Ken Stein to Scott Slade: Carter Had a Loaded Deck at Camp David
January 9, 2025
WSB radio veteran Scott Slade interviewed CIE President Ken Stein about President Jimmy Carter and the Camp David peace process for an episode of “Scott Slade’s Georgia” that aired just hours before Carter’s funeral January 9, 2025.
Scott Slade: We go way back with Dr. Kenneth Stein, speaking with the now-Emory University professor emeritus about Middle Eastern history and politics since the early 1990s. And as we look back at Jimmy Carter’s success with the Camp David Accords, this might surprise you.
Ken Stein: Pat Caddell did some surveys, both before and after September ’78, before the meetings actually took place. And within four months after Carter had these guys together, his popularity went up 1 percent.
Scott Slade: But Professor Stein says it still stands as a pinnacle foreign policy achievement, and how they got to that agreement with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat is fascinating.
Ken Stein: In terms of the Middle East, it was a sea change because now you had the largest Arab state that had been at war with Israel since its founding in ’48. Now in ’79 it was signing a treaty, and Israelis were saying, OK, we’ll give up land in order to make it happen. Over time, I think, Scott, I’ve come to a conclusion that Begin and Sadat were inching really closely to one another already before Carter invited them to Camp David in September ’78.
Scott Slade: And Jimmy Carter knew it and used it.
Ken Stein: Well, Sadat and Begin had been having emissaries meet with one another privately through Romania, through Iran, through Morocco. And they got a pretty good sense of one another. And by the time you get to the early part of ’78, Begin and Sadat are eyeing each other for their own particular reasons.
Carter told me something really interesting. I interviewed him three times while I was working at the Carter Center, three times in the ’90s. And Carter said to me in one of those interviews, he said, “I didn’t tell anyone at the time, but when Sadat was at the White House, and he visited with me in April, he said, ‘I don’t think, Mr. President, there’ll be peace in my time or peace during my tenure in office.’” And Carter said, “You know, that’s really not good enough.”
So Carter, when he went to Camp David in ’78, he knew that Sadat would go a bilateral agreement. He knew that Carter, Begin and Sadat were well primed for one another. Now that doesn’t take anything away from the Camp David negotiations and the give and take and the detail and the wrangling that went over words. That was Carter, and that was stewardship, and that was wordsmanship. All terrific attributes.
Scott Slade: Carter knew pretty much which cards were in the short deck, it sounds like.
Ken Stein: I think he did, and I think he knew that they were all face cards.
Scott Slade: Prime example of striking while the iron is hot. You can do a deeper dive, Dr. Stein, at israeled.org.