An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  As the summer of 1982 came to an end, I still felt cautiously optimistic about the future of the Middle East and believed we were going to be able to continue the peace process. In Beirut, the agreement worked out by Habib seemed to be succeeding: Along with troops from France and Italy, our marines had peaceably evacuated more than ten thousand PLO combatants from Beirut and were themselves preparing to leave Lebanon.

  Although Begin and his cabinet had rejected the larger peace initiative, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan appeared to be responding favorably to it. I thought there was a good chance that in time Israel, once it had evaluated the alternatives and had developed sufficient trust in it, would accept the plan, too. My goal for the remainder of the year was to continue working on Begin. I couldn’t help but believe that once the people of Israel, weary from decades of war, understood that our proposal offered the best prospect for a secure peace in the Middle East, they would support them and bring pressure on Begin’s government.

  I was optimistic then, not realizing that the worst was yet to come in Lebanon.

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  OUR HOPE THAT THE EVACUATION of PLO forces from Lebanon would mark the beginning of a new and comprehensive peace process and a first step toward a final resolution of the great problems bedeviling the Middle East went up in the smoke of a terrorist bomb three weeks after the PLO forces left Beirut.

  During the intervening period, we had continued to receive positive signals from moderate Arab countries in response to the peace plan I announced on September 1, and I had continued trying to persuade Menachem Begin to consider its merits. In a letter to Begin September 5, I said that I was hurt by his continuing public castigation of what I regarded as a serious and realistic peace proposal and his public statements suggesting that the United States—and by implication, that I—was betraying the friendship between our countries. I encouraged him to reconsider the proposal. “The moment has come to breathe new life into a process whose success will insure the permanent security of Israel,” I said. “I want us to be together on that journey as we move forward in the cause of peace; this is not a time for recriminations. It’s rather a time to explore together how best to move beyond the current perplexing stalemate and to seize the opportunity before us.”

  I restated my commitment and that of the American people to Israel and urged Begin “in the spirit of our enduring friendship” to take a new look at the proposals “as fair and balanced and this initiative as an appropriate means to launch a fresh start in the Camp David process . . .”

  On September 14, a terrorist’s bomb destroyed a building in Beirut where the president-elect of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, was giving a speech. It threw a nation where chaos had been a matter of day-to-day routine for more than a decade into even greater confusion. Israeli forces immediately responded to Gemayel’s assassination by moving into West Beirut and, in fierce fighting, engaged members of the Lebanese army and leftist Muslims, including those believed responsible for the bombing.

  I’d expected Saturday, September 18, to be a quiet day: Nancy had left on a brief trip on behalf of her war against drugs, and the only event of the day should have been my noon radio broadcast. But, as my diary reminds me, “Unfortunately things changed. In Beirut, Haddad’s Christian Phalanges militia entered a Palestine refugee camp and massacred men, women and children. The Israelis did nothing to prevent or halt it. George Shultz and I met and agreed upon a blunt statement which he delivered to the Israeli ambassador. It was a sad day and one which may very well set our peace efforts back.”

  The incident touched off a new storm of anti-Israeli sentiment, much of it directed at us. Brezhnev sent me a message accusing Israel of perpetrating a “bloody orgy” and implied we were a party to it. In my response, I said, “I share the revulsion of the entire American people for the deplorable events which have recently occurred in Beirut,” and added that the Soviet Union shared a responsibility to end the deadly chaos in Lebanon.

  The assassination of Bashir Gemayel, just as Philip Habib seemed to be making great progress in bringing the various sides together, changed everything. After that, Israel and Syria both refused to live up to their agreement to leave Lebanon. The hostilities continued and, more than a year later, Beirut became the focal point of the saddest day of my presidency, perhaps the saddest day of my life.

  Here are some of the notes I made in my diary during the period immediately after Gemayel’s assassination:

  Sept. 19

  A busy day for N.S.C. State and defense and staff. I attended meeting in the morning re the Beirut massacre. The Israelis did finally attempt to oust the killers. They have proclaimed their outrage. I finally told our group we should go for broke.

  Let’s tell the people we are at the request of the Lebanese sending the multi-national force back in. Italy has agreed and we believe the French will too. We are asking the Israelis to leave Beirut. We are asking Arabs to intervene and persuade Syrians to leave Lebanon at which time we’ll ask Israelis to do likewise. In the meantime, Lebanon will establish a government and the capability of defending itself. No more half way gesture, clear the whole situation while the M.N.F. is on hand to assure order.

  George Shultz and Jeane K. were enthusiastic about the idea and apparently there was no disagreement. The wheels are now in motion . . .

  Sept. 20

  Spent the morning in an NSPG [National Security Planning Group] meeting framing what I would say or rather how I’d say it on TV, what we were going to do in Lebanon. Anyway, at 5 p.m. I said it: all three networks from Oval Office. . . .

  Sept. 26

  Our Marines were to have landed in Lebanon but now it will be Tuesday. It is Yom Kippur so the Israelis won’t be out until Tuesday but they have agreed to withdraw.

  Yesterday we lost two officials in Lebanon. They were assigned to the UN as observers. They and an Irish and Finnish officer were in a vehicle on road to Damascus, hit a land mine, all dead.

  Sept. 27

  Most of my day spent on homework for press conference tomorrow night. It should be free wheeling what with Lebanon and all. Yom Kippur will be over tomorrow. Our troops will probably go ashore Wednesday.

  Sept. 28

  Cap W. signed order for Marines to go ashore Wednesday a.m. Israelis will withdraw to south of the airport; Marines will be stationed at the airport. . . . Spent afternoon getting ready for press conference. Have just had it and made it through okay. Everyone says “best yet.” My favorite answer was to Sam D. [Donaldson] who asked if I didn’t think I had done something to do with our economic problems, which I’d been laying on the Dems over the past year. I said: “Oh, my yes, I share the responsibility—I was a Democrat for years.”

  Sept. 30

  The Congress got the 218 names on the discharge petition and brought the “balanced budget” amendment to the floor. I went up to the Capitol to speak to them . . . a sad day, though, one of our Marines in Beirut, Lebanon, stepped on a mine or a part of a cluster bomb that hadn’t exploded. We’re still getting the details. One, a corporal, named Reagan was killed, the others wounded.

  The terrorism and killings continued through the early fall of 1982. Nevertheless, we had a few reasons to be optimistic about the Middle East. Following the murder of Bashir Gemayel, his brother Amin succeeded him as president and pledged to support our efforts to bring peace to the region. He was a modest, able young man devoted to ending the bloody strife that had torn apart his homeland. During a visit to Washington, he urged me to keep the marines in Lebanon while efforts continued to reach a settlement. I agreed.

  Meanwhile, several leaders of the Jewish community in America endorsed the September 1 peace initiative, agreeing that it contained the possible seeds for a long-term solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shimon Peres’s opposition Labor Party in Israel also endorsed the plan, despite Begin’s continuing resistance, and we continued to get positive, if qualified, signs of interest from Arab leaders.

  In November, Phil Habib retu
rned to Lebanon to attempt to get the stalled plan for simultaneous withdrawal of Syrian and Israeli forces back on track. He said the situation had deteriorated substantially since Bashir Gemayel’s assassination. The Israelis were now adamantly against leaving Beirut because they feared the PLO might then return to Lebanon; the Arab leaders complained that the continuing presence of Israeli forces in Beirut threatened whatever chances our peace initiative had.

  In early December, after I made a brief trip to Latin America, Habib and I had lunch in my study. He had made another trip to the Middle East and was very gloomy. He said that he thought the prospects of ending the bloody war in Lebanon were growing worse each day instead of better. As long as the Israelis refused to leave Beirut, he said, the Arabs would cite their refusal as proof that they didn’t want peace, and that it was a waste of the Arabs’ time to negotiate with Habib. The Middle East was so unpredictable and explosive, Habib said, that time was of the essence: It was essential to consummate the withdrawal of all foreign forces as quickly as possible or we’d lose a historic opportunity for a lasting peace in the Middle East. The longer the process dragged on, the harder it would be to achieve peace because of the growing influence of radical factions within the PLO. While moderate PLO leaders were likely to accept, however grudgingly, the reality of Israel, they were being challenged by PLO factions dominated by hard-line terrorists who would never accept it and would fight to the death to prevent it. Unless the Israelis left Lebanon soon and opened the way to a political settlement of the problems, Habib said, the Palestinian extremists would gain credibility among the Palestinian people and strengthen the hand of the radicals and their Islamic allies. If that happened, it was impossible to predict if there would be another solid chance for a long-term settlement of the problems.

  I instructed Habib on his return to the Middle East to again tell Begin that Israel’s intransigence might cost it its special relationship with America—and I crossed my fingers. King Hussein of Jordan, meanwhile, during a Washington visit, acknowledged that there were two sides to the Israeli-Arab conflict and indicated he was anxious to work with us to achieve a solution all parties could accept. “I really like him,” I wrote in the diary after the visit. “He is our hope to lead the Arab side and the P.L.O. in negotiating with the Israelis. He has some problems in order to keep the trust of other Arab states and right now Israel is proving difficult. I told King Hussein that this was a top priority of mine and we’d go all out to bring peace in the Middle East and we’d stand by Jordan. . . .”

  While King Hussein went to work on the Syrians, during the winter and early spring of 1982-83 we continued trying to persuade Menachem Begin to withdraw Israeli forces from Lebanon so that work on the broader peace process could resume and members of the multilateral force could go home. But he insisted that Israel had to keep its troops in Lebanon or risk losing the advantage it had gained over the PLO and Syria in a war that had cost hundreds of Israeli casualties. The Soviets, meanwhile, had responded to Israel’s crushing defeat of Syrian military forces and their Soviet-built weapons by sending the Syrians an array of their most modern arms.

  We agreed that Israel had reason to be concerned about the safety of Israelis living in towns and villages near its northern border, but Habib, George Shultz, and I constantly reassured Begin that if Israel lived up to its agreement to pull its forces out of Lebanon, the United States would not allow it to be disadvantaged. Begin, however, wouldn’t move. This left my Middle East peace initiative in limbo. Meanwhile, Israel added new settlements on the West Bank, which was in continued violation of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and ignored a cornerstone of my peace initiative. Long-term resolution of the Middle East’s problems seemed further than ever from our grasp.

  There were millions of Palestinians scattered throughout the Middle East, and all of them looked upon Israel and the West Bank (where 1.7 million Palestinians already lived) as their natural homeland. It seemed obvious that we weren’t going to find an enduring Middle East peace until the world found a place for these Palestinians. Even though Israel claimed its ancestors’ occupancy of the land gave it a right to the land in modern times, the Palestinians exerted an ancestral claim of their own on the West Bank: Their ancestors, too, had lived there for centuries.

  During a visit to Washington early in 1983 in which he reiterated his desire to be a strong friend to the United States, President Mubarak of Egypt told me Israel’s continuing refusal to leave Lebanon and its establishment of more settlements on the West Bank were inflaming the Arab world and reducing the momentum that had started to build up in favor of the September initiative. If progress wasn’t made soon, he said, Israel’s intractability would cause the initiative “to simply die on the vine.” I agreed. But I also told him that by no means was the guilt all Israel’s, and he agreed with me: “He believes [Israel] and the Syrians,” I wrote in the diary, “may be playing a game . . . even though they are hostile toward each other, [they may favor] cutting up Lebanon between them.”

  Many Jews in America as well as in Israel had been shocked by Sharon’s bombardment of Beirut, which was shown so graphically on the world’s television screens, as well as by allegations over his failure to halt the massacre by Christian militiamen of hundreds of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. They saw the Israeli assault as diametrically opposed to the moral values of their culture, and told me they believed that Begin’s and Sharon’s policies were contrary to the principles upon which Israel was founded. Many let me know that they supported our peace initiative and wished us well, and a few began speaking out publicly in criticism of Begin and Sharon. I’m sure this was difficult and painful for them because of their devotion to Israel—but they spoke out anyway, because they were anxious to bring a lasting and secure peace to the land they loved. With their help, and by emphasizing to Begin and Sharon that their policies were jeopardizing America’s support of Israel, I still hoped to persuade Israel to leave Lebanon. But throughout that long winter and early spring, I continued to get nowhere with Begin. I suspect his resolve was stiffened by his confidence that supporters of Israel in Congress would ensure that the United States would never reduce its support of Israel, as well as by my own oft-stated commitment to always stand by Israel.

  In February 1983, after a judicial panel asserted that he had been indirectly responsible for the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps, Ariel Sharon resigned as Israel’s minister of defense and was succeeded by Moshe Arens, the Israeli ambassador in Washington. I hoped this would mark a change in Israeli policies and help get the peace process started again.

  When the foreign minister of Lebanon visited Washington that spring, I told him I was more determined than ever that the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon would resume soon, and that until that happened, our marines would remain in Lebanon. He said that it had been his experience with American presidents that they at first seemed willing to tackle the problems of Lebanon, but that they “advanced so far and then retreated.” I told him I didn’t have a reverse gear.

  In late March—thanks in part, I think, to Moshe Arens—Israel began sending conciliatory signals indicating it was willing to withdraw from Lebanon under reasonable terms. We responded positively to the new attitude, and once again the level of my optimism that we would achieve peace in the Middle East began to rise. But we soon learned, tragically, that there were many people in the Middle East who did not want peace—at least not as long as it entailed the acceptance of Israel’s right to exist.

  On April 18, Nancy and I were awakened before dawn by a telephone call informing me that a terrorist’s car bomb had just exploded at our embassy in Beirut, killing scores of Americans and Lebanese employees. Among the dead were five marine guards and other U.S. personnel, including our top CIA research specialist on the Middle East.

  Shiite Muslim fundamentalists from Iran—who our intelligence people had recently learned were meddling in the convoluted affairs of Lebanon i
n order to further the Islamic revolution—took credit for the barbarous act. “Lord forgive me for the hatred I feel for the humans who can do such a cruel but cowardly deed,” I wrote that night in my diary.

  Five days later, I was at Andrews Air Force Base when the bodies of sixteen Americans murdered in the bombing came home. My diary entry that night:

  Nancy and I met individually all the families of the deceased. We were both in tears. All I could do was grip their hands. I was too choked up to speak. . . . [Later] home to change clothes and off to the White House correspondents dinner. I was supposed to do a routine of jokes, etc. I couldn’t change gears that swiftly. So as not to put a damper on the evening . . . I waited till the last and then asked their pardon for not “singing for my supper” because of our sad journey to Andrews AF Base.

  There were many, too many, days like that when I was president.

  Agonized as all of us were over this tragedy, George Shultz suggested that he go to the Middle East to attempt to breathe new life into the peace process Phil Habib had so ably kept alive for more than a year. Worn out from service above and beyond the call of duty, Habib wanted to resume the retirement from which we had lured him the year before.

  Soon after he arrived in the Middle East, George sent me a cable in which he said that he thought all sides in the dispute seemed to be growing anxious to end the killing and destruction; he said he felt a degree of optimism that his mission would succeed.

  It did: During two weeks of intensive negotiations, George worked out an agreement under which Israel promised to withdraw from Lebanon simultaneously with Syrian forces, and Lebanon, the second state in the Middle East (after Egypt) to formally recognize the existence of Israel, agreed to the establishment near its southern border of a security zone designed to enhance the protection of northern Israeli settlements.