Presidents and Crises

RAY SUAREZ:

In his farewell address, George Washington warned his successors and fellow countrymen to be wary of foreign entanglements. More than 200 years later, international crises are a staple of the modern president's job. Some perspective now from NewsHour regulars: presidential historian Michael Beschloss; journalist and author Haynes Johnson; Richard Norton Smith, director of the Dole Institute at the University of Kansas; and Roger Wilkins, professor of history at George Mason University. Richard Norton Smith, I guess no matter what the party, you can't stay out of the Middle East since 1948 if you're president of the United States.

RICHARD NORTON SMITH:

No, it goes with the territory, Ray. You know, we heard in Afghanistan it would be a different kind of war. The Middle East is dismally familiar. It's a permanent crisis. You're right; it's bipartisan. You want a really depressing experience, sit down and look at every presidential memoir going back to Harry Truman and look at the parts dealing with the Middle East. Presidents since Truman have felt various kinds of frustration. They've been frustrated over the intractability of the region. They've been frustrated over the inability of conventional diplomacy to bring about anything approaching peace.

But they've also been frustrated, quite frankly, to varying degrees at the restraints under which they have operated, in large part because of the enormous domestic political clout that is waged by the friends of Israel in this country. Lyndon Johnson, for example, found himself trying to restrain the Israeli nuclear program. It's amazing but on the first day of the Six-Day War in June 1967, his State Department actually put out a statement of neutrality. There's always been this tension between the White House and the State Department, the State Department priding itself on being unaffected, if you will, by the immediate political considerations and that is another source of tension and another part of the more or less permanent crisis.

RAY SUAREZ:

But the United States, Michael Beschloss, ends up being essential no matter what?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS:

Sure it does. And I guess I see it a little bit more positively than Richard does, because I think for much of our history there was a feeling in America that if you were a group in the United States that had strong feelings about foreign policy, you shouldn't try to influence the government. And I think in the last 50 years, not only people who feel strongly about Israel but about Cyprus, for instance, a lot of other issues were in a society where if people feel strongly and I think they should get involved in the political system. But Richard is right, it's made it more difficult for presidents.

Harry Truman was the first to encounter this because in 1948 he wanted to recognize Israel at the moment that it was declared, which I think was absolutely the right thing to do. He was told by his Secretary of State, George Marshall, "I'm against it. I think you're doing this just for political reasons and if you do this, I won't resign but if I were voting, which he wasn't because Marshall was a military man, didn't feel he should vote, he said, "if I were voting this fall, I would vote against you."

So what you have seen throughout the history since then is presidents I think who are very sensitive to the need for a democratic and secure Israel feel that we have a moral commitment to that and a State Department that, yes, is aware of that but often during the last half century has felt that that's a problem and should be weighed much more against the danger that especially during the Cold War as Richard Nixon said the cradle of civilization might become its grave.

RAY SUAREZ:

Haynes, recently-released tapes quote Richard Nixon or overhear Richard Nixon saying some pretty, by our 2002 light, pretty offensive things about American Jewry; yet when the chips were down in the early 1970s, he pulled out the stops for Israel.

HAYNES JOHNSON:

Yes. And Nixon deserves great credit for foreign policy successes. And that was the age of Kissinger and what we now know as shuttle diplomacy going back and forth to the Middle East but it goes beyond even Harry Truman.

I was in the Shah of Iran's Palace on the famous night when Jimmy Carter was over there. He raised the glass at midnight, this is 1979, and said we have no better ally than the Shah of Iran and to the symbol of stability in an unstable world. And three months later he was overthrown. In the palace that night from top to bottom, there were pictures of the Shah with every American president since Franklin Roosevelt getting older, the Shah each time, and every American…it shows the connection between that combustible area of the world. And it's still with us tonight as we're speaking right now and we're no farther along to a solution than they were then.

RAY SUAREZ:

Does anybody get any credit for a noble effort, trying and fail something it's been referred to a couple of times around the table as intractable and tough?

ROGER WILKINS:

Well, there was one American who had some success. He wasn't an employee of the American government. He worked for the U.N., and he brokered a cease-fire back in 1948. His name was Ralph Bunche. He was the first black man in the United States to get a Nobel Peace Prize. But I have to think that Bill Clinton gets some credit. At the very end, whatever his reasons, he made really a Herculean effort to get these parties over the hump. Others deserve credit. Yitzhak Rabin, a man of great courage, and a great belief in peace, took his country to the brink of peace and was killed for it.

RAY SUAREZ:

But Roger, as I'm sure you're aware in recent months, just what Bill Clinton left to the Bush Administration in the way of a Mideast policy has been the subject of some debate inside the administration itself.

ROGER WILKINS:

Well, I think the administration is sorry now that it suggested that the problems that we have now are a result of Clinton's efforts. We've always known for a long time that in the Middle East the extremists on both sides essentially have a veto. You make a deal or it looks like the moderates make a deal, somebody bombs something or somebody kills somebody and the deal is off. So I don't think that's Clinton… I don't think you can blame Clinton for these things.

HAYNES JOHNSON:

I was just thinking what Roger was saying. Jimmy Carter's failure was over the Shah of Iran on the hostage crisis but he succeeded in helping to broker the deal between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. That was a hopeful….

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS:

And took a great risk.

HAYNES JOHNSON:

And took a great risk. That was a very hopeful… of course Sadat got assassinated later. That showed you that you can do something. The role of an American president, to throw himself into there and I think Jimmy Carter deserves great credit for that. Other presidents have all dealt with this problem one way or another too. So it's not hopeless I don't think.

RAY SUAREZ:

Richard, we've been talking about the Middle East but how much does Mideast politics and presidents' involvement in it, has it been sort of an ancillary to the Cold War?

RICHARD NORTON SMITH:

Well, for years it really was a sideshow to the Cold War, and also the Middle East was viewed as a tinderbox. One reason why the State Department tended to take a more, if you will, dovish view was not only its concern about Arab oil but, for a long time, it looked at all those Soviet client states in the Middle East, and it was very concerned that if the United States weighed in too heavily, exclusively in a pro-Israeli stance, that we might inadvertently undermine, quote, moderate Arab states. Now, over 50 years, that's a recurring theme. You saw what happened to President Sadat.

One thing that I think has changed and has got to be a source of some concern for this Administration, for years and years American presidents took some comfort from knowing that at least, quote, moderate Arab governments said one thing in public for the consumption of their streets and another thing in private when they talked to American diplomats or presidents. That dichotomy seems to have narrowed or almost vanished right now. There seems to be genuine unity, genuine anger, genuine determination on the part of both the moderate and the radical Arab regimes in the region regarding certainly the Sharon government.

RAY SUAREZ:

One thing that's come up both earlier in tonight's program and in a wider sense since President Bush started to become more engaged in this issue is the extent to which the United States can influence actions within Israel, either when talking to prime ministers, talking to cabinets, to parliaments. What's the record look like there?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS:

Well, Israel is a democracy, and that makes it a little bit tougher because you're not dealing with a monarchy or a dictatorship, which sometimes makes its a little bit easier. And also we have a record of at the same time as we've been trying to be an honest broker, and that really goes back to the time of Nixon.

At the same time no one should doubt that this country has an inescapable moral commitment to the survival of Israel that makes it sometimes a little bit different…difficult. But I think the one thing that's true from Truman all the way to the present time is that every American president has to be involved in this problem. Anyone who tries to escape it is going to do it I think only at his peril.

HAYNES JOHNSON:

The reality is too the United States… without the United States Israel wouldn't exist. They wouldn't have been there. Without our aid militarily or economically, they couldn't have survived as long. So there is leverage clearly to be… and the same is true of the Arab states but that's clearly something the United States has. Now how do you use that? How do you use the leverage? That's the art of diplomacy. And that's the terribly tricky part.

ROGER WILKINS:

In all this gloom we shouldn't forget that the peace between Israel and Egypt really has precluded an all-out war for….

HAYNES JOHNSON:

That's right.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS:

Not just Egypt.

ROGER WILKINS:

Right. This has changed things. And it took two things to bring that peace: First, a great couple of leaders in the Middle East. Both of them took huge risks, one lost his life, and then a nimble American president and Secretary of State who knew how to use the American leverage. I think that it's really hard to… I mean, I see all these people saying, well, Colin Powell didn't do this, Colin Powell didn't do that.

A Secretary of State can't do magic just because he's an American and has a plane that says United States Air Force. You need… you need people on the other side who are willing to take risks. Powell and the president have been urging Sharon, Arafat, others, really to step up and make it possible for a middle person, the president of the United States, to move in and exert that leverage.

RAY SUAREZ:

And, Richard, I guess we should remember just how many times Henry Kissinger had to go to Israel.

RICHARD NORTON SMITH:

Yeah, absolutely.

RAY SUAREZ:

He didn't do it in one week.

RICHARD NORTON SMITH:

Absolutely. The lead-up before there was Camp David and the Carter presidency, during the Ford Administration, it took Kissinger six months and countless trips to the region to negotiate an Israeli pullback about 30 miles from the forward positions that they had won in the Yom Kippur War. And even then the talks bogged down for weeks over the discussions of geography surrounding two passes and what represented the crest of a pass. I mean, you know, this is not a region where things happen quickly.

RAY SUAREZ:

And is there some comfort for George W. Bush tonight in the mixed record of the past 54 years that it can't be done right away?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS:

Well, it hasn't blown up, and the other thing is that usually presidents and secretaries of state are always told, stay out of this; it's only going to cause you problems; you can't succeed. Look at the people who did make progress. Jimmy Carter, an excellent example. We wouldn't have had the last 20 years of, at least, quiet if it were not for his big risk at Camp David. So I think what we'd all say to a president is take the risk, you have to do it anyway because that's what we pay a president to do.

RAY SUAREZ:

Gentlemen, thank you all.