The Leadership and Legacy of President Jimmy Carter

FROMAN: Thanks very much. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. My name is Mike Froman. I’m president of the Council. And I just want to thank you for being here. It’s an honor to welcome you to today’s virtual symposium, “The Leadership and Legacy of President Jimmy Carter.”

I’m joined this afternoon by our chairman, David Rubenstein. He’ll deliver remarks right after mine. David, as I’m sure many of you know, worked closely with President Carter as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, among other roles. He was among a group of about 135 Council members who served in the Carter administration—folks like Robert Hunter, Roger Altman, Michael Blumenthal, Ed Morse, Jane Harman, Jane Hartley, some guy named Richard Haass. It’s a long list of CFR-affiliated people who worked during the Carter administration.

And I’d say until recently the dominant narrative around President Carter was that he was a very successful ex-president, but not a particularly successful president. And I think one of the benefits of the last several months has been a look back into his history and the quite remarkable achievements, including in foreign policy. We’re going to focus on two areas of his foreign policy legacy today, human rights and the Middle East.

But much like the frontpages of today’s newspapers, Jimmy Carter was focused on the Panama Canal. We know that he engaged in the negotiation that ultimately handed over the Panama Canal to Panama; and described the United States as dealing with countries from a position of fairness, not force.

He normalized relations with China in 1979.

When it came to the Middle East, it was a—it was an area of great achievement and also great failure—great achievement with the Camp David Accords establishing peace between Egypt and Israel which remains in place today, great failure around the 1979 Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis that everyone reminds—remembers, unfortunately, well.

During the Cold War, he cared deeply about nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and negotiated the SALT II agreement, which did not end up being ratified during his term because of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

And of course, one of the things he’s remembered for is his legacy on human rights and putting human rights at the core of a foreign policy agenda—not always applied consistently, but raising human rights to the level of a very significant issue that continues today with the Country Reports on Human Rights—Human Rights Practices.

We’re looking forward to hearing some deep dives into a couple of these issues. I’ll turn it over to David. Thank you, again, for joining us.

RUBENSTEIN: Thank you, Mike, for organizing this. And I want to thank all the participants for participating in this event.

I did work for Stuart Eizenstat, who you’ll be hearing from in a moment, at the White House for four years, and it was a great experience. I remember when I was much younger than when I was in the Carter White House President Kennedy gave a speech in which he said in his inaugural address we are going to focus on human rights at home and abroad. But the truth is that President Kennedy, for all of his virtues and strengths, didn’t really focus on human rights that much, honestly. There were other challenges he had. And so when President Carter in his inaugural address also talked about human rights, somebody might well say, well, it’s just another inaugural address saying something that some speechwriter put in there. But no, it turned out that President Carter actually believed deeply in human rights abroad particularly, and as well as at home, and actually he gave a series of speeches after the inaugural address in the first couple months of his administration in which he emphasized human rights—to the surprise, to some extent, of the State Department and to the surprise of some extent of people who had voted for him.

But President Carter really believed in human rights abroad and as well as the United States. And I’ve always thought: Why was that such the case? And Stuart and others here who knew him much better than me will talk about it, but my own view has been that Jimmy Carter grew up in the Deep South; he lived, really, with African Americans as his best friends. He saw the Jim Crow laws and he really was—felt abhorrent at what he saw in the United States in the South, and he took that and extrapolated that overseas. And because he was a deeply religious man as well, I think he felt that human rights were part of his Christian beliefs in what was appropriate to be doing for all people all over the world.

And so throughout his administration he really emphasized human rights in a way that, frankly, no other president before or since has really done. And I think while there are many things you can talk about with President Carter about his foreign policies, some of the strengths and some of the failures, I think there’s no doubt that even his biggest critics would fail to say that he was anything less than a really strong steward of human rights abroad.

We’ll hear more about that now. And it’s my pleasure to turn it over to Mara Liasson to begin the conversation. Thank you very much.

LIASSON: Thank you very much. Welcome, again, to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting, which is called “Defining Leadership—President Carter’s Human Rights Legacy.”

I’m Mara Liasson. I’m the senior national political correspondent for NPR. I’m going to be presiding over today’s session. And I just want to introduce our panelists.

Joining me today are: Michael Abramowitz. He’s the director of Voice of America, former president of Freedom House.

Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, who is currently senior counsel at Covington and Burling, and during over a decade in government service served as the former chief White House domestic policy advisor to President Carter; and the former undersecretary of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs; ambassador to the European Union; and U.S. deputy secretary of treasury during the Clinton administration. And he is also the author of a book called President Carter: The White House Years.

We’re also joined by Daniel Sargent, who’s the associate professor of history and public policy, and co-director of the Institute of International Studies, at the University of California Berkeley. And he is the author of A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s.

And you can find fuller bios for all our speakers in the roster sent in the Zoom chat. And we’re going to be talking for about thirty minutes, then we’re going to open it up to Q&A.

And I would like to start the discussion with Stu Eizenstat. He is the most Carter of everyone on the panel. And, Stu, you gave a wonderful, wonderful eulogy yesterday where you said that not only was Jimmy Carter the most consequential one-term president in history; you also said the—one of the reasons for that was that he was the first president to make human rights a part of American foreign policy. And could you just tell us how that happened?

EIZENSTAT: Well, Mara, I go back with Jimmy Carter to his first run for—his second run for governor in 1969-1970, which is when I first met him. I was his policy director then, and then—when he ran for governor, and then in the White House. And I think that he clearly came from this with a delicate balance. He saw human rights being the international side of the coin of civil rights.

In order to win in Georgia in 1970 as governor, having lost in ’66 to Lester Maddox, who was a rigid segregationist, he had to appeal to those hardcore White voters with something other than race, so he used populism as the mechanism. But as soon as his inauguration occurred as governor, he said the time for racial discrimination was over. And having lived, as David indicated, in a county that was more than 60 percent Black, all of his playmates were Black. He had a second family that took him in, the foreman of his father’s farm, and he lived almost as much with them as he did with his own parents. So he understood the Black trials, tribulations, anxieties, and hopes. And he reflected that in his presidency, appointing more Blacks—and women, by the way—to judgeships and senior positions in the administration than all thirty-eight presidents put together.

But on the foreign policy side, this was a logical extension of civil rights at home. And he enunciated it from the very beginning. Let me take you to the very first week of the administration. He gets a letter from Andrei Sakharov, who was the democratic leader—a very courageous man—in Russia, urging him to support freedom, democracy, and human rights. And there was a big debate that very first week: Is this the way to start our relationship with the Soviet Union when want to do a SALT negotiation with them? And Carter said, yes, we’ve got to do it. He answered positively. It upset the Soviets greatly. And he carried that through all four years.

The lasting impact, also—although some presidents provide less, some more emphasis on human rights—is that every single year, Mara, the State Department puts out a human rights report on all major countries in the world. So there’s a lasting duration of this, and in effect all presidents are measured by that. But clearly, this was a result of his civil rights background. And even with the Palestinians, where he got into a lot of hot water both during and after his administration, he sort of sees the Palestinians as being the Blacks of the Middle East. So this is a(n) absolutely clear thread that runs through his whole life from his youth to his passing.

LIASSON: Before we go to anther panelist I just want to ask you, you talk about the annual human rights reports as a lasting legacy of his. What other things did he do in the human rights area that have lasted and that you think might even last through the next administration?

EIZENSTAT: OK. Number one, he cut off arms for a number of Latin countries—Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Uruguay—because of their poor human rights record. And, Mara, that led to thousands of prisoners being released, but also long term their transformation into democracies, which they still are today. Absolutely a clear line between that.

Second, even Dobrynin conceded in his memoirs—and I’m quoting—that Carter’s human rights policies “helped end the Cold War,” he said, because they played a significant role in the long and difficult process of liberalization inside the Soviet Union. So even the breakup of the Soviet Union had an impact from Jimmy Carter of a lasting nature.

So those are just two examples of the lasting impact of human rights.

And, last, even the Trump administration, with Maduro in his first election in Venezuela, applied sanctions on human rights grounds, on democracy grounds. So no president can totally ignore the Carter legacy.

LIASSON: Let me turn to Daniel Sargent, who I understand is a cousin-in-law to Rosalynn. Is that correct, Daniel?

SARGENT: My wife is, I think, a second cousin to Rosalynn.

LIASSON: That’s great.

SARGENT: So we—(inaudible)—yesterday—(inaudible).

LIASSON: That’s great.

And you know, Andrew Young spoke at the end very, very powerfully, and he said that the reason why Jimmy Carter was able to do what he did in human rights is because Jimmy Carter was a minority, just as Stu has described, the way Carter grew up. You know, he was in a county where Whites were in the minority and he understood what that meant.

But I want to ask you about where this commitment to human rights came from with Carter. You put it in a religious context, if you could explain that.

SARGENT: I would very much situate Carter’s personal commitment to human rights in relation to his intense religious devotion. I think for Jimmy Carter the man really, you know, the epistles to the Romans and the Galatians are of greater importance in determining and motivating his human rights commitment than, for example, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But I think it’s important to understand at the same time that the administration is motivated by a more diverse array of influences. Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, I think comes at the human rights question from a different kind of perspective. Brzezinski was involved in Amnesty International in its early years and really sees human rights as a strategic opportunity for the United States. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance I think is motivated by a concern to remediate the failures of Vietnam. So you have an administration in which key individuals—the national security advisor, the secretary of state, the president—are all dedicated to human rights, but they come at the problem from slightly different angles, but really coalesce around the idea that human rights should be a unifying commitment for foreign policy, which I think is truly what it is, at least for the first eighteen months/two years of the administration.

LIASSON: And what happened after that?

SARGENT: After that, I think, you know—and I should really defer here to Ambassador Eizenstat, who was there—but my view as a historian is that the Carter administration has to come to terms with the reassertion of Soviet power in the world in the late 1970s. And I would argue that it reverts to a more traditional containment policy in 1979-1980 and begins to sort of reprioritize the containment of Soviet power as an overarching purpose for U.S. foreign policy. But I think in the early phase of the administration human rights aren’t just significant; I would argue that human rights really constitutes the overarching purpose of the administration’s foreign policy.

LIASSON: Michael, I want to ask you about Jimmy Carter said he would support human rights, absolutely—and as you just heard, he didn’t do it a hundred percent all the time—but what was the mixed picture of Carter’s commitment and how—and how it manifested itself?

ABRAMOWITZ: Well, first of all, I think—when I think about Jimmy Carter, I would certainly agree with Stu’s assessment that he had a very—he was a—he had a very consequential impact on human rights. I mean, it’s really kind of the standard by which other presidents would be judged.

You know, before—remember, Carter followed Kissinger, and Kissinger had a very realpolitik approach to this. He actually tried to, you know, shove human rights—you know, he told ambassadors not to make this a big deal. He did not want to rock the boat on human rights. And that changed completely with Jimmy Carter: the elevation of the bureau to a full bureau to an assistant secretary, with the human rights reports which previously had really not been really candid and kind of soft-pedaled things. They were hard hitting, and other governments took them to account.

But I think the thing that I think about with Carter is that—and he said this himself in his Notre Dame speech, which was a speech in which he kind of laid out in 1977 his views on some of these matters—that, you know, you’re not going to follow a cookie-cutter approach; that there are going to be times, you know, presidents are—when they have bilateral relations are going to be thinking about economics, they’re going to be thinking about security, they’re going to be thinking about other elements, and human rights is just one of the issues. And I certainly think, you know, this is a president who, on New Year’s Eve in 1977, you know, went to Iran and had an event with the shah, and really didn’t talk about the terrible things that the shah’s secret police were doing. He was a person who really didn’t—who kind of sugarcoated the Cultural Revolution. And really, as he was trying to get closer relations with China, he was not really pushing the terrible human rights situation in China to the forefront. He also, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, they—after the genocidal regime of Pol Pot, they fought to keep the seat at the U.N. controlled by the Pol Pot representatives, not by others.

This is not to criticize President Carter, which is just to say that every president has to kind of weigh the different balance of realpolitik and—but I think in general my sense is that President Carter did a lot to put the—to put the wheel into really promoting human rights as opposed to some of these other things. And every president since then, I think, has had to deal with the consequences of how President Carter approached this.

LIASSON: Do you think there was ever a case where Carter’s commitment to human rights undermined U.S. national security? In other words, was a problem for in foreign policy—you’re talking about times when he stepped back from it, when it was—when he needed to be pragmatic, but was—were there any times when his commitment to human rights had negative consequences for the United States?

ABRAMOWITZ: You know, that’s a good question. I can’t think of one off the top of my head.

I did want to say there are a couple of other areas about his human rights that I wanted to mention, and one is election monitoring. That’s something about the post-presidency. But President Carter spent—I think he did, like—and Stu would know the numbers better—120 or 130 election missions. And what was interesting to me—I mean, NDI and IRI were also doing these election missions, and they often would work together with the Carter Center. But I think what was, I think, really unique was that President Carter really had a personal investment. And so when President Carter said something, like in Nicaragua when Ortega lost the election thirty years ago, or in Zambia where President Kaunda lost the election and President Carter said, well, this—you lost, and they accepted it, I think, because they recognized President Carter’s kind of moral stature.

LIASSON: Yeah. I’m going to go back to Stu for a minute, but I want to ask my panelists, since I’m on my phone, when it’s 3:45 I need you to tell me so I can open it up for questions.

But, Stu, were there internal debates in the Carter administration about how to apply human rights to foreign policy? Were there different camps?

EIZENSTAT: Yes. So there was a division within the administration, a sort of fissure between Cy Vance, the secretary of state, and Zbig Brezenski, the national security advisor. Zbig was much more of a hardline hawk, wanted to have more military buildup. Cy was more of a dove, wanted to lean more on human rights. I think that they felt, with respect to human rights on the Soviet Union, that this was something they could agree on.

But the real key was, and one of the most sensitive debates, was on Iran. How do we apply human rights to the shah? Now, Carter is blamed for the fall of the shah because, the critics say, he raised the human rights standard against the shah that weakened him and led to his ultimate downfall. That’s not the case. And here we had a vigorous debate, and what Carter did with Iran was never once publicly criticized the shah’s human rights record. Privately, when they would have private conversations like a state dinner, he took him into his private study next to the Oval Office and he said, look, I am not being unreasonable; it is in your interest to reach out to the non-communist, non-Islamic democratic opposition and try to bring them into your fold so that you loosen the tensions in the country. And he didn’t, and that was his downfall.

I’ve said many times—and I want to repeat it now—Jimmy Carter didn’t lose Iran; the shah lost Iran. He lost standing among his own people. And it’s no more fair to blame Carter for losing it than it would be to blame Dwight Eisenhower for losing Cuba during his administration. So this was a major area of debate.

And so human rights wasn’t applied uniformly. It was applied where we thought it could be useful, like in Latin America, like with respect to the Soviet Union. But it was not, you know, a blueprint that you just put a stamp on for every one of the countries in the world.

LIASSON: So you don’t—you can’t think of an instance where his commitment to human rights somehow compromised overall U.S. foreign policy.

EIZENSTAT: I do not. But again, I want to say that the critics used human rights as a(n) excuse to say it was his human rights policy which undermined the shah. The shah, he sent mixed signals. He didn’t know what to do. Should he crack down? Should he not crack down? And Carter told him when—Mara, when the demonstrations started, we will support any action you take, including military action. And the shah in his own memoirs said, I did not think a sovereign could kill mass numbers of his own people.

LIASSON: Yeah.

I want to ask all of you if there was a president—if there would be a president in the White House on January 20 who wanted to make human rights a priority, what—how would they do that? How would you apply Carter’s legacy and commitment to human rights to today’s foreign policy challenges?

ABRAMOWITZ: You want me to take a crack at that?

LIASSON: Sure. Michael.

ABRAMOWITZ: Well, first of all, I do think we’re in a period now of, I would say, weakening commitment from, you know, the powers that be in our country to human rights. You know, I think about one of President Carter’s greatest achievements, the creation of the—well, with the support of Congress and really embracing what Congress was already doing, but you know, creating the assistant secretary for human rights. You know, one thing that’s kind of interesting is that—is that bureau is much larger than it was forty years ago. There’s a lot of money that’s being spent very quietly, and I think effectively, on supporting human rights activists, human rights defenders, civil society. There’s a whole kind of architecture there that’s interesting.

But in terms of the political salience of that bureau, President Trump did not have a—you know, a confirmed assistant secretary until year three and President Biden did not have a confirmed assistant secretary until year four. And so it’s not a—it’s, obviously, not only the president’s fault. Congress plays a role in this kind of confirmation matter. But I think to me that’s a very stark signal of how this issue, while there’s a lot of rhetoric about it, is actually less important. And I think, you know, really, appointing a very strong-minded assistant secretary would be a great thing to really—you know, Pat Derian, and Stu knows that, she was a major force in Washington and in the State Department in the—in the late 1970s, and there have been other really prominent assistant secretaires like her. And I think that the issue is that you want to make sure that human rights view is at the table when the secretary of state or the president are making decisions on some of these bilateral discussions.

LIASSON: Do you think—go ahead.

EIZENSTAT: I would add to that, I may, Mara—

LIASSON: Yeah. Go ahead.

EIZENSTAT: —that in terms of relevance today we have a backsliding even in Europe with Hungary and Slovakia and other countries that are drifting away from democracy and human rights into, really, autocracies or democracies with only a thin veneer. And I think that applying human rights in that instance could be very—could be very useful to try to call attention to the fact that these are contrary to Western values, and to NATO values, and to EU values. I think it’s very important in that context as well.

There also are a number of countries in Latin America that are sliding away from democracy toward autocracy. And I think human rights campaigns would have some value in those as well.

LIASSON: Well, that raises the obvious question. I mean, the leader of Hungary is somebody that Donald Trump admires and promotes. And what are the chances that you think that in a Trump administration human rights would get any attention at all?

EIZENSTAT: I think it’s very unlikely that it will get major attention, and I just hope for a holding action in which we are able to keep the bureau intact that Michael mentioned, keep the number of employees intact, don’t have them shifted into Schedule F and then fired. But again, I would say that President Trump did apply this to Maduro with his fake election, stealing of the first election. He’s stolen a second election more recently. So there are elements within the Trump coalition that think that this is important.

And I would say also that the secretary of state coming in, Rubio, has been very vocal on human rights, Michael, of course with Cuba especially. But I think this is really his Cuban experience has made him somewhat of an advocate for human rights.

ABRAMOWITZ: I agree with Stu on that point. I think we don’t yet know about President Trump. I think there are significant forces in the Republican Party who do care about this. I mean, Senator McConnell was a huge champion of human rights in Myanmar. As you say, the secretary-designate, Rubio, was huge on the Uyghurs and on China. And I think there’s generally very much of a focus—and this is sort of epitomized by the former senator, Sam Brownback—a big focus on religious freedom. That was a big issue that the State Department under Secretary Pompeo focused on, and I would expect to see that. So I think we don’t quite yet know.

And I think—I think the one issue that will be interesting is that President Carter, I think, you know, you can criticize him sometimes for being uneven in the application, but he—but they did criticize friends, either privately or publicly. And I think that the test for any administration is whether you’re going to criticize your friends as well as the people that you are kind of geopolitical rivals with.

LIASSON: Yeah.

Daniel, I want to bring you in here about just the historic view, why human rights was a timely idea in the ’70s, and what you think today’s context means for people who want it to be a priority again.

SARGENT: Absolutely. That’s a big, challenging question.

I think in the 1970s human rights is really an idea whose time has come for a number of different reasons. One I think is the proximate historical context, right? In the aftermath of Vietnam, Americans are looking for a new kind of foreign policy, a foreign policy that will avoid the mistakes that got the United States into Vietnam and, hopefully, chart a most idealistic course for the United States in the world.

But I think there are also big structural changes underway in the international system in the 1960s and 1970s. This is an era in which technological innovation is really sort of propelling the onrush of transnational communications, a process that we would today call globalization—in the 1970s, people were talking about it as the march of interdependence—is underway. And it has, I think, highly disruptive effects for the whole system of international order that emerges out of the Second World War. Americans, you know, in the 1970s are beginning to ask the question, if anti-Soviet containment is no longer a sufficient or even a plausible strategic basis upon which to organize our foreign policy, then what might be? And I think the brilliant answer that the Carter administration comes up with to that question is human rights. What Carter argues is that the United States can lead in the world on the basis of fundamental values rather than merely on the basis of a shared geopolitical antagonism towards a rival superpower.

And that, I think, is where there are meaningful legacies of Carter’s human rights policy for us in the mid-2020s. In a moment when the overarching purpose, the rationale, the logic of American global leadership is increasingly unclear, what does the United States stand for in the world, I think Carter’s recourse to fundamental values as a foundation for American global leadership is an example that is, you know, really ripe with potential implications.

EIZENSTAT: And I just think, to add to Daniel’s point, that Carter did, through the Carter Center, oversee more than a hundred elections. And what he saw, and what we see today, is that there really is a yearning in much of Africa and in Asia for democracies. People are willing to go into the streets for it. And having an administration that says what this country stands for is different than what Russia stands for, it’s different than what China stands for. We do have a set of values that mean empowering you on the ground to take control of your own life. That’s a very important message that we can give to the third world. And it should be one that the Trump administration could endorse as well.

LIASSON: Well, let me ask you, all of you, do you think that that’s something that Donald Trump would want to embrace? Marco Rubio certainly shows signs that he would, but Trump describes the world as basically three big superpowers. And values don’t seem to have much to do with it. Do you think that Rubio will become a proponent of this kind of foreign policy? And who else in the Trump administration might want to do this?

EIZENSTAT: Well, I mean, again, maybe this is the wish being father to the thought, but I do think that Rubio was, after all, in the Senate for a good period of time. He had his own political base. I don’t think he’s going to want to be just a cipher. I think he’s going to try to stand up for these issues. And that can empower others to do so as well. And the kind of people—this will be a key issue—will he be able to appoint his own deputy and assistant secretaries? Or will they all be, you know, Trump loyalists? But if he stands up for this, this could be a very important thing. And then, in terms of Mr. Waltz, the national security advisor, he’s had some positive record on human rights as well. So I don’t think it’s a hopeless situation.

LIASSON: Michael—yeah, what do you think about that? Can you be an isolationist and a human rights advocate at the same time?

ABRAMOWITZ: Well, I think one thing that I think President Carter recognized, which I think about when I think about—I ran Freedom House for seven or eight years. And one of the—one of the key points that, you know, we always try to make is that human rights, it’s not just a moral issue but it’s a national security issue. And I think Carter thought that if the United States was only identified with repressive powers, with people who are violating human rights, that would not be a good look. And it would kind of weaken our influence globally. And I think many presidents do understand that.

We’ll see how President Trump approaches that issue, but he’s—but I think, as Stu indicated, his administration does have people there who understand that it’s not just about hard power but that it’s about hearts and minds. And I think that’s a very important area where the United States has some catching up to do right now.

LIASSON: Right. Even if it’s only applied to left-wing authoritarians, not right-wing ones. I mean, you got to start somewhere, is that what you’re saying? (Laughs.)

ABRAMOWITZ: Well, I think—look, I think I’m a political realist. But things—all presidents, not just president, tend to kind of, you know, look the other way when their own side is committing this stuff. And so I think that’s not good. We should—you know, we should not have those double standards. I mean, but sometimes realpolitik enters into this. And, you know, the United States has, for instance, other issues with China. But I don’t think—you know, just to be balanced about this—I don’t think particularly President Biden on China was a big vocal tribune on human rights in China. I think they were trying to get that relationship back going. So I think this goes to both—you know, to all sides of aisle. I think it’s—

EIZENSTAT: But also, we shouldn’t put human rights as if that is the only part of foreign and defense policy. What Carter did, for example, with the then-Soviet Union is he combined uniquely soft power of human rights with hard power. All the weapons systems—he reversed the post-Vietnam defense decline. All the weapons systems that Reagan implemented and gets credit for ending the Cold War—the MX mobile missile, the cruise missile, the stealth bomber, intermediate nuclear forces in Europe—all of those were begun by Carter. And when Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviets, you know, we had the grain embargo and the Olympic embargo, the Carter doctrine of intervening militarily if they went further in the Gulf, et cetera. So you can’t just say your whole foreign policy is only human rights. It’s one important component.

ABRAMOWITZ: Can I add one other thing to what Stu said? I think you also have to look at the results, not just the rhetoric. You know, again, Freedom House tracks freedom. And really up until about the early aughts, 2003-2004, you know, freedom was on the march around the world. You had the fall of the Berlin Wall. And that brought freedom, you know, to all of Eastern Europe. Sadly, that’s now going the other way. You also had the fall of military dictatorships. A lot of that—some of that happened on President Reagan’s watch, on President Bush’s watch. So you also have to look not just at the rhetoric but actually what happened. So I think that’s—you can have a—you can have a—you can have a debate that would last for hours about which president actually, you know, was responsible for those—for those advances in freedom that took place.

LIASSON: Right, but they started with Carter. How else did Carter’s commitment to human rights affect people around the world? Somebody told a story about his efforts in Africa to get rid of Guinea worm. And they said that he left behind in every village hundreds of Rosalind and Jimmys. In other words, hundreds of people who are going to take up his cause. And I’m wondering if he’s done something like that with human rights around the world.

EIZENSTAT: Yes. I think—first of all, on eradicating two diseases, Guinea worm and river blindness. He was able to make contact with people in small villages and see that a face of the United States cared for them and cared for their future. And that’s the kind of base that you can build on. So when you have a foreign policy you have to have all elements. You have to have the hard power. You have to have human rights. You have to have humanitarian aid. You have to have AID showing people that they can live better. All of those things enhance the United States as a competitor against China. I mean, what does China do? It’s got the Belt and Road, right? And so they give African countries loans that they can’t repay. There are 750,000 Chinese workers in Africa. They build the projects, not the local people.

So these are the kinds of things that we can take advantage of in this global competition as part of our human rights. We respect the rights of individuals. We want them to be engaged in building their own country, not to have some—we don’t—we don’t export our workers to build the dams and highway projects and other infrastructure projects that the Chinese are using their workers for.

ABRAMOWITZ: You know—

LIASSON: How did—oh, go ahead, Michael.

ABRAMOWITZ: Just quickly, Mara. You know, in terms of the human impact, I think President Carter—one thing that you really have to congratulate him for is a focus on the individuals. I mean, I think of—you know, he really put a lot—his administration put a lot of energy to try to save the life of Kim Dae-jung, the Korean who later became the president. He also put a lot of effort on political prisoners in Argentina and in Indonesia, where hundreds of people—so I think that focus on the individual, I think, is one of President Carter’s distinguishing features. And I think—

EIZENSTAT: And, Michael, Sharansky in the Soviet Union.

ABRAMOWITZ: Yes. So and I think a lot of—a lot of those people really think of Carter as having personally helped save them, which I think is interesting.

If I can just add one other point, which I—which hasn’t come up in a lot of—but I do think that President Carter’s efforts to address the kind of human consequence of the Vietnam War. You know, with, you know, literally millions of Boat People and Cambodians. You know, in 1980, you know, he opened up the doors of America to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians. It might have been—and, Stu, you might know the numbers better than I, but it was one of the, you know, single biggest paroles of individuals. And those people who came from Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and so forth have really done well in this country. And I think that is also a legacy of kind of his humanitarian impulses. He set the bar—

EIZENSTAT: The way that it happened was that the—Mondale gave a fantastic speech, I think the best of his vice presidency, that we didn’t want another repeat of the 1938 conference in Evian where we closed our doors. And he reminded everybody—(inaudible)—terms. And so he got commitments from other countries—Germany and France and others—to take some of the Vietnamese. But second, over the objection of the Navy he instructed the Navy to save people in these flimsy boats that were dying. I mean literally, the Navy said, this is not our business. And he said, you are directed to do it now. That is a human right, if I’ve ever seen one.

LIASSON: Yeah. How are we doing on time, guys? What—does anybody have the time? I’m just curious.

ABRAMOWITZ: We have seventeen minutes left.

LIASSON: Oh, seventeen minutes. Before 3:45, OK.

ABRAMOWITZ: It’s 3:43.

LIASSON: Yeah, we—oh, 3:43 now?

ABRAMOWITZ: Yes.

LIASSON: Oh, we have two minutes left before questions. OK, that’s what I’m asking for. OK, so we have time for one more question from me and then we’ll go to the audience.

Stu, this is for you. Did you ever have conversations with Carter after he left the White House about his feeling about his human rights legacy, if he had regrets, what he was most proud of? Did you ever have conversations with him about it?

EIZENSTAT: Yes, of course, in the course of all the work we did together following the administration. And he felt—and this is, by the way, one of the bases for the Nobel Prize that he should have gotten for Camp David but was given to him in 2002. And I was in Norway with him to receive it. And it was because of the human rights campaign he launched after the administration as well. The humanitarian work that he had done, going village to village to village, I mean, it was remarkable, really, for a former president of the United States and a former first lady to go into these tiny villages and work and show them how Guinea worm could be eradicated. So he said that this was one of his really proudest accomplishments.

Now, again, he got into trouble because he also applied it to the Palestinians. And he felt very strongly about it. The book he wrote, Peace or Apartheid, caused huge problems for him politically. And it’s still remembered in Israel, having sort of overwhelmed what he did at Camp David and the treaty.

LIASSON: Did he have regrets about any of his human rights efforts?

EIZENSTAT: The only regret is that it wasn’t more effective, not that—he didn’t do enough. (Laughs.)

LIASSON: OK. So let’s open this up to the audience for Q&A. And at this time I’d like to invite all CFR members to join our conversation with their questions. Remember, this meeting is on the record. And the operator is going to remind participants how to join the question queue. And we’ll let them take it away. We’ll have the first question.

OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.)

We will take our first question from Paula Stern.

Q: Thank you so much all of y’all.

And I wanted to talk about how domestic politics shapes foreign policy, which, as Stu knows very well, was the subject of my book on the Jackson-Vanik amendment, and how up until then we didn’t really understand that. But I have a feeling that President Carter was watching very closely from the domestic political point of view when he was running as a candidate within the Democratic Party. And while I completely agree with David about his background from the South, and his concern about America’s civil rights blights with segregation, he was also looking within the Democratic Party and running. Henry Jackson, of course, was behind the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which ultimately passed in ’74.

But I am wondering, Stu, if you could give me a little insight about whether there was any recognition by the president or the candidate—presidential candidate, at the time, that this was really good domestic politics to be pushing for human rights. I remember sending stuff down to Atlanta from my office—the office I was working with, Gaylord Nelson, the senator, about human rights stuff, about arms sales issues. And that they were getting a really good response down there in the campaign. But I never have gotten any further details about how that may have—his domestic desire to be the president may have had some impact on how it shaped his foreign policy positions.

EIZENSTAT: Well, it’s a good question. I mean, he—I think we all realized in the campaign that Ford was still sort of taking what Mike described as the realpolitik view of Nixon, not caring so much about what happened internally. And that by taking this kind of position on human rights it could strengthen his appeal to the Hispanic and Black communities. He was, after all, a southern governor who had come out of a state that had a history of racism. So this was another way of him to show his bona fides to the Black and other minority communities.

LIASSON: OK. Daniel, does anybody else on the panel have something to contribute to that, how domestic politics played in this? Was human rights a winning political issue, or did he just do this out of sheer conviction, not political calculation?

SARGENT: I’ll say quickly that, yes, I think that it is a popular position in 1976. Carter is not the only candidate who talks about the amorality of Henry Kissinger’s and Gerald Ford’s foreign policy. Ronald Reagan does too in his insurgent campaign for the Republican Party’s nomination. So I think human rights is a policy platform that has the capacity to sort of outflank Kissinger’s détente approach to foreign policy, on both the left and the right. It’s popular, and that’s part of its appeal.

EIZENSTAT: Daniel made another important point earlier about the Christian religion angle. So, Paula, further to your question, Carter believed—his Baptist belief was the social gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. Now, interestingly, in the middle of his campaign the Baptist Convention was taken over by the hard right, by Falwell and so forth. But we saw the human rights effort as one that was consistent with Christ’s social gospel. And that this would have appeal to southern Evangelicals, which it did. We won every single southern state except Virginia. And that was one of the reasons. And by the way, one of the reasons they flipped in 1980 and went the other way was because the IRS, with our approval, denied tax deductions to contributions to racially segregated private religious institutions.

LIASSON: Wow. That’s a fact that people don’t know. Wow.

OK. we’ll take another question.

OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Maryum Saifee.

Q: Hi, Maryam Saifee. Thank you so much for this extraordinary panel. I’m a State Department Foreign Service officer.

I had a question sort of building off of what Michael said, that there’s sometimes this tradeoff in the human rights debate. At least—and I see this as a Foreign Service officer, That human rights is a nice-to-have versus a national security imperative. And to Stuart’s point about the book that got him in hot water, Peace not Apartheid, to what extent was President Carter making the case that an elevation of human rights or an end to the occupation is a precondition for national security in terms of peace and regional stability? And are there other examples like that in his career that kind of bridge this gap between the sort of human rights—you know, the Cyrus Vance versus the Brzezinski debate about human rights and national security actually being kind of codependent, in a sense, if that makes sense?

LIASSON: Yeah. Stu

EIZENSTAT: Yes. So I think that with respect to the sort of apartheid issue, I told him—this is one of the only books that he ever wrote of nonfiction that he did not run by his former aides.

LIASSON: Wow.

EIZENSTAT: And I found out about it only when I was giving a talk at Goucher, and Alan Dershowitz, of all people, was on the panel. And he said—he was my professor at Harvard. He said, you know about your president’s—your boss’s book? And I said, what book? And as soon as I found out, I wrote him a memo saying: It’s not apartheid. You may disagree with the settlement policy on human rights grounds, but it’s not classic apartheid, which is a minority government not allowing its own majority citizens to have rights.

And the Palestinians and the Arabs in Israel have full rights to vote, to get health care through Kupat Holim, free education, and the like. And I said, why don’t you just change the title and leave the rest? And he said, that’s a good argument. I said, you don’t want to be associated with the Durban crowd, Zionism is racism. And he said, I wish I had run this by you. It’s too late. The books are on the bookshelves. But so this was a big—a very big issue, and I think hurt his legacy with respect to the Middle East, at least in Israel and among some more conservative Jews.

LIASSON: And he was willing—and he understood that, it sounds like? He wishes he had changed the title.

EIZENSTAT: He’s the one that—he’s the one that came up with the title.

LIASSON: Wow.

EIZENSTAT: And the fact that he didn’t show it to us sort of indicates, to me, he wanted to make a point. And Ham Jordan, his, you know, earliest political advisor, at the 30^th anniversary of his inauguration there was a big conference we had in Athens, Georgia, where University of Georgia is. And Ham said to me, this is the worst thing he’s done since—maybe the only bad thing he’s done since he’s left the presidency.

LIASSON: Wow. OK. Next question.

OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Mark Hetfield.

Q: Thank you. Mark Hetfield, I’m president of HIAS, which is a Jewish communities refugee agency. And picking up on Paula’s question about the politics of human rights. I was really glad that Michael and Stuart both talked about the number of refugees that President Carter let in. Just wanted to add that he actually—there was no refugee resettlement or asylum system in the U.S. until President Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980 and implemented it. And he did, in fact, admit over 210,000 refugees in 1980, a larger number than any president has ever admitted before or since.

My question, though, is about the politics of the Refugee Act. It was interesting because this is something that was championed by Senator Kennedy at a time when he was challenging Carter in a primary race. And yet, the Refugee Act, which is impossible to imagine today, had bipartisan support in both the Senate and the House. And President Carter signed it and implemented it into law. So I’d just love to hear from Stuart in particular about how that happened.

EIZENSTAT: So, Mark, it’s a terrific question. And the fact that it had bipartisan support shows how the whole refugee issue has been turned around 180 degrees today. There was no big blowback about accepting several hundred thousand Vietnamese. And let me give you another example. When the Iranian revolution occurred, Jews who had lived in in Iran for 2,000 years, since the first, you know, destruction of the temple with the Babylonians, were at great risk with the new radical Islamic revolution. That certainly was a part of it, but Carter granted two things.

First, he exempted from expulsion after our hostages were taken all Christians, Baha’is, and Jews in the country. Who they told me they would be killed when they came back. And second, we instructed our consulates in Europe to give special visa status to any people leaving Iran on religious grounds. And 50,000 came in, Jews, Baha’is and Christians, under that. Again, a human rights notion, but also with a recognition of what we had not done during the Holocaust. And there was no blowback. So it’s very interesting now that the whole refugee issue has gotten conflated with illegal immigrants.

LIASSON: Yeah. And I didn’t know, did Carter start the Holocaust Museum? Was that on his watch?

EIZENSTAT: Absolutely.

LIASSON: Yeah.

EIZENSTAT: I sent him a recommendation in April of 1978. It was to set up a presidential commission on the Holocaust, headed by Elie Wiesel. He announced it when Menachem Begin was visiting. And then we accepted the recommendation of that commission to make it a museum. We drafted the legislation and got it passed. He is the father of the Holocaust Museum.

ABRAMOWITZ: If I could add one thing, because I worked at the Holocaust Museum for eight years. And, you know, one of the things that was in the 1979 report that Stu referenced that Elie Wiesel chaired, that commission, was that they should be a museum, but there also should be a so-called Committee on Conscience which would look at contemporary cases of mass atrocities. And so I think that’s developed over the last forty years. And I think, arguably, that’s also part of President Carter’s legacy, that the museum plays a very important role in calling out where these—where these events are happening.

EIZENSTAT: Yeah, and right now—Michael did spend eight years. Right now, Mara, today—if you went into the museum today, OK, Holocaust Museum, it opened the ’93, you would find a special exhibition of the genocide against the minority in Myanmar.

LIASSON: Yeah. Next. We can take another question.

OPERATOR: We will take our last question from Priscilla Clapp.

Q: Am I unmuted?

OPERATOR: Yes.

LIASSON: Yes.

Q: Yes. I’m a former Foreign Service officer, and now with the U.S. Institute of Peace.

But I was a political—in a political position during the Carter administration in the State Department. And I can tell you that we—in judging his legacy you really need to look at the institutions he left behind. The Human Rights Bureau, Human Rights and Democracy Bureau, the Refugee Bureau. All of those things in the State Department were established—the groundwork was laid for those during that time. Mike Abramowicz would know about this because his father was the ambassador to Thailand at the time. And he brought in a whole crew of assistant secretaries that were specifically there to carry out his foreign policy priorities. And it was very effective in the way they rejiggered the State Department against a mentality that was really dug in, a Cold War mentality, that fought what he was trying to do. But he made it. And also the Carter Center carried that on after he was president. They’ve done a lot of this.

EIZENSTAT: Yeah, so, Priscilla, just to give you a name to that, he named Pat Derian.

Q: Pat Derian, exactly.

EIZENSTAT: To be assistant secretary for human rights. She was the first. And, boy, she was really effective. And I have to admit, there were some conflicts with the White House on how far to push in particular areas. (Laughter.) But Pat had the support of the president. And she made an enormous amount of difference. So who—it’s not just having—

Q: And Hodding Carter too. Hodding Carter, Pat Derian.

EIZENSTAT: Well, Hodding was her husband. But it makes a big difference. We’ll have to see, Mara, who is appointed to that position in the Trump administration. That will speak volumes about what emphasis or what deemphasis human rights will have.

LIASSON: Well, this is the end of our discussion. I want to thank all of you, our audience and our panelists, for joining today’s virtual meeting. And I think our speakers, Stu, Michael, and Daniel, did Carter—they did right by him today. And I just want to note that the audio and transcript of today’s meeting will be posted on CFR’s website. And we hope that you can join us for the next session, which starts in about half an hour, “President Carter’s Legacy in the Middle East.” Thanks for listening.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

 

WOODRUFF: And welcome everybody to this session, this meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. It is titled “President Carter’s Legacy in the Middle East.”

I’m Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. I’m delighted to be joining you.

I hope many of you were able to hear the session that preceded this discussion by about half an hour on President Carter’s human rights record. It was a rich discussion and one that I think in many ways relates to what we’re talking about with our panelists.

So let me get right to it. As you heard, the session is on the record. We are delighted to have a terrific group of three individuals joining us. They are:

William Quandt, Bill Quandt, Stettinius professor of politics emeritus at the University of Virginia. And most important for this conversation, he served on Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council staff during the Carter administration.

Ray Takeyh, who was—who is a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Has served in the State Department.

And finally, journalist Jonathan Alter. He’s an analyst for MSNBC, the author of the book, now bestselling book, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life. He too is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

And later on in the hour, we’ll be hearing from Tom Donilon. We’ll introduce him later when that moment comes.

But I want to just say that we are talking about the Middle East. So we’re going to be discussing certainly the Camp David Accords and spending time on that. I do want to spend time, of course, on Iran and touch on Afghanistan—the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. All three of which, of course, occurred during Jimmy Carter’s tumultuous, active four years as president. And, Bill Quandt, I want to start with you, because you were there at the origin of all this. You were there when Jimmy Carter served as president. It was only a year and a half into his presidency when he decided to invite Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel, Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, to Camp David to try to cobble together some kind of a peace agreement. Where did the idea come from? Why did he think this even had a chance of succeeding? Bill.

QUANDT: Well, from the outset of his administration Carter was extremely interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And I think one of the reasons was it was strategically important. And we had inherited from the Nixon-Ford period an ongoing kind of diplomatic process led by Henry Kissinger, primarily. But that had stalled in 1976. And Carter really wanted to revive it and had quite major ambitions for how broad it should be. But he didn’t know the players and he didn’t know that much about the Middle East. But in addition to whatever he knew about strategic issues, he had a deep personal commitment to the Middle East because of his religious background. I don’t know how much that weighed. It was not what drove me to be so intently interested in the Middle East, but it was clearly important to him.

So we spent the first year and a half of the Carter administration trying to set the stage for a fairly broad-based Arab-Israeli peace negotiation. By the time we got toward the end of the first year, was clear that Sadat was—President Sadat of Egypt was eager to go more quickly than any of the others, and was getting frustrated with the slow pace of, let’s say, normal diplomacy. By this time, he had—Sadat had met with President Carter. They had really hit it off very well. And in October of 1977, basically we had to make a decision whether to move more quickly on the Egyptian front than any of the other Jordanian, Palestinian, Syrian fronts. And it was kind of a no-brainer that that was the one that had the biggest payoff and looked most plausible.

So by the middle of the next year, 1978, Carter was simply getting frustrated. He hadn’t much to show for all the time he had spent on this, and he had midterm elections coming up. And he wanted to have a success, as most politicians do. So he made the decision to call for a summit meeting with Prime Minister Begin of Israel and President Sadat. And he thought it would go fairly quickly and successfully.

WOODRUFF: Why did—why did he think—why Camp David? I mean, how did that idea come about?

QUANDT: Well, I think he felt that it was important to try to isolate the leaders from the day-to-day pressures that every politician is normally under. And taking them into this isolated place where they didn’t really have much communication with the outside world. This was pre cellphones. You couldn’t just pick up the phone and call. You had to go through the White House operator. And we told them not to make any calls that were not, you know, this. You know, the press wasn’t being briefed by them. And we thought that was important that they have a chance to think about the issues without constantly looking over their shoulders.

WOODRUFF: I will say that I covered that, and spent thirteen days, I guess, at Thurmont, Maryland, right outside of Camp David. There were some leaks. (Laughs.) And in the end, we—in the end, we thought it was all falling apart. But then, lo and behold. Just I know there’s so much to say about how it all came together, but why, in the end, do you think it worked? What was the magic sauce? What made it happen, Bill Quandt?

QUANDT: Well, I’m not saying this just because we’ve been talking about President Carter recently, but I think without him it would not have succeeded. He was the energy that made it work, partly because he felt that he couldn’t afford a failure. Not just in political terms, but strategically that Sadat would be undermined if we couldn’t—he couldn’t come back with something to show for it. The only one who could have walked away from Camp David without an agreement and paid no price was Menachem Begin. And in fact, he knew that that was his strong suit. We needed to find a way to keep him there. And therefore, he had to get some of what he wanted. He couldn’t get all of it. But I think without Carter’s ability to work separately with both President Sadat, and more—with more difficulty with Menachem Begin, we wouldn’t have had an agreement.

WOODRUFF: Jonathan Alter, you looked at that period, along with the rest of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and his life. What would you add to what was it that made it work in the end?

ALTER: Well, first of all, thank you, Bill Quandt, for your fine writing on this period, which, you know, contributed to my understanding of it. There’s a couple of things that happened before Camp David that are important, especially Anwar Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem which was a huge story and a breathtakingly dramatic moment in the Middle East. They had fought four wars against each other, and here was Sadat in Israel. But a kind of a misconception developed especially on the right that this was the key moment, and Carter doesn’t really deserve any credit because Sadat had already gone to Jerusalem. But what happened in truth is that after the trip the momentum slowed and even reversed itself and Begin and Sadat were taking these shots at each other. And there had already been a failed effort to get together at Geneva with the Soviets. And things were kind of moving in the wrong direction.

So Carter’s decision to hold the summit was to see if he could reverse that momentum. And he found out early in the conference that they couldn’t be in the same room with each other. And he actually had to block the exit when—to keep them from leaving after, you know, two days. They didn’t like each other. And when they first met, they were—it was very vituperative. And so Carter decided, I’ve got to keep them separate. And the only time they got together again in the full thirteen days before the end of the conference was when they all took a trip to Gettysburg, where in the car Begin and Sadat were talking about their time in prison and kind of getting to know each other a little better. And then Begin really impressed everybody by reciting the Gettysburg Address from heart—by heart at Gettysburg.

But they continued to have these terrible disagreements. And both Begin and Sadat threatened to leave. And at one point—everybody assumes, oh, well, Sadat was Carter’s friend. But at one point Carter went to Sadat’s cabin, and he said: Look, I will cut off aid to Egypt if you leave. This will be very, very bad for you, Anwar, if you leave. And partly because of that threat, and partly because of his genuine friendship with Carter, he stayed. Begin got very—was a lawyer, and he got really bogged down in the details. And at a certain point, Carter did something that, you know, no other president has done. First of all, this was the greatest Stu Eizenstat first wrote this, and I think he’s absolutely right. This was the greatest achievement of personal diplomacy by any American president.

So Theodore Roosevelt is given credit for resolving the Russo-Japanese war. But he didn’t actually go to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to negotiate. He was doing it from afar. Carter was down in the weeds, twenty drafts. And at a certain point he started negotiating with one of Begin’s lawyers and one of Sadat’s lieutenants, because they were the ones who were more into these very gnarly details. And then, you know, famously, at the—toward the very end of the conference, it had broken down. And Susan Cough, Carter’s late personal secretary, got this idea to have Carter bring over signed photographs that had been taken on the first day of the conference, that Carter made out to Begin’s grandchildren.

And so Carter went to Begin’s cabin. And he gave them to Begin. And Begin started crying. But he still didn’t relent. And it took—it took more negotiation. Finally, they got—they got an agreement. But it was—it was really a—I think, a hugely dramatic story. And as both Begin and Sadat said afterward, if it wasn’t for Jimmy Carter it simply would not have happened.

WOODRUFF: He certainly deserved credit, because he was so deeply personally involved. Ray Takeyh, put this in the larger perspective. You weren’t around at the White—in those—in those days, but that agreement, which—and there was a peace treaty that was signed the next year. They signed it at the White House. What has been the lasting effect of Camp David in the Middle East?

TAKEYH: Well, it removed the possibility of interstate war. It essentially removed the possibility of an Arab-Israeli war, nation-state against nation-state, because the other Arab states—the rejectionist camps could not have mustered an invasion of Israel without Egypt, which was the largest, most populous, and strongest of Arab countries. So in that sense, it established a predicate for Israeli security that made it possible, potentially, for the Israelis to deal with the Palestinian issue without being concerned about the possibility of a larger Arab conflict. And this set up a predicate for the Jordanian agreement that came much later.

Carter, as I understand it—and Bill can speak about this more—had hoped that Camp David would continue to establish some kind of a Palestinian homeland. And he viewed that as essentially a basic failure of that process. And he blamed, as I understand it, Menachem Begin for that, which essentially soured his relationship with the Israelis for some time to come. And that, to some extent, in my opinion, conditioned his approach to Israel in the aftermath of his presidency, where he was much more critical of the inability of the American administrations and the Israeli administrations to complete his task and actually have a Palestinian homeland that would remove the larger grievances between the Arabs and Israelis. And that never happened. That has not happened today.

WOODRUFF: Bill Quandt, pick up on that—on how the seeds of today’s—where we are today with Israel and the Palestinians has grown out of that period, but specifically about Jimmy Carter’s attitude toward Israel and toward the plight of the Palestinians. By the way, this came up in the previous discussion on human rights, a discussion about President Carter’s book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid that came out in 2006. Bill.

QUANDT: Yeah. Well, Carter felt that he had gotten a commitment from Menachem Begin at Camp David that after—that once they had signed the agreement that there would be no more Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza, up until the time when negotiations would start with Jordan and the Palestinians. Which is an indefinite period, but the target date would be about a year after the signing of the Camp David Accords. Of course, we didn’t have any agreement with the Jordanians and the Palestinians on this. So Begin was very reluctant to give him that commitment, because, you know, he believed that settlements were legitimate and that he had been committed to continuing the process. So he gave Carter a three-month commitment that there would be no additional settlements. But Carter never heard it that way. He heard it as, you’ve got the commitment that you asked for.

WOODRUFF: What do you mean, he didn’t hear it that way? What do you mean?

QUANDT: He thought that he had a verbal commitment from Begin that there would be no more settlements until the onset, or at least through the end of—the conclusion of the Egyptian-Israeli peace, and beginning of negotiations with the Jordanians, and Jordanian Palestinians. We never got that commitment in writing, but Carter, to the last time I ever heard him talk about it, believed that he had the commitment from Begin, and Begin broke that commitment. I cannot tell you what happened. I was not in the room. But we knew we didn’t have it in writing. Carter, however, thought he had it verbally from Begin.

ALTER: Actually, you know, I spent a lot of time looking into this particular issue and talked to President Carter pretty extensively about it. He felt like Begin was not acting in good faith on the Palestinian question. And he—well, first—and this is little known. Judy, you may have been on the trip. So immediately after Camp David, toward the end of 1978, the deal basically fell apart. American Jews, even though, you know, as Ray said, the only real threat to the security of Israel, the Egyptian army, had been taken off the table, they couldn’t take yes for an answer. And they started telling, Begin, you know, you got snookered in withdrawing from the Sinai. You know, you didn’t get enough. And Begin starts to believe this. So the whole thing starts to come apart.

And then in March of 1979, Carter goes to the region. Everybody tells him, all of his people, don’t do this. It’s not—the deal is dead. Don’t put your personal prestige on the line this way. And he says, I’m going. He went to both Cairo and Jerusalem. And the story of him in Jerusalem—in Cairo, Sadat supported him. But in Jerusalem, he had a very complex political challenge. Moshe Dayan helped him out a lot. He addressed the Knesset. And that was influential. But it was really The Perils of Pauline, a really dramatic story of what happened in Jerusalem in March of 1979. But he eventually, with kind of bailing wire and chewing gum, he put the deal back together, and they went to Washington and signed it.

But he felt—and this is one of the big surprises to me from our conversations—was he was, of course, proud of Camp David. He knew that everybody thought it was a great thing. He personally thought that normalization of relations with China would be his bigger legacy, because that became the foundation of the global economy. And I think one of the reasons he sort of downplayed Camp David a little bit in our conversations is that his biggest regret about not getting reelected was he thought in a second term he could get a comprehensive Middle East peace, and that he had the capacity to do that. And but he did feel that the Israelis were making it harder. And then some of that turned into some almost bitterness in future decades where he got a little bit maybe too emotional for his own good on the subject.

WOODRUFF: And the book that he wrote in in 2006, I heard Stu Eizenstat, again, in the previous discussion, say this was the one book Carter wrote where he did not reach out to his aides to bring them in, at least according to Stu. He didn’t bring in his advisers, his aides at the time, to talk to them about what he was going to write. And they tried to talk him out of it, but by then it was too late. I just—before we completely wrap this up, I want to come back to you, Ray, just—you know, you spoke about the impact of Camp David. I mean, how do you rank it in terms of, you know, all the efforts have been made at finding peace in the Middle East. Where would you put this one?

TAKEYH: I would say it’s the most substantial one, because you haven’t had that many meaningful agreements really since then. The Jordanian peace treaty was recognition of the existing reality where Jordan and Israel had already private relationships that were formalized. There has been no durable relationship with the Palestinians at all. And obviously, no agreement with Syria. So it is the most enduring of the peace agreements, and also the most substantial. And even through all the ups and downs of the Middle East over the past forty years, variety of Egyptian governments of very different colorations have adhered to it. And now, of course, you began to see Israeli-Egyptian relations have to be even more important in terms of what happens to Gaza. But it is the most substantial American-engineered peace agreement, I would say, in the Middle East.

WOODRUFF: And President Carter deserves credit. I want to turn to Iran now. We are going to—by the way, in about ten minutes or so we’re going to open up for questions from members. But Iran, I know, Ray, you were very involved in the Iran story over time. But, Bill, I want to come back to you on—you know, it’s a complicated legacy around Iran, the hostage taking. And some people—you know, many people over time have blamed President Carter for, quote, “losing” Iran. But the seeds of it went back, of course, farther than that, other administrations, the aid the United States gave to the shah and so forth. It’s a big subject to squeeze into just a few minutes, but how would you—how would you describe—how would you sum up, if you will, what happened in Iran and during Carter’s presidency, and why it happened?

QUANDT: Well, I wasn’t primarily dealing with Iran, but I followed it pretty closely. I had my hands full with Arab-Israeli issues. But as of the end of Carter’s first year, he actually made a trip to the Middle East. And he went to Iran. And he made this famous statement that Iran was an island of stability in a region of turmoil. Which was, of course, about a month later shown to be wrong as uprisings began in Iran that sort of snowballed. And by the middle of the year, it was pretty clear that the shah was facing unprecedented domestic upheavals.

The shah tended to tell us that he could handle it. He was, you know, on top of it. He had a strong military. He had strong intelligence services. The one thing we didn’t know about the shah was that he was also seriously ill. The only ones who knew that were the French, who provided the doctors. But they didn’t bother telling us. So the shah was bizarre because he would have ups and downs. Sometimes he would be very self-confident. Other times he would be very gloomy about his prospects.

This all kind of came together in September while we were at Camp David. And there were the riots in Tehran, quite serious ones. And the shah and the president talked. And at that time the shah said he was on top of it. He was going to appoint a new government, and they would deal with it. But then weeks later, he would be again in this kind of down mood, and as if he had no idea what to do. It was a very bizarre period because we were totally focused on Egypt and Israel, while Iran was slipping away. But we didn’t quite understand the degree to which the Shah was no longer the Shah we had been dealing with in previous years.

WOODRUFF: So, Ray, on balance—again, huge, huge subject. So much to say about U.S.-Iran at that point. But on balance, did Jimmy Carter make the right—we know that letting the shah in for medical treatment to the United States had a proximate role the—you know, what happened in Tehran after that, the hostage taking. But on balance, Jimmy Carter, a positive or not when it comes to the legacy of Iran?

TAKEYH: Well, it’s hard to argue that it was a positive development, given the collapse of the monarchy and the rise of an Islamic republic that has tormented the region for the past forty-five years. However, the question is, was it Carter’s fault? Whenever you’re dealing with an internal insurrection, as a foreign power you’re only as good as your ally. And this is what the Iranians and the Russians found out in Syria. If your allies are weak, then you have a problem. The opposition to the Shah—clerical-led opposition was resilient, disciplined, and determined. And the monarchy was none of the above.

And throughout the time when Carter began to focus on Iran, which was around November, he kept prodding the shah to restore order. Which essentially meant, use force. Carter as—I think as Jonathan has demonstrated, always blended pragmatism with idealism. He was not a racist, but he played the race card in 1970 election. He believed in human rights, but he also believed that Iran was an essential critical element of Iranian—America’s system in the Middle East, and had to be preserved. So he wanted the shah to crack down and preserve order. And the shah wouldn’t do it.

And that, essentially, led Carter to be very much frustrated by what is taking place in Iran, because it was an outcome he couldn’t control. He had to rely on allies that were feckless, broken, and mournful. Whether the shah’s cancer had much to do with that, I’m not sure. He always faded in times of crisis. Nor did he have the military to be able to essentially stem the tide of the revolution. Jimmy Carter tried to thwart a revolution. That’s not easy to do. And then, of course, he tried to undermine the regime through various schemes, which seem, as I mentioned, fantastic in retrospect.

WOODRUFF: And I’m going to come quickly to you, Jonathan, and just save a few minutes here for Afghanistan before we go to members. (Laughs.) But how did—how did President Carter himself look back on what happened with Iran, Jonathan?

ALTER: Well, he kind of tried to spin it as being a triumph, because they all came home in one piece. Which was important to him, too important. He allowed himself to be held hostage, essentially, by the ayatollah. So compare the way Joe Biden is handling the American hostages in Gaza right now. Most Americans don’t even know there are Americans being held in Gaza, because Biden learned the lesson from Carter. Now, part of that wasn’t Carter’s fault, because Ted Koppel and Walter Cronkite were reminding everybody of it every day. But the—you know, the other—I mean, the big mistake in letting the shah in, Carter kind of sensed it was a mistake, didn’t want to do it. And then the Rockefellers—you know, most Rockefeller conspiracy theories, almost all of them, are ridiculous, except this one. They lied to the State Department and said that the shah’s cancer could not be treated in Mexico, which was 100 percent untrue. Carter, on a humanitarian basis, let the shah into the United States. And the hostages were seized just a few days later.

So that was a big mistake, I think, in terms of the—I think Ray makes a very important point about the shah. He did have the military force. What he didn’t—he wasn’t bloodthirsty enough. And at one point the shah said: A dictator shoots his own people, a monarch does not. And if I start shooting them in one street one week, they’ll assemble in another street the next. So he eventually didn’t abdicate, but he just fled, which he had done in 1953 as well. And, you know, then there was this kind of period of instability. And where I think Carter could have done better, though he didn’t have a lot of time, was there were these potential—you know, who became essentially Kerenskys of the revolution, interim figures for people who know the history of the Russian revolution, who Carter might have been able to bolster better if he had more time and applied his normally very important attention to detail to Iranian politics.

He also could have—there were a number of—I think his fundamental policy failure on Iran was a lack of creativity. And that was partly born of ignorance in the State Department. You had people in the White House who didn’t even know the difference between Shia and Sunni. You know, they just—they just were ignorant about the region. And so it was clearly the weakest part of what was otherwise, I think, a surprisingly successful foreign policy, not just Camp David and normalization of China, but opening up the Panama Canal, and human rights across the board beyond Iran. It was very, very successful.

TAKEYH: Can I just say one thing about the hostage crisis? Because the admission of the shah to Iran has always been suggested as instigator of the hostage crisis.

WOODRUFF: You mean acceptance to United States?

TAKEYH: That’s right, to come for medical treatment. There were three reasons why the embassy was taken. Number one was because of the domestic situation in Iran. The consolidation of the revolution required a crisis with the United States. Number two, it was to humiliate the United States that, at that time, still had a hold on the popular imagination of the Iranians. So the idea was to bring United States down to the size. And Ayatollah Khomeini always says this indicates that Americans can’t do a damn thing. That was a slogan.

Number three, that’s not often stated, is Khomeini’s personal animosity toward Carter. If you look at his speeches during the latter stages of the revolution, lot of them are aimed at Jimmy Carter. There was a personal animosity between them because he thought he was responsible for sustaining the monarchy beyond its duration. Therefore, it is my opinion—just my opinion—that that embassy was a sitting target no matter where the shah was. That became a reasonable pretext for taking the embassy, but I also believe there were a lot of other factors that explain why the embassy was taken, and also why the hostage crisis lasted as long as it did.

ALTER: Just one quick data point on that, Judy. One quick data point. Brzezinski met in Algeria just a week before with senior civilian members of the government. And when he did so, and word got back to Tehran about these meetings, they had to resign, which very much weakened the secular government in Tehran and empowered the mullahs, who weren’t in full control at that point.

WOODRUFF: Yeah. I would just point out the previous administrations were supporting the shah. But, you know, it all comes down to when it when it comes down. Bill Quandt, were you trying to say something a minute ago about the hostages?

QUANDT: Just briefly, I know we’re running out of time. This was also one of the few issues that I was aware of where Carter was getting quite divergent recommendations from his National Security Advisor Brzezinski and his Secretary of State Vance. Vance was quite opposed to the idea of encouraging the shah to use force to put down the uprisings. He said, this is beyond his control. It’s beyond our control. Just nature is going to have to take its course. And we’ll have to just see how it plays out, but we can’t do that much about it.

Brzezinski was much more in favor of intervention. And I think he organized, or tried to organize, things so that there would be a moment after the shah had already left Iran but Khomeini had not returned, when the military in Iran would be given the green light to go ahead and put down the uprisings by force. And it didn’t happen because we went to the general that was supposed to do the job, General Djam, told him that we would support him if he did it—Brzezinski’s recommendation endorsed by Carter—and Djam said, I’m neutral.

ALTER: Yeah. General Hurley went there. It was more complicated. Just one quick thing on the Iran hostage rescue mission, since you brought up Cy Vance. You know, he quit over that. And Carter told me and others that if he’d had one more helicopter, in April of 1980 he would have been reelected. I don’t think that’s true in the face of double-digit inflation and double-digit interest rates, but that was his view.

QUANDT: Yeah.

ALTER: That was a painful—you’re right, the rescue—the rescue attempt.

We are overdue to go to members. I mean, you know, it’s not as if there weren’t a lot of things going on in December of ’79. That’s when the Soviets went into Afghanistan, creating one more giant headache for President Carter in the Middle East. Does one of you want to sum up what happened at that point before we take questions from our—from our from our members? Who wants to grab Afghanistan? Or we can go to members.

ALTER: I can try to do it super fast. So it the Soviets invade. Carter is in the middle of a very tight contest with Ted Kennedy, but he’s surged into the lead because of rally around the flag with the hostages. This also helped him politically. But I do think he genuinely believed that Soviet expansionism in that region was a threat. So he established something called the Carter doctrine. He made two big mistakes that are pretty well known. The grain embargo and the Olympic boycott were both ineffective. So the Soviet Union could buy grain from other nations, and did. And that just hurt Carter in the farm belt and didn’t do the slightest bit of good. And the Olympic boycott, which was very popular at first—everybody forgets this—as time went on people felt this was just unfair to the athletes. It wouldn’t do anything. And it became one of Carter’s least-popular initiatives.

WOODRUFF: And I would say also, the decision to—ultimately to arm the Mujahideen, as they called them, in Afghanistan, led to later a lot of second guessing about to what extent that led to the rise of the kind of terrorism we’ve seen out of that—out of that region. Not to mention al-Qaida.

All right. You guys have been great. We are now going to turn to questions from members. And, Deanna, I think you’re going to introduce them.

OPERATOR: As of now, there are no questions in the queue.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

WOODRUFF: OK. Thank you. Yeah, let me know if any—if any questions pop up. This clearly means you all are answering everybody’s questions.

I do want to spend a minute or two, at least a few minutes, on Afghanistan. Bill Quandt, do you want to weigh in on—(phone rings)—let me hang up on this. Sorry about that. Do you want to weigh in on how Carter was able to deal with Afghanistan, given everything else on his plate at that moment?

QUANDT: I was no longer in government when that happened, thank goodness. Also, strangely, the way the National Security Council and the State Department were organized, Middle East issues and Afghan issues were not in the same bureau. Afghanistan was part of the South Asian Bureau at that time. And so even if I had been in government, I would have not had responsibility for Afghanistan. And I think it was—had not been a high priority concern for the Carter administration. And they were kind of blindsided by what happened. And I can’t say very much more about that, but partly I’m not sure what we could have honestly done. But, of course, it turned out to be a much bigger preoccupation in later times. But it was certainly not high on the agenda before the Russians went in.

ALTER: Well, what happened, there was—there’s a great backstory. The ambassador, Arthur Blood (sic), was assassinated. And there was a coup in Afghanistan, in Kabul, and the new strongman was meeting secretly with the Americans. And when the Politburo found out about this, it wasn’t that they thought Carter was weak; it was they were worried that their client state was going over to the other side. And this is very much demonstrated in the documents.

As far as al-Qaida goes, Judy, you raise such an interesting historical question. When I interviewed Brzezinski, and I questioned him about the covert aid of the Mujahideen which people associate with Reagan but started under Carter in the summer of 1979, and Brzezinski, who first told a French newspaper about it years later—it was a total secret—was shortly before his death very proud of it. And I said, well, you know, Osama bin Laden was part of the Mujahideen. What did you guys unleash?

And he said, if it’s a trade between al-Qaida and ending the Soviet Union, I’ll take that trade. Because they believe that the Mujahideen turned Afghanistan into the Soviets’ Vietnam and fatally undermined the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of its demise. And historians will argue over that for a long time. I think a lot more of it has to do with Mikhail Gorbachev and Max Boot in his new book about Reagan says the same thing. But, you know, that’s what Brzezinski thought. Carter wasn’t at all tubthumping about that because his priority was always peace. He wanted peace.

WOODRUFF: With the Soviet Union. Ray, where do you come down on that?

TAKEYH: It shows how decayed the Soviet leadership was at that time. Brezhnev was not capable of making decisions. He was working maybe one day a month. And the decision to invade Afghanistan was made by the head of KGB Andropov and Foreign Minister Gromyko. And they assured Brezhnev, on his little bit of lucid time, that this was going to be a very quick invasion. And they would come in, restore the government, and get out. But in turn, of course, they went into a quagmire from which that empire never recovered. But one implication of that for Jimmy Carter was it ended his arms control agreement.

The 1986 SALT II agreement. He had always been very interested in proliferation. And he essentially viewed disarmament and reduction of nuclear danger as a moral issue. For him, nuclear disarmament was a way of preserving human civilization. What is more moral than that? And the 1986 SALT agreement, at that time, died. The Reagan administration agreed to adhere it to its limits till 1986, when they stopped it because they were introducing new weapon systems. So it essentially deprived Carter of an arms control agreement that he could have had through the Senate, perhaps, in absence of the Russian invasion.

WOODRUFF: Bill Quandt, if you put these together—and I hear you saying that at that time that Afghanistan was seen as South Asia and not the Middle East—what if Carter had made different decisions? What if—I mean, and my thought experiment is what if he had not decided to wade in so aggressively into the Middle East? I mean, it wasn’t in his—it was in his nature, I should say, to get involved, to try to fix it. And as you, as others have pointed out, it did go back to his faith. To his—you know, he had a deep interest in the Middle—in the Middle East, in Israel, and its history, its relations with its neighbors. But, I mean, you know, how much—how much argument was there inside the administration about whether—excuse me—whether it was even smart for him to get involved with Israel and Egypt?

QUANDT: Let me just go back to the situation we found ourselves in in 1977. We still—we were just four years past the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, which had caught the United States by surprise. It resulted in an oil embargo that was costly to the world. And it led to a near U.S.-Soviet—not genuine nuclear confrontation, but a very intense moment toward the end of that war, that pretty much put pay to the idea that détente would prevent these kinds of explosions from happening. And it was a very—it was a very powerful moment for the American public. This is what you have to remember, that Nixon and Kissinger were still talking about détente during the 1973 war. They dealt with the Soviets diplomatically a lot. But this almost put an end to the notion of détente as a legitimate policy objective.

The other thing it did—and this is the kind of surprising outcome of the ’73 war, is that it put the United States in the key diplomatic position to negotiate between Egypt and Israel. And to an extent, Kissinger set the model—a model of sorts, for American-led diplomacy in the Middle East. And Carter picked it up with greater ambition and intensity. And I think we could not, in 1977, with an incoming president, simply say, the Middle East doesn’t matter. We had just been through a period when, you know, not Iran, and not Afghanistan, but the Arab-Israeli issue was a crucial issue where we were making progress. And to turn our backs on that, no president would have done it. I’m not sure any would have taken it as intently forward as Jimmy Carter did, but nobody would have turned their back on it.

WOODRUFF: Jon Alter—

ALTER: Go ahead, sorry.

WOODRUFF: Yeah, no, I was just going to say, I mean, Henry Kissinger was the secretary of state. I mean, the national security advisor, he had an entire decades of experience in foreign policy at that point. Jimmy Carter was a former governor of Georgia. I mean, where did the confidence come from—and background as a peanut farmer, as we know. Where did the confidence come from inside of him that he could do something remarkable and historic in the Middle East?

ALTER: Well, he took a trip when he was governor to the Middle East, the first time he went there, to what he always called the holy land. And he bathed in the Jordan River. And Jody Powell bummed cigarettes from Golda Meir, and Carter drove around. And it was a very, very impactful trip for him. And then Brzezinski was the director of something called the Trilateral Commission, which was almost like a form of education for Jimmy Carter when he got an appointment to that commission. And so he started, before he was president, really studying foreign policy to the point that he was often more knowledgeable than people with decades of experience, and sometimes let them know it.

But he was an engineer. And he engineered peace. He would break it down into its component parts and figure out how to build it. And this was—the engineering part of Carter is very, very important to understanding him. But he also had a truly high IQ. And he could integrate these issues very well. People accused him of not having any, you know, strategic vision, but it’s because he was very pragmatic. He wanted peace, and he wanted to figure out how to get there. But there are all kinds of sort of delayed consequences to his policies. And one of the really interesting things is how much his human rights policy contributed to the end of the Cold War. And people like Vaclav Havel had very interesting things to say about it, as well as a number of conservatives who at the time really resented the human rights policy, were very much Reaganites.

But later they understood that this soft power that Carter in many ways pioneered made a big difference. And that started early on. Carter sent Sakharov a letter on the second day of his presidency, infuriating the Soviets. And he had a prisoner swap. There’s a moment that sticks out of my mind. He brought a Christian Russian who had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union. And there was a prisoner swap. And the Russian came to Plains, Georgia, and went to church with the Carters. And he was sitting next to Rosalynn Carter. And he opened the heel of his shoe and he showed her that in the heel he had a picture of Jimmy Carter that he—that provided him sustenance for the years that he was in prison.

WOODRUFF: That’s something. I mean, are there—Ray are there—are there lessons to be taken from how Jimmy Carter—I mean, we just heard Jon describe him, you know, using the skills of an engineer to figure out how to come up with a peace deal between Israel and Egypt. Are there lessons to be learned, or was this sui generis, a one time off thing that he did?

TAKEYH: Well, I think one of the things that, in any agreement of international consequence, it requires a very direct engagement of the president. Even the Iran nuclear deal that failed had—was because Barack Obama was so engaged in it that he understood the details, and he was essentially the desk officer. Jimmy Carter’s attention to detail was extraordinarily important in arms control agreements or in peace agreements, where details matter a great deal—particularly how the territories are apportioned, and so forth. One of the things I would say is Jimmy Carter should not be made in death what he was not alive. He was often arrogant. He was prickly. He was difficult to deal with.

ALTER: Yeah, all true.

TAKEYH: He was religious to the point of sanctimony. He would often lecture the American people about all the things that they were doing wrong, about their selfish ways. He was, essentially, a preacher scolding his flock in some way, not necessarily leading the country. He was a poor custodian of the Democratic Party. He could never unify it. The Democratic Party at that time was a diverse political coalition. It might have been difficult to unify. But in some way, his own personality was basis of his success because he was so relentless, but it also militated against his success in some way, because of his own limitations, in that sense.

WOODRUFF: Isn’t it interesting, how that happens? Oh, sorry, I stepped on you. What did you say?

TAKEYH: I think Jonathan would know more about his personality than I would, but he’s—he was—he was acerbic. He wasn’t always a nice, kind grandfatherly type.

ALTER: That is absolutely—

WOODRUFF: Right. Yeah, I covered him going back to 1970. And I have to say, you’ve touched on a number of qualities—I want—I do want Bill Quandt to weigh in, though, because, Bill, you dealt with him. You were in those meetings when all these things were being discussed.

QUANDT: Well, for whatever his prickliness and arrogance may have been on occasions, when he dealt with someone like Anwar Sadat, who was not the easiest person to get along with, they developed very quickly a remarkably positive relationship. And that was crucial to our ability to move forward with Egypt. I never found him difficult to deal with. I mean, if he disagreed with you he told you. But the other thing that was important about him is he did his homework. Almost every night Brzezinski and I would send a memo to him, sometimes Brzezinski would send his own, sometimes I would send one through Brzezinski. He would read them before he went to bed and we would get the comments the next day telling us what he wanted us to do next.

So I don’t care if he was a bit prickly. He was a hard worker. And if you’re working for somebody at the highest level I can’t imagine what it would be like to be dealing with a Donald Trump, who doesn’t read, who doesn’t we care about what his aides think—

ALTER: Just on—

OPERATOR: We will take—we will take the next question from Mark Feldman.

WOODRUFF: OK, sorry to interrupt.

ALTER: No problem.

WOODRUFF: Go ahead, Mark.

Q: Yes. Thank you very much. I’m sorry to interrupt this fascinating conversation.

But I—and while I was—I worked in the State Department in the Carter years. And it was a very busy time for everybody in the government in the foreign affairs field. And I worked on Iran, but I did not work on Israel. Still, I want to ask—and happy to be corrected—my recollection of how he got involved in Camp David started with an effort to do a multilateral peace process that would involve the Soviet Union. And some people in the department back in the day who said that frightened Sadat into going to Jerusalem. And I just wonder whether what our panelists might think about that as a contribution to the process.

WOODRUFF: Bill, or Jon? Yeah.

ALTER: Go ahead, Bill. Go ahead.

QUANDT: It’s not quite true that Sadat was frightened to by the idea of a conference with the Soviet Union. What he didn’t want was a conference that included the Soviet Union unless we had some prior agreement on what the parameters of it would be. So he became alarmed in October that the United States was heading toward the convening of a conference without much prior agreement. And he came to Carter, and he said: We need, you know, to do something before we go to the conference. And they talked a bit about it and at that point I think Carter had also had the first big negative reaction to his diplomacy, after announcing that there would be this U.S.-Soviet sponsored conference. And he was sort of shocked by the intensity of the domestic backlash.

Sadat saw that and said, Carter’s been weakened, and I have to do something to help make it possible for this diplomacy to go forward. And without any urging from us, although Carter claims credit for this but I don’t think he deserved it, Sadat decided to go to Jerusalem on his own. And his own advisors disagreed with him. They thought it was a mistake. He did not ask us in advance before he announced it whether he should do it. Once he said in front of his own parliament that he was going, we, of course, had to determine whether he was serious and was going to. His foreign minister said, he’s bluffing. He’s not going to. Don’t worry about it. Nothing’s going to change. And he immediately contacted us and said, no, I want to go, and I want you to help organize it because I don’t have direct contact now with Begin.

So we actually went to Begin and said, he’s serious about it. Can we help put it together? That is, just facilitate the technique of getting him there and making sure you know what he needs, and he knows what you’re going to do. The Israelis, when he arrived on the plane, his military advisors told Begin, this may be a trick. He may have the plane filled with his own military, and they’ll come storming out, and they will assassinate the prime minister of Israel. And they had snipers on the—on the rooftop waiting as the door opened. Of course, none of that happened. Sadat had no such intentions. But, yes, it was a big surprise. And it opened the way toward a much more separate Egyptian-Israeli track of negotiations than we had initially envisaged.

WOODRUFF: Bill, thank you so much. And, Mark, thank you for that question. I want to thank our panelists who have had—we’ve had just a terrific discussion. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Ray, and Jon Alter. So appreciate it.

We’re now going to—we’re going to hear for some closing remarks from Thomas Donilon, Tom Donilon, distinguished fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, chairman of Blackrock Investment Institute, as we know former national security advisor to President Obama. Tom Donilon, you have the floor.

DONILON: Thank you, Judy. I’ll just get—just make a couple of brief, remarks reflecting on President Carter’s foreign policy legacy. But first, it’s really terrific to be here with Jonathan, Ray, and Bill Quandt. And particularly Jonathan, thank you for your great—your great biography of Jimmy—of President Carter. I think it really put a lot of things in perspective for a lot of people interested in that history.

You know, my relationship with President Carter, as you know, Judy, goes back to 1977. I went to work for President Carter when I was twenty-two years old, right out of college. I think that’s where we first met, Judy, when I was at the White House as a young staffer working in the Congressional Relations Office and then went on to run the convention in 1980 for President Carter and the knock-down, drag-out fight for the nomination that he had with Senator Kennedy. And when President Carter ultimately lost the general election in November of 1980, I went with him to Atlanta and was down there for eight or nine months doing his transition to private life. So I have a great, terrific fortune to have met President Carter then. He’s been a very important force in my professional and personal life.

You know, Bill, I was a long way from national security when I worked at the White House in the 1970s. And I’d leave the White House late at night. And I’d walk by down West Executive Drive. And I’d look up at Dr. Brzezinski’s office. And it would be late at night and the lights would always be on there. And I would say to myself, what are those guys doing up there all the time, right? And I was able to find out thirty years later, obviously, when I moved into that—when I moved into that office.

On the record—President Carter’s record, you know, it’s—and Stu Eizenstat made this point in his eulogy yesterday, and this discussion really undergirds the point I’m about to make, which is that Carter is often less regarded for his presidency than for his post presidency, where he took up the title of citizen, as he said, and redefined what a—what a president can do after leaving the White House, and made tremendous contributions at home and overseas on human rights, and conflict resolution, and public health, and beyond. It’s a lasting legacy in its own right. But it undersells what happened in his one-term presidency which, as Stu said yesterday, really was probably the most productive one-term presidency we’ve seen in the modern history of the—of the presidency.

So I think I really like this discussion because it does focus on the steps that he took, the accomplishments he had as president, not just as former—as former president. And I was struck really, as national security advisor serving in the—in the government on a number of occasions after President Carter’s presidency, but particularly as national security advisor. I was struck by how relevant President Carter’s achievements were to the world that we faced at that time, in the Obama years. They were directly relevant to the world I faced as national security advisor. And I think there are three things that—three phrases, or three words that I would use to describe a number of these achievements. Which were they were foundational, fundamental and, most importantly, on reflection, they were quite durable.

And I’ll just mention three or four, and then close out. We talked about a couple of them here in this—in this discussion. Obviously making peace in the Middle East. You know, when Carter enters office Israel remains in a state of war. It has fought four major wars against its Arab neighbors over the prior thirty years. No diplomatic relations. And as Bill Quandt points out, Carter took this on. And it is, I think, as Stu Eizenstat, again, as Jonathan said, it is a towering example of presidential diplomacy by a United States president.

But what’s durable from it? And Ray made these points. It is the most significant achievement to emerge from decades of Arab-Israeli peace attempts. Second, it is the cornerstone of stability between Israel and Egypt. And today it remains that, despite a lot of pressures on this, including—I was national security advisor during the Arab Spring in 2011. And even during that period, right, during the fall of Mubarak and the rise of more radical groups in Egypt, they maintained that relationship. Three, it’s been the basis for most peacemaking efforts, right, including Oslo and Madrid, in the region since. So I think, again, a durable, foundational set of—set of achievements.

Second, and Ray knows—talked about this a bit, and has obviously written extensively about it, but Carter reoriented the U.S. national security and foreign policy in the Middle East. You know, obviously—and you go through the list here. The Carter doctrine, right, in his State of the Union address in January of 1980, where he stated an attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States, and such an assault be repelled by any means including military—including military force. That has undergirded, really, the approach that the United States has had in the Persian Gulf and in the Middle East ever since.

Second, interestingly, to back that commitment up Carter established a rapid military deployment force. That force became—that was the predecessor of Central Command. U.S. Central Command, which is now, as we know, the primary presence of the United States in the Middle East and in Central Asia today. And third, I think—and really, for me, quite poignant, is that, you know, the searing image of President Carter’s foreign policy is probably—is most likely, obviously, the tragedy in the desert and the failed attempt at hostage rescue mission in April of 1980.

But out of that tragedy, President Carter went to work and established the predecessor of the Joint Special Operations Force, right, JSOC, which is a unique American asset. It kind of—you know, the analysis coming out of the failed hostage rescue mission was that there wasn’t enough coordination among the various pieces of the military. And obviously, it ended in a tragedy. But for me, you know, the establishment of the Special Forces, right, was really kind of poignant for me in how important it was for presidents in similar situations in the context of the Osama bin Laden raid against Abbottabad—in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May of 2011.

That was a difficult decision for President Obama. There was no direct evidence. It was not a direct evidence case. It was an analytical and circumstantial case. And I believe strongly that the decisive factor in President Obama’s decision to go ahead and launch that raid—by the way, over the objection of a number of senior officials in the government including some who had been in the room in April of 1980—including, for example, Secretary Bob Gates.

I think that the decisive factor, right, was his faith and confidence in the Special Operations Forces, JSOC. And that was a unique American asset available to the president in 2011 that was not available to the President and 1980. Again, rising from that tragedy. I think, you know, history was really in the room during the Osama bin Laden raid. And a lot of it was the history coming out of the Carter administration. Again, a foundational, durable contribution.

Third is China. Obviously, strategic engagement with China. Engagement with China had stalled, really, since the opening of Kissinger—by Kissinger and Nixon. And Carter, obviously, undertook the effort to reengage, reestablish relationships, put together the construct that has really provided for the peace in that region for four decades, arising out of the recognition effort and the Taiwan Relations Act. And we have had peace. And we’ve obviously had—I think which has been an important positive for everybody involved, including especially Taiwan which is now, obviously, a vibrant democracy and a technological powerhouse.

The last thing, Judy, I’ll mention, because I think it’s really underappreciated, is President Carter’s role in ensuring the ultimate downfall of the Soviet Union. During the second part of his presidency, President Carter did undertake a much more confrontational approach to the Soviet Union. And Jonathan mentioned this. And it’s very important, I think. He challenged publicly and consistently the legitimacy of Soviet rule, human rights efforts, efforts to help dissidents, right? He did put in place new military capabilities. He increased the size of the defense budget, really, the largest that had been since the end of the Vietnam War, new capabilities, including stealth technology.

And indeed, it just, I think, was kind of the—it was the foundation on which President Reagan built the ultimate challenge to the Soviet Union and his downfall. And there are others, obviously, which we can talk about—the Panama Canal Treaty, and the importance of that in terms of Western Hemisphere negotiations, the elevation of human rights in U.S. foreign policy, the Holocaust Museum in the United States, energy security. The bottom line is I just am struck by how relevant, durable, and foundational the contributions that President Carter made in national security and foreign policy and that one term are to the world today.

So it’s delightful to be with everybody here today. And I think it’s an—it’s an important—it’s an important moment to reflect, obviously, on President Carter’s legacy.

WOODRUFF: Yes, it is. And Tom Donilon, we so appreciate your perspective. It is kind of astonishing, in a way, to think about the many, many different ways that what President Carter did touched on not just what happened at the time, but what’s happened in the decades since. I want to thank you, Tom. Thank you very much. Tom Donilon, William Quandt, Bill Quandt, thank you. Ray Takeyh, thank you, and Jonathan Alter, for just a—really, a terrific, rich discussion.

On behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations thanks to all of you who’ve been watching and listening. And the final thing I’m to tell you is please note that the audio and the transcript of today’s meeting are going to be posted on the Council’s website. With that, thank you all. Have a great Friday night. Thank you for being with us.

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This is an uncorrected transcript.