Presidents Sadat and Carter: Personal and dramatic. Such are friends

CAIRO - 29 December 2024: The unlikely friendship of President Anwar Sadat, assassinated at 62 years old, and President Jimmy Carter, deceased at 100 years of age, is a rare thing. It is quite regular that Arab leaders are not mentioned favorably in the memoirs of U.S. presidents. However, the respect these two had for each other was genuine.

Carter said it himself at the 20th Anniversary of the Camp David Accords October 25, 1998 at the University of Maryland.

“There was an element of mutual trust and accommodation and rapport of a political and human nature that was possibly unprecedented between two leaders of nations.”

Without those two men, the peace treaty would not have been born. Sadat’s courage and Carter’s perseverance and impressive patience as a mediator ended what could have been a never ending war.

At one point during the Camp David negotiations, Sadat and Menachem Begin were no longer on speaking terms. Carter, then, took on the role of a “go-between.” He made proposals with one of them and then the next, according to Camp David Accords:  Thirteen Days After Twenty-Five Years from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.

During Carter’s presidency is also when Egyptian-U.S. relations began to flourish, something that has been solid ever since.

My good friend Jimmy

That is how Sadat called President Jimmy Carter. Little did he know that their precious friendship will be cut short by his own assassination in 1981, and that his good friend Jimmy will catch him more than four decades later.

For his part, Carter said at the University of Maryland “Sadat was as good a friend as I ever had personally. Rosalynn and Jehan are close friends. My children are friends with Sadat’s children. My grandchildren are friends of Sadat’s grandchildren. He came down to Plains to visit me in my little home town, six-hundred people, just a few months before he gave his life for peace. And when I went to Egypt I went to his little home town. And I walked through the streets and talked to some of his neighbors.”

Carter even summoned that precious friendship into Camp David negotiations. When Sadat called for a helicopter to take him out of Camp David after a deadlock in negotiations, Carter had “a highly personal and dramatic encounter” with Sadat, as described in” Camp David Accords:  Thirteen Days After Twenty-Five Years” research on the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.

Personal and dramatic. Such are friends.

“I explained to [Sadat] the extremely serious consequences... that his action would harm the relationship between Egypt and the United States, he would be violating his personal promise to me. . . [and] damage one of my most precious possessions—his friendship and our mutual trust,” Jimmy Carter from Keeping Faith.

Sadat, as we all know, stayed till the end.

“There was a general consensus at Camp David that Sadat trusted me too much and that Begin did not trust me enough. Sadat was the most forthcoming member of the Egyptian delegation. Begin was the most reluctant member of the Israeli delegation,” the late U.S. President added.

When Carter was asked who was the greatest leader he had ever met, he always had Sadat for an answer.

Sadat was “bold, authoritative, and self-confident, independent, strategic in his thoughts,” according to Carter.

“I began to explain to him my dreams of peace in the Middle East. I found a receptivity that I had not experienced anywhere else, and I began to recognize the attributes that made him great. He was calm, self-assured, and had a far-sighted awareness of global interrelatedness. It was obvious that he was bold and did not lack political courage.”

Indeed, Sadat did not lack political courage when he addressed the Israeli Knesset on Nov. 20, 1977, famously calling for peace in the Middle East. And the rest is history.