On his own people, Ford’s matter-of-fact serenity bestowed the precious gift of enabling the generations that followed to remain blissfully unaware of how close to disaster their country had come in a decade of tearing itself apart.
Together with the prestige Nixon had accumulated over 5 years of foreign policy successes, we were able to sustain what came close to a policy of bluff. In October 1973 at the end of the Middle East War, it even saw us through an alert of our military forces, including of the nuclear arsenal. But with every passing month, the sleight of hand grew more difficult. We were living on borrowed time.
Although (and perhaps because) his presentation was delivered in the unassuming style of Grand Rapids rather than the convoluted jargon of the academic world, he left an extremely favorable impression on students who, in the prevailing atmosphere of the incipient anti-Vietnam protest, were anything but benevolently disposed toward advocates of a strong defense.
As a general rule, the policymakers have offices in the WH; supporting staffs are installed in the Old Executive Office Building. In that respect, the location of the VP’s office accurately reflects his real power.
Since one could never be certain that Nixon might not undo what he appeared to have just decided, wariness occasionally verging on paranoia prevailed among his entourage.
With Ford, what one saw was what one got. Starting with that first meeting, I never encountered a hidden agenda. He was sufficiently self-assured to disagree openly, and he did not engage in elaborate maneuvers about who should receive credit. Having been propelled so unexpectedly into an office he revered but never thought he would hold, he felt no need to manipulate his environment. Ford’s inner peace was precisely what the nation needed for healing its divisions.
He enunciated 3 criteria affecting his decision on the new VP: who would make the best President, who would be easiest to confirm without provoking further Watergate problems, and who would provide the least incentive for the advocates of impeachment to do away with Nixon.
In addition to being acceptable to Congress, Ford carried another benefit in Nixon’s eyes: his lack of experience on the executive level would give Congress pause in any plan to impeach Nixon. On several occasions, the President mused that Congress would not dare to assume responsibility for replacing him with a man who had so little background in international affairs.
To remain credible, a candidate feels obliged to devote most of his energies for the better part of 3 years to accumulating a war chest from fragmented and disparate constituencies. In that process, his principal incentive — approaching an imperative — is to try to be all things to all people. What starts as a tactic, over the course of the grueling campaign easily and imperceptibly turns into a defining characteristic. National recognition is achieved at the price of nearly compulsive personal insecurity.
The age of computer and television has compounded this insecurity. When the visual image replaced the written word as the principal means of understanding the world, the process of learning was transformed from an active to a passive mode, from a participatory act to assimilating predigested data. One learns from books via concepts that relate apparently disparate events to each other and require analytical effort and training. By contrast, pictures teach passively; they evoke impressions which require no act by the viewer, emphasize the mood of the moment, and leave little room for either deductive reasoning or the imagination. Concepts are permanent; impressions are fleeting and in part accidental.
The new technology has fundamentally altered the way in which the modern political candidate perceives his role. The great statesmen of the past saw themselves as heroes who took on the burden of their societies’ painful journey from the familiar to the as yet unknown. The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar. Heroes walk alone; stars derive their status from approbation. Heroes are defined by inner values, stars by consensus. When a candidate’s views are forged in focus groups and ratified by television anchor-persons, insecurity and superficiality become congenital. Radicalism replaces liberalism, and populism masquerades as conservatism.
A curious blend of brittleness and flamboyance thus defines the modern political persona: brittleness verging on obsequiousness in the quest for mass approval, flamboyance turning into panic when the public’s mood shifts. Far more concerned with what to say than with what to think, the modern political leader too frequently fails to fulfill the role for which he is needed most: to provide the emotional ballast when experience is being challenged by ever-accelerating change. The inability to fulfill these emotional needs lies behind the curious paradox of contemporary democracy: never have political leaders been more abject in trying to determine the public’s preferences, yet, in most democracies, respect for the political class has never been lower.
Cartoonists had great fun with Ford’s occasionally fractured syntax. They forgot — if they were ever aware — that being articulate is not the same as having analytical skill, which Ford had in abundance.
No other society has so conceived itself to be the product of a uniquely moral vision as America’s. Freed by geography from the necessities of geopolitics as well as from its temptations, the US has been permeated by the conviction that political issues — especially with respect to foreign policy — could be equated with choices between good and evil. American have always perceived their society as in pursuit of perfection in world affairs, rewarded when it fulfills this promise, punished when it falls short. Wilsonianism distilled this conviction into the unprecedented theory that wars are caused not so much by struggles for power as that these struggles reflect domestic moral failings, specifically the degree to which a society falls shorts of the democratic ideal. In a world of democracies, conflicts would be settled by international law. Alliances would be based on the principle of collective security, which bases defense less on the balance of power than on a coalition of the righteous against the lawless.
Ford’s request was entirely unscripted. There was not the remotest legal basis for urging the release of a Soviet citizen being held in a Soviet prison. Fortunately, Ford’s goodwill coincided with the Soviet desire for a favorable start to its relationship with the new President.
Yet ultimately Nixon’s obvious and unending struggle with himself proved so unsettling, even threatening, because deep down one could never be certain that what one found so disturbing in Nixon might not also be a reflection of some suppressed flaw within oneself.
Nixon’s single most important quality was the ability to make bold decisions. That attribute was all the more remarkable because he was not by nature daring and by no means a happy warrior. On the contrary, he made his major decisions with a joylessness verging on despair, as if he was doomed by some malign destiny to have so much anguish brought to naught despite all the meticulous reflection and all the notepads crammed with options.
This was then — and probably still is at this writing — a minority view in a society which, never having experienced national tragedy, identifies the quest for peace with the missionary vocation of the spreading of its own domestic values around the world.
Behaving more like the rejected lover than a sworn enemy, Nixon was eager to be admitted to the club, not to destroy it.
Nevertheless, the President is the symbol of national unity. This imposes an obligation to rise above the level of adversaries pursuing some special interest and to submerge the day-to-day battles in some more embracing national purpose. While in office, Nixon never managed any such act of grace.
Ironically, the quest for dialogue achieved, if anything, the opposite of its intended purpose. For it laid the groundwork for a permanent misunderstanding between me and the intellectual community. At first, the academic community interpreted my eagerness to exchange views as a sign of sympathy for its point of view and as proof that I was being overruled by a bellicose, unbalanced President. When it gradually realized that I was basically on Nixon’s side, many liberal intellectuals began to treat me as an opportunistic traitor to their cause.
So it happened that, by the end of the Nixon Administration, the President and I found ourselves being harassed by what had originally been our normal constituencies. Liberals accused me of abandoning them in quest of power; conservatives thought that Nixon had been seduced by visions of Establishment legitimacy.
The reason for Nixon’s diffidence in face-to-face encounters was the opposite of arrogance: it was a reflection of his abiding fear of being rejected. Others more knowledgeable about Nixon’s early years may be better able to explain this handicap — for such it was — in a man of such intelligence and possessed of extraordinary powers of persuasion. Or the even greater anomaly that Nixon seemed more paralyzed by the prospect of rejection than by its actuality. Once the worst had, in fact, occurred and the dreaded (and half-anticipated) debacle had finally taken place, Nixon displayed extraordinary fortitude, willpower, and resilience.
The reverse side of this fear of being rejected — its ballast, so to speak — was Nixon’s romantic image of himself as a fearless manipulator, marching to his own drummer, unaffected either by turmoil around him or contrary advice on the part of his Cabinet and staff.
Nixon’s achievements, in fact, transcended his version of them. Who drafted what parts of the communique was far less important than that Nixon had been the President to open the way to China, knew how to cast the resulting dialogue in geopolitical terms, and had presented the American view of world affairs in a masterful way. (Whether he had displayed stamina, abstinence, and humor in the process would surely be lost in the background noise of history.) History has shown that Nixon had no need for these embellishments, for it has already accorded him his due as one of the most creative American Presidents in the field of foreign policy.
After he left office, Nixon himself occasionally participated in spreading that myth in his characteristically elliptical manner — usually by volunteering in the course of an interview a disavowal of some purported charge made against me (and about which he had not been asked).
But verbatim office conversations are the worst way to demonstrate coherence. It would be difficult years after the event to disentangle the sarcastic from the genuine, the tentative from the serious, the fleeting thought from the carefully worked out proposition.
Most of a President’s time is taken up by various supplicants: heads of departments pressing their case; foreign leaders urging a course of action or seeking guidance; spokesmen for domestic constituencies advocating their special interests or those of their ethnic groups. These points of view are largely tactical and geared to specific situations. Long-term issues make they way onto the President’s agenda only with difficult and then usually as a result of some interdepartmental controversy. The outcome too often reflect the overriding desire to keep peace in the bureaucracy or with Congress, with conclusions phrased in platitudes that enable the various agencies to interpret them in light of their own initial preferences, thereby starting the cycle all over again.
This is why the conduct of the presidency almost of necessity involves a depletion of intellectual capital. Paradoxically, Nixon’s abhorrence of face-to-face meetings enabled his administration to deal with one of the most important challenges of modern government: to husband the President’s time — his most precious commodity — so as to give him the opportunity for reflection. Nixon’s schedule was carefully managed to allow time for the conceptual problems that interested him and the solution of which represented his greatest strength. The tactics of diplomacy and the details of negotiations bored him. But Nixon made the basic strategic decisions, if not crisply at least in a timely fashion, and prided himself — correctly — on his ability to “get ahead of the power curve.”
The Goodpaster blueprint produced an NSC system meticulous in assembling the options and open in developing its strategy but opaque with respect to implementation. The various departments participated fully and made major contributions to the development of the options. But Nixon reserved for himself the final decision and to act alone if necessary. He treated the formal interdepartmental system in much the same way some senior professors deal with their research assistants. He absorbed the product without necessarily committing himself to the perceptions of his subordinates.
I say this not to deprecate Rogers’s exceptional decency and human qualities nor his abundant common sense. His influence was benign and always moderate. Throughout he behaved with a dignity shaming to those who systematically undercut him. In retrospect, I am not proud of the way I participated in Nixon’s deliberate effort to marginalize the man who at the time was considered by most observers to be the President’s closest friend.
The Foreign Service, sensing the discomfort of the Secretary and explaining its exclusion from decision-making to itself with the myth that its views were somehow being kept from the President, resorted to massive leaks or procrastination — the idea being to give Nixon a second chance to see the light. The President, in turn, interpreted these obstructions as a form of class warfare and as yet another example of the East Coast Establishment’s unending battle against him.
The State Department representatives at daily interagency meetings argued passionately that India was a more important country than Pakistan — a judgment we did not challenge. But, at that moment, our incipient China policy was more important than Indian goodwill. We judged that it would be easier to restore our relations with India than to remain inactive toward a challenge that might be viewed in Beijing as a rehearsal for pressure against China.
Their real complaint is not that they were ignored or bypassed but that they were overruled. From Nixon’s point of view (and mine), once the President had rejected the State Department position, the debate should have ended. Instead, it was moved by leaks into the media and Congress.
The answer was that Nixon was flirting with greatness, but a President’s ultimate achievement can never be a purely personal effort. Rather it resides in that intangible ability to inspire one’s society and one’s associates to aim for what they had always regarded as being beyond their reach. This Nixon was unable to do. His vision of the statesman as a romantic loner diminished his associates, and his perception that he was somehow living in a hostile environment caused him to spend more time fending off dangers than seeking to transcend them.
When I learned the final news, by then so expected yet so hard to accept, I felt a deep loss and a profound void. In the words of Shakespeare: “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”
…So let us now say goodbye to our gallant friend. He stood on pinnacles that dissolved into precipices. He achieved greatly and suffered deeply. But he never gave up. In his solitude, he envisaged a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen historic friendships, and give new hope to mankind — a vision where dreams and possibilities conjoined.
Richard Nixon ended a war, and he advanced the vision of peace of his Quaker youth. He was devoted to his family, he loved his country, and he considered service his honor. It was a privilege to have been allowed to help him.
Even more importantly for Nixon was that he was presiding over the transition of America’s role in the world from domination to leadership. For much of the postwar period, the US was preeminent because of its nuclear predominance and economic strength. By the time Nixon entered office, our nuclear monopoly was dwindling, Europe was regaining vitality, Asia was entering the international arena, and Africa was being swept by independence movements. Dominance can be based on power; leadership requires building consensus. But an attempt to balance rewards and penalties inseparable from consensus-building ran counter to the prevailing Wilsonianism, which tried to bring about a global moral order through the direct application of America’s political values undiluted by compromises with “realism.”
Wilsonianism rejects peace through balance of power in favor or peace through moral consensus. It sees foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil, in each phase of which it is America’s mission to help defeat the evil foes challenging a peaceful order. Having prevailed, the US can then devote itself to fostering the underlying harmony or cultivate its own virtues until the next discrete crisis arises — perceived not as a disturbance of the equilibrium but as a deviation from the moral order. Such a foreign policy tends to be segmented into a series of episodes and not perceived as a continuum requiring constant attention and adjustment, a quest for absolutes rather than as the shaping of reality by means of nuances.
Our values were needed to provide the moral fortitude to act in the face of the ambiguous choices and uncertain outcomes, which is how historical decisions present themselves to the policymaker. To avoid either overextension or abdication, the US needed, in addition, the guide of a concept of the national interest.
Our object, in the first instance, is to support our interests over the long run with a sound foreign policy. The more that policy is based on a realistic assessment of our and others’’ interests, the more effective our role in the world can be. We are not involved in the world because we have commitments; we have commitments because we are involved. Our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.
Upheavals in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and a near-revolution in Poland in 1970 dramatized the tenuousness of the Soviet hold over its satellites. It had become popular to joke that the Soviet Union was the only state entirely surrounded by hostile Communist countries.
The ultimate nuclear dilemma was that, even after all the buildup, the strategic arsenals were useful primarily to deter nuclear attacks and for little else. This frustration came to expression in an exaggerated challenge I threw out — unwisely but correctly — at a press conference at the end of the Moscow summit of 1974: “What in the name of God is strategic superiority? What is the significance of it… at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?”
Detailed instructions are now relayed so easily and quickly that Presidents and foreign ministers prefer to focus their communications on the nuts and bolts of day-to-day diplomacy rather than on its purposes. Diplomats are more likely to be told what to say than why they should say it. Tactics and domestic politics substitute for strategy, and what strategy exists is confined to the minds of a few top policymakers, who, fearful of leaks, rarely articulate or share it. History turns into an account of the immediate and sensational, devoid of historical perspective or long-term vision.
For Soviet negotiators, who tended to behave as if diplomacy were trench warfare, there was no such thing as a minor issue. Every problem or formulation was treated as having equal significance and fought over with a grim persistence if only to establish some future claim should it later become necessary to abandon it. Chinese leaders used concessions on nonessentials to establish a reputation for reliability in the long term. And they have taken great pains ever since to show that Chinese friendship is not a transitory phenomenon by the meticulous attention they have paid to retired statesmen around the world who, while in office, had fostered closer ties with China.
The other Chinese leaders invariably buttressed their arguments with extensive quotations from the Chairman, conferring legitimacy on their pronouncements and perhaps security on their persons. By the same token, they were always extraordinarily deferential in his presence.
When Nixon tried to draw Mao into a discussion of specific countries, the Chairman replied: “They should be discussed with the Premier [Zhou Enlai]. I discuss the philosophical questions.”
When I first encountered high Maoist officials, I learned to my astonishment that, prior to the Communist takeover, many families had sent their sons abroad, each to a different country, as a form of insurance against all possible outcomes of the civil war. One sone would stay with the Communists, another would go to the US, occasionally a third could be found in Taiwan. This is how it happened that several senior Chinese officials I encountered had brothers in the US — a condition that, in the USSR, would have precluded government service and, under Stalin, might have bene life-threatening.
Ironically, the family structure is now being imperiled more by China’s birth control policies than it ever was by Communist ideology. Families limited to one child will give rise to generations in which there are no uncles, aunts, cousins, or any of the vast network of obligations and mutual support system that have hitherto defined the traditional Chinese family unit. An only child will lack the broad context of contemporaries to help socialize him and will find it harder to adjust to the competition and discipline by which the reverence for achievement and learning was historically inculcated in China.
Assuming it to be a negotiation in the Soviet mold, I suggested that we each put forward our optimum outcome and then see what compromises might be required. Huang Hua replied that a much better approach would be to begin by explaining our necessities to each other — specifically what each side required in order to prepare its people for the announcement that a secret trip had taken place and that Nixon would visit China.
Zhou took the importance of American support for granted but insisted that a country could sustain its morale only by relying on itself in the first instance. Only in this manner could it be worthy of outside assistance.
No chief executive of any advanced industrial democracy conducts his office in so personal a manner as the American President. There are few limitations on his executive branch appointments; upon taking office, he is in a position to fill nearly 3K positions down through the level of deputy assistant secretary of each department and a whole host of special assistants. The Cabinet serves at the President’s discretion, and there is no requirement that it approve — or, fo that matter, even discuss — his decisions. The fewest, if indeed any, major foreign policy decisions of any administration are put before the Cabinet except in the form of a general briefing. The underlying assumption is that Cabinet decisions are bound to leak because its memberships is too diverse.
Even this forum is advisory; the President is not bound by its view. In my experience, neither Nixon nor Ford ever asked for a vote. And Nixon would ostentatiously announce his decisions by memorandum from the Oval Office, thus emphasizing the NSC’s purely advisory role.
It is axiomatic that those who have not participated in the give-and-take of the diplomatic process become the heroes of retrospective analysis. Unaware of the hurdles surmounted, they can afford to concentrate on the concessions that were made rather than on the achievements these had elicited. With a free shot at the outcome, they tend to foster the fantasy of a negotiation in which all concessions are made by the other side.
When I joined Nelson’s staff on a part-time basis in 1957, we spent 3 evenings a week and many Sundays engaged in what the contemporary politician would consider a waste of time: meeting with leading experts to define national goals in a variety of fields, both foreign and domestic.
Rockefeller bore his disappointments with the attitude that no one is entitled to a particular position but everyone has an obligation to help the country — represented by the President, of whatever party. On one occasion, I reported to Nelson that, in a conversation with President Kennedy, I had pointed out a number of policy mistakes. Nelson asked whether I had offered any remedy and, when I replied that I had confined myself to analysis, he grew impatient: “Always remember that Presidents are overwhelmed with problems. Your obligation is to help them find solutions.”
The American system of separation of powers resists exorbitant influence, especially on the part of appointed officials. In the normal course of events, the more prominent a Cabinet member, the more fire he draws. The party in opposition will concentrate its attacks on the best-known personalities in order to weaken the incumbent administration and also to garner the maximum of publicity. This had certainly been the fate of Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles. I had been spared so long as Nixon was the principal target.
Cyprus proved to be a foretaste of a different kind of conflict, one that became increasingly common as the superpower rivalry receded. In ethnic conflicts, the contenders are not motivated by concern for stability, which, if anything, they identify with the status quo at the heart of their frustration. Harkening to some mythic Golden Age in which each of the contending groups believes itself to have been dominant, appeals to conciliation are treated as unforgivable appeasement of the hated rival. Resentments and grievances stored up for centuries leave no room for compromise, which, in any event, is interpreted as tantamount to historical defeat. The ideal national map of each group is incompatible with that of its adversary. None of the contestants will accept an outcome dependent on the good faith of the adversary presented to the children of each generation as the incarnation of evil. In these circumstances, power-sharing becomes a contradiction in terms.
Paradoxically, submitting to a more powerful outsider has often proved more tolerable than to the rule of a hated ethnic adversary occupying the same territory.
For centuries, Greeks and Turks had nursed their mutual hatreds, periodically venting them in massacres and other atrocities. Each ethnic group could recite convincing evidence for why it must not entrust its fate to the goodwill of the other.
In 1959, Britain brokered an arrangement which was doomed from the start because it sought to address the essentially irreconcilable demands of all the parties by agreeing to all of the simultaneously. The so-called London-Zurich Agreements established an independent, sovereign, and unitary Cyprus in 1960 with a Greek Cypriot President and a Turkish Cypriot VP, each elected by his own community. The Turkish Cypriot VP had an absolute veto on defense and foreign policy issues and, provided he was supported by a majority of the Turkish Cypriot members of the legislature, a veto on fiscal matters as well.
As a result, if one attribute eluded Makarios, it was the ability to inspire confidence — which happens to be the prerequisite for effective diplomacy. Displaying little concern (indeed, a certain disdain) for the point of view of the other party, he never understood that evoking trust is as much a practical as a moral imperative. True, a statesman’s foremost responsibility is to look out for the interests of his own country. But the wisest of them — and, in the long run, the most successful — understand that only those agreements are destined to last in the maintenance of which the other side also develops an interest. For, in foreign policy, one meets the same people over and over again. The tricked or outsmarted will never again make reliable partners. And any international agreement has to be carried out by sovereign states, by the very definition of sovereignty in a position to renege on what they have come to regard as iniquitous.
In the classic pattern of ethnic conflict as practiced from Lebanon to Bosnia, solutions are much more likely to emerge from the total victory of one side or from mutual exhaustion than from the contribution of meditators.
After the coup if Cyprus, a cottage industry of investigative journalists claimed to have discovered intelligence warnings which were ignored by an administration driven by its dislike of Makarios and its obsession with geopolitics. What outside observers rarely understand is that, in large bureaucratic government, it is almost always possible to discover some document or other predicting the event under investigation; it is a way for the bureaucracy to cover all bets. What really matters, however, is the context and to whose attention the warning was brought.
Deterrence presumes calculability and rationality — qualities which, even in a bilateral relationship, are precarious.
Callaghan’s principal experience had been in ministries concerned with domestic British problems where mediators are generally dealing with willing parties that start from the premise that a compromise will emerge sooner or later and whose statements of their objectives can be taken more or less at face value. By contrast, in ethnic conflicts, the mediator is on thin ice if he expects such criteria to guide parties whose mutual hatreds have been refined over the centuries. Unlike Callaghan, my experience in mediation came from Middle East diplomacy; hence I took the pronouncements of the parties less literally, and my expectations for rapid progress were correspondingly lower.
These objectives need to be kept in balance; to overemphasize one of them had the potential to tear the entire delicate fabric.
While working to prevent enosis and to remove Sampson, we resisted pressures from Congress, the media, and much of the bureaucracy to cut off military aid to Greece because, in our view, military aid to a NATO ally was an expression of the long-term interest of the Atlantic Alliance and not an expediency to be manipulated. To cast off Greece in the middle of an international crisis might accelerate Turkish intervention and Soviet meddling while Greek public opinion shifted the blame onto us for the near-certain — albeit self-inflicted — debacle in Cyprus. In the end, crisis management is about managing imperfections, not ideal solutions.
We are professionals. We are here to serve the national interest. We are not here to lead crusades before we know what is going on. Nor are we newspaper commentators. In the early stages of a crisis, it is our responsibility to determine the balance of forces, assess the likely evolution and, above all, to shape these factors into a policy that serves the national and public good.
In an ethnic conflict, the weaker side frequently finds it easier to acquiesce in an imposed solution than to agree to a more favorable outcome by making a concession. Compromise implies a decision, while a fait accomplishes absolves the victim of any responsibility for the outcome.
One respect in which all the humanitarians and liberals and socialists were wrong in the last century was when they thought that mankind didn’t like war.
The legislation set up a vicious circle. The Ford Administration had already committed itself to encouraging significant concession from Turkey. But once Congress appointed itself as the arbiter of what constituted progress, its definition would go beyond the capacities of diplomacy. The issue was not who “controlled” foreign policy, as was often stated by the pundits and congressional leaders. In our system of separation of powers, neither branch can — or should — have total control. The American style of government works best when Congress concentrates on overall supervision of long-range policy without attempting to second-guess day-to-day tactics, a task for which it is not organized and for which it lacks perspective.
The passion and eloquence was unfortunately not matched by a commensurate grasp of reality.
I told the congressional leadership that, while the threat of an aid cutoff might conceivably do some good, its implementation would prove disastrous:
The Greeks would expect concession no one could get them. These restrictions would lose us the Turks without helping the Greeks and destroy this negotiating process I have been describing.
The American embargo on aid to Turkey went into effect on February 5, 1975. By way of response, Turkey closed all American military installations except one air base.
President Kennedy had once considered him a potential Secretary of State — or so Fulbright believed — but had rejected him for being too independent. Whether it was for that reason or not, Fulbright had since made querulousness toward incumbent administrations his stock-in-trade — and he treated Democratic administrations not much more gently than Republican ones. With a tutorial air which at times shaded into the condescending, the intellectual level of Fulbright’s interventions was always high. My relationship with him was constructive but wary.
I told Ford that the draft was more strident than I considered wise, but it might just barely fall within the outer limits of the tolerable.
One was therefore struck with special force upon arrival in Moscow by the incongruity between the pretensions of the Communist state and its realities. Intelligence reports conveyed fearsome images of a vast military capacity in the service of an implacable resolve. But anyone who had ever been on an official visit to the Soviet Union could not but gain the impression that the whole elaborately constructed state set was precarious and might collapse at any moment. Just beneath the labored facade of hospitality flowed an undercurrent of incipient panic lest, in the end, the deadlocks and bottlenecks that plagued Communism might derail the entire enterprise.
Though by the time I encountered this troika, Stalin had been dead for nearly 2 decades, the inescapable impression was that the brutal dictator had left them drained of initiative and intellectual energy. Each had made his big step up the bureaucratic and party ladder during the purges of the 1930s when Stalin killed off virtually every prominent leader of his own generation. Having witnessed the extermination of those who had made the revolution at the whim of the autocrat, Brezhnev and his associates were bound to have the essential precariousness of their own hold on power burned into their souls. They had risen more rapidly than they could have dreamed possible, but they paid for it with congenital doubts about their own legitimacy and staying power.
High office in the Soviet Union was not just a means of sating ambition; it was the prerequisite to surviving with any status at all. When a leader retired — which was very rare — or wound up as the loser in some internecine battle, the result was a precipitous decline, first in his status but soon in living standard as well. In the “classless” Soviet society, status depended, as it does in feudal societies, on having an official function, which provided access to personal luxuries that came — and went — with high office. Probably the hardest to bear was the social ostracism associated with the loss of official position.
Whatever one’s level, the motivating force in the Soviet system was to elevate political survival into a principal, at times obsessive, preoccupation. It was the Soviet officials’ most finely honed skill, the subject about which they thought most creatively. By the same token, they paid for this obsession with a lack of imagination on matters of global strategy. The generation governing the USSR in the 1970s accumulated military and geopolitical power less as an expression of long-range geopolitical aims than as a substitute for them. Inevitably the pursuit of strength for its own sake frightened most of the non-Communist world and brought about a tacit coalition of all industrial nations plus China agains the Soviet Union, which made its ultimate collapse inevitable.
The outside world might view the Soviet Union as an implacable colossus, but its leaders could never forget how close-run outcome had been. The Soviet Union had prevailed only after suffering 27M casualties and the total devastation of a third of the country.
At that stage, Brezhnev’s efforts still focused on a quest for status, in itself a sign of insecurity, since those who know themselves to be genuinely equals do not require constant certification of that fact.
With a stagnant economy and a GNP at best 40% of that of the US, Moscow could only compete militarily by condemning its population to a standard of living which would sooner or later raise questions about the validity of the Communist system itself. And even at that level of civilian deprivation, the arms race strained the very limits of Soviet industrial capacity.
To be sure, if the USSR were permitted to amass military power without a decisive American response or if the US were to tolerate creeping expansionism, the Soviets might yet convert their disadvantageous position into a strategic gain by sheer brute power. But that was like speculating whether a chess player, down 2 pieces, might yet win the match; while theoretically possible, success against a competent adversary is decidedly unlikely. And the Fort Administration had no intention of permitting the requisite lapses.
By contrast, I argued, the Soviet buildup was generating the capability to threaten our land-based forces. When Brezhnev insisted volubly that “we had no intention of attacking you,” I replied that his intention was irrelevant: “I’m not saying you have the intention, but you clearly have the capability.”
It was a good point, in many ways at the heart of the Cold War dilemma: the arms race was insoluble without a measure of confidence, but the ideological gulf was so great that both sides were defining security only in technological terms which evoked as many perplexities as solutions, driving them back to protecting their basic strategic programs.
At the same time, he expressed his “reservations about the wisdom of legislative language that can only be seen as objectionable and discriminatory by other sovereign nations.”
Not even an independent department, the CIA was created under the National Security Act of 1947 as an advisory body to the NSC, which is headed by the President. The traditional approach would have been fro Colby to leave the constitutional issue for the President and, in the event of conflict with Congress, to seek a final determination in the courts.
But in the Senate, we were dealing with responsible individuals who, even if they did not agree, would take into account the administration’s view of the national interest.
I offered to submit a detailed explanation of our policy, together with a description of all the options considered. I would as well assume full responsibility for our final conclusions. But I refused to tell the committee which officer had recommended a particular course of action. By doing so in the absence of any charge of malfeasance, the integrity, spontaneity, and confidentiality of the State Department’s internal decision-making process would be destroyed. If every recommendation by every junior officer came to be written with an eye to having to be defended before a congressional committee, perhaps years after the event, those committees would, in effect, turn the day-to-day tactics of the State Department into a political football.
(a) Decline, by order of the president, to discuss classified material, and (b) Decline, by order of the Secretary of State, to give information which would disclose options considered by or recommended to more senior officers in the Department of State.
American intelligence activities have 3 elements. The analytical branch of the CIA supplies officials with reports and estimates ranging from personalities of foreign leaders to an evaluation of policy options. The operational branch of the CIA deals with the subjects upon which many movies have been made: the espionage, covert operations, and paramilitary actions that all major governments consider to be in their national interest but are reluctant to affirm. The third component consists of a plethora of organizations, many of them under the auspices of the Defense Department, charged with the collection of intelligence by technical means.
In terms of traditional diplomacy, the peace process was a never-never land. Nations that did not recognize each other were talking about peace, and the formal program of some Arab leaders participating in the peace process still called for the eradication of the Jewish state.
For the sake of a formal peace and recognition, a significant segment of the Israeli public was becoming susceptible to confusing the legal aspect of peace with its substance. Within Israel, it was difficult to strike a balance between absolute demands for security and absolute demands for peace.
Why should Arabs pay with their territory for the crimes committed in Europe against the Jewish people? Why should Arabs be asked to accept the biblical claim of a religion they do not themselves practice?
Some of the Arab leaders had drawn the ominous conclusion that Israel could not stand pain, as Asad said to me on more than one occasion. He had, in fact, identified Israel’s neuralgic point. Given the country’s small population and extraordinary concern with human life, relatively few casualties were needed to generate a searing shock.
Allon was imbued with the special brand of schizophrenia of the first generation of Israel’s leaders. He had witnessed too many Israeli casualties to be at east with the notion that confidence could be built by ceding territorial buffers. Yet that was precisely what the peace process was all about: to balance legitimacy and security, confidence and territory. He recognized the importance of the peace process intellectually; what he recoiled from was its practical application.
Now, only 3 months after the draining Golan Heights negotiation, Israel was being asked to consider further withdrawals and on the West Bank, the most sensitive area geographically as well as psychologically — opening a domestic debate over whether Israel’s leaders had a right to cede territory which to conservative Jews was a divine dispensation.
In its most fearful moments, the Israeli cabinet could see itself being pushed back by fateful step toward the 1967 borders or worse by salami tactics whereby major changes result from the accumulating succession of seemingly marginal steps. And what appeared like small steps to Americans might be massive on a territory only 50 miles wide.
The Israeli cabinet navigated between these incompatibilities by the device of not arming Allon with any formal mandate; whatever propositions he advanced to me had merely an “exploratory,” “personal” status, hence they were entirely subject to being disavowed.
After the Syrian disengagement, the US had agreed to study sympathetically Israel’s additional security needs, especially with respect to the next generation of advanced aircraft. In previous cases, these statements of general intent had been treated as expressions of good faith for the necessary technical follow-on negotiations. The new Israeli cabinet interpreted them as a legal commitment to a gigantic request for a 10-year authorization of $40B to be put to the American Congress on Israel’s behalf.
“The President has sent me to make your acquaintance, to report to him about you and to prepare your visit.” It was Fahmy’s way of saying that he had come — uninvited — not to negotiate but to size me up. And he gave me every opportunity to earn a passing grade, largely because he was sufficiently sophisticated to recognize that he had no other choice.
Suave and vastly complicated, Fahmy was a master of the insinuating innuendo. His opening move was to elevate me to the status of master diplomat, in pursuit of which he would sometimes ascribe to me convoluted schemes of truly breathtaking complexity as his way of eliciting assurances regarding America’s interest in good relations with Egypt. Ford, used to far less elliptical and complicated interlocutors, at first listened to Fahmy’s presentations with amazement — unsure whether I might not have overlooked some item in my briefing — and later with the sort of appreciation one might reserve for a spectacular theatrical or athletic performance.
Fahmy, like his Arab colleagues, relied on volubility as a screen for secretiveness. Where he differed from them was in a talent for transforming oratory into diplomatic tactics and in the skillful dispensation of individual doses of carefully measured practicality which he distilled from Sadat’s amalgam of epic poetry and prophetic vision. Maneuvering among the passions of the Arabs, the suspicions of the Israelis, the clumsy assertiveness of the Soviets, and the legalistic goodwill of the Americans, Fahmy adroitly edged ever closer to a separate agreement.
Rifai’s importance did not stem from his ministerial rank, which was temporary, but from his close friendship with the King, which was permanent. A member of a small circle of confidants with whom Hussein felt at ease, Rifai would rotate in and out of office according to the requirements of Jordan’s precarious position and the imperatives of the dynasty’s survival.
Rifai was well suited to his role. Bluff and highly intelligent, he was a tough negotiator whose wicked sense of humor softened the vehemence and skill with which he defended the interests of his country and of the Hashemite dynasty. Of all our Arab interlocutors, Rifai was the least prone to the romanticism that occasionally caused even Sadat to bend reality to the rhythm of some epic poem.
As it turned out, he badly misjudged his bargaining position. Rifai was convinced that the Jordanian option was realistic because Sadat simply could not afford to antagonize his fellow Arabs by making another separate agreement.
Had we been in a position to allow our sympathies to guide our policies, both Ford and I would have concurred eagerly. Unfortunately, we had learned enough from our contacts with Hussein’s Arab “brothers” to realize that we were in no position to deliver a separate Jordanian negotiation. The best we could do, and even that without real conviction, was to promise to explore Fahmy’s hint that simultaneous negotiations on two fronts might be conducted or at least to start Jordan’s shortly after Egypt’s.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, the Syrian leadership concluded, as had Egypt’s-albeit more grudgingly-that, if any progress was to be made, America’s role was indispensable. As a result, the primary purpose of Khaddam’s visit was to prevent Syria’s exclusion from Middle East diplomacy.
The rhetoric of Saudi diplomats on behalf of the Arab cause was impeccable and occasionally intransigent but, behind the scenes, Saudi policy was almost always helpful to American diplomacy.
Unfortunately, Ford’s relationship with Rabin never really prospered; their first encounter came as close to a disaster as the realities of domestic politics in either country would permit. It was a pity because, on the face of it, the two men should have gotten along well. Rabin had been an outstanding Israeli ambassador to Washington, where he had shown unusual understanding for the kind of moderate conservatism Ford represented. Ford had been a strong supporter of Israel throughout his congressional career. Yet the occasion of their first meeting ushered in a difficult period in American-Israeli relations.
Part of the problem was the psychological makeup of the two men. Rabin was cerebral and analytical, Ford instinctive and commonsensical. Rabin sought to persuade by aloof integrity, Ford by human warmth and goodwill. Ford had made his career in Congress, which operates by compromise; Rabin had earned his spurs as the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, which requires command skills. Ford had been in politics his entire life; Rabin was learning the art of politics in the premiership.
Tough as Golda Meir could be in face-to-face negotiations, she never showed that side publicly when it came to Israel’s relations with the United States. Ever conscious of the reality that, in the end, Israel’s survival depended on American goodwill, she cultivated the relationship with charm and tenacity. On American television, Golda portrayed herself as the earth mother-compassionate, witty, critical only occasionally and then more in sorrow, never in anger.
He was also perhaps the most erudite of that generation of Israel’s leaders. Yet preeminence always just eluded him. Peres’s combination of driven ambition and abstract intellectualism was not in keeping with the style of the Israeli public and contributed to his defeat in no fewer than five elections, including contests for Prime Minister.
The difference was that Peres was intuitive where Rabin was analytical, intellectual where Rabin was practical. Peres’s training had been in France, and he shared the trait of French academics, who tend to believe that the formulation of an idea is equivalent to its realization.
A military man, Rabin taught himself, step by reluctant step, the grammar of peace. In the course of a lifetime of military service, he became convinced that long-term security required Israel to go beyond the accumulation of military power. A people which had survived the tragedies of Jewish history is condemned to the constant premonition of disaster and cannot entrust its survival to the goodwill of other states. But a state of 5 million in a sea of several hundred million, perhaps the majority of whom consider the Jewish state somehow illegitimate, will consume its substance if it finds no way to transcend that mutual hostility. Rabin grew gradually convinced-and then deeply committed-to the proposition that his people owed it to themselves to attempt the peace of recon-ciliation, not merely the peace of strength.
From his military experience, he knew better than most that the concessions being urged on Israel were permanent while the contributions of its adversaries consisted of revocable declarations of peaceful intent and recognition.
Thus he came to his ultimate insight: for Israel, peace is less a legal definition than the creation of a new reality for the Jewish people. Having lived in ghettos for nearly two millennia, Rabin would argue, they must not turn their national home into another ghetto, cut off from the rest of humanity by philosophical and political alienation. They cannot abandon their concern with security to that quest, but neither must they define their future entirely in military terms.
Rabin never doubted that the process would be painful and therefore never resorted to describing peace as some fantasy nirvana in which all tensions would magically disappear. And though he was prepared for the possibility that his effort might not succeed, he was certain that Israel could face its ultimate adversity best for having made the effort. He was a sabra, his entire life consisting of variations of struggle. But if Rabin ever permitted himself a display of emotion, it was when he spoke of Israeli soldiers killed in battle and of families decimated by Israel’s endless wars.
As a military man, as a commander, as a minister of defense, I ordered many military operations to be carried out. And together with the joy of victory and the grief of bereavement, I shall always remember the moment just after taking such decisions: the hush as senior officers or cabinet ministers slowly rise from their seats, the sight of their receding backs, the sound of the closing door and then the silence in which I remain alone.
That is the moment you grasp that as a result of the decision just made, people might go to their deaths. People from my nation, people from other nations. And they still don’t know it.
At that hour they are still laughing and weeping, still weaving plans and dreaming about love, still musing about planting a garden or building a house—and they have no idea these are their last hours on Earth. Which of them is fated to die? Whose picture will appear in the black frame in tomorrow’s newspaper? Whose mother will soon be in mourning? Whose world will crumble under the weight of the loss?
As a former military man, I will also forever remember the silence of the moment before: the hush when the hands of the clock seem to be spinning forward, when time is running out and in another hour, another minute, the inferno will erupt.
In that moment of great tension just before the finger pulls the trigger, just before the fuse begins to burn—in the terrible quiet of the moment, there is still time to wonder, to wonder alone: Is it really imperative to act? Is there no other choice? No other way?’
However wary, Golda Meir would seek to avoid having to engage her prestige in a public debate with the President; she always concentrated her fire on some subordinate, often me. By contrast, Rabin sought to burnish his authority vis-à-vis his cabinet by posing direct challenges to the American President’s management of negotiations. Perhaps it was his method of educating his divided and fractious colleagues as to the limits of American tolerance; perhaps he thought Ford would be easier to deal with than I. Whatever the reason, it conferred an unusual sharpness to the initial dialogue.
Rabin and the other leaders are grappling with the dilemma of history and logic. The history has been one of pain, anguish, suspicion, suffering, and four costly wars. The logic is that the risks of standpatism are far greater than realistically facing up to necessary step-by-step compromises essential for progress towards a settlement because the choices they [Israel’s leaders] will face a year from now if they let the situation drift will be much worse than those they face now…. We have an abiding interest to support Israel’s security; but our interests in the area go beyond any one country…. Our strategy of segmenting the issues which divide Israel and its neighbors into negotiating units which are politically manageable ….. is based on the belief that a progressive series of limited agreements could create new situations which in turn will make further agreements possible.
History works in strange ways. The stalemate of the fall of 1974 proved to be the precondition for the breakthrough in Israeli-Egyptian negotiations which eventually led to a peace agreement. It was navigated into port by a slow meandering that eliminated all the other options, under the aegis of two men destined for greatness, Yitzhak Rabin and Anwar Sadat. Each had his own reasons for arranging a temporary diplomatic stalemate to pave the way for the next step toward peace: Rabin grudgingly, to solidify his domestic position and to teach his fractious cabinet the facts of international life; Sadat confidently, by navigating steadily toward a peace separate from his Arab brethren-even while signing joint affirmations of unity with them as at Rabat. After months of exploration, we thus reached a crossroads representing the amalgam of every participant’s immediate goals, albeit at a heavy price.
Throughout, the United States had held the ring against forces which, had they been permitted to coalesce, would have destroyed the peace process: the radical Arabs, the Soviet Union, and most of our European allies then trying to extricate from the energy crisis by championing radical Arab positions. The measure of America’s achievement was that all parties took it for granted that the diplomatic framework we had established should continue and under American auspices.
The ensuing minuet between Sadat and the Israelis was both stylized and shaped by each side’s awareness that the ultimate significance of its demands was largely symbolic. Ending the state of belligerency was a revocable gesture short of peace, while the passes, which cut across a low range of hills, did not significantly affect the military situation.
The biggest obstacle to rapid progress was psychological: the parties had still never met each other face-to-face and therefore tended to misjudge the impact of their demands on the other and to blame the mediator when their arguments did not prevail. Sadat thought the United States had the ability to command Israeli acquiescence in whatever plan we favored. As recent victims of an Egyptian surprise attack, the Israeli leaders found it difficult to credit my accounts of Sadat’s moderation.
My personal friendship with the Israeli leaders proved to be more of an obstacle than a spur to progress. Since Rabin, Allon, and I had been friends for many years, all three of us were convinced that an outright collision was impossible because, at the last moment, someone would veer away. Allon in particular had an almost mystical faith in my ability to bring off the most improbable negotiations and liked to console himself at every deadlock that these were but the prelude to some ultimate, though as yet unspecified, breakthrough. His faith in me, he would argue, had been rewarded in the Syrian negotiation and would be again. Allon proved deaf to my rejoinder that winning at roulette once does not make it a good idea to base one’s annual budget on the spin of a wheel.
To break the stalemate and determine whether some realistic position could be extracted from the parties, I came up with the idea of an “exploratory” shuttle. Israel accepted eagerly because it provided a further mechanism for delay; Sadat went along reluctantly as a way of starting a negotiating process even though he thought it highly improbable that the Israeli cabinet would commit itself to specifics during an “exploratory” trip.
Sadat was proved right. In an actual shuttle, the presence of a high-level American mediator supplies the deadline and hence a sense of urgency. The parties have an incentive to consider what cost a stalemate might exact in terms of their relationship with the United States. In an exploratory shuttle, however, there exists neither a deadline nor a penalty. The parties’ incentive is to hold back their concessions in anticipation of the real thing. Stalemate is ingrained in such a process-as all succeeding administrations were to experience as well.
Unfortunately, there was next to no compatibility between what we needed to reestablish executive authority in the United States and what the parties considered necessary for their own domestic consolidation. Our great test would be whether we could dominate Middle East diplomacy, ease the crisis in the Middle East, and prevent another outburst of violence which might drive the energy crisis out of control. Sadat needed to demonstrate to his colleagues that moderation produced tangible benefits. For the Israeli negotiating team, domestic consolidation depended on exactly the opposite: extracting concessions from Egypt and arms from the United States without having to pay any significant territorial price for either.
But when I met with the full negotiating team, it became clear that Rabin had not succeeded in convincing his colleagues. What produced, paradoxically, a sinking feeling was the absence of the tense, almost frenetic mood which had prevailed when actual withdrawals had been under discussion during the disengagement negotiations. Instead the Israeli negotiating team concentrated on a philosophical discussion of the relative merits of a step-by-step versus an overall approach without ever touching on the subject that had brought me to the Middle East: the specific terms for a Sinai interim agreement.
But he refused to specify these elements; they would be leaked, he said, and be turned by Israel into the starting point for a new set of demands.
Later, on the plane, I told Under Secretary of State Joseph Sisco what Golda Meir had said. “It is amazing,” I remarked, “how quickly people get out of touch when they leave office.”
Unfortunately, it was not Golda but I who was out of touch, at least as far as Israeli realities were concerned. I could not imagine that the Israeli cabinet would have allowed me to embark on a shuttle unless it was prepared to settle within the general framework Ford and I had repeatedly described to Rabin (we counted a total of twenty-four times). Israel, we thought, had too much at stake in a moderate Egypt to abort the negotiation, especially after having stonewalled the Jordanian option. What I had not calculated was that Israel might well drift into deadlock as a result of conflicts within its cabinet rather than from sober calculation.
Aware that the Arabs’ romantic streak often led them to overextension, he also recognized that head-on opposition to these tendencies might unhinge the delicate balances of his kingdom. At the same time, despite his genuine friendship for the United States, Faisal was convinced that America’s excessive pragmatism faced the kingdom with choices beyond its emotional capacities. He therefore maneuvered between the rhetoric of the Arabs and the practicalities of Washing-ton. While he could not afford to endorse our policies formally, he found ways to support them so long as he could do so unobtrusively.
The shuttles had a way of bringing home to the American team the vastness of the gulf between the national styles and perceptions of the Egyptian and Israeli leaders, obliging us to shift gears sometimes as often as three times in one day. Upon arriving in Israel, we would be taken directly by car or helicopter to the conference room adjoining the Prime Minister’s office; our hosts never squandered precious time on such nonessentials as personal conversation or social meals. Upon arriving in Egypt, we would be enveloped, at Sadat’s insistence, in a mandatory spell of relaxation-depending on the venue, at the beach or Sadat’s garden at Alexandria, the presidential rest house near the pyramids in Cairo, or at some desert retreat near Aswan. Meetings in Jerusalem invariably alternated between the Prime Minister’s residence, comparable to a middle executive’s domicile in the suburb of some American metropolis, and the Prime Minister’s austere conference room. There were few grace notes; our interlocutors went straight to the subject and never strayed far from it. Even the banter was strictly related to the issues at hand. When it concerned territorial adjustments, Israeli leaders were beyond frivolity. With survival at stake, the Israeli negotiating team was reluctant to interrupt the negotiation even for meals, most of which consisted of sandwiches while the talks continued.
It did not seem to matter that the United States had supplied Israel with almost all of its arms or that our backing was absolutely indispensable to the success of Israeli diplomacy. Treated with extraordinary wariness, the American negotiators were put on notice that any agreement would require monumental exertions. Israeli negotiators, steeped in the Talmudic tradition, parsed each document with super sophistication and subtlety, delighting in the discovery of abstruse shades of meaning that might have eluded us. Often grating on our emotional balance, their greatest fear seemed to be that they would be accused by their demanding and strident constituencies of having been taken in by their American allies. They had no intention of settling until they had absolved themselves of the slightest potential for blame by relentlessly imposing physical and emotional exhaustion on their American interlocutors.
There was something at once heroic and heartrending in such monumental intransigence: heroic because only unquenchable self-absorption could have transmuted total dependence into defiant insistence; heartrending because the defiance barely masked an undercurrent of panic lest this generation of Jews, through its own mistakes or-more likely-through the folly and shortsightedness of allies, be consigned to continue the tale of disasters that spell Jewish his-tory. Israel’s negotiators dared not avow what they feared the most: that the United States was being seduced by a newly moderate and charismatic Arab leader, and that, in the process, Israel would become a pawn in America’s Cold War strategy and lose its traditional emotional anchor in the United States.
By contrast, Egypt’s leaders seemed to have imbibed at least some of the rhythm of eternity implicit in the long history of their country. Egypt might have lost every war with Israel, but it was instinctively aware that its survival had never been at stake. Egyptian territory was too vast to be conquered by Israel; Cairo alone stood at nearly twice the population of all of Israel. All Egypt needed was a single victory, while Israel would be hazarding its very existence with a single defeat. Egypt could afford a margin for generosity; Israel, clinging to the very edge of survival, was bound to view any appeal to generosity as an invitation to disaster.
Egypt’s leaders-in particular Sadat-were less preoccupied with semantic traps and legal loopholes and more willing to take gambles on the intangibles of personal relations and of historical evolution. For them, diplomacy was a balancing of emotional commitments. The Arabs’ great weakness was the proclivity toward romanticism. It was not always easy to tell whether an interlocutor was putting forward epic poetry or a realistic appraisal of the situation at hand; at times, these blended imperceptibly. The Israeli obsession was legalistic exegesis; it led them to an odyssey in search of precision that occasionally lost touch with reality. The Arabs’ quest was dignity and honor, the Israelis’ security and survival.
Whenever we left one end of the shuttle, the backup team would be frantically preparing its analysis of the outstanding issues and their status, and fine-tuning the principals’ generalities into negotiating language. As it took only an hour to fly from Cairo to Tel Aviv, accomplishing this in time required a major tour de force that frequently tapped all of Sisco’s not inconsiderable histrionic abilities.
The rulers in Cairo viewed themselves as heirs to an ancient civilization, the borders of which had been defined through the millennia. They participated in Arab politics more by choice than by vocation, for Egypt did not consider itself a purely Arab country. It looked as well toward Africa and the northern shores of the Mediterranean.
On the other hand, Syria’s vocation-its very reason for existence-was Arab nationalism. Its borders were almost as arbitrary as Israel’s, resulting from the division of Middle East spoils between Britain and France at the end of the First World War. Just as many in Israel sought fulfillment in extending Israeli control over biblical Palestine, so many Syrians saw themselves as the advance guard of an Arab nation which, in their dreams, included Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and, at exuberant moments, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Thus Syrian leaders feel a responsibility not just for the entity which is today Syria but for the Arab cause as they interpret it.
When I negotiated with him, Asad usually followed a three-stage procedure which symbolized his power base. First he would meet with me and my interpreter alone, which enabled him to control what would be conveyed to his associates; then he would call in a group of military officers to hear a condensed version of the dialogue; finally, a civilian group would join us for an even more abbreviated version.
Ruthless, intelligent, charming when he wanted to be, Asad was a specialist in pursuing every negotiation until he had convinced himself that he had extracted the last possible concession-even if that meant jeopardizing the entire negotiation and weakening Syria’s overall standing. As far as he was concerned, peace had no abstract value, and he never pretended that it did. It registered, in Asad’s view, an equilibrium of forces which would end when the equilibrium altered. Thus a formal agreement with Israel would only formalize an existing balance of power. A succession of American Secretaries of State have perceived their talks with him to be about moving him toward a breakthrough in his perception of the nature of peace. The effort was doomed to failure. Asad was never prepared to conclude more than an armistice no matter what heading might appear on top of the document being signed at the conclusion.
The only possible explanation for the relaxed demeanor of the Israeli negotiating team was either that the cabinet had made its decision or, more likely, had once again failed to reach any decisions, so that the Israeli negotiators had nothing to tell us. Sisco, for one, was suspicious: “They are too friendly,” he whispered to me. “We are getting too paranoid,” I replied.
Rabin concluded the evening by handing me a memorandum containing seven principles which would guide the Israeli negotiating team—as if we were in an academic seminar and not the first stage of a shuttle. The language was conciliatory, but there was nothing to act on. The seven points were a generalized version of what we had been warning for months would not prove sufficient.
The Israeli critique was both accurate and irrelevant. The same criticism could have been leveled had Sadat agreed to a formal pledge of nonbelligerency - or, for that matter, to formal peace. To be sure, the proposed Israeli concessions were territorial, while the proposed benefits were revocable. And yet it was irrelevant because, from the beginning, it was clear that this would have to be the structure of the negotiations. No matter what the heading of an agreement and what the formal provisions of duration might be, agreements between sovereign states-even peace agreements-can always be abrogated. What penalty has there ever been for revoking a peace agreement or for disregarding a proclamation of nonbelligerency other than going to war-precisely what the peace agreement or nonbelligerency pledge is supposed to prevent?
The legalistic, taunting dissection of Sadat’s offer ignored the crucial reality that the only alternative was to return to a multilateral forum at Geneva, where Israel would face a coalition of all its adversaries and the need to come to grips simultaneously with much more complex issues such as the future of Jerusalem and final borders. Some key members of the Israeli negotiating team-and surely Rabin-understood these choices well enough. But they sometimes left the impression that they were more afraid of each other than of a diplomatic explosion.
In the course of every negotiation, a point is reached when the parties either conclude that they will eventually come together or that they are hopelessly deadlocked. In the former case, the negotiation gathers steam; individual issues are reconsidered in the light of imminent consensus. In the latter instance, though the process may drag on for some time, the negotiation is doomed because, from then on, the parties concentrate on shifting the blame for failure to each other.
This was not because Israel’s demands were excessive. That was standard procedure for the initial session with Israeli negotiating teams, which are in the habit of aggregating the preferences of each of its members. But the change from Golda Meir to Rabin brought with it two differences in style which proved to be decisive. Golda was as tough in private as she was in the negotiating sessions; we knew where we stood. In his first tenure as Prime Minister, this was not the case with Rabin. In private conversations, he left us with the conviction that he agreed with not only our strategy but our basic terms; he seemed primarily concerned to mitigate costs for Israel in redesigning the military infrastructure supporting the new lines. But in the sessions of the negotiating team, Rabin adamantly insisted on his seven principles and would not countenance a gradual approach to them.
When the shuttles were effective, they were sustained because each party-including the Israelis-was prepared to make slight adjustments in its position at each visit of the mediating team. This eased the atmosphere and encouraged the other party to make adjustments of its own. In this manner, the two sides narrowed the gulf between them.
On this shuttle, the Israeli cabinet took the position that it would not modify its stance until I had achieved close to its maximum position from Sadat. I am sure that Rabin, like Allon, was hoping that somehow I would return from a shuttle having pulled the rabbit out of a hat. And Rabin would then have recommended significant Israeli concessions.
It was a misconception of shuttle diplomacy. For Sadat was bound to interpret what really constituted Israeli cabinet politics as an attack on his national dignity. With each shuttle, he became less amiable. And while he— playing by the old rules—kept modifying his stance, he no longer did so with the flair with which he had overridden all previous deadlocks.
In all likelihood, he had understood that his associates would resist sweeping concessions they had not had a hand in shaping and were determined to make him assume responsibility for not only the general direction of the peace process but for its detailed provisions as well.
And in that month of collapsing hope, I was myself haunted by the specter that I might once again be, with the best of intentions, the driving force behind another peace process that would end with the collapse of an ally.
To demonstrate his strong support of my conduct of the negotiations, Ford wanted to come to Andrews Air Force Base on Sunday evening, March 23, to welcome me back to Washington. I dissuaded him because Presidents should not, if avoidable, identify themselves publicly with failure, whatever its cause. Nothing, however, could keep Ford from greeting me on the South Lawn of the White House, where my helicopter touched down.
The easy camaraderie and the frequent declarations of friendship could not obscure the fact that the two sides had a way of getting on each other’s nerves: Israel resented the cavalier way Americans would dispose of territory perceived as part of its margin of survival; Israeli negotiating methods, which placed little faith in give-and-take and treated every concession as an extortion, often set American teeth on edge.
You should not, repeat not, get into a post-mortem on why the negotiations reached an impasse or engage in discussion of the merits of any particular Israeli idea. Your posture should be one of seeking any new ideas the Israelis might have so you can report them when you return to Washington. While you should say that the USG [U.S. government], as has been said publicly, will treat any such ideas with an open mind, you have not come on instructions to press the Israelis. If Rabin puts forward any new ideas, you should ask him whether they are purely personal ideas or whether they are ideas which he feels the cabinet could support.
Rabin would not have been Rabin had he not coupled the proposed Israeli concessions with a vast shopping list for military and economic assistance from the United States. Nor did he let the occasion pass without asking for a veto over any proposals the United States might put forward if the Geneva conference were reassembled. Ford could not agree to a proposition which, if leaked-as it was certain to be-would destroy our mediating potential in the Arab world.
When I rejoined that, at the end of the day, he would have no other option than the one chosen by Sadat, Asad replied coldly: “You are selling out Vietnam; you will abandon Taiwan. And we will be here when you grow tired of Israel.”
The reaction in Amman was ambivalent. For months, Hussein had been urging another interim agreement as the only hope of preventing a Middle East war. Yet when it happened, the King could not fail to note that he-arguably America’s most constant friend-stood alone among Israel’s neighbors in still having failed to achieve any territorial gain or other benefit with the assistance of the United States.
Hussein chose a symbolic way to show his displeasure. The band at the airport played only the American and not the Jordanian national anthem, there was no march-past of troops and no social event either at the palace or at the Crown Prince’s residence as had been the unvarying custom on the night of my arrival. Courteous as ever, the King conducted the dialogue in his office seated across from me at a conference table-the only time I was received in this manner on any of my many visits to Amman before or after. I include these incidents to convey the mood but also to let my Jordanian friends know twenty years after the fact that we did understand the point they were making, though we saw no utility in commenting on it at the time.
Objective factors determine the framework within which policies are conducted, but it is the leaders who must mold the clay.
Battered by his domestic opposition, assailed by competitors for leadership within his cabinet, pressed by his American allies to move faster, Rabin held to his determination to bring about some progress toward peace and not simply a new military arrangement. Had he moved too quickly, his cabinet would have fallen apart, and new elections would have had to be held; had he moved more slowly, he would have risked the American alliance.
Though Rabin basically agreed with our strategy, as he often told me, he had to adjust its pace to his own fragile political base and to what his beleaguered people could sustain.
The passage of time has mercifully eased some of the pain of those somber months. Nevertheless, the way Indochina was brought to collapse in 1975 still evokes a sinking feeling in me, composed in equal parts of sadness for the victims that were abandoned and melancholy for what America did to itself.
Others will see what happens to people who rely on the United States. First we make an undesirable settlement, but with the promise of unlimited aid —and then aid is cut off within two years.
Each ambassador faced an extremely fast-moving collapse, testing his initiative and his capacity to improvise because Washington was too far away and too unaware of the local intangibles to give meaningful day-to-day operational guidance. As a result, each ambassador developed proconsular attitudes and often felt free to disregard explicit instructions from Washington. Yet in their interpretation of the scope and purpose of their proconsular roles, the two men diverged dramatically.
Throughout this controversy, Ford stood tall; he quite simply could not imagine abandoning those who had risked their lives for decades by cooperating with what five Presidents of both American parties had declared essential for the security of the free world. I did my best to ensure that this courageous and decent man would have the widest range of choices available and took great care to give Ford a way out.
Not the least irony of the death throes of Vietnam was that those who were usually being attacked for realpolitik insisted on honor and moral obligations while their critics, usually so free with moral claims, were acting like lawyers looking for escape clauses in a contract.
We were in the humiliating position summed up by British historian Edward Gibbon: that persuasion is the resource of the feeble and the feeble can seldom persuade. What made our situation so especially harrowing was that we had been made feeble by choice, not by necessity.
Martin ended his report to Washington on this poignant note: “I went home, read the daily news digests from Washington, took a shower, scrubbed very hard with the strongest soap I could find. It didn’t help very much.” Ford, Scowcroft, and I felt the same way.
I think this is not the occasion, when the last American has barely left Saigon, to make an assessment of a decade and a half of American foreign policy, because it could equally well be argued that if five administrations that were staffed, after all, by serious people dedicated to the welfare of their country came to certain conclusions, that maybe there was something in their assessment, even if for a variety of reasons the effort did not succeed.
As I have already pointed out, special factors have operated in recent years. But I would think that what we need now in this country, for some weeks at least, and hopefully for some months, is to heal the wounds and to put Vietnam behind us and to concentrate on the problems of the future.
The government of the United States demands the immediate release of the vessel and of the full crew. If that release does not immediately take place, the authorities in Phnom Penh will be responsible for the consequences.
In diplomatese, assigning responsibility for the consequences means that military action is likely; it is the nearest thing to an ultimatum.
When the Pentagon is less than enthusiastic, it does not reinterpret orders—as the Foreign Service is wont to do—but fulfills them literally without any additional initiative on its part. Given the complexity of military deployments, the practical effect is the same as procrastination. Throughout the Mayaguez crisis, the Pentagon dutifully assembled the forces as it was ordered to do. But it was clearly reluctant, offered no ideas of its own, left it to the civilians to prod it into action.
In retrospect-though I did not think so at the time-these events demonstrate the risk of planning military operations in the National Security Council without any preparatory work by a subordinate group and without some official short of the President being made responsible for the hour-by-hour coordination. The NSC is better designed for overall decisions than for micromanage-ment. The President had ordered allout strikes at the NSC meeting and, in the absence of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there was no military officer sufficiently close to him to transmit the orders unambiguously through the chain of command. This gave the Secretary of Defense-who is actually, in our system, not directly in the chain of command-what turned out to be a decisive voice.