Stung by the criticism, and hoping to keep their electoral support, the White House arranged a breakfast for CDM’s leadership and the president on January 31, 1980.30 By that time Carter had adopted a harder line toward the Soviets following their invasion of Afghanistan, and all the ingredients of a reconciliation seemed to be in place. There are wildly different accounts of what went wrong, but the guests felt that the president was defensive, did not respond to criticism, and took the position he was doing everything they wanted in foreign policy and could not understand why they had come to complain. I felt to the contrary: My notes show that the president said he had reversed the post-Vietnam defense-spending decline; that there was “unprecedented unity” of the American people following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and his strong stand, which had “changed policy”; and that there was a need for greater allied support. He told CDM clearly: “I don’t want a return to the Cold War, but I am prepared to take the consequences if our standing firm leads to that.”31
Podhoretz urged him to orchestrate a vast human rights campaign against the Soviet Union. It surpasses imagination that they could believe the president, who so strongly supported human rights and the cause of democratic dissidents and Jewish refusniks in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, would not have been responsive to their demand for a tough anti-Soviet line: He had already taken the actions Podhoretz recommended. Podhoretz later told me he felt that Carter got red with anger and was “really pissed off.”32
What Carter said and the tough actions he had taken should have been music to their ears. Instead Josh Muravchik, CDM’s director, said that most decided in the weeks after the meeting to support Ronald Reagan, and he wrote a book critical of Carter’s human rights record.33 For some who had been engaged in an eight-year struggle to bring the Democratic Party around to their view, it was the last straw. Wattenberg said they left the meeting “dumbstruck” because they felt the president did not have a clue about their ideas; they felt they were no longer welcome in the Democratic Party.34 Peter Rosenblatt, who was appointed to a secondary post as Carter’s personal representative to Micronesia, in the western Pacific Ocean, and then ignored, said the neoconservative movement was actually born at that meeting. With only limited influence left in the Democratic Party, they gained significant standing inside the Reagan administration, where their hawkishness was welcomed.
JEWS, ANDREW YOUNG, AND THE PLO
How could a Democratic incumbent in 1980 receive the lowest percentage of support from the American Jewish community of any modern Democratic presidential candidate, especially one with such a record of courting and actively supporting causes dear to the hearts of American Jewry? Carter brokered the first peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, its most dangerous foe; strongly supported a new law banning American companies from participating in the Arab boycott of Israel; created the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust headed by Eli Wiesel, and then enthusiastically endorsed by word and deed its recommendation to build the United States Memorial Museum in Washington. He even supported me in overriding the National Park Service’s refusal to permit the Lubavitch Chabad movement to erect the world’s first giant public menorah in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House, and then personally joined in the Hanukkah lighting with me, my family, and Lubavitch Rabbi Abraham Shemtov, a senior aide to the revered Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Certainly part of the reason was the tough positions he took with Israeli prime minister Begin to forge a peace treaty with Egypt’s Sadat. But the immediate culprit was a series of catastrophically botched diplomatic decisions about UN resolutions on Israel. One involved our UN ambassador, Andrew Young, and another swung Jewish support to Kennedy almost overnight at a critical stage in the Democratic Party primary battle. In politics even one foolish move can overwhelm the best of good intentions, especially when expressed by someone who still seemed somewhat alien to his Jewish supporters.
As a white Southerner, Jimmy Carter would never have been nominated by the Democrats or elected had it not been for the validation he received from prominent figures in the civil rights movement, especially Andy Young. As the quiet and effective counsel at the side of Martin Luther King, Jr., he had negotiated with bullying white sheriffs and judges trying to thwart King’s historic marches for racial justice and equality. With significant organizational help from my wife, Fran, policy advice from me, liberal white and overwhelming black support, in 1972 he became the first black since Reconstruction elected from the Deep South to the U.S. House, representing Georgia’s Fifth District, in Atlanta.
The more Carter campaigned with Andy at black churches around the country, the more deeply Andy was hooked. “Carter understood better than anybody running the two major problems facing America, race and poverty,” Andy told me later.35 His essential political role in Carter’s budding presidential campaign could not have been more forcefully demonstrated than at a meeting Andy arranged with his colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus. Charlie Rangel of Harlem led the doubters by asking: “Why do you want to bring that Georgia redneck up here and try to sell him as president?” I helped prepare him on the issues, but that was not what swung the day.
As Andy recounted, the meeting was held at the Capitol with more than a dozen members of the Black Caucus. Before Carter could get in a word, Barbara Jordan of Texas jumped on him with questions more hostile than those directed at the parade of previous presidential hopefuls. But the question that threw the others off course was: “How many black people do you have on your staff and what are they doing?” Each of the candidates had only one, and Morris Udall of Arizona had plaintively confessed that he was looking for a black staffer. But Carter replied: “I don’t know how many black people I have, but it is at least fifteen or twenty. We don’t have a segregated campaign where black people campaign with black people.” He had wisely brought along a young black Georgia state senator, Ben Brown, and when Carter turned to him, Brown said: “Governor, at last count we have 27, and they serve in every area of the campaign.” That, Andy recalled, “had them stunned.”
Andy’s support for Carter was crucial not only in the black and liberal white communities, but in the Jewish community as well. I knew from working as Andy Young’s policy director during his 1972 campaign that his support for Israel was not empty rhetoric. We developed a strong position on Israel that appealed to the influential Jewish community in Atlanta, and he carried this with him to Congress, where he compiled an impeccable pro-Israel voting record. After Carter’s narrow victory, Andy wanted to stay in Congress and help drive through his legislative program, but the president-elect had grander plans for him: the cabinet-level position as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Said Carter, “We need somebody who worked with Martin Luther King, because our human rights policies won’t have any credibility if it is just something we are saying, and if we don’t have somebody that’s really large on the human rights issues.” Andy said he would be glad to take up the task in a second term, but insisted he could be more useful now in the House. Carter replied prophetically: “There may not be a second term. I think whatever we are going to do, I think we have four years to get it done.”36
He asked the new ambassador to visit Africa as soon as he was sworn in and recommend what the new administration could do to advance human rights there. Andy found that hard to turn down, and his wife Jean argued he could have a greater impact taking flight from a world stage at the United Nations. It turned out to be the journey of Icarus. Andy’s personal and professional life gave no clue of the lightning rod he would become at the UN. His civil rights biography preceded him, and the knowledge that he had the ear of the president was a known strength but also, as he privately recognized, “my weakness” because it meant—or he thought it did—that he could bypass the State Department bureaucracy. He complained that if he wanted to advocate a change in some amendment to a UN resolution, he needed “seventeen different clearances within the State Department, [and]
could go directly to [Secretary of State] Cy Vance and the president and get it changed. And I did that often.”37 This infuriated the hierarchy department at State, a designed to achieve consensus by flattening out sharp views.
Outside the conference rooms of the UN, Andy delivered a stream of unscripted remarks that were nowhere near U.S. policy. In a Playboy interview he labeled former Presidents Nixon and Ford as racists because they neglected Africa; in an interview with the French newspaper Le Matin he likened the Soviet gulags to American prisons; he called the Ayatollah Khomeini “a saint.”38 Such comments understandably got under Vance’s skin.
Of the many ironies in Andy Young’s downfall, perhaps the greatest is that he tripped over a deviation from the State Department’s diplomatic script in an attempt to protect Israel from a resolution directed against it by no less than the PLO. This time there were no unscripted words. Quite the contrary, Andy operated through a back channel toward a forbidden interlocutor in the hope of helping Israel and Middle East peace. This is exactly the way diplomacy is supposed to operate at the United Nations—by small steps, often hidden from view, in the hope of bringing the world’s intractable conflicts into the light of dialogue. He broke an official rule established by Henry Kissinger as secretary of state as part of his interim withdrawal agreements, agreeing with Israel that the United States would not negotiate with the PLO. Carter renewed this pledge during his election campaign to hold on to the Jewish vote, and Congress formalized and broadened the diplomatic ban in 1976.
In the summer of 1979, as Andy Young prepared for a six-month term as rotating president of the Security Council, he was warned by his British predecessor of a resolution being drafted by the Arab bloc demanding recognition of the PLO as the head of a Palestinian state-in-exile. Its capital would be established in Jerusalem and all territory conquered by Israel in the 1967 war would be given up. Such an extreme resolution might force Young into casting an embarrassing U.S. veto while serving as council president, and he set out to modify or delay the draft. For the past several years, the Carter administration’s diplomats had been doing backflips to entice the PLO into accepting Israel’s existence and joining the Middle East peace process, and Carter himself led the way. When he visited the UN in 1977, Carter conspicuously shook hands with the PLO representative in a reception line, causing great controversy.
On July 25 Andy and his senior staff lunched at his ambassadorial residence in the Waldorf Towers with Arab ambassadors from Kuwait, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. They told him the resolution had been written by Yāsir Arafat himself. Young replied that this was a trap for him and the other Arabs, because if the United States cast a veto, it would only prove to the radical opposition to their conservative Arab regimes that America did not want peace; this would give the PLO and the hard-liners just the pretext they needed to justify violence and argue that politics and dialogue were pointless.
Ambassador Abdullah Bishara of Kuwait said the Arabs could not sell a delay to the Palestinians and could no longer negotiate with Young on the PLO’s behalf. But as the luncheon was breaking up, Bishara suggested that he could set up a meeting that day at his home to meet with Zehdi Labib Terzi, the Palestinian observer at the UN.39 Young assured me that all this took place within the hearing of other American officials and was fully reported to the State Department.
Because Bishara had a young son, Andy took along his own six-year-old-son, Bo, and to stress the informality of the meeting, the ambassador wore jeans. Bishara’s son did not show up, so there were three adults: Young, Bishara, and Terzi—a tenured professor of English literature at Columbia and, by Andy’s description “a very gentle, sophisticated old man.” A Christian Arab, he was a member of the PLO, and although the meeting was made out to be chance and informal, there is no question that its purpose not only was entirely benign but actually in the U.S. and indeed the Israeli interest—to persuade Terzi to drop or postpone his provocative resolution.
Andy began the meeting by saying: “If we don’t have peace in your lifetime, we’re not going to have peace. I do not want to miss this opportunity. But I will have to veto it if you bring it up.”40 Andy won the battle and lost the war. The resolution was postponed, but Andy lost his job trying to help Israel in the process, thanks to the constraints of bureaucracy, diplomatic duplicity, and his own misjudgments about notifying the State Department.
On the one hand, as the American ambassador to the UN he was barely authorized even to acknowledge the existence of any representative of the PLO, let alone meet for a drink in the Delegates’ Lounge, the informal birthplace of many diplomatic initiatives that eventually matured into deals among powers great and small. But on the other hand, at the start of the following week Ambassador Young would be taking up his role as president of the Security Council for six months, and was required to meet with all parties to any dispute before the council. Moreover, if his tumultuous years in the civil rights movement had taught him anything, it was the necessity of dealing with white officials who virulently opposed him and his cause. Andy felt: “Not talking to the enemy is the worst possible thing.”41
Within hours Andy’s closest aide Stoney Cooks was told by a press officer at the U.S. Mission that Newsweek was on the phone seeking comment on the Terzi meeting. They decided not to comment, partly because they thought the full story was on record at the State Department and they had been instructed to keep quiet about it anyway. For a while the story died down because Newsweek described the meeting as a social encounter. But the lack of official comment fed a press frenzy, as it usually does when reporters smell some kind of internal bureaucratic dispute that might blossom into a scandal.
Hodding Carter, the State Department spokesman, was on vacation, Vance was also away, and when Hodding returned he had to hold a press briefing without top-level guidance and therefore issued a bland statement based upon Andy’s assurances that the meeting had been accidental and signified no change in State Department policy.42 Andy was thus unprotected and unprepared, and the press ate him alive. He concluded that his life as an ambassador was “pretty much over, right there.”43 Who was in charge—Ambassador Andy Young or Secretary of State Cyrus Vance? Given Andy’s public profile as a loose cannon who refused to be a team player, the answer seemed obvious.
* * *
Exactly how the PLO meeting came to light remains a mystery to this day, but much evidence points to the Israelis. The Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Yehuda Blum, hotly denied that the Mossad bugged the homes or offices of anyone involved, but the fact is that almost everyone at the UN spies on one another.44 Andy gave Blum a detailed briefing about the meeting—more than he gave Vance—admitting it had not been all that casual. Blum, a dour, conservative diplomat who felt his American colleague was a decent man out of his depth, remembered Andy realizing that he was in trouble. Before he left the office that afternoon, Blum cabled an account of their conversation to Jerusalem.
The very next morning Jerusalem time—about midnight New York time—U.S. ambassador Sam Lewis was summoned by Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan to receive an official protest. By the time Ambassador Blum reached his office in New York the next morning, the affair was front-page news. Ambassador Blum insisted that the Israelis had never asked for Andy Young’s resignation. They did not have to: No one knew better than Dayan how to rouse the anger of American Jewry. This set the stage for a round of who said what to whom and when, an exercise in finger-pointing about as useful as trying to identify the culprit behind a screen in a police lineup. But Andy was the most visible: More than a scapegoat, he became a target, to the great detriment of the already fraying relations between the blacks and Jews in Carter’s political base.
Andy’s future fell into Vance’s lap, and the secretary of state, like his boss the president, wanted his word to be trusted. Vance later told me he felt he had no choice but to take this to the White House: “I felt very badly in going to the president, and I was saying that under the circumstances we just
could not let the word of the government be treated in this kind of a way. I felt that Andy ought to go.”45 He interrupted Carter jogging on the White House track because, as Carter told me later, Vance could not abide “an ambassador in the UN he could not trust.”46
At 9:30 p.m. the president called me at home with great agitation in his voice. He summarized events and told me: “Andy must go, and the question is how to do it with a minimum of trouble to Andy, to the administration, and to black-Jewish relations.” Jesse Hill, a black Atlanta business leader, had already called him to defend Andy. I urged the president to reconsider and leave it at a verbal reprimand. But Carter was firm: “Cy is making it a choice between Andy and himself, and this it is the eighth or tenth time Andy has caused problems.”47 Andy’s provocative statements had tested the patience of not only Vance and the State Department, but of Carter himself. As he told me: “Some of the things Andy said were true, but shouldn’t have been said. Andy was truly an unguided missile.”48
That long night I talked twice with Jesse Hill, Andy’s closest friend and adviser, and my colleague in Andy’s 1972 congressional race; he warned of “severe repercussions with blacks if Andy goes.” He believed that the Arabs had tricked him into the meeting.49 Andy called me at half past midnight to pour out his side of the story: He said he had been pursuing the department’s goal of persuading the PLO to accept Israel and if he had to resign he did not want it to be seen as handing his head on a plate to Vance. I urged him not to act precipitously and to work out a reprimand because he was too valuable to the administration and, in any case, his resignation would severely damage relations between blacks and Jews, just as he feared.
President Carter Page 102
