Negotiation and the Art of Narrative Open Access

Lawrence Wright's Thirteen Days in September is a superb telling of what “really” happened in one negotiation. (The quotation marks that I have placed around the word “really” suggest the limits inherent in any narrative built on what an author has chosen to select from interviews, memories, and documents.) Wright weaves together four different narrative strands. The dominant story is the moment‐by‐moment account of the negotiations among U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that took place over thirteen days in 1978 at Camp David, Maryland.¹ Wright comes as close as one can to providing a transcript of a negotiation as it exists, in the words the negotiators actually used: the reader feels as though he or she is actually in the room.

The book's second narrative strand examines in depth those aspects of each negotiator's past that influenced the interactions of three intense lives. For this story, the reader is not “in the room” — rather he or she is perched above, watching the life stories of three intensely energetic people who would collide and ricochet over the course of those thirteen days.

Wright's third story is the history of the Jewish creation of Israel and the evolution of the modern Egyptian state following the end of British rule. Finally, his fourth story focuses on the members of Begin's and Sadat's highly accomplished and forceful negotiating teams. Begin and Sadat each had to fight with his own team to maintain his leadership position, and the outcome of Camp David I had everything to do with the resolution of those intra‐team battles. Wright brilliantly delineates the very different roles assumed by each team as well as the differences among personalities within each staff. (Carter attempted to exploit some of these differences by making direct overtures to staff whose views were closer to his own.) Again, personalities, histories, and negotiating dynamics collided and caromed.

Wright's telling is neither conventional nor chronological: he does not first describe the history leading up to Camp David and then describe the negotiations; rather he weaves these stories, going back and forth from present to past to present, making the stories of each merge for the reader as they did for the participants.

I read this book as a struggle by each principal to gain control over the power of history — Begin and Sadat are engaged in a process that demands that they alter the national and personal narratives that have formed their lives. For most of the thirteen‐day negotiation, each leader fails in this effort, and Wright shows how each responded to his own and each other's failure to do so. Wright makes the reader comprehend each man's need to control the negotiation, and his sense of failure at his inability to do so. He engages the reader intensively with each moment, somehow creating suspense even for those readers who are well acquainted with the process and outcome.²

In his book, The Much Too Promised Land (2008), Aaron David Miller described the uses of power in the Israeli–Arab negotiations, emphasizing the limits of American power and the costs that the U.S. incurs in using it.³ Miller suggested that the use of power most often depended on dramatic rhetoric and raised voices.

Wright goes further. He spells out in detail what the use of power looked like at Camp David, whether wielded by Carter, Sadat, or Begin. For Wright, the classic definition of negotiating power — the party whose need is greatest has the least power — is the dramatic frame for all the interactions he describes. Threats abound: to walk out, to blame another for failure, to end a friendship, to cut off international support, to lose domestic support, to miss the opportunity for historic breakthrough, to disappoint the grandchildren. Carter repeatedly reminded the parties how much time the president of the United States was giving to this one issue and the risks he would confront if the process failed. This flow of quite‐credible threats illustrates that who‐needs‐who‐more was not a static state but fluid, depending on each participant's shifting sense of self‐confidence, the passage of time, and the moment‐by‐moment perception of each about the other two. Neither the parties nor the reader can be quite sure where “the power” lay at any given time.

What does it feel like to be a negotiator? What is the experience? Difficult negotiations are consistently frustrating. The past is a burden, and sometimes a comfort. The future is a lure, but uncertainty is a danger. The negotiation literature has given us few glimpses of the interactivity among these elements. Wright does a masterful job of enabling the reader to empathize with each major player and simultaneously see the process as a whole.

Thirteen Days is not Wright's first attempt at telling the Camp David story — he first wrote a play about the negotiations (titled Camp David) that premiered at the Arena Stage in Washington in 2014. The sequence is important because it tips us to the author's inclination to use dramatic confrontation as an opening into deeper understanding of the participants. While the play is powerful, I found the book to be even more impressive — it widens the lens, considerably enlarges the cast, and intensifies the impact. But I read both to make the same point: the negotiation was driven forward by colliding waves of emotion.

“Narrative art,” wrote film critic David Denby (2014), “lives in small details woven through large emotions.” Wright adheres to this principle. The book, like the play, doesn't describe what happened at Camp David as much as enact it, showing how it feels to be one of these negotiators, particularly what it must feel like when they were forced to weather the emotional assaults of those around them. Neither the book nor the play gives the reader much distance: I experienced anger and frustration along with the negotiators. I felt hope and feared that hope would be destroyed. Like the parties, I felt certain that any eventual success would be fragile.

We hear often that pressing problems could be addressed if only leaders had more courage and political will. Wright illustrates what those words mean to leaders who must make tough decisions. Sharing the Camp David experience with the parties via this book while simultaneously knowing the outcome enhanced my engagement with these struggling humans, rather like seeing a good play for the second or third time. The parties occasionally remarked half humorously that they felt trapped in their isolated location in the Maryland woods, and the analogy to being trapped by their own histories was lost on none of them.

Do the unique qualities of this negotiation make the possibility of learning from it less likely? Three heads of state, including the president of the United States, worked on the world's stage, with lives and deaths in the balance. This doesn't happen very often.

But what would happen if someone of Wright's ability were to take on a small claims mediation, a commercial negotiation, or a divorce mediation? Thirteen Days runs to three hundred pages; what I am suggesting would presumably be shorter. But would such a telling contain less drama? Would we find fewer or less intense revelations of emotion and collisions of frustration than at an international peace negotiation?

Obviously, most negotiations don't have decades of history behind them, nor do they loom quite so large in the lives of the participants. But I think such an approach would reveal emotional complexities that are often not explored in conventional negotiation writing and teaching.

Should we consider Camp David I a success and thus an example of good negotiating? The Israelis and the Egyptians reached a deal that has been maintained without violation for thirty‐six tumultuous years. But the Palestinians got nothing from the process, and the Israeli right wing still feels betrayed by the removal of settlements from the Sinai. These were not small matters then, and they are, if anything, larger today.

The more relevant question for negotiation scholars, I believe, is: what made this negotiation successful? Wright's book raises questions about what made it so and whether conventional negotiation literature was helpful then or would be now in assessing the events. Wright's book focuses on negotiating rather differently than typical negotiation scholarship does. What implications might we draw from that?

Here, for example, is a sample of topics, central in Wright's account, that I suggest negotiation scholars should consider.

Stamina. All three principals stated their primary interests early, and held angrily to them day after day. Stamina certainly defined their behavior. What do we know about the role of stamina in difficult negotiations?

Negotiation tools. Negotiation theorists and educators have developed a range of negotiating and mediating tools. In my reading, Wright's book implicitly raises questions about their effectiveness. The only negotiating technique he names directly is the use of a “single text” (a continuously revised single document whose iterations reflect the parties' current level of agreement at any point in the negotiation), and the book provides some glimpses throughout of an evolving text in Carter's hands. It is worth noting, however, that Carter often used the single text as a cudgel, including new elements or excluding them according to his own assessment of where that cudgel's impact needed to be felt.

What drives concessions? Sadat and Begin did finally make crucial concessions. (Sadat ignored the Palestinians, Begin agreed to remove Jewish settlements from the Sinai.) Each felt pressures from many directions, and face‐saving techniques were proposed. But what made them change their minds? What finally “worked?” Wright does not answer this question, but he effectively dramatizes the impact of that mystery — of not knowing exactly how to persuade each other — on the parties. Carter, in particular, tried one tool after another with apparently no impact, only to find, in a swirl of frustration, that Sadat and Begin finally each seemed to yield. Or did they? Backtracking and misunderstanding — revealed even after Camp David I concluded — call any certainty of real agreement into question. But they did sign the accords, which, decades later, still stand.

Mysteries are not inert. They influence how parties feel and what they feel they can accomplish, but they have not been the focus of much negotiation scholarship. Negotiation scholarship has analyzed the ambivalence at the heart of many negotiations, but it has not examined the impact of that ambivalence on the experience of those who feel it nor has it considered the effect that wrestling with that mystery has on decision making.

History and memory. So much social science thinking is a battle between accurate complexity and useable simplicity, and each has strong appeal. When Wright leans toward complexity in the book, he emphasizes the historical context, for example, the role of memory, both personal and national. Does the negotiation literature speak adequately to the roles of history and memory?

Hope and courage. Wright does not explicitly mention the role that hope and courage play in motivating negotiation behavior, but I found examples on every page. Hope fueled the parties' conviction that the benefits of peace would overwhelm the agreements' opponents and make its costs seem small by comparison. Each principal was committed to his own vision of the future, whether his counterparts derided that vision or not. And Wright portrays vividly how much courage it took for Sadat, Begin, and Carter to each crawl out on his limb and how lonely each perch must have felt.

Wright provides extensive sources for every quote and every action he describes, but the book still reads like fiction. He never suggests that he can “read the minds” of the people he describes, but he provides so much information that the reader can vividly imagine the conflicts, hopes, and fears that seemed to motivate the participants. What I take from this is that narrative journalism, drama, and even fiction can illuminate the murky forces that drive the process.

Wright's stage version provides two provocative illustrations of how dramatic recreations can effectively reveal negotiation dynamics at work. The play focuses more extensively on the relationship between Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, than does the book — it makes their marriage seem like an actual force in the negotiating process. Their scenes leave a deep, resonating impression of how behind‐the‐scenes events can influence what occurs at the table.

The play also does what nearly no one else has ever been able to do: it portrays Begin — typically depicted as sanctimonious, arrogant, and rigid — with sympathy. In the book, Begin and Sadat are of equal weight as characters. In the play, Wright gradually moves Begin toward center stage, making his personal turmoil, especially in his brutal contest with Carter, the emotional core of the play. I read nothing in the final scenes of the play that is not also supported by the record of evidence that Wright provides in the book, but by focusing dramatically on Begin's final concession, Wright seems to open a window on a changing mind, a changing heart, and in some ways a changing worldview. The echoes of that scene leave questions about the costs to Begin of making this decision: how will he speak to the Knesset, how will he speak to his wife, how will he face himself?

Do those of us who write about and teach negotiation overemphasize the instrumental approach and focus too much on social science? We may thus find ourselves like the drunken man in the old joke who has lost his key on the way home one night and looks under the street light for the lost key because that's where the light is when he had, in fact, dropped it in the dark bushes.

I infer from this book that the key may indeed be elsewhere, that we would benefit from using a broader lens. Might we, and especially our students, find value as good negotiators in wrestling more often with narrative journalism, drama, and fiction? Might Thirteen Days in September work well as the final, or even the opening, reading in an introductory negotiation course, or the core of an advanced one?