Friday, August 19, 1983
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Purely Commentary
PAC as an Ethical Issue in American
Politics, the Involvements and 'Targets,'
and a Recollection About Senator Vandenberg
By Philip
Slomovitz
.
PAC as a National Factor
Not to Be Confused with
Propagandistic Negatives
As a normalcy in American politics, the 1984
Presidential campaign is already a subject for widespread
consideration. In the course of considering its numerous
aspects, there is a frequent reference to PAC — to the
Political Action Committees whose business it is to secure
contributions in support of favorite candidates.
As usual, the "Jewish involvement always gets Page
One reference. Now PAC is being considered as an element
in the analyses of political developments.
The Wall Street Journal, in a recent issue, made the
considered Jewish involvement a matter for Front Page
consideration in a lengthy article under the heading
"Jewish Groups Increase Donations, Target Them ,Pre-
cisely." The article, written by John J. Fialka, a Wall Street
Journal staff reporter, commenced his accumulated facts
about massive donations and the candidates supported
with the reported large funds by stating:
American Jews have organized new financial
muscle to back up their already-powerful lobby
for aid to Israel.
During the last congressional election, Jews
used over 30 separate political-action committees
to give favored candidates $1.67 million, more
than in any prior election.
The impression might be viewed as exposing a group
selfishness. Pro-Israel candidates are introduced as the
Jewish favorites. Anti-Israel members of Congress are
listed as the "targets" in such Jewish actions.
Therefore, this may well become a subject scrutinizing
the Jewish role, reimposing the aspect of a "Jewish vote,"
leaving, perhaps a bad taste among voters and Jewish
fellow citizens.
This requires several treatments. In the first place,
PAC as an American element is not new in this nation's
political experience. It has existed for a long time and has
grown in proportion to the past. Therefore, there is nothing
new in the matter labeled PAC.
Are Jews to be blamed for opposing candidates who
advocate support for the PLO and, therefore, directly serve
as agents for anti-Israelism in Congress? Furthermore,
what's wrong in perpetuating friendships and supporting
candidates or in being Philo-Semites?
The Fialka article in the Wall Street Journal refers
specifically to Democratic Congressman Clarence Long,
the chairman of the House of Representatives appropria-
tions subcommittee on foreign operations. It states that he
received $31,250 from 18 Jewish groups to help him in his
race for re-election in the suburbs in Baltimore. Then the
Fialka article quotes Congressman Long:
"Nobody has to give me money to make me
vote for aid to Israel. I've been doing that for 20
years, most of the time without contributions,"
Rep. Long says. "I would call this defensive
money. They want to try to keep me in Congress."
Congressman Long and his associates have a real pat-
riotic case in this regard. Support for Israel is a defense for
the American position in the Middle East, with Israel as the
strongest backer of American policies in that area.
A personal note is in place here: Michigan's distin-
guished Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg was one of the strong
supporters of Zionist ideology. He must have received con-
tributions in his political campaigns from Jews, and they
did not necessarily have to be from Michigan alone. When
Sen. Vandenberg died, this Commentator wrote a column
(Jewish News, April 1951), "Vandenberg: A Tribute to a
Great Statesman." The late Congressman John D. Dingell
included that column in his own tribute to the eminent
Senator in the Congressional Record. When the U.S. Se-
nate published a volume in tribute to Sen. Vandenberg,
that column was the only tribute by a Jew to him in the
Senate Memorial Volume. That column included the fol-
lowing:
In all the years that we conferred with him he
never — not once — showed the slightest interest
in this commentator's political preferences. We
were concerned with grave matters involving the
security of the Jewish people, and we stuck to this
point. On this score he was unselfish and always
honorable. If only for this reason alone — which is
one of many — we honor his memory as we hon-
ored and respected him in his lifetime.
This tribute to Sen. Vandenberg is applicable to all
friends of Israel.
There can be no denigration of Jewish involvements in
PAC activities, as long as they are honorable and adhere to
the decencies and highest ethical standards in political
actions.
Let this be noted, as the debate is certain to develop
over PAC, the Jewish involvements and all exaggerations
regarding "targets."
Seymour Hersh's Volume, The Price of Power,' Reconstructs
Henry Kissinger's 'Spite' Over Rogers Middle East Plan
"The Price of Power" became a byword in character testing, in the study of America's
foreign policies during the Nixon regime, in the scrutiny of the Kissinger approaches to
the many issues that confronted this nation in world affairs. Since the emphasis was in
the Nixon-Carter-Kissinger relations, little attention was given to the Middle East and
the Israel-Arab conflict in the discussions about "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the
Nixon White House" by Seymour M. Hersh (Summit Press).
Hersh delves deeply into the Henry Kissinger role as it conflicted with the views of
his predecessor, Secretary of State William Rogers, and the deep personal invovlement in
Middle East confrontations by President Richard M. Nixon.
There certainly was no lack of bitterness on all sides in the quest to direct the policies
that involved Israel and Egypt and affected the relationships with Jordan.
In the totality of his coverage of the challenging events of the late 1960s and early
1970s, the Hersh coverage is a most impressive summation of the events as they related
to the Israeli and Arab identifications, with special emphasis on the Soviet image and the
search for power and the determination of American officials to keep that power out of
Middle East and related affairs.
The much-touted Rogers Plan, the emphasis given for several years to dealing with
the Middle East on a basis of even-handedness, the USSR involvement and the Jordanian
situation have their echoes in the Hersh volume.
The Kissinger antagonism to Rogers is especially evident, Kissinger, in the power
struggle, striving to undermine the Rogers program and the then Secretary of State's
influence. Nixon and Kissinger in the main collaborated on this score.
Because the Rogers plan is so frequently referred to, its essence as elaborated upon
by Hersh is important. The Hersh claim of "spite" in Kissinger's role becomes apparent in
the elaboration on the Rogers Plan, as thus outlined by Hersh:
In early December, faced with continuing complaints about his diplo-
macy from the Israeli Embassy and the American Jewish community, Ro-
gers decided to make his plan public. Rogers' decision was obviously a
hurried one: State Department aides recall a scramble to find a suitable
public forum for the Secretary to announce the American policy for the
Middle East. The speech was delivered Dec. 9 to an adult education forum
which had been scheduled to receive a routine policy address by a low-level
Foreign Service officer. The Rogers speech, outlining what became known
as the first Rogers Plan, explicitly said that Israel should withdraw to its
pre-1967 boundaries in the Sinai Desert in return for recognition from
Egypt and an end to belligerency. Rogers also called for a more broadly
based settlement in the Mideast, involving negotiations between Israel and
Jordan over the West Bank, the future of united Jerusalem, and the Pales-
tinian refugee problem. The gist of Rogers' recommendations had been
privately conveyed to Cairo a month earlier, according to Mahmoud Riad,
the Egyptian Foreign Minister, whose memoirs, "The Struggle for Peace in
the Middle East," were published in London in 1981. Egypt found much
merit in Rogers' attempt to seek a comprehensive settlement, Riad wrote,
rather than one limited only to Egypt and Israel.
The Rogers Plan caused a shock wave of opposition in Israel, which
had received no advance word, Official or unofficial, of his speech, and from
Israel's supporters in Congress. There was a sense of crisis in Israel. The
Cabinet was summoned to an emergency session the next day and formally
rejected Rogers' initiative. Kissinger, in his memoirs, claimed that Rogers
had not cleared his speech in advance with Kissinger or Nixon; on that day,
at least, the Secretary of State had apparently usurped Kissinger's right to
usurp him. Kissinger was furious as he and his aides read a news report on
Rogers' speech as it came across line by line on one of the wire-services
machines in the White House. There was the usual tantrum, one aide recalls;
Kissinger railed not only at the substance of the speech but at what he said
was Rogers' failure to dear it with his office.
It may have been more theatrics. Sisco recalls that Rogers' speech had
been sent to the White House before it was given, and that Kissinger not
only approved the text but made substantive comments and recom-
mendations for changes. Sisco adds, "I don't know whether Henry showed
it to the President." His implication is clear: Kissinger had now shown the
speech to the President in advance, so that when the predictable Israeli
protests came after it was given — the timing was left to Rogers — he could
suggest to Nixon that Rogers had delivered it without clearance. Such
maneuvering would explain Kissinger's elaborate performance before his
aides at the first reports on the speech and his failure to acknowledge in his
memoirs that the basic Rogers proposal — if not its timing — had received
his blessing.
Over the next few weeks, Kissinger and Nixon worked in tandem to
further undercut the Secretary of State. On the day after the speech, as
protests from Israeli officials and American Jewish leaders began pouring
into the White House, Kissinger criticized the Rogers approach at a Na-
tional Security Council meeting, reiterating his thesis that the longer the
stalemate in the Middle East, "the more obvious would it become that the
Soviet Union had failed to deliver what the Arabs wanted." On Dec. 17,
Nixon ordered White House aide Leonard Garment, a Jew and a former
Nixon law partner who served as an occasional intermediary with the
Israelis, to give private assurances to Prime Minister Golda Meir that the
State Department initiative would not have his full backing. Similarly, the
word was quietly passed to American Jewish leaders, one such leader
recalls, that there was nothing to worry about. Nonetheless, protests went
on.
Hersh maintains that the Rogers Plan did provide "a strategic base for America's
Middle East policy in the years to come -. Its basic principle — an Israeli withdrawal —
eventually became the underpinning for Kissinger's famed Middle Eastern shuttle
diplomacy after the 1973 Yom Kippur War."
Throughout the analyses of these events Hersh emphasizes the American role of
preventing Russian influence in the area. The Soviet Union was then closely involved in
Egyptian relationships and the Kissinger-Nixon policies were to avert USSR interven-
tion. Israel's aerial attacks on Egypt then, as quoted by the Israel Ambassador Yitzhak
Rabin had the Nixon endorsement and at one point Rabin quoted Nixon as saying: "If it
were just a question of you and the Egyptians and the Syrians, I'd say let them have it, let
them have it. Hit them as hard as you can. Every time I hear of you penetrating into their
territory and hitting them hard, I get a feeling of satisfaction."
In September 1970, during the PLO-Jordanian clash and the eventual expulsion of
the PLO which resulted in thousands of casualties, Nixon ordered the bombing of the
PLO forces. It was after the PLO hijacking of four American aircraft "bad weather"
averted the bombing, but the American involvement was firm and it may have been the
beginning of the prolonged close relationship with Hussein. The Syrian threats were
repulsed by Jordan and the Russian involvement was resisted to the fullest. The Rogers
Plan saw its demise, as indicated by Hersh:
Nixon later told Congress that the crisis in
Jordan was "the gravest threat to world peace
since this administration came to office.
The major victors were the Israelis, who had
joined in active partnership with Nixon and Kis-
singer in supporting Hussein's regime. On Sept.
17, shortly before the Syrians sent their tank force
into Jordan, Nixon had authorized $500 million in
military aid for Israel and also agreed to acceler-
ate the delivery of previously promised F-4 Phan-
tom aircraft. There was also an unprecedented
promise from Nixon and Kissinger: If Israel
moved its troops into Jordan and they were
engaged by Egyptian or Soviet forces coming to
the aid of the Syrians, the United States would
then intervene on behalf of Israel. The agreement,
which has never been fully disclosed, was made in
oral communications, between Ambassador
SEYMOUR HERSH
(Continued on Page 72)