Audition

by Barbara Walters

  I grabbed our film crew and off we flew. Once in the air, I leaned my head against the window and fell asleep, having not had that luxury in close to twenty-four hours. I woke with a start to see the pyramids directly below us. I thought I was dreaming, but it turned out the Egyptians had not made us stop in Cyprus. Amazingly the pilots got permission to fly nonstop from Tel Aviv to Cairo, a matter of just over an hour. We were the first civilian plane to make this direct trip to Egypt since the creation of Israel in 1948. Historic, but at the time people had more important things to think about.

  We landed in an airport that was almost empty. Security was very tight in light of Arab resistance to Sadat’s solo journey for peace. I bolted out of our plane and ran toward the main terminal. And there, with incredulous looks on their faces, were John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite. As Cronkite later recalled on the PBS program American Masters: “I was boarding the plane in Cairo when a little private plane landed on the field and she hopped out of it and ran across the field like a football player going into the play, holding her hand up—wait, wait, wait for me.” The two news anchors were not overjoyed to see me. “I couldn’t have been unhappier,” Walter confessed. As for me, I couldn’t have been more thrilled that I’d made the flight, and in short order we were in the air again, this time to pick up Sadat at his weekend retreat in Ismailia.

  Going up against Chancellor and Cronkite was a scary prospect. But, there we were, ABC, NBC, and CBS, in one plane. (The only other American journalist on board was Wilton Wynn from Time.) We landed near the town of Ismailia, and there was Sadat, beaming and meticulously dressed in a navy blue suit. He walked slowly along a red carpet past an Egyptian honor guard and his major ministers. (His foreign minister and former friend Ismail Fahmy was not among them. Calling Sadat a traitor, he had resigned in protest of this visit to Israel. Sadat did not seem perturbed.) As he got close to us, I reached out with my microphone and asked, “Mr. President, what are your feelings at this moment?”

  I did not get the exclusive, newsworthy sound bite I’d wanted to flash home. “Bar-ba-ra,” Sadat exclaimed in his booming voice. “So you made the plane.” I laughed, but before I could repeat my question, Sadat turned to Cronkite and asked, just as loudly, “Walter, what do you think of Bar-ba-ra making the plane?”

  “Well, Mr. President,” Walter said dryly. “It’s not exactly what I had in mind.”

  When we were airborne again Sadat invited the three of us into his private cabin for a brief interview. We drew straws en route to see who would get the first question. That seemed very important at the time, but now I can’t remember who won, so I suspect it wasn’t me. But I had an ace up my sleeve.

  Before we entered the cabin, I’d written a question on a slip of paper. “Mr. President, would you agree to do an interview with me after you speak at the Knesset?” To make the request easy to answer, I’d put four boxes at the bottom of the page, reading “Yes” “No” “Alone” “With PM Begin.” As we left the cabin, I slipped the note to one of his aides.

  ABC was broadcasting live President Sadat’s history-making arrival on Israeli soil and as soon as the plane landed, I ran across the tarmac to find Peter Jennings and the ABC setup at the airport. I didn’t even have time to look at the note Sadat’s aide had returned to me as we landed. I was probably still panting when I went on the air with Peter to describe the plane flight from Egypt and the interview we’d had with Sadat. Only then did I look at the note I’d stuffed in my bag: “Yes,” Sadat had checked. And “Alone.” It would have been even better if he’d agreed to be interviewed with Begin, but no matter—I’d gotten an exclusive with the man of the hour! (I lost the piece of paper, of course. I lose everything.) The only person I told was my producer, Justin Friedland, who then had to set up the secret interview without my competitors knowing about it. If the word got out, I was afraid that Sadat would have to include them.

  With the interview sewed up, I relaxed for a tiny moment to take in the extraordinary scene at the airport. There were hundreds of people waving Israeli and Egyptian flags. I wondered how the Israelis had managed to get so many Egyptian flags so quickly. And how the Israeli army band had gotten the music and learned the Egyptian national anthem. But most of all I remember all of Sadat’s former enemies lined up to greet him—Menachem Begin, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin. It was almost too much to comprehend.

  (It was certainly too much for the viewers back home who had tuned in to ABC to watch the Ohio State vs. Michigan football game. Instead of seeing the kickoff on their screens, the football fans saw Sadat’s dramatic arrival in Israel. They were furious and jammed the ABC telephone lines to complain. After seven minutes ABC went back to the football game, to the fans’ great relief. To hell with history.)

  Justin and I drove from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. What a sight! All along the road were people cheering, small children waving Israeli and Egyptian flags. The impossible had happened. The enemy had come to Israel. We all felt optimistic. If Sadat was meeting with Begin, could peace be far behind? It was one of the most glorious days I had ever experienced.

  Arriving in Jerusalem, I went directly to an interview I’d arranged with Prime Minister Begin. The prime minister’s residence was small and modest. Begin and his wife, Aliza, whom by now I knew quite well, greeted me, and the prime minister took me into his study. It was a very personal room with photos of his family all around. I had expected Begin to talk of Sadat and the triumph of this day. Instead, with great emotion, he talked of the Holocaust and the pictures of his relatives who had died in the concentration camps. Those were the thoughts uppermost in his mind after meeting Anwar Sadat.

  After the interview Begin seemed energized. He had a busy schedule the next day, including following Sadat in addressing the Knesset, but he was obviously too excited to go to bed. He still hadn’t prepared his remarks to the Israeli parliament. He never wrote anything in advance, he told me. Instead he asked his faithful aide, Yehiel Kadishai, for a Bible to look up some references for the address. He was still talking long after midnight, when Kadishai said, “Mr. Prime Minister, for all our sakes, please go to bed.”

  Begin left, but like a child who just wouldn’t go to bed, he popped out again. “Barbara,” he said, “I forgot to tell you something. On the ride from the airport I said to President Sadat, ‘For the sake of our good friend Barbara, would you do the interview tomorrow with me together?’ And Barbara, Sadat said yes. So we do it in the Knesset, when we’re finished speaking.”

  Richard Nixon may have gotten me an interview with Prince Philip, but Begin had gotten me the most important interview of my career. “Thank you, Prime Minister,” I said. “Thank you so much.” And off he went to bed.

  The next day Justin had a small room off the main chamber of the Knesset all set up for the joint interview. There was no football game that day, so ABC broadcast live Sadat’s extraordinary address to the Israeli Knesset and Begin’s speech as well. Shortly afterward the two leaders arrived at the room to meet me amidst a great commotion of Israeli security guards and Egyptian soldiers, followed by a few incredulous members of the Israeli press.

  I had stayed up most of the night preparing questions for this first-ever joint interview with the leaders of Israel and Egypt. I talked with them for forty minutes—two tape cassettes’ worth in TV time—during which the difficulties on the road to a finalized peace quickly emerged. Both men expressed their admiration and even liking for each other, but the devil of an actual peace agreement was in the details. Sadat had said in his address to the Knesset that although everything was negotiable, the Arab people would not concede one inch of occupied land. And he reiterated his position when I asked him whether he would give up any of that land for peace.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Not at all.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I said. “If you will not give up any of the land, if none of it is negotiable, then what will you be trying?”

 
“We can sit together, we can talk; no one knows what will happen in the next week or so.”

  I pressed on until Sadat said, “Barbara, politics can’t be conducted like this.”

  “I have to keep trying,” I said to him.

  I then tried a lighter question and asked President Sadat if he planned to invite Prime Minister Begin to Cairo.

  “I am planning to invite him to Sinai,” Sadat replied with a mischievous smile. Sinai was, of course, still occupied by the Israelis.

  “Well,” Begin shot back. “I invite you.” And they both laughed.

  We covered other topics as well, including the sensitive subject of a possible Palestinian state. Begin said very firmly, “My position is no.” We also talked about Sadat’s visit earlier in the day to the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem. “I was very moved,” he said. “I never thought it reached to such an extent like I saw today.” I also asked Sadat, remembering other Egyptians who considered him a traitor, if he was at all concerned for his physical safety.

  “Why should I be? I will not be taken one minute before God wants it,” he replied. Four years later, as a result of this quest for peace, he would be assassinated.

  What some American people didn’t understand then, and may still not, was the significance of Egypt’s place in the Middle East, and why Sadat’s unilateral quest for peace with Israel had drawn such condemnation from the other Arab leaders, including King Hussein of Jordan. The answer was in the numbers—Egypt had two-thirds of the Arab population in the Middle East, counting the Sudan, and by far the greatest military capability. What Egypt did greatly affected all the other Arab countries in the region.

  “Is it true that there cannot be war or peace in the Arab world without Egypt?” I asked Sadat.

  “This is a fact,” he replied. “War or peace is decided in Egypt because we are forty million people.”

  I was very proud of this interview. It made headlines around the world the next day—and started a firestorm at CBS.

  As soon as my interview with Begin and Sadat ended, Justin grabbed the tape cassettes and rushed to the Israeli Television Broadcast Center to edit the conversation and satellite it to New York. The word quickly spread, prompting an Israeli driver for CBS to run to his producers and say: “ABC has Sadat and Begin!” And the chase was on.

  CBS staffers frantically tracked down the two leaders and pleaded with them to do another interview, this time with Walter Cronkite. CBS News was so determined to beat the upstart, third-place ABC News, not to mention the possibility that I might personally upstage the much more authoritative Cronkite, that they instantly transmitted Cronkite’s entire unedited interview back to New York and directly onto 60 Minutes. That turned out to be a mistake. Not only did ABC get my interview on the air seconds before CBS ran Cronkite’s, but at the end of his interview Cronkite is clearly heard saying: “Did Barbara get anything I didn’t get?”

  I returned to New York, having slept the entire way home in a “nest” the El Al steward made for me on the floor, to find my status greatly improved in the news division. The back-to-back interviews with Castro and Arafat, followed by the interview with Sadat and Begin, had put me back on the map as a serious journalist. It didn’t hurt that I’d gone head-to-head with Chancellor and Cronkite, the top men in broadcast journalism at the time, and, you should excuse the expression, beaten the pants off them. From that time on I was more or less accepted as a member of the old boys’ club.

  But I had unfinished business. I had a major plan in mind. At the end of my interview with Begin and Sadat, I had asked them if their respective ambassadors in Washington “could at least now meet and talk, which they’ve never done before?” Sadat thought for a minute and then replied, “Why not? I say, today we are ready.” Begin then also agreed. “I hope that starting from tomorrow the ambassadors of Egypt and Israel all over the world will give common interviews and meet with journalists and express their opinions.”

  I immediately phoned Simcha Dinitz, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, and his Egyptian counterpart, Ambassador Ghorbal, to invite them to do a joint interview with me on Issues and Answers when I returned home. Dinitz agreed but Ghorbal refused. He didn’t want their first exchange to take place publicly on television. So instead I invited them to an off-the-record dinner party, which they both accepted. This was, believe me, a major event. Even today the Egyptian and Israeli ambassadors are rarely at the same dinner.

  I hosted the dinner, a coming-out party of sorts, at the Madison Hotel in Washington just a few weeks after I’d returned from Israel. Though both diplomats were assigned to the United States and both lived in Washington, they had never met. They couldn’t, for Egypt and Israel were still technically at war and had been, actively at times, since 1948.

  What a euphoric time it was for all of us. I carefully planned the party. Among the guests were Katharine Graham, Ben Bradlee, and Sally Quinn; the humorist Art Buchwald; President Carter’s close adviser Hamilton Jordan; Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell; Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski; the outgoing secretary of state, Henry Kissinger; and my old friend Bill Safire, by then a columnist at the New York Times. I also asked Sam Donaldson, our incomparable White House correspondent, Peter Jennings, and about thirty others.

  All eyes were on the two ambassadors, who stood and chatted for the first time during predinner cocktails. They later recalled that their first exchanges were meaningless pleasantries. “We even discussed the weather,” Ambassador Dinitz said. “But then we talked more substance, and it was a good feeling.”

  Luckily Bill Safire took notes that evening, because I never would have remembered exactly what their toasts were to each other during the dinner. Ambassador Dinitz praised Ambassador Ghorbal “for his ability and professionalism—and sometimes I wasn’t too happy about that,” and then went on to recall the smiling faces of the children he had watched on television welcoming President Sadat to Israel. “It is incumbent on us to give them a reason for their smile,” he said.

  Ambassador Ghorbal responded in kind. “For the first time, Ambassador Dinitz has spoken for both Israel and Egypt,” he said, and went on to pledge his government’s commitment to a full, comprehensive settlement “and not leave it to the next generation.” He then raised his glass to the prospect of peace, to the ambassador of Israel, and to President Carter.

  The party was a great success. As Henry Kissinger said in his brief and amusing remarks, “I have not addressed such a distinguished audience since dining alone in the Hall of Mirrors,” referring to the hall in the Palace of Versailles outside Paris, where the treaty was signed ending World War I.

  Everything at the party was supposed to be off-the-record, but the next day, to my horror, I read an item in the gossip column in the Washington Star about the incomprehensible behavior of Hamilton Jordan at the party. The president’s soon-to-be chief of staff had evidently had too much to drink and insulted his dinner partner, Amal Ghorbal, the Egyptian ambassador’s wife, by staring down the front of her décolletage and announcing, “I’ve always wanted to see the pyramids.”

  I nearly fainted when I read it. Sam Donaldson was at the table and was asked if it happened. He wouldn’t admit it publicly, but he told me privately it had. I had been so busy being a hostess that, perhaps luckily, I didn’t see or hear any of this. But the sorry story made the rounds of the newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, leading Bill Safire to feel free to write about the more gracious part of the evening in his New York Times column. He titled it “Barbara’s Dinner Party,” and it was a very nice piece that mercifully left out the Hamilton Jordan story. Even more mercifully, Ambassador Ghorbal did not seem upset.

  For all the hopes for peace at the time and the feelings of goodwill between the Israelis and the Egyptians in 1977, the peace talks didn’t progress until Jimmy Carter essentially locked up Begin, Sadat, and their respective delegations from Israel and Egypt at Camp David in Septem
ber 1978. I was assigned to cover this. A news blackout was imposed on the press, leaving us hanging around the outside of the presidential retreat (we weren’t allowed inside), waiting for any news droppings and chasing down rumors. One of the most persistent was that Jordan’s King Hussein was about to fly to Washington from London to join the talks. I can’t tell you how many times I was told, “Jordan’s coming in.” The rumor was so persistent that several people began reporting it as the truth. I had King Hussein’s private phone number in London where he was staying, and when I, alone, got him on the phone, he denied categorically that he was heading to the United States. (Hussein in fact was dead set against Sadat making a separate peace with Israel.) Further, he told me that no one from the White House had even been in touch with him. So I went on the air and reported that, quoting King Hussein, and the next day someone else would again report that he was coming to Camp David.

  It made me very uneasy. I’d spoken to the only person who knew whether or not he was coming to Washington—the king himself—and I believed him. Yet something inside me wondered whether the print reporters knew something I didn’t. I was struck once again by the power of the printed word. It reminded me of my own mother believing the lies the papers printed about me when I started at ABC. But Hussein, as he had told me, did not come to Camp David. My reporting was correct. Sadat himself almost left, frustrated with his supposed partners for peace. Jimmy Carter had to keep intervening between the two delegations until finally, after thirteen days (and setting aside the thorny issue of Jerusalem), they reached an agreement. On September 17, 1978, Sadat and Begin, shepherded by Jimmy Carter, signed the Camp David Peace Accords at the White House.

  This again was a huge story, and I hoped to have another joint interview with the two leaders. Begin said yes, but Sadat said no. His representatives would not say why. Therefore the next day I interviewed each in his respective embassy. I remember the interviews clearly, mostly because many of the questions I asked them were deliberately identical. One was about the status of Jerusalem, to which Begin replied that 99 percent of Jews worldwide considered Jerusalem the capital of Israel, while Sadat said that seven hundred million Muslims and Arabs would disagree. Another question was about Israeli settlements in what the Palestinians considered their land in Gaza and the West Bank. Begin said he considered the settlements essential to the security of Israel, while Sadat insisted that Israel had no claim of sovereignty over either.