Strategy for Camp David — Brzezinski Memo to President Carter (1978)

TL;DR — The national security adviser’s five-page brief telling Carter how to run the Camp David summit: take control from the start and make failure costly for Begin.

A declassified White House memorandum from Zbigniew Brzezinski to Jimmy Carter, written days before the September 1978 summit with Sadat and Begin. Five pages, from the CIA Reading Room.

The memo reads each side’s incentives: Sadat cannot afford failure and knows it; Begin may think a failure would hurt Carter and Sadat but not him. Sadat will measure success by substance (withdrawal on all fronts), Begin by procedure. Brzezinski’s advice is to control the talks from the outset and convince both men, especially Begin, that failure would damage relations with Washington.

What it is: a primary source. It shows how one adviser framed a negotiation before it happened, not how it went.

Where this came from

• r/obscurePDFs post, February 2019 — “Strategy for Camp David: Zbigniew Brezezinski’s 1978 memo to Jimmy Carter [5 pages]”. Routing record: The obscurePDFs Subreddit
• Link as posted: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/1978-08-31c.pdf
• Archived copy (Google Drive): Google Drive

5 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.