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CNNNSU: Henry Kissinger Interviewed on Yitzhak Rabin

CNN Sunday Morning November 5, 1995

Transcript .31 Segment .11

JOIE CHEN, Anchor: We now continue our coverage of the death of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. As the initial shock of Mr. Rabin's killing begins to fade, the experts are trying to get a clear picture of where the mid-East peace process moves next. CNN's Judy Woodruff joins us now with more reaction from leading world figures. Judy?

JUDY WOODRUFF, Correspondent: Thank you, Joie. And for some of that analysis and expert reaction we go to a distinguished former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Dr. Kissinger joins us from Hong Kong.

He was, of course, secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. Before that he was the assistant to the president for national security affairs. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli War he engaged in shuttle diplomacy among the various capitols of the Middle East. Dr. Kissinger, first, your reaction to this horrible assassination.

HENRY KISSINGER, Fmr. Secy. of State: It's an extraordinary tragedy and what is so ironical is that among Israeli leaders nobody understood the concerns of the critics of the peace process better than Rabin did. But he had come to the conviction that the peace process reflected the necessities of all sides, that a balance had to be established between Israel security and the self respect of its Arab neighbors and the population that lived under its rules and between military strengths and international support. And once he had thought his way through to that recognition which did not come easy to him, and I have known him for 30 years, then peace became his vocation and not simply a technical task. And that is why it is a sad occasion.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Talk about Yitzhak Rabin, the man, for just a moment, if you would.

HENRY KISSINGER: Yitzhak Rabin was a soldier and he was a thinker. He was actually rather shy and reticent man who had sealed himself to acts of extreme toughness. It was very painful for him but he was doing his duty to his people and to the world as he saw it. A very gentle man, actually, once you got to know him but basically rather shy.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I think you get at, Dr. Kissinger, one of the paradoxes of this man, someone who as you describe was gentle and shy and yet he was capable of acts of great toughness.

HENRY KISSINGER: Well, but when he was- when he engaged in acts of great toughness, one had to ask oneself why he did that and what drove him to it. The fate of Israel is a tough fate. To live in a country, in an area that at its widest point between the Jordan and the sea is 50 miles wide with people that reject the presence of Israel for reasons which one can grab and with the necessity of balancing the survival of a people that has after all suffered many tragedies with the dignity of its neighbors. That's not an easy assignment. But as I have known him over the 30 years, the process of learning was transformed into an act of leadership and into a vision and he was not some starry-eyed idealist who was leading protests. He came to his convictions in a painful way but once he had reached them, he was prepared to walk a very lonely road.

I saw him last two weeks ago and he was actually quite optimistic. But he also knew that it would be a bitter period with great vilification and that it was always easy to state the risks without balancing them against

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the needs. But he thought that it would be a painful road that would lead to a conclusion and I believe it still does.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Dr. Kissinger, as someone who as you say has known him for 30 years and has been doing diplomacy, if you will, with the nation of Israel for a long time, how does the fact that he was assassinated by another Israeli affect that country and the immediate political future of the peace process?

HENRY KISSINGER: Well, it is, of course, a shocking event. I don't know any Jewish person who would ever have thought it possible. And it shows the extent to which unreasoning pageants have taken hold of it. Now, how will it affect the peace process? I am one of those who at first had my own doubts about the agreement with the PLO. I recognized, the more I thought about it and above all, the more I saw how Rabin handled it, that what he was really doing is to work out a grammar of co-existence between two suffering people who would learn step-by-step the grammar of day-to-day living together. That is the key to this process and not some document signed in some dramatic ceremony and, therefore, this procedure, where the analysis goes city by city and almost road by road, is necessary. And he had done it in a masterful way and in cooperation as people do not always fully understand with Arab leaders like King Hussein. And in the process, gained international- a degree of international acceptance for Israel which it had never enjoyed before. That process now must continue and we have to avoid, it seems to me, two extremes. One, a spasm of saying this process has suffered- has produced so many casualties that it is hopeless. But the other one is to have a spasm of saying we must now do something dramatic. There's nothing dramatic that can be done immediately. The only dramatic thing that can happen is the realization that the grammar of co-existence must continue more or less on the road that Rabin has charted.

One of the tragedies is that he and Peres were a marvelous combination in the sense that Peres had inspirations and Rabin had strategy. And Peres, who I know well and respect greatly, now has to carry the burden alone but I think it will be done and it must be done.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, it's interesting. You use the term grammar - the grammar of co-existence. As you know, the skeptics are already weighing in though, Dr. Kissinger. They're saying essentially what you just said that Mr. Rabin provided the strategy but he also provided the stature. He had the integrity. He had the respect of his people. People are saying- just this morning we've talked to various experts who've said Mr. Peres does not have the respect and the admiration of his people. He comes at this from a different background and without being critical of him personally can anyone really step into this void?

HENRY KISSINGER: Rabin was a great man. He had worked a lonely road but- but if what he did had any meaning, it cannot depend on him alone. He came to this view. He never claimed that he alone understood something that no one else understood. He believed that he understood something that everybody would understand sooner or later. Peres has had a different road. I think he is a man of great intellectual strengths and he now has the responsibility and I have every hope that he will be able to carry it out but it will be idle to say that there isn't a huge void. But we should not- he knows what Rabin wanted to do. He saw it. And he has not rejected it. They had different roads.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What about the feeling- and, Dr. Kissinger, I appreciate your emotions here because as you said- have said a couple of times, this is someone you knew - Yitzhak Rabin - someone you had known for three decades. Is there- what is the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin? I mean, we're in the middle of a peace process. It has come a long way but it is

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certainly far from finished.

HENRY KISSINGER: Yitzhak Rabin in a way paralleled the history of his people. When I knew him first in Washington, he was worried that an impetuous America would sweep away the possibilities of survival of his society because we didn't understand that when your margin of survival is a few miles, you cannot engage in grandious experiments as we can with no powerful neighbors and a continent. At every critical juncture, however, he balanced that fear against the hope for some progress towards peace. He was a major force in the disengagement agreements with Egypt and Israel, even though- and Syria, even though he was not in the government. He was already designated in the case of Syria as an next prime minister. With great pain in which the American and Israeli view took some time to reconcile, he went along with- he helped lead the second disengagement agreement with Egypt. But my point is not to argue individual agreements. At every step of the way he raised his sights and then the moment came when Sadat came to Israel and then that the White House lawn ceremony.

As I said, I know him well. I know he hated to shake hands with Arafat and he didn't know until the last minute whether he could bring himself to do it. But at the end of the process, at the last conversation with him, he knew that something had happened to Arafat, not necessarily because of a great spiritual insight but because of the necessity of the situation. So, what I am saying is this is not a prophet who came out of the wilderness with an insight that nobody had, he learned like his people did and like his people will have to. And I think for this reason it will not end with him.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, Dr. Henry Kissinger, we appreciate so much your joining us from Hong Kong. Thank you very much.

Copyright (c) 1995 Cable News Network, Inc ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The preceding text has been professionally transcribed. However, although the text has been checked against an audio track, in order to meet rigid distribution and transmission deadlines, it has not yet been proofread against tape.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

ITEM TYPE: PACKAGE
SHOW NAME:
SHOW CODE: CNNSU
SHOW NUM: 31
SHOW SEG: 11
SHOW DATE: 11/05/95

SHOW TITLE: Henry Kissinger Interviewed on Yitzhak Rabin

SHOW DESCRIPTION: The former secretary of state discusses his personal and professional relationship with the slain prime minister. He says Rabin was a shy man who acted with outward toughness both as a soldier and politician.

SHOW TOPICS: t576-t508-t460

BYLINE:

SECTION: News; International

TYPE: Package

SHOW GUEST: HENRY KISSINGER, Fmr. Secy. of State (LIVE);

UPDATE:

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