''Begin liked the idea, but first he wanted to see the text. Carter recalls that, during their first day at Camp David, he proposed that the three leaders issue a joint call for the world to join them in prayer for the success of their efforts.
The Israeli Prime Minister is pictured as explosive, mercurial, pedantic and unreliable, a man who would commit himself to one position in private and promptly contradict it in public. The Egyptian President is depicted as a charismatic figure of courage and vision, the master of the grand gesture who, by his trip to Jerusalem, changed the course of history in the Middle East.
Begin are portrayed as political and psychological opposites. He provides perceptive portraits of the different players in the drama, a keen sense of the tension that underlay their mountaintop encounter and a historically invaluable account of exactly how the various compromises were reached. 5, 1978, at Camp David, and the result is a vivid narrative that builds like a diplomatic thriller. Carter kept a detailed diary during the 13 days of intensive talks with Anwar el-Sadat and Menachem Begin that began on Sept. Nonetheless, there are three absorbing sections in the book - those that deal with Carter's private meetings with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev in Vienna in 1979, his protracted efforts to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis and, best of all, the extraordinary roller-coaster negotiations at Camp David that led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. He is the same enigma now that he was when he first burst upon the national political scene a decade ago. There are no real insights into the man and how he actually felt. There is little introspection in its pages, even less analysis of why and how things happened.
''Keeping Faith,'' his personal account of those four years, is vintage Jimmy Carter, a mirror, in fact, of its author: honest, sincere, intelligent, dry, humorless and impersonal. He left it four years later, still largely an outsider, after a stunning electoral defeat in which he lost 44 of 50 states. The man from Georgia arrived in Washington in January 1977, an out-sider who had confounded the political odds by getting elected in the first place. Jimmy Carter's term as President was essentially an interregnum, a bridge that carried the country from the end of its preoccupation with Watergate to the advent of the Reagan revolution.
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