Keeping Faith

Keeping Faith is a 1982 memoir by President Jimmy Carter. According to Gaddis Smith of Foreign Affairs, the book "has no great literary distinction, but it is short, sincere, and straightforward." The New York Times, in a negative review, is less charitable, calling it  "vintage Jimmy Carter, a mirror, in fact, of its author: honest, sincere, intelligent, dry, humorless, and impersonal."

Much of the book focuses on the sheer joy President Carter felt at the simple acts of governance many Americans take for granted. Improving diplomatic relations wasn't controversial or headline-grabbing, but it was a concrete accomplishment Carter is proud to share. The same is true of when Carter helped the Senate ratify the Panama Treaties.

In his own charming way, Carter discusses far more impressive or monumental achievements with the same folksy humility as his more commonplace accomplishments.



Nowhere is this more evident than when discussing the negotiations at Camp David, which eventually led to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Carter faced a daunting task in playing mediator between Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel. Pulling from detailed notes he took during the thirteen days of negotiation, Carter describes the two as being complete opposites, both in temperament and in terms of their politics. Sadat is described as charismatic and politically shrewd, knowing exactly when to lay on the easy charm and when to go for the big gesture. Begin, meanwhile, was unpredictable and made everyone uneasy, contradicting himself at every turn. Even something as simple as the three of them engaging in a shared prayer broadcast to the world made Begin suspicious, Carter writes.

While Carter is humble about his role in the negotiations, it is clear from even the driest explanation of the thirteen-day marathon event that the President was crucial in bringing the two to reach an agreement. They had reached tentative agreements and then abandoned them so many times during the process that Carter couldn't be blamed had he given up on the two heads of state. Nevertheless, Carter persisted, even embarking on a joint tour of Cairo and Jerusalem at a time when the negotiations seemed hopeless. Such a trip would have been a political disaster had it failed. However, Carter trusted the courage of his conviction that there was common ground for the two countries to share.

Another major segment is devoted to Carter's one meeting with the Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev. That meeting was less fruitful than Carter's Egypt-Israel negotiations. Although the two agreed in principle on the SALT II treaty, which would restrain the build-up of nuclear arms by both countries, ultimately, the treaty was never ratified. Moreover, the President's advisements against aggression toward the Soviet Union's neighbors was ultimately not heeded: The USSR would invade Afghanistan later that year.



That failure appears to have little to do with Carter's talent as a statesman. Rather, the United States found itself in a much-weakened position later in the year when the Iran hostage crisis broke out. That ended up sucking all of Carter's energies to the detriment of other potentially productive efforts. Carter calls the Senate's failure to ratify the SALT II treaty as ''the most profound disappointment of my Presidency.''

Which leads into “the most difficult period of my life,” the hostage crisis. It may be too fresh for Carter to write about, in 1982, because he fails to address some of the major questions about his handling of Iran and its shah in the weeks leading up to the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, an event which contributed greatly to his losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan and becoming relegated in history as a one-term president. For example, Carter writes that he knew the risks of inciting Iranian revolutionaries by admitting the highly unpopular shah into the United States for medical treatment. In fact, he says he only relented to his advisers' pleas to admit the shah when he discovered how dire the deposed leader's medical condition had become. However, he fails to answer a central question that may have changed the course of history: Why didn't Carter evacuate American diplomats before admitting the shah?

In the end, Keeping Faith is a valuable, if somewhat dry, Presidential memoir.