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security is a common problem which can only be dealt with through
cross-border cooperation.

To repeat, the diplomat's and the politician's definition of peace
and the philosopher's have moved closer. Both are now talking about an
international system where peace depends on national commitments to
building cooperative relationships across borders, to eliminating the
causes of conflict, and to developing a sense that common security
depends on peaceful cooperation and not on military confrontation and
superiority. That point is not yet fully understood or widely accepted.

At the same time, the pursuit of peace and a strategy for
strengthening the United States' position in the world are also coming
closer. Again, experience in the Middle East brings two points into
sharp relief.

First, experience in the 1970s illustrated that events generated by
rapid social, political, and economic change and a sense of injustice
within a region can be more likely to occur, nearly as harmful to
American interests, and almost as dangerous to world peace as a direct
threat of Soviet military intervention. The revolutions in Afghanistan
and Iran and the repeated outbreaks of Arab-Israeli fighting have made
this clear. The rapid pace of change in this area have far more
capacity to cause instability than Soviet subversion. The anger of
those who feel themselves the victims of injustice is more likely to
bring down governments than Soviet attack. Encouraging orderly and

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peaceful rather than destructive change is not a task for the military.
It is a task for the politician and the diplomat -- for the peacemaker.

The second point is that U.S. mediation in the Arab-Israeli conflict has enhanced U.S. influence in tangible ways. I have participated in the years from 1974-1979 in the signing of five agreements which produced concrete steps toward an Arab-Israeli peace -- including the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. I experienced in my contacts with representatives of other governments the respect and increased influence in shaping world events which the United States gained from its role. I experienced the power that comes from making peace -- the power that comes from helping others do what they want to do and know is right but cannot do for themselves.

In short, we are increasingly recognizing that a strictly military or strategic approach to the problems of the world does not meet the full challenge to the United States' interest in building a more stable world. The experience of the United States in the 1970s begins to demonstrate that if the United States is actively engaged in the pursuit of peace and in dealing with the causes of conflict, its ability to influence the course of events in the world and its position in relation to the Soviet Union are strengthened, provided we do not neglect continued development of necessary military strength.

With "peace" defined by the hard calculus of nations' interests in common security in the world, peacemaking wisely and cautiously pursued with all of the care of the statesman, the diplomat, the political

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leader, the business executive, the military commander, the legal
adviser, can provide the conceptual centerpiece for policy. Peacemaking
enhances our ability to pursue our interests because it demonstrates the
ability of the United States to influence the course of history and
because it puts the United States on the side of the highest aspirations
of mankind -- and not just the pursuit of its own self-interest. Our
interests are served -- but only when our interests reflect larger
objectives shared with others. It is from this premise and its
corrollaries that I begin this book.

"I never thought of myself as a great orator in the tradition of William Jennings Bryan," wrote Gerald Ford. "Rather I thought my talents would be those of a mediator and counselor. As Abraham Lincoln once wrote: 'It is as a peacemaker that the lawyer has a superior opportunity.' That appealed to me."

## My Purpose in Perspective

My purpose in these pages is to reflect -- to the extent anyone can
who has not been President -- on what one foreign policy problem that
has engaged eight presidents looks like from the Oval Office and how
policies have been devised to deal with it. Informed by the insights of
scholars and by the experience of those who have worked with Presidents,
my aim is to look back into those moments when policy was shaped and
reshaped to understand United States policy toward the Arab-Israeli
conflict from the perspective of the men who bore ultimate
responsibility for it.

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My effort marries two career-long fascinations -- how the human being who is President manages that monumental job to make policy and how to bring peace between Arabs and Israelis. We have much to learn in both of those areas that could affect the ability of the United States to maintain its global influence through the remainder of this century and beyond. Presidents will need to give at least as much attention to strengthening our peacemaking arsenal as to asuring our military power. If power is demonstrated in the ability to affect the course of events, American ability to reduce tension and to move conflict toward resolution is central to maintaining a position of strength. The alternative of allowing tension to mount and to drive events where American interests are at stake erodes our stature.

If those who govern the United States will be judged on the world stage and at home partly by their performance in removing causes of conflict and promoting "real peace," then we need to understand more fully how the President goes about that job. The Middle East provides a unique testing ground. This, in the broadest sense, is the challenge to American diplomacy and to the American future from the Middle East. It is the focus of this book.

In trying to understand more fully how Presidents set our nation's course, no one analysis by itself fully explains the process. Nor will any one description of how it works will fully explain it. What one experiences is a continuing process involving many elements where human beings sift and refine ideas to devise workable approaches to practical problems. Each approach to understanding sharpens our insight. But in

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the real world, the policy process involves many aspects in varying
mixes at different times. Since it is only fair to readers to help them
place an author in the perspective of other ways of looking at the
subject, let me recall how my own perspectives on how foreign policy is
made have changed over the past three decades.

Rational Analysis

Looking back at how analysts have explained policymaking, most of us recall learning to explain the process mainly in terms of rational analysis of the nation's interests and objectives, of the means for achieving them, and of the policy choices realistically available. The National Security Act of 1947, written in the wake of a chaotic World War II policymaking experience, established the National Security Council to bring together advice for the President which would enable him to coordinate policy choices and the resources available to carry them out. Policy was to be made by rational calculations using the machinery of government.

Entering the government in 1956 as a junior officer trainee in the
Central Intelligence Agency, my focus on the machinery of government and
of rational decisionmaking was reinforced. By that time mid-way through
the two Eisenhower Administrations, the National Security Council (NSC)
system was elaborately set. Detailed policy papers labored their way up
through the bureaucracy to the NSC Planning Board, an interdepartmental
group of senior sub-cabinet level representatives. Cleared by them

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after much negotiation over formulations, these papers were discussed in
the NSC, which met twice a week and was normally chaired by the

President. Approved papers then found their way down "policy hill"
through the Operations Coordinating Board, which was charged with
overseeing implementation. Most of us saw that machinery -- not
President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles talking
several times a day on the fringes of the NSC, in the Oval Office, or on
the phone. I understand why my colleague in 1961 told me that "policy
isn't made on paper...," but at that moment in the mid-1950s the focus
was on systems, machinery, paper, and rational analysis.

The problems with this view, I learned, were that government does
not really work that way and that the "national interest" is not so
clearly defined as I had once understand.

In the first place, the machinery of government has to be designed
to support the human being who is President in making important
decisions. That "machinery" is, really nothing more than a way of
organizing the people in government so as to help the President and his
advisers analyze their choices and reach decisions. Those who observe
government closely or participate in it know that, in the end, the
critical conclusions are crystallized in small groups of key people.
There is nothing mechanical about the process, supportive as the
organizational machinery might be.

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In the second place, professionals in government and scholars again
and again have written their statements on American interests in the
Middle East. They have written in the hope that a forceful analysis of
those interests will compel senior policymakers to take the steps that
should logically follow from such analysis. Often, however, senior
policymakers have decided on courses of action that did not seem fully
to reflect the career officers' or the academics' definitions of the
nation's interests. Recommendations derived from the professionals'
analysis of the national interest and sent to the Oval Office have
sometimes borne limited similarity to the decisions that came out. Why
is there often a marked difference between the policy conclusions
suggested by a "rational analysis" of the national interest and the
policies set by the highest decisionmakers in the land?

One answer is that the President really knows what the "right"
policy is but cannot pursue it because of domestic political pressures
and constraints or the resistance of the international situation to his
influence. There is no question that Middle East policy is one of a
handful of foreign policy issues subjected to broadly organized and
uniquely sophisticated lobbying.

Another answer -- not at all excluding the first -- might simply be
that the President has his own way of defining the national interest.
In contrast to a statement of U.S. interests defined analytically, the
President's definition is forged in the political process and not
entirely from analysis. Consequently, his operational formulation of

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the national interest may in some way reflect the people's view of the
national interest by including his view of what approaches will or will
not win political support.

Yet a third answer -- not excluding the first two -- may be that we
have not thought our way through to a workable concept of what the
"national interest" is. We used to take for granted that the national
interest is obvious and clearcut. It almost seemed a natural and
unchanging derivative of a nation's geographic, political, economic, and
military character, assets and needs. Then scholars in the late 1960s
and 1970s we all became fascinated with the number of new actors and
interests on the world stage, ranging from the multinational
corporations to those concerned about environmental issues that cut
across national borders and raised questions about the nation state as
the exclusive definer of a nation's interests. If these other actors
like the big corporations or international financial organizations built
their own networks of relationships across national borders, their
pursuit of their interests worked outside the scope of governments
pursuing their states' interests.

However the current concept of the national interest is defined,
anyone who has been part of decisionmaking at the highest levels of a
government with global responsibilities knows that the governing working
definition of the national interest in any situation -- that is, the
President's definition -- is to some extent in constant motion because
shifting and competing challenges change priorities of the moment and
new situations may produce new views of the problems faced.

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Contending Interest Groups

In the course of an interdisciplinary graduate program in American
Studies during the first half of the 1950s, I had read how in a large
republic like ours many actors contest to play a dominant role in
shaping the perceptions and in defining the interests that guide
American policy. Large bureaucracies peopled with public servants, some
superb and others not so good, some dedicated and others more interested
in their own influence; voters and party machinery; members of Congress
and powerful staffs; ethnic lobbyists and business interests; reporters,
headline writers, columnists, news photographers, TV commentators;
individual citizens with the President's ear; and the Presidency itself
at the apex of the National Security Council "system" -- all played
their roles. Since that time in the mid-1950s, we have learned a great
deal more about how individual and organizational interests play
themselves out within the government; how the President does his job by
managing this conflict constructively; how Congress asserted itself
during Vietnam decade by legislating a veto for itself over programs
like arms sales and through the War Powers Resolution.

Those who work in the government are keenly aware of the tug-of-war
among contending interests. The media in describing decisionmaking
reinforce for all of us the view that policy is made by contending
bureaucratic or political elements or individuals competing for
influence with the President to swing him to their formulations.
Contests make interesting reading. The slow evolution of consensus or a
decision in one man's mind does not. Conflicts are easier to report.

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The correspondent with a daily deadline does not find an easy lead in
the slow process of putting the elements of strategy in place. He or
she needs to report who is winning or losing today. Reporters need
action, and much of what is real about policymaking is anything but
dramatic action. Good American journalists overall must be among the
best in the world. They certainly have better access to the leaders of
government than journalists anywhere else in the world. Yet even the
best of American reporters have a difficult time grasping the processes
of policy formulation.

The "mix" of these contending interests as they influence policy
shifts as the nature of the problems shifts. For instance, the 1973
Arab-Israeli war, the airlift of critical military supplies to Israel,
and the resulting oil embargo of 1973-74 called up a different mix of
players from those flying on the Kissinger shuttles or working through
almost thirty drafts of two international agreements at Camp David.
Whatever the mix, the central figure in sifting these influences is the
President.

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## Presidential Policymaking

In the 1960s and after, the more fluid style of decisionmaking in the Kennedy Administration reflected a sharp reaction -- whether justified or not -- to the seemingly highly structured Eisenhower style. It reflected a strong conviction that policy is made by people -- not by institutions. It was in that environment in 1961 that my colleague told me, "Policy isn't made on paper; it's a constantly changing mix of people and ideas." The new departure was also captured in the advice of a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Henry Jackson for the new President to be elected in 1960: He should "deinstitutionalize and humanize" the NSC system. The difference became apparent between those who painted policymaking as emerging from contending forces and institutions and those who saw policy in the end as being made by the President talking with the people around him, sifting the ideas reaching him, weighing a wide range of choices, considering resources and constraints, and reaching his own decisions.

Participants in the process and scholars alike focussed on how all of the influences of our complex political and governmental systems are somehow funneled into decisions made in the mind and in the guts of one human being. Computers may be better than the human mind in relating a large number of precisely coded variables, but no coder has yet found a way of handling all the shades of gray that complex political situations produce. People still have to deal with the nuances of problems created by people. People help shape a President's perceptions and decisions.

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People put flesh around the skeleton of his decisions in carrying them out and often even give it a shape he did not foresee. But in the end, it is the President who sets the course if it is to be set.

In my later years in government, I became fascinated as the social scientists zeroed in on the President and the presidency, searching for patterns of personality and organization which might help explain what influences how Presidents do their jobs and make policy decisions. The more they studied the less regularity they saw. I found it less bothersome than they that their analysis of behavior patterns had become less clear. For anyone who has worked with Presidents, the effort to systematize their complex lives seems unreal. For many of us, it is enough to sharpen insight and enhance understanding of what those working around Presidents had felt. The danger in trying to be too systematic lay in systematizing analysis of the human being until he was no longer human. Some things in human life may be unknowable, and we need to accept that as part of life. As President Kennedy himself wrote in 1963, "The American Presidency is a formidable, exposed, and somewhat mysterious institution.... it is mysterious because the essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer -- often, indeed, to the decider himself." [Kennedy's Foreword to Theodore C. Sorensen, *Decision-Making in the White House: The Olive Branch or the Arrows*, (New York: Columbia University Press), 1963, p.xi.]

We can take comfort, in my view, from the fact that policy is made by Presidents in a human way. At the lower end of the governmental totem pole, I have seen what happens when bureaucrats stop being people

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and become their titles. They change form and begin acting like institutions. They combat each other as institutions. They compromise with each other as institutions. And by the time their recommendations at their worst leave their desks, those recommendations are bloodless. It is not always that way in the bureaucracy. The good professionals never stop acting as human beings. But that institutionalization very rarely happens at the Presidential level because it is the President's job to move human beings behind him at home and in front of him abroad. We would understand our Presidents more sympathetically and elect them more wisely if we understood that the problems a President has to deal with are so complex that there is no other way for a President to make decisions except to take a reading at the end of the day of how he feels about a problem and what instinct tells him to do about it. He is no different from the rest of us when we face paralyzingly complicated decisions in our own lives. In the end, after we have endlessly sifted the advantages and disadvantages, the pros and cons, we finally clench our teeth and act, knowing that the chances are slim that we will end up being one hundred percent right.

At the same time, we as the leaders of the free world may no longer be able to afford the luxury of personal decisionmaking that is not in some minimal but effective way institutionalized. President Carter speaking after he left office to an audience of young people at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, spoke of the importance of the principle of bipartisan continuity in foreign policy as a check on the fallibility of Presidents. We can no longer afford not to articulate continuity and institutionalize our foreign policy in some measure. We

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can no longer afford to start fresh with each new learner in the Oval
Office. Other countries in the world are asking how the United States
can suffer such wide swings of the policy pendulum. How can a
superpower, they ask, not know what its interests are from one
administration to the next?

In the remainder of this introductory section, my aim is to sketch
out some of the factors that go into Presidential policymaking as I have
observed it. I have written mainly from the perspective of what I have
learned as a day-to-day participant in the process and have described
how eight Presidents shaped, developed, and revised policy toward the
Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

My intent is to discuss from the participant's viewpoint how
Presidents define and come to grips with key issues. Presidents have
their own accounts. After watching one President after another, career
officers in the executive branch develop views about what happens when
new Presidents tackle old problems and try to move them forward. The
observations of Presidents and career officials need not be inconsistent
with each other but Presidetns may be more realistic about how much can
be explained. Presidents' accounts may reflect judgements from
experience about what is knowable and what may not be knowable in the
ebb and flow of events. As President Kennedy wrote, situations facing
the Presidents are sometimes so complex that they themselves may not be
able to analyze precisely why they made the policy decisions they made.
They will explain their thinking to the best of their ability, but in a
close call even they may not fully understand the combination of

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instincts and reasons that sway decision. Nevertheless, even if we
cannot analyze a particular decision with scientific precision, we can
still try to understand the main thrust of a President's purpose and
policy.

What I offer in these pages are the observations of a practitioner
on how the process works. I hope that my observations may complement the
work of the scholars and the journalists and stimulate further
discussion and understanding of a process which is critical to the
future of the United States and to peace in the world. I have taken
this time to put my thoughts about the process in perspective because
many informed Americans have gone through a parallel evolution of their
own views of how government operates.

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## Chapter Two

### Presidents as Policymakers

#### The President's Policy

The President's policy has a character of its own. That is not to say that the President's policy exists apart from the government's policy. It is to say that the President's policy provides that extra measure of direction which in any large organization should come from the leader at the top. Policy recommendations which emerge from the career levels of the government or from studies in the think tanks and universities are rooted in analysis of a situation, of how U.S. interests are affected by the situation, and of realistic ways for dealing with that situation in its own terms. The President, in addition, has to think more widely about how to build political support for his policy at home and about how much influence he will have in carrying it out abroad. Part and parcel of his policy is how to maneuver individuals and centers of political support into place.

Because the President cannot be sure how much support and influence he can muster to carry out his policies, he is more likely than analysts and bureaucrats to preserve flexibility in setting policy. For him, policy is more likely to be a sense of direction and a few pointers rather than a detailed roadmap. Recalling a meeting with Secretary of State James Byrnes in the Oval Office on January 5, 1946, Truman recounted that he had written a long memo for Byrnes on aggressive

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Soviet behavior in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and Iran. In Truman's words, his memorandum "was the point of departure of our policy. 'I'm tired of babying the Soviets,' I had said to Byrnes and I meant it." [Year of Decision, p.552.]

For the President, policy is more likely at first to be ideas formulated in a particular way to define a goal and to marshal political support and cooperation rather than a computer printout of proposed actions. Those who will take the specific steps to begin carrying out the President's decisions are more likely to produce the detailed action plan, but that is more the builder's blueprint than the architect's rendering. "The President," Professor Alexander George of Stanford commented to me, "given broad goals and a sense of direction, tends to proceed incrementally, relying on feedback to make mid-course adjustments along the way thereby creating the road-map as he goes rather than plotting and following a pre-set itinerary." [Personal comment]

If the President's policy has a character of its own, and is national policy, one way to trace the evolution of United States' policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict is to try to identify those points at which the President established a sense of direction for himself and then gradually adjusted his thinking. The development of the President's policy is not necessarily synchronous with the main events in a narrative of U.S. diplomacy. Understanding how a President initially defines a problem and when and why he changes his mind and adjusts his course is critical to understanding the twists and turns of

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the United States' foreign policy. That is the organizing principle in
this book. This is not a narrative history of U.S. involvement in the
Middle East. It is a reflection on the Presidents' policies toward the
Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- how the Presidents perceived the
problem, why they cared about it, what they decided to do about it, and
how and why they changed their minds as they grappled with it.

We will discuss in a few moments how Presidents make decisions, but
my first interest is the substance of the President's policy -- the
ideas which are shaped into policy. Decisions are often only the
symptoms of policy, not its substance. I start with the assumption that
Presidents go through about the same mental processes as the rest of us
do in dealing with problems. I do not believe it is too much of an
oversimplification to suggest that policy develops out of the effort to
deal with three questions that any of us might ask about a problem we
have to cope with. The President sits down by himself or with his
advisers and asks: What is the problem? Why do I care about it? What
should and can I do about it?

It is important to say that all three questions are in the air at
the same time. Analysis would be sharper if these questions could be
discussed one at a time, but in the real world it rarely happens that
way. Once in a while, policymakers will take time to go back and
analyze basic perceptions and assumptions, but normally they are too
pressed to take action to allow themselves the luxury of such discussion
for very long. The definition of the problem will affect decisions on
what to do about it, so advocates of one policy or another will try to

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shape the definition to lead to their policy. The definition of
interests can be shaped by how the problem is defined or what a
policymaker wants to do about it. While the questions and their answers
become intertwined, together they provide an analytical checklist for
the issues that will be covered as policy is made. Let's look at each
of these questions in turn.

## What is the problem?

How a President defines a problem begins to determine how important he will decide it is and what he will do about it. Defining a problem is not some sophomoric exercise. It can direct or misdirect energy and attention. It can be a vehicle for bringing up key issues for decision or key arguments for public attention. It will be the starting point for determining what advisers he will especially rely on. It will be the basis for judging what part of his larger goals are engaged by the problem. Defining a specific problem will provide the link between that problem and his more general objectives in the world. For these reasons, it can become the subject of heated political controversy.

It makes a difference whether the Middle East is seen -- as Truman initially saw it in 1945 -- as a haven for the tragic survivors of the Nazi holocaust or as a strategically important area where the population is predominantly Arab. It makes a difference whether one sees the problem as essentially a problem of a persecuted Jewish people or as a problem where both Jews and Arabs have rights to be fulfilled. It makes a difference whether the Middle East is seen as an area where

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post-colonial nationalism can be pro-Western as Eisenhower saw it in 1953 or as an area where Communism is working through local nationalism, as Eisenhower seemed to view it in 1958. It makes a difference whether non-aligned leaders are seen as anti-Western or as standing genuinely between East and West. It makes a difference whether the Middle East is seen as momentarily stable enough to be left in the hands of an international mediator with little political weight, as Johnson did after the 1967 war ended, or as a "powder keg" -- to use Nixon's phrase a year later -- requiring front-burner attention. It makes a difference whether the Arab-Israeli conflict is seen as part of a strategic contest as Reagan allowed Secretary of State Haig to characterize it almost exclusively for eighteen months or whether it is seen at heart, as Carter saw it, as a problem also involving fundamental human values and another displaced people, the Palestinians.

The next chapter concentrates entirely on how views of the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian problem began and have changed since 1947 and how the changing perspective has affected efforts to deal with the problem. The point to be made here is that the frames of reference a President uses for getting into problems will not be neat analytical historical statements about the background of the problem. They may include some views about priorities among American interests and the threats to them. They may even include some sense of a possible course of action. Whatever the frame of reference that gives definition to a problem, that is an initial collection of ideas which the President will use in beginning to deal with it. Those ideas are the substantive foundation for his policy.

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Why do I care about it?

Many decision memos that go to the President start with discussion of how U.S. interests are affected by a given problem. What is the U.S. national interest? That has become one of the most misunderstood questions in international relations today.

There was a time, as I have said, when people seemed to assume that the national interest was clearcut -- almost a part of the natural order of things. In the 1940s and 1950s, we were taught that each nation has an objective set of continuing national interests that can be discerned from analysis of its position in the world. Is it protected by oceans, or do enemies stalk its borders? Does it have rich resources and the ability to export, or is it poor in resources and dependent on imports? Do its military forces have the weight of population and an industrial base behind them, or does the nation depend on another nation's military and economic help? Even today, there are certain rock-bottom interests such as protecting physical security, assuming economic well-being, maintaining certain principles of world order -- interests for which a nation might be prepared to go to war under certain circumstances.

As time passed after the Second World War, however, we came to realize that the concept of interests was not so cut and dried. This became obvious for a number of reasons:

First, even the basic interests were subject to compromise, especially when protecting all of them resulted in potential conflicts

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among them. The President had to make trade-offs among them. In
October, 1973, for instance, President Nixon decided to airlift military
equipment to Israel to meet emergency needs resulting from early losses
in the Yom Kippur War, even in the face of an Arab threat to counter by
embargoing the shipment of oil.

Second, defining the exact nature of interests themselves became
the subject of controversy. Is the U.S. interest in the security of
Israel basically a human commitment or a strategic interest? Does our
interest in Israel's security relate to Israel within the borders of
1949-67 or to Israel enlarged by conquests of 1967?

Third, at different times, different interests may deserve more
attention as they seem more or less secure or in jeopardy. Through the
early 1970s, the Persian Gulf was relatively stable, and the volatile
Arab-Israeli area claimed priority attention. With the fall of the Shah
of Iran, the collapse of the Persian Gulf security system, and the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the threat to the steady supply
of oil was dramatized and claimed a higher proportion of the President's
energy.

Fourth, many more elements of our society today have interests
involved in international relations. American commercial relationships
with the Arab world and their positive contribution to the balance of
payments multiplied in the 1970s. Supporters of a sound relationship
with Saudi Arabia supported by sale of sophisticated aircraft could

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narrowly win votes in the United States Senate over determined Zionist opposition in 1978 and 1981.

Fifth, the situation is confused as means of assuring interests almost become interests in themselves. For instance, we have long spoken of a U.S. interest in the stability of key states in the region. Rigorous analysis may correctly tell us that our interest is not in stability itself but in the flow of oil or in strategic cooperation with friendly governments which stability permits. Yet when revolution occurs in a country like Iran, many will define our interest as lying in preventing the upheaval.

We end up with a spectrum of "interests," some of which may be literally vital, others may describe conditions on which pursuing interests depend. But all of them may in varying degrees be operationally important considerations in making a particular decision.

In short, defining the national interest in a given situation has become an act of high policymaking and leadership. In making his judgements, a President will normally work from two bases: (1) Career officials responsible for a certain area will normally be starting from a comprehensive analysis of the full range of U.S. interests. (2) Thinking in that analytical environment, the President will shape his own definition, taking into account the full picture of domestic and global issues he faces. One of the main purposes of this book is to enhance understanding of the reasons for difference in these

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definitions. Whether right or wrong, the President's definition is the
basis for national policy.

Presidents want to know what their theoretically possible options
are and what they _should_ do in pursuing the national interest, but in
the end they must judge what they _can_ do.

Unlike career officials, the President's answer to this question
will involve more a way of dealing with the other key actors in a
situation than a specific plan of action. The President's policy is his
posture toward a problem. It is his way of maneuvering his way around
or through it. It is as much political instinct as precise calculation.

Presidents think and talk the language of political maneuver. It
is their job not only to decide what needs to be done, but to persuade
others to cooperate in doing it. I remember President Carter in the
Israeli cabinet room in March, 1979, in a particularly critical meeting
trying to persuade Prime Minister Begin and his negotiating team to
accept compromises which would conclude the Egyptian-Israeli Peace
Treaty. My professional colleagues and I had been up much of the
previous night developing possible formulations which might permit
Carter and Vance to close the deal. Now, I thought, as I watched Carter
look across the table at Begin and his tough cabinet colleagues, he has
to persuade them to accept what we have proposed. The difference
between his job and ours at that moment was the difference between the

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person who reads the road map and points the way across forbidding terrain to a destination and the person who actually has to get there. The President's policy results, in major part, from his thinking about how he can marshal the political influence to accomplish what he wants to accomplish.

Presidents state their policies in terms of structuring a political situation so as to maximize incentives or pressures on others in order to accomplish a desired result. In 1969-70, President Nixon and then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger were trying to build a structure of power between the United States and the Soviet Union which would offset the nuclear equality which the Soviets had achieved. In their efforts to build Soviet respect for a new code of superpower behavior, they moved aircraft carriers and alerted airborne forces during conflicts in the Middle East and in South Asia in order to impress the Soviet Union that it could not take a free ride in exploiting regional conflicts without expecting some negative consequences from U.S. action.

One of my bosses, Walt Rostow, who was President Johnson's National Security Advisor from 1966 through the end of his term, later captured the essence of this point reflecting on the special quality of the way heads of state talk to each other. "Chiefs of government do their business together in a manner quite different from foreign ministers," he commented in 1970 on some hundred such talks he had participated in. "The latter approach professionally, in a fine-grained way, the exact formulae which might resolve specific issues on their technical agenda.

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Chiefs of government -- when meeting in relative privacy -- usually expound to each other with candor their domestic political setting and problems; isolate, within those limits, how and where they can move together in military and foreign affairs; where they will have to live with differences of view; and how inevitable differences can best be kept from becoming enflamed." [W.W. Rostow, *Politics and the Stages of Growth* (Cambridge University Press), p. xi.]

Presidents have to compromise their objectives as they measure their ability to achieve them. As the saying goes, "Politics is the art of the possible." Policy at the Presidential level deals in the arena of political maneuver where power and influence must be used to move adversaries, and if they cannot be moved policies fall. Sometimes we have wondered whether a President could not have succeeded in accomplishing a far-reaching objective if he had been tougher. After Camp David, Prime Minister Begin faced down President Carter when the President insisted that there be a moratorium on Israel's policy of building settlements for its people in territories it occupied during the 1967 war and wanted to control. Students of Middle East policy date the failure of part of the post-Camp David negotiations from that moment and ask whether Carter could not have made his insistence on a moratorium stick. Carter knew, however, that Begin and Sadat had digested just as many decisions as their capacities permitted and that one more might upset all that had been achieved. It was the President's judgement that it was better strategy to preserve what had been agreed at Camp David as a foundation for fighting that battle another day than

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it would have been to bring the whole framework down in a battle he felt
he could not win at that time.

## The President's Decisions

The President's decisions -- like the policies they contribute to -- also have a character of their own. "This business of making decisions for America brings me strange experiences." Eisenhower wrote his lifelong friend, Swede Hazlett, on July 21, 1953. "I recall almost daily an observation attributed to Napoleon that went something like this: 'The genius in war is a man who can do the average thing when everybody else is growing hysterical or panicky in the excitement of the moment.' Of course you know that I have always striven to prepare myself as much as possible for the known or calculable requirements of any job assigned me. In this particular post such intentions and practices have to be almost completely discarded. This is because of the infinite variety of problems presented, and the rapidity with which they are placed in front of the responsible individual for action. Consequently, the struggle is to apply common sense -- to reach an average solution." [Source]

A President has to factor into his decisions a much wider collection of considerations, unknowns, and variables than almost anyone else on earth. He probably has to make more decisions on an impossibly wide range of issues in shorter periods than all but a few world leaders. "Almost by definition, the decisions that must be made in the Oval Office are difficult," wrote Gerald Ford. "If they're easy,

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they're made elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy." And the decisions of only a few others touch the lives of as many people. Sometimes we even have to ask what constitutes a "decision" in the Oval Office.

We commonly think of a decision as a set of ideas clearly defined at a given moment to guide further action after systematic weighing of alternatives. In the case of the President we picture decisions being made through full use of the governmental machinery. That is not always the case. Many decisions are made that way. Others happen in the heat of a crisis, almost without deliberation. Some simply coagulate over time as a consensus oozes into a certain shape and settles. Some take form apparently spontaneously in the words of a conversation or a statement at a press conference. To learn that monumental decisions just emerged often disappoints the citizen, the journalist, or the scholar, but Presidents are human and the most realistic explanation of a decision is often the human one.

When government is working most efficiently and has time to work systematically, foreign policy decisions will come to the President through the National Security Council system. Analysis will be prepared and realistic policy choices described by the specialists in the bureaucracy, usually under the direction of an assistant secretary. They will be reviewed by the appropriate cabinet secretaries and their deputies. They will be discussed with the President in the National Security Council, sitting in the cabinet room of the White House, next to the Oval Office. Out of these formal discussions, the President will initial or amend and initial a carefully drawn up set of

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recommendations. Or one of his advisers will distill his views from the discussion, write them down, and check with the President in writing. Often a formal decision memo will be distributed to those who need a precise statement of the President's instructions. Those decisions can range from major new diplomatic initiatives to next steps in an effort already in progress. In these cases, the consequences of each main policy choice have been carefully weighed, and decisions are explicit.

On other occasions, large new directions in policy or course changes sometimes simply emerge from discussion over a period of time or from the stress of dealing with a new turn of events. This is not to say that such decisions are taken without thought. A problem may have been discussed for some time, but when the moment of "decision" actually comes we may see few of the formal trappings of decisionmaking. For instance, one of the biggest decisions which President Johnson "made" in the Arab-Israeli war of June, 1967, was never really "made." In the opening hours of that war, the President, his advisers, and his press secretary began saying that after this war there should be a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all. Little did anybody stop to think what that would involve or whether the United States could produce such a result in the wake of a war. There was no meeting of the National Security Council to determine whether we were prepared to invest in a peacemaking process the effort it would require to achieve such a result. A posture was adopted and a policy was thereby set which sanctioned Israeli military occupation beyond its pre-war borders for years after that war and had profound consequences for the political map of the Middle East.

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To complete our framework for looking at the Presidents' policies
toward the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict to see what we can learn
from them, we need to have in mind some thoughts about what goes into
those decisions -- whether the decisions are sharp and explicit or
whether they are subtle changes of mind and approach. In the next few
pages I am going to suggest that, among other influences, the
President's evolving experience itself establishes a changing context
which influences decisions. The ingredients of that changing context
include these cumulative elements:

* the personality of the man who is President, his
character, his view of how the world works, his
skills, and his personal pre-presidential experience
with particular issues;

* the experience of _becoming_ President;

* his experience _as_ President, which includes the
analysis of the information he needs to make
decisions, the options he has, and their
consequences and organizing the people around him to
help him weigh those decisions; and finally his
experience as President in building support to carry
out his decisions and then reviewing and reshaping
his initial policy decisions to reflect his
continuing experience.

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Within that framework we can ask ourselves how the Presidents' policies
developed.

The President as a Person

Just like anyone coming to grips with problems as an adult, a
President begins by drawing on his personal resources to understand it.
"To understand what actual Presidents do and what potential Presidents
might do," Professor James David Barber at the University of North
Carolina explained in a book read twice by Jimmy Carter before he became
President, "the first need is to see the man whole -- not as some
abstract embodiment of the civic virtue, some scorecard of issue stands,
or some reflection of a faction, but as a human being like the rest of
us, a person trying to cope with a difficult environment. To that task
he brings his own character, his own view of the world, his own
political style." [James David Barber, *The Presidential Character:
Predicting Performance in the White House*, second edition (Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1977) pp. 3-4.]

Numerous ways have been used to explain the elements of a
President's personality as they influence his decisions. Professor
Barber suggests three.

<u>First</u>: "Character" reflects that combination of mechanisms we
humans use to deal with such feelings as the need for love and respect,
the fear of rejection, guilt, or anxiety. "<u>Character is the way the</u>

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**President orients himself toward life** -- not for the moment for enduringly. Character is the person's stance as he confronts experience. And at the core of character a man confronts himself. The President's fundamental self-esteem is his prime personal resource; to defend and advance that, he will sacrifice much else he values."

[Barber, p.8.] This is the dimly lit domain of the psychiatrist, formed in childhood. We know it is important but doubt we can understand its complexity well enough to explain decisions in this way alone. But it does influence those decisions in some way.

Professor Alexander George relates the point to the President's decisionmaking by noting that a President may define a good decision in terms of whether it will "satisfy or frustrate his personal values; provide an outlet for expressing deep-seated motives and impulses; obtain approval or disapproval from persons who are significant figures in his life; enhance or damage his self-esteem; advance or set back his career prospects; strengthen or weaken his political and bureaucratic resources." [Alexander L. George, *Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice* (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1980), p.3.]

**Second, "a President's world view consists of his primary, politically relevant beliefs, particularly his conceptions of social causality, human nature, and the central moral conflicts of the time,"**
Barber explains. "Like the rest of us, a President develops over a lifetime certain conceptions of reality -- how things work in politics, what people are like, what the main purposes are. These assumptions or

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conceptions help him make sense of his world, give some sense of order to the chaos of existence. Perhaps most important," Barber concludes, "a man's world view affects what he pays attention to, and a great deal of politics is about paying attention." [Barber, pp. 7-8] [Note: Alex George would substitute "belief system."]

> *Third, "style is the President's habitual way of performing his three political roles: rhetoric, personal relations, and homework."*

Style, Barber explains, "is how the President goes about doing what the office requires him to do -- to speak, directly or through the media, to large audiences; to deal face to face with other politicians, individually and in small, relatively private groups; and to read, write, and calculate by himself in order to manage the endless flow of details that stream onto his desk." [Barber, p. 7.]

My purpose is not to press or debate any one theory of presidential performance. This book is not intended as an entry in the running discussion among social scientists but as a complement to it. As a practical observation, Professor Barber makes the general point to be made here: "...the degree and quality of a President's emotional involvement in an issue are powerful influences on how he defines the issue itself, how much attention he pays to it, which facts and persons he sees as relevant to its resolution, and, finally, what principles and purposes he associates with the issue. Every story of Presidential decisionmaking is really two stories: an outer one in which a rational man calculates and an inner one in which an emotional man feels. The

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two are forever connected," he emphasizes. "Any real President is one whole man and his deeds reflect his wholeness." [Barber, p. 7.]

Those who work for a new President try to learn quickly what is on their new boss' mind, how he talks and thinks about problems, what he knows and does not know, what he considers important and unimportant, how he absorbs information, how he makes decisions, how he deals with people, how he uses power and negotiation, how he supervises and governs, when he prefers confrontation or conciliation. They do not try to psychoanalyze him. They try to understand how he operates as a political leader and how to work and communicate with him as a human being. They try to "get on the same wave length" with him and to find out "where he is coming from" on a given set of issues.

## The Experience of Becoming President

With these personal resources to start with, each President's thinking about an issue develops through several stages as he "becomes" President. It may seem simple-minded to say that no man looks like a President until he has been one, but it seems to be true that a man really becomes President only as he comes to grips with real-world problems and agonizes as the ultimate decisionmaker over how to deal with them. The experience of grappling with problems from the unique perspective of the Oval Office enables the President to speak with authority that few can match. Think of the phases through which leaders pass as they move toward that point.

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First, as they become candidates for elected office, they have to
take stands on a wide range of issues. We all try to understand
problems by relating them to what we have already experienced.
Sometimes we have no experience with an issue and have to try to relate
it to something comparable. Other times, we may have had limited
experience. Presidents are no different. In this book, I have not
tried to work from a broad personality analysis of each postwar
President, but I have devoted more than a normal amount of effort to
probing to the roots of each man's early exposure to the
Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how he related it to his views of
the larger world. I have done so because I have observed that such
early ideas are among the resources a new President initially draws on
for his first approaches to a problem. His body of knowledge and
experience naturally expands once he is in office. He develops new
judgements about patterns of behavior and response, what works and what
does not, what improves a situation and what does not. In most cases,
however, viewpoints developed in the pre-Presidential years have a
substantial influence on his initial efforts to deal with a problem and
last well into an administration.

Second, during that long period when a person establishes himself
as a candidate and then runs his campaign, he sharpens his positions on
individual issues as well as his general posture toward conducting the
foreign relations of the United States. Often, issues are sharpened
largely in ways designed to pose a contrast to their opponents. Those
sharpened views about what America's role in the world requires are
often crudely codified in party platforms. They are articulated and

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developed in formal and informal speeches through the campaign. Even
foreigners seem to understand that most of these speeches are designed
for appeal to domestic constituencies and do not necessarily represent
policies to be followed if the speaker becomes President. One example
that became classic in the 1970s was each candidate's appearance before
the late-summer convention of B'nai B'rith where pro-Israeli speeches
are almost required. Early political supporters can influence a
candidate's basic views.

Third, when he is elected, the new President-to-be begins receiving
"transition memos" both from his own campaign and transition teams and
from the career officials in the government. Those are his first steps
in coming to terms with ongoing policy. This process may continue well
beyond inauguration day. Initially, it involves developing his
positions to take into account, if he wishes, the analysis that he is
now receiving of the current situation. Then, he will normally test his
tentative conclusions in some way -- by sending his Secretary of State
abroad to talk with other leaders, by talking with some of them himself,
or by suggesting some course of action. In that process, he determines
the constraints of the real world. When he has some reaction to these
early approaches or to detailed questions he has put to advisers --
usually within his first five or six months as President -- he is ready
to establish a "baseline" from which to move his policy forward.

Although this "baseline" may be achieved at different times on
different issues, it may be fair to say that it is only through this
process of reaching the "baseline" that a man begins to be President. I

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remember meeting President Nixon the first time. Shortly after the
inauguration, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger arranged for
the President to drop into the Roosevelt Room in the White House across
the hall from the Oval Office to meet his staff. I had spent a fair
amount of time with President Johnson before he left office and had seen
in his face and manner some small measure of the toll that his
responsibilities had taken. As I watched President Nixon move around
the room making quick *repartee* with his new NSC staff, I found myself
thinking, "He hasn't been President yet." His time would come too with
the experience of the office, but at that moment he had not suffered
under its burdens or been challenged by its responsibilities, despite
his already extensive experience in public life.

## Being President

**Policy analysis.** In preparing for decision, the President and his advisers must assure that he has adequate information and interpretive analysis to answer the three questions that are the essence of policy: What is the problem? What do I care about it? What can I do about it?

He must assure that the problem has been accurately analyzed and
interpreted so he will be dealing with the central issues. Among the
questions I was most frequently asked by top policymakers were these
two: "What's really happening? What's going to happen next?" The
President could read the press and other reports of events, but he
wanted to understand what lay behind those events -- motives, interests,
hidden agendas, relationships among actors, ideological and emotional

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barriers, alliances and enmities, abilities and behavior patterns. When
he asked about the future, he was not expecting sure-fire prediction but
instead he wanted to see how someone else's mind worked in laying out
the factors which would shape the future.

Because the president's job is to move people toward a goal, many
of his questions will pose unanswerable questions about the motives and
intentions of adversaries in addition to their capabilities, which can
be measured. As a politician, he will tend to interpret events in terms
of what other political leaders are trying to achieve. The intelligence
analysts can in many cases do a superb job of counting Soviet missiles,
but the President himself with his political experience may have more
sensitive instincts in guessing intentions.

Most formal decision or briefing memos within the government will
discuss basic elements of the problem, but for some short moment the
President will also try to establish his own understanding of what the
facts mean by relating the problem to his own experience. He may look
for analogies -- ways in which this situation is at least partly similar
to other situations which he knows. He may try to categorize the
problem in some way that is important to him -- as a strategic problem,
as a human rights problem, as a diplomatic problem. As he engages with
others in the political arena, he may try to understand a problem by
identifying issues it poses for him or issues within the situation which
provide openings for him to assert his influence. A master politician
lives by reducing problems to the basic issues they pose because he must
identify how he differs from opponents and he must pose choices for the

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electorate. This ability to reduce problems to key issues is an
intellectual art form if done well. It requires incisive analytical
clarity. It is a way of giving meaning. A good staff will learn this
art of "oversimplifying" issues to help the President understand what is
at stake in a given situation. Engaging in political controversy or
even preparing for it will sharpen the President's understanding of a
problem by forcing him to choose among alternative interpretations of
it.

The questions the President asks are often in the realm of the
unknowable. The task of those who support the president analytically as
he prepares for decisions is to bridge the gap between the President and
the analyst. Sometimes I described the job of the National Security
Council staff as conducting a running conversation between the President
and the career officers in the government, assuring that they understood
the questions that were on the President's mind and stretched their own
imaginations beyond the reports on their desks to join in the mental
process which presidential decisionmaking requires.

The President must assure that all of the actual and potential
implications for American interests have been clearly recognized,
explained, and assessed. The President always has the option of doing
little about a problem and needs to know what the costs of that approach
would be. He does not need someone to "cry wolf"; he needs a hard-headed
appraisal of how important and how urgent the problem really is. How
much of his attention, time, and energy does it justify? What will be
the effects of passing time on the character of the problem? If the

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implications of the problem seem to call for action, can those
implications be described credibly so the public will understand them
and agree that genuine American interests are at stake? It is not
always easy to assure such analysis. Some conventional understandings
of the United States' interests in a situation can become trite and
outdated.

**Organizing for decision.** That brings us for a moment to how a President organizes his advisers to suit his method of decisionmaking -- particularly the White House staff and the National Security Council system, which includes relations with his Secretaries of State and Defense, his National Security Adviser and others like the Director of Central Intelligence and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In the formulation of policy, analysis goes through three stages.
In the first stage, the professional level of government will describe
the situation and lay out in one-dimensional form a full range of
possible courses of action for achieving objectives. In a second stage,
those options will be reviewed at the sub-cabinet level where political
factors will be taken into account, extreme options discarded, and real
options shaped in the light of political realities. It is on this level
that the options will begin to take on three-dimensional shape. In the
third stage, a reformulation of options will be discussed with the
President for his eventual decision.

How each President organizes the machinery of the Executive Branch
to help him in working with his advisers to make decisions is an

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excellent example of how the personal decisionmaking habits of an
individual President will affect the machinery of government. Often
when I have explained teh National Security Council system to audiences,
I have started with the old statement, "There's no right way or wrong
way -- just the boss' way." Each individual President makes up his mind
in a different way. Some Presidents like to talk their way to
decisions. Others like to retreat to their studies and sit down with a
yellow pad and work up their own calculations of advantages and
disadvantages of each course of action until they have reached a
decision. Some Presidents like a lot of choices; others would prefer to
have their cabinet advisors narrow the field of choice. All this is
reflected in the way each President changes the organization of the
National Security Council system.

Let me give a couple of examples.

I always thought President Johnson must have had a conversation
with Secretaries Rusk and McNamara that went something like this: "You
fellas are smart and you know what my problems are. I know that the two
of you are going to disagree on some of these issues. But I want you to
sit down together and to try to figure out between you what you would do
if you were in my shoes. I want your energy to go into mapping a course
of action that you would take if you had to consider all the facts that
both of you have in mind." Johnson then set up the NSC machinery so
that options would be formulated at the assistant secretary level and
then would be reviewed by a senior panel chaired in the State
Department. When recommendations came to the President there would be

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an agreed course of action. The President would then give the Secretaries of State and Defense a chance in his presence to describe their separate concerns and other approaches, but the energy of the bureaucracy would have gone into shaping a realistic course of action that would take into account all of the concerns the President might have.

President Nixon, on the other hand, came to office feeling that Johnson's system deprived the President of realistic choices. I always pictured Nixon feeling on a much larger scale the same way I did when I went to the membership meetings at our cooperative school. One night we might be asked to vote on raising teachers' salaries. A committee would have done a great deal of work to produce a recommendation that faculty salaries be raised by a small amount but with no work on what the effect would be on tuition if salaries were raised by a greater amount. When the vote came, our choice was between no raise and an inadequate raise. In other words, no real choice. President Nixon set up the NSC system so that each department was encouraged to come to the White House with its own separate recommendation as fully fleshed out as possible. Recommendations would then be reviewed by a sub-cabinet and cabinet-level review group chaired by the President's National Security Adviser who would undertake to present to the President the fullest possible range of realistic options and the pros and cons for each.

Whatever the formal system, each President found ways of arranging an informal series of discussions with his advisers. President Johnson, for instance, held what I always thought were his real NSC meetings at

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what was called the regular "Tuesday Lunch." Many of the decisions on
key issues, including many of those relating to Vietnam were made in
that forum. Policy papers were prepared and some notes were kept of the
outcome of the discussion. Much later, President Carter came to rely on
a forum which was called the "Foreign Policy Breakfast," usually held
Friday mornings. Each of these meetings included the key members of the
National Security Council and several of the important White House
advisers.

Presidents have also found different ways of patterning their
relationships with their individual advisers apart from the NSC
structure. Those scholars who have written about the Presidency have
made a great deal of the fact that some Presidents like Franklin
Roosevelt or John Kennedy encouraged the flow of information directly to
them from a number of advisers while others like Eisenhower and Nixon
established a more hierarchical flow of information to them through one
or two key individuals, like Sherman Adams, H.R. Haldeman, or Henry
Kissinger. The scholars have dubbed the former approach "collegial" and
the latter "formalistic." Once again, the point for me is not so much
whether discernible and distinguishable patterns emerge to characterize
different kinds of Presidents. It is rather that each President will
make his decisions in a slightly different way and will therefore relate
to the people and ideas around him in slightly different ways. The
question of interest to us in this book is when and how advisers,
however organized, contributed to the President's changing perceptions
of a problem and the success of his policies.

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Sometimes, Presidents collect judgements as well as analysis. In May, 1967, as an Egyptian-Israeli war loomed imminent, Lyndon Johnson faced a meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban to explain what the United States planned to do to restore Israel's freedom of navigation in the Straits of Tiran, which Egyptian President Nasser had declared closed. Johnson called a meeting the Cabinet Room where he included not only the officials who needed to be there but old colleagues like Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford whose judgements he trusted. He arranged that Joe Sisco, then Secretary of State for International Organizations (particularly United Nations Affairs) would present the Israeli view of the situation which Johnson would shortly hear from Foreign Minister Eban. He arranged for Luke Battle, then Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, to paint the picture as the Arab leaders saw it. Secretary Rusk reported the views he had found in the Congress. At the end of the meeting after arguments and views on all sides had been laid out, Johnson said in his Texas way, "Come sundown, I'm the one who has to bell this cat. What would each of you tell him if you were in my shoes?" And he went around the table hearing how each mind sifted that information. Certainly, Johnson had sifted what he had heard for himself, but he wanted to see where other minds whose workings were familiar had come out. Having collected information, Johnson was now collecting judgements.

**Carrying out decisions.** Since policy is rarely "made" but more often "in the making," the President's decisionmaking frequently -- maybe normally -- requires constant assessment of progress and reassessment of approach. The President, of course, has an almost

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unceasing string of decisions on particular steps, some of them extremely important. They often commit him visibly and openly to a particular course. But they are not the same as the policy which they may or may not reflect. A President may commit his prestige to a particular decision -- for instance, the sale of the AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981 -- without having a coherent overall policy for the Middle East.

The President must be able to keep continuing watch on whether his approach is achieving the results he wants. Sometimes political opposition crops up in an unexpected quarter. Sometimes purposes of other actors, previously hidden, become more apparent. The unexpected -- assassination, election outcomes, terrorist acts, war, parliamentary reversals -- can force changes in original plans. One of the most difficult tasks a President faces, even if he has the best intelligence and analysis available, is to decide when the character of a situation has changed definitively so as to change the premises for his earlier policy judgements. For instance, in the fall of 1979, evidence was mounting that the Shah of Iran could not continue to govern Iran, but President Carter recognized that his accepting that premise and visibly shifting course could seal the Shah's fate. It is rarely easy in the midst of complex, and changing conditions to know exactly when a milestone has been passed.

Even with multiple sources of information, the President also finds it difficult to avoid becoming the prisoner of those with whom he spends the most time. The President and a relatively small group of advisers

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-- or even several groups -- will after a time begin to repeat old arguments and viewpoints and will reinforce each other in them. The classic example in recent times was the difficulty of shifting mental gears on Vietnam. The same men interpreted to each other the same kinds of reports from the same people and then had to defend their positions before an increasingly hostile public -- each experience tending to drive them further into their convictions rather than to open minds to fresh perspectives.

A President must also be concerned that any policy course will be derailed either by inattentiveness to detail in implementation or by different purposes or interpretations among those who carry out orders. Those who write about bureaucracies paint a picture of junior officials just waiting to sabotage a President's decisions. That sometimes happens. More often, the problem is that the President and his staff have reported their decisions to the bureaucracy but not the policy that lies behind them. Without understanding the President's intent, an official down the line may in good faith take all the concrete steps necessary to carry out a decision but put the wrong twist on what he does and convey a different message from the one the President intended. Even Presidents and their closest advisers sometimes mistake specific decisions for the policy underlying them. By failing to communicate the policy and therefore their purpose, they may be as much to blame as their appointees or a career serve when policy goes awry.

## The Stage Is Almost Set

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In the next chapter, we will complete the stage-setting by sketching out the elements of the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the different ways that problem has been defined. Then we will be ready to look at the experience of eight Presidents in dealing with it. When we turn to the experience of each man who was President, 1945-85, the following questions capturing the essence of these first two chapters will form a checklist and a framework for the analysis:

* What was the man's exposure to the Arab-Israeli problem before he became President? How did it seem to relate to his broader views of how the world works and the United States' purposes in the world?

* As he entered in earnest the period of "becoming President," how would we describe his tentative policy, say, about the time of his inauguration?

* How did he then test his preconceptions and tentative policy to move toward a "baseline" from which to launch an operational policy of his own? At that point, how did he define the problem and U.S. interests in it; what were his real priorities; what did he think it realistic to try to achieve in what time frame; what political support did he expect? What mix of people -- including both the President and his advisers -- and ideas seemed to produce the policy?

* Then, what were the key points during his administration when his picture of the problem and of the workability of his policy

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seemed to shift? What seemed to bring about those shifts? Did he lead
or did his advisers? Were they reflected in specific decisions, or
not, or only later?

° As the President's perceptions shift, in what ways does he
change or refine his earlier views of the problem? In what ways does he
adapt his way of dealing with it?

° What, in conclusion, can we say about the mix of people and
ideas in his administration?

Throughout, we will keep an eye out for current views on the
meaning and importance of an Arab-Israeli peace in his thinking.

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