Our approach was to segment the diplomacy into a series of steps during the negotiation of which the Soviet capacity for obstruction would be at a minimum. But we could obtain Soviet acquiescence in this course only by putting before the Kremlin the prospect, at some point, of participation in an overall peace conference. Moscow no doubt went along with the disengagement phase, in part because it had no solution of its own to the plight of the Third Army, in part because it believed that the American solo role could not be sustained beyond the opening stage, and above all because it calculated that its time would come when the Geneva Conference opened. We did nothing to disabuse the Soviets of that view; we consulted with them meticulously about the procedures for assembling the peace conference. On my October trip to Moscow, we had reduced the joint “auspices” to a minimum: American and Soviet representatives were to participate only at the beginning of the conference and when key issues were dealt with. For the future we intended to be extremely restrictive in our definition of what was “key.” But we kept alive the prospect of a peace conference as a safety net and to discourage the Soviets from interfering with the disengagement phase.
My first visit to Cairo exceeded my hopes. For it, I received some public plaudits for negotiating skill. But if this implies that I talked Sadat into something he might otherwise not have done, the point was missed. What looked like a negotiating breakthrough to outsiders was in fact the merging of Egyptian and American perceptions that had been approaching each other for many years. Each side for its own reasons sought partnership with the other — a partnership that unlocked the door to peace and advanced the interests of all peoples of the Middle East.
Anwar Sadat
IN the years following that first meeting with Anwar Sadat in 1973, he became a world figure. At the time he was little known in the United States, at best considered one of the many volatile leaders in the Arab world whose posturing, internecine quarrels, and flowery eloquence were as fascinating to contemplate as they were difficult to fathom. But from that meeting onward, I knew I was dealing with a great man.
I had the honor of working in tandem with Anwar Sadat for the first few steps of his journey to peace. Then I left office and he went on within a year to new, bold strides that I had thought might take decades. When within sight of his dream, he was murdered. Prophets perform their service by inspiring ordinary men and women with their vision, but they pay the price of being consumed by it. So the reader will forgive a brief diversion as an appreciation of my fallen friend.
Isaiah Berlin once wrote that greatness is the ability to transform paradox into platitude.
When Anwar Sadat appeared on the scene, the Arab countries had too little confidence in their arms and too much faith in their rhetoric. The majority of them relied on the Soviet Union, which could supply weapons for futile wars but no programs for progress in diplomacy. Negotiations consisted of exalted slogans incapable of achievement; the Arab countries seemed to want the fruits of peace without daring to pronounce the word. The nations of the West stood on the sidelines, observers at a drama that affected their destiny but seemingly without the capacity to influence it.
Within a few years, Sadat overcame these riddles. When he died, the peace process was a commonplace; Egypt’s friendship with America was a cornerstone of Mideast stability. By his journey to Jerusalem in 1977 he had demonstrated to all those obsessed with the tangible the transcendence of the visionary. He understood that a heroic gesture can create a new reality.
The difference between great and ordinary leaders is less formal intellect than insight and courage. The great man understands the essence of a problem; the ordinary leader grasps only the symptoms. The great man focuses on the relationship of events to each other; the ordinary leader sees only a series of seemingly disconnected events. The great man has a vision of the future that enables him to put obstacles in perspective; the ordinary leader turns pebbles in the road into boulders.
Sadat bore with fortitude the loneliness inseparable from moving the world from familiar categories toward where it has never been. He had the patience and the serenity of the Egyptian masses from which he came. I visited him once in the simple house to which he regularly returned in his native village of Mit Abul-Kum in the Nile Delta. For someone used to conventional topography, the unequivocal flatness of the countryside came almost as a shock. There was no geographic reference point, nothing to mediate between the individual and the infinite; one’s relation with the universe was established through the medium of a pervasive, enduring mass of humanity. The population pressure in Egypt is a standard feature of the literature on the country. In Sadat’s village, as I suppose in all the villages of Lower Egypt, one sensed it almost palpably though one saw it only in the smoke rising from innumerable chimneys over the trees and hedges that screened Sadat’s small property from his neighbors’. A pensive stillness cloaked the activity one knew was all around one; the rhythm of a civilization was intuited but neither seen nor heard. One felt strangely sheltered, as if in a womb. Sadat said to me once, seemingly enigmatically, that he felt most relaxed at dusk when he knew all the villagers were preparing their meals at home. Sadat’s inner security and his instinctive sense of his people’s yearning for peace were periodically renewed here at their source.
But there was also another Sadat not content with resting with his origin: a man on restless peregrinations around his beloved country. Mrs. Sadat once told me it was a legacy of his time in prison; he felt confined if he stayed too long in one place. Sadat’s dread of confinement was not only physical; he felt psychologically ill at ease with anything that limited the meaning of life to the status quo. He raised his people’s gaze toward heretofore unimagined horizons. In the process he accomplished more for the Arab cause than those of his Arab brethren whose specialty was belligerent rhetoric. He recovered more territory, obtained more help from the West, and did more to make the Arab case reputable internationally than any of the leaders who regularly abused him at meetings of the so-called rejectionist front. He moved his people toward a partnership with the West, knowing that a sense of shared values was a more certain spur to support than a defiance based on striking poses. And when he had thus transformed the paradox and solved the riddle, he was killed by the apostles of the ordinary, the fearful, the merchants of the ritualistic whom he shamed by being at once out of scale and impervious to their meanness of spirit.
Sadat’s passion for peace grew in intensity and profundity as his mission proceeded. When I first met him, peace had been a tactic in the pursuit of Egypt’s interests. By the time he died it had become a vocation in the service of humanity.
Early in our acquaintance, in a military hospital he was inspecting, he spoke movingly to me of how much Egypt had suffered, how an end had to be put to pointless conflict, how he did not want to send any more young men to die. Egypt needed no more heroes, he said. The last time I saw him was on his plane from Washington to New York in 1981, during what turned out to be his final visit to our country. He had just met his fourth American President in the eight years since he had begun his cooperation with us. He seemed a little tired and perhaps the slightest bit discouraged that our political process forced him at such short intervals to start over again building confidence and explaining his vision. But then the old buoyancy returned. He was planning a week’s celebration on the occasion of the return of the Sinai to Egypt, he said, at the end of April 1982. Perhaps I could join him for at least part of it, considering that we had started the journey together. And on the day afterward we might go to Mount Sinai; there he could show me the place overlooking the desert where he planned to consecrate the peace by building three chapels — Moslem, Jewish, and Christian — side by side. And then he and I could meditate there for a while.
But a statesman must never be judged simply as philosopher or dreamer. At some point he must translate his intuition into reality against sometimes resistant material. Sadat was neither starry-eyed nor soft. He was not a pacif
ist. He did not believe in peace at any price. He was conciliatory but not compliant. I never doubted that in the end he would create heroes if no other course he considered honorable was left to him.
Any simple assessment of Sadat is therefore likely to be mistaken. Dozens of visiting Americans were charmed by him. But he was also aloof and reflective and withdrawn. Like many men of power, he had an almost carnal relationship with authority. He could hold his own with small talk, but on deeper acquaintance it became clear it bored him. He much preferred to spend idle time in solitary reflection. Most of his bold initiatives were conceived in such periods of seclusion and meditation, often in his native village. I know no other leader who understood so well the virtue of solitude and used it so rigorously.
His urbanity made it easy to forget his early career as a revolutionary struggling for his country’s independence and suffering for it in a succession of prisons. Such men are never “regular fellows,” however charmingly they present themselves. Revolutionary leadership is a career that attracts only the deeply dedicated; its votaries forswear all the normal attributes of success because to them their cause transcends normal calculation. One can challenge the convictions of such men only if one is prepared for struggle; standing in their way is never free. Sadat took a long view but he would also insist on achieving it.
Sadat had an uncanny psychological discernment. He handled each of the four American Presidents he knew with consummate skill. He treated Nixon as a great statesman, Ford as the living manifestation of goodwill, Carter as a missionary almost too decent for this world, and Reagan as the benevolent leader of a popular revolution, subtly appealing to each man’s conception of himself and gaining the confidence of each. He worked at identifying Egypt’s interest with America’s own. He repeatedly challenged us to enter the negotiations not as mediator but as participant, or else he offered to accept what we put forward — an offer one could embrace only if one understood that it was part of a strategy, not an abdication. And yet there was a true act of faith involved here beyond advancing his country’s aims. Sadat deeply believed in America’s sense of justice. He sustained himself by confidence in our leaders and, in the process, made them live up to the best within them.
Sadat analyzed correctly that Arab radicalism tended to reinforce America’s special relationship with Israel. This offered America no alternative: It added the argument of strategic necessity to the existing moral ties. So Sadat set out on a course that would have been considered mad until he proved it possible: to woo the United States into a more “evenhanded” posture, to create another moral bond that would produce an incentive for American assistance in recovering lands the Arabs considered theirs. In this sense the 1977 journey to Jerusalem was at one and the same time an act of nobility and a method of disarming Israel psychologically: a unique gesture of reconciliation and a device to isolate the Jewish state.
This explains Israel’s ambivalence toward Sadat. Israelis, for decades the object of their neighbors’ hatred, greeted Sadat’s overtures at first with incredulity, later with hope, even exaltation. But there was also a gnawing fear that his seduction of the United States would ultimately leave Israel alone and friendless in a hostile world. Therefore the Jewish state was torn between embracing Sadat’s overture and haggling over its terms, between its own hopes and nightmares. And the last page has not yet been written in a history in which both Israel’s hopes and its nightmares could come true.
Like all great men Sadat had the defects of his virtues. The same qualities that caused him to transcend obstacles made him impatient with the sensitivities of those incapable of sharing his lofty vision. He found it difficult to believe in the good faith of his critics, even allowing that he had more than his share of critics who could not be granted that attribute by the widest extension of charity. When challenged he moved further in the direction he had chosen to emphasize his opponents’ impotence to stop him; thus did his dauntless courage turn into a provocation of those who resisted his march toward peace. He became so consumed in the peace process that he seemed at times to subordinate to it even the day-to-day longings of ordinary Egyptians — especially after they had come to take peace so much for granted that they no longer listed it among their unfulfilled aspirations. Great men are needed to break a mold; afterward, it is often their destiny to be so out of scale as to evoke a nostalgia for less demanding leadership.
But Sadat was more than the sum of his parts. By one of the miracles of creation the peasant’s son, the originally underestimated politician, had the wisdom and courage of the statesman and occasionally the insight of the prophet. Yet nourishing all these qualities was a pervasive humanity. Who can forget his offer of haven to the fallen Shah of Iran, abandoned by friends who owed him more but succored by Sadat with a grace and nobility that redeemed the honor of all those who had failed their test?
On a visit I paid to Egypt after I had left government, Sadat invited my wife, my son, and me to dinner at his villa by the sea in Alexandria. The table had been set at the exact spot on the lawn where we had negotiated and signed the second disengagement agreement. During the course of the evening, I said that all Americans who had worked with Sadat owed him a great debt; he had made all of us look good. The remark disturbed him; he kept coming back to it. He did not want his labors to be considered personal; it was his duty, not his preference, to restore dignity to his people and give hope to his country and perhaps the world.
For once Sadat was wrong. He did make us look good. Only he made it seem too easy, too natural, so that we took him too much for granted. And when he was no longer with us and we had to journey toward peace alone, it was starkly clear how much we needed him.
No other people has been so obsessed with immortality as the Egyptian. None has sought to capture time so persistently — at times with defiant boldness, at times passively; now relying on endurance rather than the grand assault, now raising tremendous edifices to faith in the future. The Pyramids at Giza, at once simple and monumental, have withstood the elements and man’s depredations for as close to eternity as man can come. At no other place in the world is man forced into humility so exclusively by one of his own accomplishments. In that sea of sand, split by the green valley of the Nile stretching man’s vision in a narrow line for hundreds of miles, there is no natural monument to dwarf him; the most breathtaking landmarks are all man-made. They inspire awe by their immensity and grace and above all by the presumption of their conception. The tremendous Egyptian statuary evokes the same emotions: The figures are larger than life; yet their faces are infinitely human and their gaze leads us toward distant horizons.
Such a man was Anwar Sadat. Only the future will tell whether he started an irreversible movement of history or whether he was like that ancient Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who dreamed of monotheism amidst the panoply of Egyptian deities a millennium before it was accepted among mankind. Either way, none who knows history will ever forget that the journey to peace in the Middle East began with Anwar Sadat, and could not have progressed without him. Whether we reach our destination is up to us. For his part, Anwar Sadat has already earned the immortality of which his Egyptian ancestors dreamed — as an inspiration if we succeed, as a shaming example if we fail. One way or another, the cause of peace will be his pyramid.
Sisco and Saunders in Israel
ISENT Joe Sisco and Hal Saunders to Israel, as I have said, because I did not want to offend the many distinguished guests Fahmy had assembled for dinner. Moreover, moving my entire caravan — including press — could have been construed as a crisis in America and as pressure in Israel. Also, I could not believe that there could be much controversy in Jerusalem. After all, Israel would receive its prisoners, be relieved of pressures to withdraw to the October 22 lines and of the blockade of Bab el-Mandeb — all in exchange for permitting a few UN checkpoints, on a road the shoulders of which it continued to control, to assure the resupply of an army that the international situation (and its own interest, if it u
nderstood it properly) would not permit it to destroy. To make doubly sure, I had armed Sisco with the assurance that if Israel accepted the six-point plan, we would veto any future UN resolution requiring a return to the October 22 line.
Still, the symbolism was unfortunate. For a nation seeking some sense of control over its future, my sending subordinates, however able, tended to raise the nightmare of being taken for granted in an American arrangement made behind Israel’s back — despite the fact that I had just concluded talks with Mrs. Meir four days before.
Sisco and Saunders met the Israeli negotiating team on Wednesday evening, November 7, in the Guest House, the scene of my encounter with Golda two weeks earlier. The session began auspiciously enough. Golda congratulated Sisco on what had been accomplished. But soon the basic realities asserted themselves. Sadat, representing an ancient country with the innate sense that time was on its side, could afford the grand gesture. Israel, fighting for its right to exist, could salvage its identity only by struggle — or so its history had taught it. Israeli domestic politics combined with the insecurity of a nation denied legitimacy to produce a maddening, nitpicking style of negotiation.
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