With this green light from Henry, I rearranged my schedule to allow for a brief stopover in Cairo. I met with Nasser in his Cairo home. He looked older and tired, barely recovered from a heart attack he had suffered a few months earlier. When I entered the room, I noticed he had a signed photograph of Lyndon Johnson standing amid his collection of Socialist leaders and Marxist revolutionaries.
I told Nasser I would be seeing Nixon after my return and would be pleased to pass on any message he might have. Nasser readily agreed to my taking notes for this purpose.
As in my prior meeting, Nasser insisted the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East was Israel’s refusal to abide by U.N. Resolution 242, which required withdrawal behind the borders that existed prior to the 1967 war, before negotiations for a general peace agreement could begin. Nasser had said this before, and I began to wonder if I had traveled to Cairo just to be harangued. Then he switched gears. In a confidential tone he said that while Resolution 242 should provide the general framework for peace, he was willing to support some border rectifications and also the demilitarization of Syria’s Golan Heights, which Israel viewed as a grave threat to its security. In return, Israel’s right to exist would be accepted by all Arab nations. This constituted a significant change in Nasser’s position. His willingness to concede Israel’s right to exist and to negotiate on other issues might enable a regional peace accord to be reached.
I wondered what had caused Nasser to change his mind. He said there were a number of reasons. He was worried about the growing radicalism and instability in the region. “The Fedayeen [Palestinians] are growing stronger every day. A year ago King Hussein could control things in his country, but no longer today—the Fedayeen are too strong. The ability of Egypt to exercise any control over them may also prove to be short-lived. Israel holds the view that the longer a peace settlement is deferred, the greater the chances that his [Nasser’s] government would fall and that they would be able to deal with a more flexible man.”
Nasser believed the opposite would be the case.
“Prolongation of the conflict has weakened the conservative governments. Changes in government in the Sudan and Libya are examples. In Saudi Arabia there was an attempted coup, which with the aid of the CIA was put down, but the last has not yet been heard from it.”
Nasser was also worried about his own domestic position. He was frustrated by Egypt’s total dependence on the Soviet Union for military assistance and economic aid. He said that the loss of most of Egypt’s military capability in the ’67 war had made the Russians his only alternative for rebuilding his army and air force. With a note of regret he added, “We were a free country until 1967, now we no longer are. We have to depend on the Soviets until the war is settled.”
The crux of Nasser’s argument was that the situation would become worse unless movement toward a lasting peace started immediately. And for that to occur the United States would have to put pressure on the Israelis in order to reassure Arab governments of our goodwill.
I told Nasser that I would report all of this to President Nixon upon my return. It was the last time I saw Nasser. The Egyptian president died of a heart attack the following year.
A WARNING FROM KING FAISAL
I then flew to Riyadh for a meeting with King Faisal.
The Saudi-Egyptian rivalry had long divided the Arab world. The two countries epitomized the divergent political and economic tendencies of the region. Nasser represented the Pan-Arab vision and Socialist ideas of the first generation of Arab reformers. The Saudis, bolstered by their enormous oil wealth, held fast to the structures and beliefs of the more traditional Islamic world. While the Saudis remained staunch American allies, they were under great pressure from the rest of the Arab world to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinians and their independence from the United States. As a result the Saudis had taken the lead in the affairs of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and they had begun to talk openly about using their enormous economic power to resolve the conflict in the Middle East. Faisal was a hereditary monarch who kept the reins of power securely in his own hands. One of more than fifty sons sired by the great desert warrior Ibn Saud, who had created the nation of Saudi Arabia, Faisal became king in 1964 after a palace coup in which he toppled his ineffectual half-brother. A good part of Faisal’s power derived from his religious role within Islam. His formal title was Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and he was a devout Muslim and strictly observed all the dictates of his religion.
The al-Sauds regarded their country as a family economic enterprise, and Faisal’s principal duty was managing the large and fractious royal family. To keep them loyal and satisfied, Faisal distributed the first 20 percent of oil revenues among the six hundred or so members of his family before making the remainder available to the government. There was more than enough to go around. In 1969, with oil selling at $2 a barrel, Faisal had almost a billion dollars a year to distribute among his relatives, an amount that would rise to almost $24 billion by the early 1980s. Even this was not enough to maintain family peace; Faisal was assassinated by a deranged nephew in 1975.
Faisal greeted me warmly when I arrived. We exchanged gifts, and he reminisced about the lunch I had given him at Pocantico in 1966 at the time of his state visit to the United States. I told him I was interested in hearing his views about the current situation in the region and that I would report them directly to President Nixon upon my return to the United States.
Faisal was even more emphatic than Nasser about the disastrous consequences of U.S. Middle Eastern policy. His opinions were inflexible and his language unrestrained, and his dark, piercing eyes seemed to bore right through me. My notes from that meeting read, in part:
Faisal feels our policy in the Middle East is dictated by U.S. Zionists and is entirely pro-Israel. It is driving more and more of the Arab nations away from us. He is convinced that it is this policy which has given the Soviets a growing foothold in the Middle East. He feels we have actually encouraged radical elements in countries to overthrow more conservative regimes. . . . Faisal is convinced the U.S. is steadily losing friends and influence in the Middle East. Our only friends now are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco. If the war with Israel persists, we will soon have none at all.
Faisal’s views on Israel were, frankly, bizarre:
Faisal believes that all the troubles in the Middle East stem from Zionism and Israel. He says most of the Jews in Israel come from Russia, that Communism is a product of Zionism, that the Israelis are a Godless people, that Israel is a socialist state which only pretends friendship with the United States, and that Israel and the Soviets have a secret understanding whereby all of the Arab world is to fall into Communist hands.
Faisal dismissed my attempt to counter his argument. But Faisal also said he had no desire “to push Israel into the sea.” There was now an element of flexibility in the Saudi ruler’s position that had been missing previously.
As I left the meeting, I reminded Faisal that I would report the essence of our conversation to President Nixon. The King responded by saying that the former governor of Pennsylvania, William Scranton, had made the same offer to him a year earlier and had publicly supported a more even-handed U.S. Middle Eastern policy. The public outcry, Faisal noted, had all but ended Scranton’s political career. He hoped I would not suffer the same fate.
INFORMING THE PRESIDENT
I returned to New York deeply concerned about what I had learned. Both Nasser and Faisal had been clear and unambiguous. They perceived U.S. policy as actively hostile in tone and substance toward the Arabs. They saw Soviet penetration of the area as the direct consequence of this policy and believed its continuation might have an adverse effect on the global flow of oil. On the other hand, both men seemed willing to compromise and negotiate if the United States would modify its unwavering support of Israel. It was this message I felt obligated to convey to President Nixon.
A few days after my return from the Middle East, I saw Henry Kissinger in Washington and informed him of the substance of my conversations. Henry told me the administration was well along in the process of reassessing its Middle East policy and would announce a more balanced position in the near future in an effort to bring the Israelis to the bargaining table. He thought it might be valuable for President Nixon to hear my assessment firsthand.
A month later I was invited to the White House, but I was surprised to discover that the Oval Office meeting would also include Jack McCloy, Standard Oil chairman Kenneth Jamieson, Mobil chairman Rawleigh Warner, Amoco chairman John Swearingen, and Robert Anderson, a former Secretary of the Treasury, who had developed extensive and somewhat controversial business interests in the Middle East. I had hoped for a private meeting to candidly report what I had learned from Faisal and Nasser, but found myself part of a larger group concerned primarily with oil, which gave the meeting a very different cast from the one I would have chosen.
Each of us shared his concerns about the situation in the Middle East and his hopes for a more balanced U.S. policy at the meeting on December 9. Jack McCloy and the others expressed alarm about the pressure the radical regimes in Libya, Algeria, and Iraq were putting on the oil companies and about the possibility that the Soviet Union might increase its influence in the area and limit American access to the region’s resources. While I shared my colleagues’ views, I was more interested in pointing out that both Nasser and Faisal were offering us a legitimate way to resolve the crisis and that it was important for the United States to respond positively.
Nixon said he agreed with our concerns, and he showed us the speech that Secretary of State William Rogers would deliver that evening which would spell out U.S. proposals for a Middle East settlement. After months of behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Russians, Secretary Rogers would urge the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the 1967 war,” in return for a binding peace agreement from the Arabs. The Secretary included a statement about the importance of a just settlement of the Palestinian refugee problem, and also proposed that Jerusalem become a “unified” city, open to people of all faiths. Although it did not appear that either the Nixon administration or the Soviets had discussed any of these issues with either the Israelis or the frontline Arab states, all of us agreed that the Rogers speech was a constructive step. I left the Oval Office believing that positive changes might be imminent.
Rogers’s speech met with a mixed reception. While The New York Times endorsed it, other papers denounced the change in policy. The Israeli government rejected it out of hand. Prime Minister Golda Meir accused Rogers of “moralizing,” and to show their independence, the Israelis immediately announced that all of heavily Arab East Jerusalem would be opened to Jewish settlement.
This provocative act should have been met with a stern response from the Nixon administration, especially if it wanted to show Nasser, Faisal, and the other Arab leaders a new U.S. commitment to a policy of balance. Instead, the administration did nothing.
A LEAK TO THE TIMES
And there matters might have remained—except that someone in the White House leaked the fact of our meeting with Nixon. Tad Szulc reported it on the front page of The New York Times two weeks later. He reported the facts accurately but implied that economic self-interest had led us to urge the President to adopt not just a balanced policy but a “pro-Arab” position. Szulc wrote:
According to officials familiar with the discussion, the consensus in the group was that the U.S. must act immediately to improve its relations with oil producing and other Arab states. The group was said to feel this was necessary to deflect what the group feared to be an imminent loss of U.S. standing in the Middle East that might be reflected politically as well as in terms of American petroleum interests in the area.
The group was said to feel that United States weapons deliveries to Israel, including the recent shipment of supersonic Phantom jets, and Washington’s alleged support of Israeli policies in the Middle East conflict were turning moderate and conservative Arab leaders as well radical Arabs against the United States.
Szulc failed to report, or perhaps the “leaker” had not informed him, that we had not counseled abandoning Israel to the tender mercies of the Arabs. However, the affiliations of those involved in the meeting—the heads of three major American oil companies, a Wall Street lawyer with close connections to the petroleum industry and to Chase, and my own historic ties to Standard Oil—made Szulc’s inference that we had acted out of self-interest seem plausible.
In retrospect, all of this may well have been a setup. Instead of meeting Nixon alone to discuss my conversations with Nasser and Faisal, I had been drawn into the controversial politics of Arab oil and Israeli security. But perhaps this was the point all along. The composition of the group seemed a deliberate attempt to serve up scapegoats to explain the reason for Nixon’s change in policy if public opinion turned negative.
In any event, a tidal wave of criticism broke over me and the Chase. The resulting controversy effectively killed any chance for the introduction of a more balanced policy toward the Middle East.
CONFRONTATION WITH KOCH
Democratic congressman Edward Koch fired the first salvo. He wrote a letter to me demanding to know if the “thrust” of the story was correct and accusing me of acting as a shill for the oil industry. Before I even received the letter, Koch had distributed it to newspapers and TV stations in the City and done a number of live interviews. And that was just the beginning. Newsweek covered the story with a photo of me that carried the caption “Rockefeller: Blinded by Oil?” Even my brother Nelson, facing a difficult reelection campaign in 1970, quickly distanced himself from me and demanded an “explanation” from the Nixon administration about their policy on Israel. I began to wonder if King Faisal’s warning about the fate of Bill Scranton might be coming true.
Chase was swamped with letters and phone calls protesting my alleged anti-Israeli bias. Prominent rabbis, some of whom I had known for years, came to my office to complain; several Jewish businessmen organized a boycott; and a number of important accounts were withdrawn from the bank.
In order to clarify my position I issued a public statement in early January 1970 describing my meeting with President Nixon. It read in part:
A recent trip to the Middle East reinforced my conviction that the continuing hostilities there could easily escalate into full-scale war. . . . My observations during my trip convinced me that thoughtful Arabs are beginning to question whether the current turmoil in the area really furthers their own interests. More and more of them appear disposed to explore reasonable compromises.
In expressing my views at the recent White House meeting, it was my intention merely to suggest that the United States encourage these more positive and conciliatory sentiments.
I believe, as I always have, that the United States must do everything it can to safeguard the security and sovereign existence of Israel. My sole interest is in seeing that hostilities are ended and peace is achieved.
The controversy ignited by the Times story obscured the real issue: the need to move toward reconciling the increasingly entrenched and inflexible positions of the Israelis and Arabs. By January 1970, Nixon himself backed away from the Rogers initiative, and the level of violence in the region—terrorist acts against Israel, Israeli counterattacks into Jordan and Lebanon, and pitched battles between the PLO and forces loyal to King Hussein in the streets of Amman—mounted steadily. The PLO also launched a campaign of bombings in Western Europe and hijacked a number of commercial airplanes. The dangers Nasser and Faisal had warned about, and which I had passed on to Nixon, were coming to pass. “Balance” was as elusive as ever in the Middle East.
VISITING THE OTHER SIDE
There was one positive outcome of the Koch controversy. Although I had met Prime Minister Golda Meir, Foreign Minister Abba Eban, and Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin in New York on a number
of occasions, I had never actually set foot in the State of Israel. This was due in great part to the complications of reaching Israel from other countries in the Middle East. All Arab states prohibited direct flights to Israel, requiring a stop in either Cyprus or Athens before flying on to Tel Aviv, which made a visit there tied in with a trip to Arab nations difficult to arrange. In addition, Israel’s heavily regulated private sector and the inconvertibility of the shekel made the country unattractive from a banking perspective. However, Koch’s reckless accusations made me realize that never having visited Israel could add to the spurious notion that I was anti-Israeli. I thought it wise to visit Israel as soon as possible.
The atmosphere surrounding my first visit in March 1971 was understandably tense. Golda Meir and the other leaders I met were personally pleasant, although they remained inflexible on the issue of withdrawing from any of the occupied territories.
Politics aside, one of the real joys of this trip was meeting Mayor Teddy Kollek of Jerusalem. Teddy took me on the first of many tours to view the restoration work he had initiated throughout the Old City to restore the glory of the past and honor the three religions that consider Jerusalem the Holy City. We need more broadly tolerant people like Teddy if the problems of the Middle East are ever going to be resolved.
By 1973 I had been involved in Middle Eastern affairs for the better part of two decades, and I was one of a very few Americans with access to the Arab leaders of the region. I would find my knowledge and relationships severely tested as the Middle East entered a new and extremely dangerous period in the early 1970s.
CHAPTER 20
SURVIVING OPEC
Memoirs Page 36