TN: Nixon period, looking at the Nixon period,
what would you like to recall as some of your personal achievements? Things that,
as you know, as someone in the National Security Council staff, what
things do you think you contributed personally, to policies? HS: Well, I think the
biggest, the biggest realm would be the period of the Kissinger shuttles and the whole
business leading up to that, the dialogue with Soviets, and thinking about
paths to peace, and in the Middle East, but on the Kissinger shuttles, I was
the person of the, the usual team was Joe Sisco who is by then the Under Secretary
for Political Affairs, by the later shuttle period Roy Atherton,
my Assistant Secretary, and I was, I had become, in July of '74, the Deputy
Assistant Secretary. The first Kissinger shuttles, I was still in the NSC staff,
but in that, with that team we developed a device for a mediation, which we called
the checklist. If you have a mediator who's starts the day in Jerusalem
talking to the Israeli government, goes to Egypt, talks to Sadat, comes back and
through all this back and forth is advancing the text of an agreement, or
the first of all, the concept of an agreement, then the text of an agreement.
It's very complicated to keep track of what's going on at that speed.
So, we developed a checklist. 'Mr. Secretary, Sadat asked you to get answers
to these questions from the Israelis, the Israelis had asked certain questions and
Sadat gave you these answers,' and so on. We had these, this sequence of things
that then you can look at those checklists and watch the mediation
advance meeting by meeting, and the checklists were moved forward in a
helicopter, in a car, on the flight from one country to the other, typed,
retyped on the plane, copied and so on, and when you got to the point where
there were texts attached to this checklist, the texts were there, and you had to
advance those, and so on. But that's all mechanical, but what it signifies is
the work of taking a strategy, which is Henry's strategy, we're going to use
these interim agreements as stepping stones, one step toward peace and
another step toward peace and so on. We'll back the Soviets off, out of the Middle
East, and gradually move toward a settlement proving to the Arabs that we
can get their territory back, the Soviets couldn't. So, that was the
strategy. How do you translate that into something happening on the ground? Well, I
think my primary role was to provide Henry with the concepts that would
translate what he wanted to do, generally, onto something on the ground, and then
as the negotiations advanced, I would be in touch with, for instance, the military
attaches, whom I would use as advisors, and so on and so on. Advancing the mediation, not just in
terms of the the written the part of the agreements, but well, my dear friend in
Boston those years, Roy Atherton, described my job to my successor as
being the architect of the next step. But if you take the idea of an architect and
the next step, it's an unusual combination, it's conceptualizing where the next step
might be, and where it might go, and then how would you put that on a map, or in a
series of reassurances and so on. I learned peace process that way. I think
we coined the phrase "peace process" in January of '74 on the Kissinger
airplane. We'd started into this process, talking about the negotiating
process, we would mediate one agreement and then another and build on a third.
So, we'd have a process of mediated negotiations. Then we realized that
that first Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement was having political impact. As
I mentioned earlier, the King of Saudi Arabia said to Kissinger, "Mr. Secretary
if you could do that with Syria, I'd try to get the oil embargo lifted." Well, we
weren't just mediating agreements to get people's territory back. We were trying
to, we were changing our relationship with states in the Middle East. So, we
coined the phrase "peace process," and when I left government, the one thing I could
take with me was "peace process" the idea. Then I devoted my life through
nonofficial dialogues ever since with Soviets, Israelis, Palestinians, all over
the place, to this idea of nonofficial dialogue to promote a peace process.
In the Seventies, I learned three big lessons. One, I've already mentioned, my
exchange with Golda Meir over my wife's death, I learned the importance of the
human dimension of conflict. We weren't just mediating agreements between
governments. The second thing was we were mediating transformation of
relationships between peoples, and then, of course, the major lesson was the power
of a continuous political process to change relationships. So, all that I could
take away, but I think it was also my contribution to conceptualize what we
were doing. TN: Do you think, in retrospect, we should have
done more to work with the Palestinians sooner? And could we have? HS: My answer
would be yes on both counts. Much of that might not have taken place
in the Nixon period. It really came up more in the next year or two. For
instance, after the second Sinai Agreement which was, of course, done
under President Ford in the September of '75 but two months after that,
then-Congressman Lee Hamilton, who was the head of the Middle East Subcommittee of
the House International Relations Committee, held hearings on the
Palestinians, and his purpose, as he often did, was to hold some hearings, get the
little record of the hearings as an educational device to distribute around
the House, and the hearings were about the Palestinians, and I, they asked
for somebody to come up from the State Department and talk about this
subject. Well, Kissinger sure wasn't going to talk about that subject, and Sisco was
going to be out of town, I think, and Roy Atherton, the Assistant Secretary,
they thought maybe shouldn't. So, I was a Deputy Assistant Secretary and the
lowest person on that four man totem pole, the lowest one who could go and
speak for the Administration before the Congress. And so, I was sent up there and
I prepared. I spent a weekend in the office with some colleagues preparing a
statement on the role of the Palestinians in the peace process.
Obviously, an incredibly sensitive subject because
there was a memorandum of understanding with the Israelis at the end of the
Sinai II Agreement. That's where we said we would not recognize or
negotiate with the Palestinians unless they accepted UN Security Council
Resolution 242, accepting the existence of Israel, but anyway, I prepared this
statement, and today it looks like the most innocuous of statements. One of the,
two of the sentences in it that caused tremendous commotion in Israel were, we
have to find a way to bring the Palestinians into the peace process. Yeah.
The other was that the Pales-- in many ways, the Palestinian issue is the heart
of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Seems self-evident today. The testimony was,
I think, on a on a Wednesday or Thursday and by the time it got into the Israeli
press, it was Shabbat, the Sabbath. So, there's a Cabinet meeting on Sunday
and members of the Cabinet had read the press reports of this testimony. And so,
the Cabinet condemned it and there was a tremendous furor over Kissinger. I had
cleared it very carefully with Kissinger. It's somewhere around in the State
Department files, probably not in the Nixon files or the Ford files, but
somewhere, there's a copy of the thing with his handwriting on it, but when the
press asked 'Mr. Secretary, did you approve this statement?' [As
Kissinger:] 'Do you think I read everything that some Deputy Assistant Secretary says to the
Congress?' Well, on that subject, the whole press corps knew very well that, they
knew how, they've been on the plane with us, they knew how this team operated. They
knew very well nobody was talking about an issue like this without the approval
of the Secretary of State. So, that was my personal statement. It later became, there was
such a commotion over it, it later became known as "the Saunders document," but it it was
written because I believed, going back a long way to your question, I believed
that it certainly was time, and by after the second Sinai Agreement
in September '75, it was time to get the Palestinians into the act. Of course, that
didn't really happen until Camp David in 1978 when we did bring the Palestinian
issue to the top of the agenda, out of the Camp David Accords, but yeah, if
we could have done it, if something could have been done earlier, it probably would
have been a good thing. Although, you could argue just as
well that the Middle East wasn't ready for it yet.
We weren't politically ready for it. The peace process wasn't ready for it. When
we did it at Camp David, yes. Even Begin was ready for it, not the PLO but the
Palestinians, I mean, just nose under the tent, so to speak. TN: Did you meet Arafat?HS:
Yeah, long after, No, I actually, I did not violate American policy, which I
explained faithfully, but did not agree with, but I
think it was 1989 or '90. A few of us with my colleague on the NSC staff and at
Camp David, Bill Quandt, got an invitation. We were at Brookings Institution
together. He got an invitation to take hold of a group to meet Arafat in
Tunis and we did, and I was glad that I had that chance. Then later on, my wife and I
met him in Gaza in connection with the, actually a conference in Be'er Sheva on an
anniversary of Camp David, of Camp David Accords. So, yeah, I'm glad I had a chance
to meet him. TN: And to and to close the loop with two questions: One, you mentioned
how the Saudis responded to the effect of this disengagement
relationship with the, or the agreement with the Syrians. How did we, did
we miss manage the relationship with the Saudis? How is it that they came to use
the oil weapon against us? We knew that this could be done. HS: I think they just had
to go on with the rest of the Arab world, and they, I think, they did not, I
don't believe, they initiated that. I think they just couldn't stand aside. TN: What effect, if any, did Watergate have on that last year of our effort in the Middle East? HS: Strangely, I'm going to say that I I
think we could not have accomplished more than we did. I don't think it had
that much effect. By the time... I'm gonna cut down to really toward the
end, we had established our credentials through the disengagement agreements. My
feeling was, in those years, and the rest of retrospect, in retrospect it still seems
the same, the United States had several major conflicting interests in
the Middle East. There was the Arab world and the oil, there was the commitment to Israel.
The only way that we could conduct a strategy that could bring those two
conflicting interests together under the same strategic group was to be trying to
make peace between Israel and its neighbors. As you know, to this day, the
Palestinian issue is probably the most cancerous component of the U.S.
relationship with the Arab world, and the same was true in those days. So, as long
as we were walking that path of trying to solve the problem and demonstrating that
we could do it, at least in pieces, that was a strategy that won us respect, and
therefore, I think it was, it stood by itself. It didn't depend anymore, yes,
there was the backing of the President of the United States and he was in
trouble but, uh, we were able to conduct the policy and
it produced results regardless of what was going on at home. Kissinger's
philosophy often stated in staff meetings in that period was our job is
to demonstrate that the foreign policy of the United States continues forcefully, competently, and, of course,
that statement he used that when the President Nixon resigned and Ford
took over, there was going to be continuity, and so on. He had a very deep
commitment to the idea that the foreign policy of a great country should not be
derailed by domestic developments, and, of course, he had his own painful experience
with all that in the Vietnam context, but nevertheless, that was the commitment, and
I think here it held it held true, and just an aside that I can't remember
where it was, but it was one of the Arabian Peninsula visits, somebody asks the question after the
President's resignation, where were the tanks? The idea that a country could go
through this, conduct its foreign policy and produce results over here regardless
of what was going on. Transfer of power, totally peacefully, from one leader to
another was something that they couldn't quite take aboard. TN: With that, I think, it's a good place to
stop. Thank you very much, Mr. Saunders. HS: Thank you very much. It's been a
great pleasure to go back and relive years that obviously had a great impact on
my life. TN: Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you gentlemen.
