Jimmy Carter with Sadat and Begin

[SpankMe]

7. I was there in person

I was 15-1/2 years old. I was visiting Washington with my mom, aunt and brother just for tourism. We were on foot in the area and noticed crowds getting thicker as we got closer to La Fayette park. We had no idea that anything important was going on there.

We got to La Fayette park - the crown wasn't that thick - and saw this event happening on the North Lawn of the Whitehouse. I stood on something elevated (a bench or a rock or something) and was barely able to see Carter, Sadat and Begin because they were far away. After a while, they stood up and after some other movements they shook hands together and the crowd near the platform they were on cheered.

I didn't know what the event was until the next day when I read in in a newspaper. I was not aware of current events at that time as I was a clueless, aloof teen and was all jacked for the Air and Space Museum.

Decades after this event, I think back and was surprised at the somewhat small size of the crowd in front of the Whitehouse given the significance of the event. There were lots of people, but it wasn't a shoulder-to-shoulder dense crowd and we were able to walk into and out of it without a lot of trouble. Although Pennsylvania Avenue was still open to traffic in front of the Whitehouse in those days, it was blocked off for this event.

I recall we were able to freely walk into and out of the area; there was no fence or checkpoint we had to walk through in order to get to La Fayette park just off of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Whitehouse. The security posture was different then, even with Middle Eastern leaders outside in public.