's portrayed in Wright's book as a kind of mirror-opposite of Sadat, the one suave and composed, the other moody and disheveled, the one bold and confident, the other cryptic and suspicious (as Wright reports, Israel's revered first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, compared Begin to Hitler: "He is a racist who is willing to kill all the Arabs in order to gain control of the entire land of Israel"). The best part of Thirteen Days in September - edging out even its breakneck pace and utterly confident narrative style - is Wright's almost Plutarchian skill at character sketches, and he returns to Begin often, telling us, "In his autobiographies, Begin comes off as intransigent, supremely sure of his great intelligence, passionate, riven with guilt, and full of rage ... His eloquence was always poised on the edge of sophistry and bombast, frequently slipping over the edge."But the best and shrewdest character study in this book is the aforementioned honest broker in the center seat: President Carter, the Georgia peanut farmer and former nuclear submarine officer who rose from rural obscurity to become governor of his state, then Democratic national candidate, then president - but one of the strangest of all presidents, a jarring blend of Huey Long's Louisiana and Calvin's Geneva. Carter was a born-again Christian evangelical who carried his own bags even as President, installed solar heating panels on the roof of the White House, and knew his Bible backwards and forwards, and Wright is always at his most evocative when describing the man:

He was intelligent but impersonal, with a kind of mechanical affect that made it difficult for people to like him. He frequently displayed a huge toothy smile - the subject of countless caricatures - but rather than warmth or humor the effect was often goofy, or insincere, or even menacing to people who saw the wrath behind it. Carter was by nature cool and reticent, but he turned icy when he was angry. His voice would go quiet, his eyes hardened into bullets, and he would smile inappropriately in what looked like a rictus. People who encountered him in this state rarely forgot it.

It was these three men who came together in September of 1978 at Camp David to build on the unprecedented moment of Sadat before the Knesset, and as its title implies, Thirteen Days in September is a day-by-day and at times hour-by-hour account of that summit, which most of the three staffs involved (to say nothing of the entire political establishments in all three countries) considered a waste of time. Wright has read all the memoirs and private accounts of those staff members and key players (his end notes are very pleasingly weighted toward these kinds of primary sources, although it's possible Hillary Clinton would be dismayed by how many of these books are titled some close variation of "Hard Choices"), and he brings these men and women to life again for the members of his audience who know Carter and his people only from the history books:

[Secretary of State Cy] Vance was the quiet half of Carter's foreign policy team, often overshadowed by the brash and imaginative national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Vance embodied the “establishment” that Carter had run against: Yale, Wall Street, and years at the upper tier of the Washington bureaucracy, serving as secretary of the army under John F. Kennedy and deputy secretary of defense in the Lyndon Johnson administration … Brzezinski focused on the big picture, Vance on the small print. Hamilton Jordan, Carter's political strategist and later chief of staff, analyzed the role each of these men played in the administration. Brzezinski, he decided, was the bold side of Jimmy Carter – the side of him that ran for president when he was still “Jimmy Who?” That was the side that was never afraid to challenge conventional wisdom to risk everything, just as he was doing now by holding a summit at Camp David. Vance was the more traditional and methodical side of Carter. He got to work before the sun came up, and he was principled to the point of priggishness. His decency earned the trust of everyone he met. According to Jordan's analysis, Brzezinski was the thinker, Vance was the doer, and Carter was the decider.

Carter was, at least initially, a reluctant decider at Camp David. Although he'd become instantly fond of Sadat when they'd met the previous year ("at last," Wright tells us, "Carter believed, he had found a partner for peace"), he was unprepared for the eager strength of the racial, territorial, and religious incompatibilities he encountered. He'd been confident that the bucolic charms of Camp David's trout stream and picturesque woods would exorcise demons, but his guests brought three millennia of arid desert winds along with them.And yet emotions weighed heavily into the discussion, and here Carter was at a disadvantage. His own emotional range was narrow. Although he respected the powerful feelings that the Israelis and the Egyptians brought to the table, his personal style was direct and sincere and not really suited to cajoling. He was no therapist. He was too impatient to respond to the endless litany of slights and insults, whether real or imagined, that each side had. He had thought that Camp David was going to be a meeting of three serious minds dedicated to fixing a problem that had everyone had an interest in resolving. In the back of his mind there was always the sense that God was present. But if God wanted peace in the Middle East, so far that wasn't evident."If the summit was going to succeed, it would require a catalyst, someone with new ideas, yes, but also someone who was willing to go beyond pleading and persuading to the point of issuing threats," Wright correctly summarizes. That catalyst had to be Carter and the enormous military and financial clout of the United States, and the task wasn't easy for a man of Carter's temperament. He'd found dealing with Begin's predecessor Yitzhak Rabin "like talking to a dead fish," (one wonders what success Carter had talking with live fish, but one supposes that what happens in Georgia stays in Georgia) and more often than not at Camp David, he was equally frustrated with Begin, who seemed, as Wright puts it, more willing to obstruct than to lead. Begin alternated between lecturing and pouting, with only very infrequent and unpredictable lapses into a stiff kind of courtesy, and he was dedicated to Israeli land-grabs more than to any other aspect of his country's political identity. This fact kept the Camp David summit returning obsessively to the question of Palestinian rights and Israeli West Bank settlements. Sadat's Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel had put it bluntly: "The Israeli attitude rests on an erroneous racist belief, which dominates their thinking and governs their behavior – namely, that they are God's Chosen People. Accordingly, whatever they believe, their rights transcend the rights of others.”

In a dozen tensely-structured chapters, Wright takes his readers through the tension and the tedium of those thirteen days of negotiations and counter-negotiations, of walks in wooded groves and hasty mini-conferences in thick-beamed bungalows. Our author is writing earnest historical synthesis here, trying to balance all accounts against all other accounts, but nevertheless, three things quickly stand out in the story he tells: the naive heroism of Anwar Sadat, the surprising competence of Jimmy Carter, and the unrelenting deceit of Menachem Begin. Sadat, who considered himself a modern-day pharaoh and contemptuously referred to his enemies as "pigmies," was convinced his personal charisma could sell abroad what his fellow Arabs considered the worst of all possible apostasies. Carter, who'd originally budgeted the Camp David summit a maximum of one week, sensed as time went on that he might be close to grasping his own legacy. And Begin, while signing notes and memoranda about the sovereign rights of Palestinians with one hand, was simultaneously moving bulldozers and jack-booted thugs into the Gaza Strip with the other. It falls to Kamel again to angrily - and a bit presciently - sum things up to Vance:

You will live to regret this agreement, which will weaken Sadat and may even topple him. It will affect your position in the modern Arab states, who are your friends, while all the Arab peoples will resent you. As for Egypt, it will be isolated in the area ... All that will happen is that it will allow Begin a free hand in the West Bank and Gaza with a view to their annexation. Far from providing a solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute, the agreement will only add fuel to the fire.

As Wright progresses the Camp David story through a hundred false stops toward its famous accords, he highlights more and more strongly the sense of destiny involved:

Each of these three men had come to this crossing point in his life. For good or ill, each would be remembered by the decisions he made on this day. No one else could choose for him what to do. History would train its unsparing eye on his actions and sum up his accomplishments or his failure. The true loneliness of leadership is found in such moments, when great gains and great losses await a decision and there is no way of tallying in advance the final cost.

The Camp David Accords were finally reached, but those final costs Wright mentions didn't wait very long to come due. While the ink was still drying on the paperwork, Begin was back in Jerusalem deriding and undermining the agreements he and Sadat and Carter had reached. Sadat's worried deputies were indeed right: the rest of the Arab world temporarily turned its back on the first of their number to acknowledge the Jewish home state, much less sit down and negotiate with a Jew. In 1979 Begin and Sadat shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1981, Sadat was assassinated by outraged Islamic jihadists ("I have killed the pharaoh!" one of the gunmen shouted). In 1982, Begin's beloved wife died, and shortly afterwards his always-tenuous health seriously began to fail and he retired from the service of the state. And Carter, after pouring so much of his energy into securing peace on the other side of the world, lost the White House in a staggering landslide to Ronald Reagan (whose own peace accord efforts would center more on the Soviet Union than the Middle East). When summing up the Carter administration, Vice President Walter Mondale said, "We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace. And that ain't bad."After it all, the Camp David Accords still stand, battered and criticized but essentially intact. Egypt and Israel no longer go to war every five years, threatening to plunge the whole region into chaos. Begin had dodged and feinted just enough on the Palestinian question to give Israel the leeway it needed to continue its illegal West Bank settlements, and although Carter and Sadat were aware of the slippery nature of the point's language, they made their Chamberlain pact to sacrifice the freedom of one disaffected group in order to protect the peace between the most powerful players.When President Carter dies, Camp David will be mentioned in the first line of every obituary in the world, and it will have the same connotations on that sad day as it's had since 1978, that same almost unbearably simultaneous invocation of success and failure. Out of the day-by-day struggles of these three flawed, forceful men, Wright has crafted as powerful and readable an account as we're likely to get of a brief interlude that resulted - however temporarily - in headlines of hope.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Washington Post, The National, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.