The Good News is That So Far There's Not Much Bad News

By Richard H. Curtiss

''I have friends on the Clinton campaign, close associates. Gore is very committed to us. . . I've known Bill for seven, eight years from the National Governors Association. I know him on a personal basis. . . One of my friends is Hillary Clinton's scheduler, one of my officer's daughters works there. We gave two employees from AIPAC leave of absence to work on the campaign. I mean, we have a dozen people in the campaign, in the headquarters, in Little Rock, and they're all going to get big jobs. . . I also work with a think tank, the Washington Institute. I have Michael Mandelbaum and Martin Indyk being foreign policy advisers. . . Steve Spiegel. . . We have Bill Clinton's ear. I talked to Bill Clinton. He's going to be very good for us. . . I have full confidence that we're going to have a much better situation. . .A girl who worked for me at AIPAC stood up for them at their wedding. Hillary lived with her. I mean we have those relationships. We have never had that with Bush. Susan Thomases, who's in there, worked with me on the Bradley campaign. We worked together for 13 years. She's in there with the family. They stay with her when they come to New York. One of my officers, Monte Friedkin, is one of the biggest fund-raisers for them. I mean, I have people like that all over the country. . . He 's said he 's going to help us. He 's got something in his heart for the Jews, he has Jewish friends. Bush has no Jewish friends. . . Clinton is the best guy for us. . . We're talking now. We don 't have, no commitments yet. We're just negotiating. We're more interested right now in the secretary of state and the secretary of National Security Agency. . . I've got a list. But I really can't go through it. I'm not allowed to talk about it. . . We'll have access. "

—Remarks by President David Steiner of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee taped and released by New York businessman Haim (Harry) Katz, Oct. 22, 1992.

Publication of AIPAC President David Steiner's boasts of pre-election access to then-presidential candidate William Clinton resulted in Steiner's resignation as president of Israel's principal Washington lobby. * It may also cost people he named jobs in the Clinton administration.

Shortly before the remarks were made, AIPAC General Counsel David Ifshin had relinquished his position as legal counsel to the Clinton campaign after mention in the media of the incongruity of a paid lobbyist for a foreign country holding such a sensitive position with a candidate who was promising not to bring lobbyists for foreign governments or companies into his administration. However, the press failed to note at the time that Clinton campaign director Mickey Kantor also was a member of the AIPAC board of directors, as well as a partner in a law firm, Manatt, Phelps, Phillips & Kantor, that has registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent to lobby for NEC, a major Japanese industrial conglomerate, and the governments of Cyprus and Jamaica.

After Clinton's victory, however, Kan*A transcript of the Steiner-Katz conversation was published in the December '92-January '93 issue of the Washington Report, pp. 13-16.

Kantor was shunted aside, at least temporarily, in favor of Warren Christopher, also a Los Angeles attorney and former assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration and assistant attorney general in the Johnson administration.

Instead of directing the Clinton transition team, Kantor found himself placed in charge of the two-day December "economic summit" in Little Rock. Christopher was named transition director in Little Rock and then given the Clinton administration's top job, secretary of state.

Leaks to the mainstream media attributed the shift in the pecking order between the campaign and the transition team to a "campaign staff revolt" against Kantor's autocratic ways. Although the high profile of AIPAC officers and staff employees in the campaign was not mentioned, there were intimations in the press that an anti-Christopher whispering campaign to the media by hard-line Jewish leaders had backfired. It had not prevented Christopher's nomination, but it generated unfavorable comment about Clinton's choices.

Reporter Martin Sieff wrote in the Dec. 28 Washington Times that Christopher "appears to remain calcified in the beliefs that led American foreign policy to catastrophe in the 444-day-long humiliation of the hostages in Iran from 1979 to 1981."

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, one of America's most reliable media apologists not just for Israel but also for the "greater Israel" dreams of former Likud prime ministers (and terrorists) Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, wrote of Christopher: "He has never been accused of being a strategic thinker. His friends are said to doubt whether he even has a political philosophy."

For Americans hoping for continuity in U.S. Middle East policies, with the Clinton administration building upon Bush administration accomplishments in Gulf security and in laying a solid groundwork for a land-for-peace settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Krauthammer's unhappiness may portend good news. Whatever the reason, the AIPAC cabal so evident in Clinton's campaign organization suffered its first apparent setback only days after Clinton's victory with Christopher's appointment to direct the transition team, and its second with Christopher's nomination as secretary of state.

Setbacks for AIPAC

Christopher, a man famous for playing his cards close to his chest, declined to answer questions posed by the press in advance of his Senate confirmation hearings. Nevertheless, he must have stunned some of Israel's media supporters when, after Clinton's introduction, he told them:

"Nothing could be more wasteful than for a new administration to abandon constructive initiatives like the Middle East peace talks or relief efforts in Somalia." He did not elaborate, but few would deny that the key element in the Bush administration's "constructive initiative" was linking U.S. aid to Israel to Israeli performance at the peace table, a tactic criticized during his campaign by Clinton.

In a statement on Israeli deportations of Palestinian Muslims that New York Times writer Thomas Friedman called "as evenhanded as anything ever uttered by the Bush administration," Clinton sounded a possible retreat from such campaign rhetoric when he deplored both the killing of Israeli soldiers by Islamic extremists and Israeli deportations of Islamic leaders. Clinton's statement didn't differ from one issued by Bush administration National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft.

Clinton's foreign policy statements were crafted for him throughout his campaign by a foreign policy team headed by Christopher and including Anthony Lake, Samuel Berger, and Madeleine Albright. The fact that they, along with pension fund executive Clifton R. Wharton Jr., son of America's first African-American career ambassador, received key foreign policy jobs visibly disappointed Clinton's AIPAC backers.

Staff writer Thomas L. Friedman described in the Jan. 5 New York Times "behind the scenes wrangling between Mr. Clinton and Jewish leaders that has been going on during the transition" because "prominent members of the Jewish establishment" have not yet been appointed to top administration jobs. "Although they make up a much smaller percentage of the electorate than female, black or Hispanic voters, Jews donated about 60 percent of Mr. Clinton's non-institutional campaign funds and about 80 percent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for the Democrat," Friedman wrote.

In fact, at this writing, Israel's U.S. media claque has expressed unqualified approval for only two Clinton nominees. Defense Secretary-designate Les Aspin, who as a Wisconsin Democratic member of the House Armed Services Committee has received more than $86,500 in donations from pro-Israel political action committees, was hailed by Krautharnmer as "a serious foreign policy thinker."

Another appointment praised by some of Israel's U.S. supporters was that of Central Intelligence Agency director-designate James Woolsey, described by some columnists as ''the Republicans' favorite Democrat" and by others as a "neoConservative." The term normally is applied to Democrats who opposed second terms for Carter and Bush, both of whom were opposed by the Israel lobby, and supported a second term for Ronald Reagan, just as did much of the Israel lobby.

Woolsey, 51, served the Carter administration as undersecretary of the Navy and the Bush administration as a disarmament negotiator. Krauthammer called Aspin and Woolsey "two first-rate thinkers."

Aspin was the Israel establishment's first choice for secretary of defense, just as Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ) was its first choice for secretary of state. Israel lobby choices for National Security Council leadership were Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Prof. Michael Mandelbaum and Australian-born Martin Indyk, as indicated in the taped Steiner conversation quoted above. Indyk, who speeded up his naturalization to enable him to accept a job involving the highest security clearance, was an AIPAC employee when he teamed up with a wealthy AIPAC officer to open a spin-off think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Clinton instead named 53-year-old W. Anthony Lake, presently a professor of international relations at Mt. Holyoke College, as national security adviser. Lake, a career foreign service of officer who became a Vietnam specialist, achieved fame when, in 1970, he resigned his position as special assistant to Nixon administration National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to protest the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. Subsequently he served as director of International Voluntary Services, a private version of the Peace Corps, from 1974 to 1976, when he returned to the State Department to serve the Carter administration as director of policy planning under then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Deputy Secretary Warren Christopher.

As his deputy national security adviser, Clinton named 46-year-old Samuel R. (Sandy) Berger, a specialist in international trade law on leave from the Washington law firm of Hogan and Hartson. Berger served as State Department deputy director of policy planning under Anthony Lake in the Carter administration. Berger also has served on the staff of New York Mayor John V. Lindsay and two members of Congress, and worked with Clinton on the 1972 Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern.

Berger has become a target for Jewish organizations lobbying for more appointments to foreign affairs positions, along with Sara Ehrman, who served as Clinton campaign outreach director to Jewish supporters, and campaign director Eli Segal. All are slated for Clinton administration appointments and, like Council of Foreign Relations President Peter Tarnoff, whose appointment as State Department undersecretary for political affairs is considered likely, are said to be closer to dovish American supporters of Israel's Peace Now than to AIPAC. If so, they will find it easier to work with Israelis of Labor Party leanings than Likudniks.

Interestingly, it was Berger who brought his former State Department boss, Lake, into the Clinton campaign. In 1972, when Berger and Clinton were forming their personal tie on the McGovern campaign, Lake was working for the campaign of McGovern's rival, Sen. Edmund Muskie. Even though some AIPAC supporters labeled Berger and other prospective appointees named above the "wrong kind of Jews," they also have complained that Berger should have been Lake's boss instead of vice versa.

In his writings, Lake has called upon presidents to expend less energy on ideological agendas reached without input from career State Department specialists. He also has urged the U.S. to deal more effectively with Third World radical regimes. As assistants to Berger on the National Security Council staff, Clinton named his campaign foreign policy ad. viser, Nancy Soderberg, and Gore's campaign foreign policy adviser, Leon Furth.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations designate Madeleine K. Albright came to the U.S. as the 11-year-old daughter of Czech diplomat Josef Korbel, a U.N. official. At the conclusion of that assignment, Korbel sought asylum in the U.S. from Czechoslovakia's communist regime.

Albright, 55, entered politics as Maine i senatorial campaign coordinator for Senator Muskie in 1976, and worked under Carter's hard-line national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, from 1978 to 1981. She served as adviser to the Mondale-Ferraro campaign in 1984 and the Dukakis campaign in 1988. She has been a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and, since 1989, has served as president of the Center for National Policy, a Democratic think tank.

The nomination of 66-year-old Clifton Wharton as deputy secretary of state instead of to the higher profile position of U.S. ambassador to the U.N. came as a surprise to many. It looked like a Clinton exercise in "ticket balancing," in more than just terms of gender and ethnicity. Former Brooklyn Rep. Stephen J. Solarz had campaigned hard for either the number-two State Department position or the U.N. ambassadorship.

Many State Department professionals had hoped for the nomination of U.S. Ambassador to India Thomas Pickering to the State Department deputy secretary position. Clinton also was said to have considered him for director of the CIA. Pickering's experiences not only as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. but also as U.S. ambassador to Jordan, El Salvador and Israel have established him as a seasoned on-the-spot diplomat and a convincing interlocutor with members of Congress. He may yet be selected as Clinton's special representative to the Middle East peace talks. That would be welcomed by Arab moderates and the Israeli peace camp alike.

Wharton, namesake son of the first Black diplomat to attain the top two ranks of the career foreign service, has done some precedent-breaking of his own. At Michigan State University he became the first African-American president of a major university with a predominantly white student enrollment. He also served as a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, chancellor of the State University of New York from 1978 to 1987, and as chief executive of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and College Retirement Equities Fund, a major private pension system.

Another Clinton appointment of interest to Middle East watchers is that of Admiral William J. Crowe Jr. as chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Crowe was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under the Reagan and Bush administrations, and endorsed Clinton at a time in the presidential campaign when his candidacy was imperiled by charges that Clinton had dodged the drain during the Vietnam War. Crowe, 67, was commander of the U.S. Navy's standing Middle East Task Force in the Persian/Arabian Gulf in 1976 and 1977 and was commander-in-chief of NATO forces in southern Europe from 1980 to 1983. He is honorary chairman of the newly formed American Bahraini Friendship Society.

Media criticism of the Clinton appointments centers on the obvious attempt to keep his campaign pledge to produce a cabinet that ''looks like America,'' with more attention paid to ethnic, gender and age balancing than to a political agenda.

Two Invitations from One Senator

Christopher was invited twice to the office of Democratic Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the only Orthodox Jewish senator, to hear such complaints. At a Jan. 6 meeting, representatives of hard-line Jewish organizations told him they feared his team would not be inclined to carry out Clinton's pro-Israel campaign promises. Participants in that meeting included President Lester Pollack of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, AIPAC Vice President Monte Friedkin, and AIPAC Political Director Elizabeth Schrayer.

At a Jan. 8 meeting in Lieberman's office, Christopher heard the same line in "neo-conservative'' guise. Among those telling him Clinton must make "promotion of democracy a central tenet of foreign policy" were AIPAC General Counsel David Ifshin (this time representing the Coalition for a Democratic Majority); Penn Kembel; Joshua Muravchik; Peter Rosenblatt; labor union leaders John Joyce (Bricklayers), Albert Shanker (American Federation of Teachers), and Adrian Karatnycky of the AFL-CIO staff; and former State Department human rights and arms negotiator Max Kempelman.

Noting that "conservative Democrats and pro-Israel Jews" also "deserve representation in the administration," New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb wrote on Jan. 8 that since "some job candidates from these groups can't work with anyone who disagrees with them. . .Mr. Clinton has to exercise great care not to mortgage his policies to their rigid views." Warning that "self-appointed arbiters of who loves Israel" are targeting Christopher and Lake because they "served Jimmy Carter," Gelb said "Clinton seems poised to reward the purveyors of this anti-Carter guilt-by-association garbage by naming ideologues of their choice to his team."

Two candidates being pushed hard by the pro-Israel establishment, according to Friedman, are Richard Schifter, Reagan administration assistant secretary of state for human rights, and Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's domestic policy adviser. Since leaving government, both have been virtually full-time right-or-wrong apologists for Israel, even during the Likud era.

Middle East watchers note that Donna Shalala, whose father was Lebanese, was appointed secretary of Health and Human Services. The former University of Wisconsin president has not been active in Middle East affairs. She is more closely identified with ''political correctness" than any other Clinton cabinet appointee.

Other Jewish nominees include Zoe Baird, who may face confirmation problems, as attorney general; Harvard Prof. Robert B. Reich, a fellow Rhodes scholar and longtime economic adviser to Clinton, as secretary of labor; and Mickey Kantor as U.S. trade representative.

Although a partner in Manatt, Phelps, Phillips and Kantor says Mickey Kantor personally has done little or no work for the Los Angeles firm's foreign clients, it very likely will be necessary for the new U.S. trade representative to rescue himself from one of the first trade issues facing the Clinton administration in March.

That is a review of whether Japan has met a target of buying 20 percent of its semiconductor chips from foreign companies.

NEC, represented in the U.S. by Kantor's firm, is a major Japanese manufacturer of computers. Ironically, many of the policies espoused by AIPAC, on whose board Kantor serves, are viewed very skeptically by U.S. manufacturers and exporters, who fear they could result not only in a continuation of the Arab boycott against Israel, which particularly hurts U.S. firms competing with Japanese and European companies for Middle East trade, but eventually in economic retaliation targeted directly at the United States.

Kantor makes it clear that it was he who involved fellow Los Angeles attorney Christopher in the Clinton campaign. Also working in Kantor's favor is his closeness to Clinton resulting from the campaign, and to Hillary Clinton with whom he served on the board of the Legal Services Corporation during the Carter administration. In accepting Clinton's nomination on Dec. 24, Kantor choked up as he described how his family "has been blessed by your and Hillary's friendship for almost 14 years."

Christopher, 67, who first joined the law firm of O'Melvey & Myers in 1950, headed its management committee after returning to Los Angeles following the defeat of Carter's re-election bid. Under Christopher's direction, the firm grew to encompass 550 lawyers and, like Kantor's smaller firm, has a large number of foreign company clients.

In a column about the Clinton foreign policy team, Gelb described Christopher as "a cautious liberal. . . exceedingly careful, tidy, disciplined, precise—no mistakes." By contrast, Gelb wrote, Lake is "an eclectic pushing forward the new world order he helped sketch in Mr. Clinton's campaign speeches."

Aspin, described by Gelb as "a conservative activist," will probably clash early with armed forces chief of staff Gen. Colin Powell. Aspin has criticized Powell's "all or nothing" approach to the use of armed force. Aspin also has called specifically for the use of U.S. airpower to halt Serbian aggression in Bosnia, a policy Powell has opposed, but one that Clinton is likely to support.

Aspin supports reductions of $68 billion more over the next five years from the Pentagon budget than those planned by the Bush administration. Similarly, as secretary of defense, Aspin may have to do some rethinking of his strong support as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee for high levels of military aid to Israel. Continuing aid at these levels now will involve cuts in Pentagon programs for which Aspin will be responsible.

The Clinton foreign policy team of Christopher, Albright, Lake and Berger, who demonstrated their ability to work harmoniously together throughout the campaign, faces some immediate hard choices affecting U.S. relations with Middle Eastern allies. Policy recommendations they prepared for candidate Clinton called for a more active U.S. policy in Bosnia and U.S. support of a U.N. rescue mission to Somalia. They also called for more support for Boris Yeltsin in Russia, use of trade sanctions to force China to reduce its human rights violations, and tougher trade negotiations with Japan.

"Distinguishing" Policies

They also called for a more sympathetic U.S. policy toward Israel. They know, however, that returning to the Reagan-era blatantly pro-Israel tilt in the Middle East would obviate Bush administration gains there, and very likely throw the area, and its relations with the United States, into chaos. Speaking off-the-record to reporters, Clinton aides say policies enunciated during the campaign were only to "distinguish" Clinton from Bush.

If so, the Clinton foreign policy appointees may be just the team to "conceptualize" an activist policy building upon the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War and the accomplishments of previous administrations. On the other hand, exposure of the Steiner tape may end up affecting the appearance but not the substance of Clinton's Middle East policy.

He knows that his greatest problem as president will be to avoid the perception that he is paying back the special interests he relied upon to fund and staff his campaign. Just as he visibly distanced himself from Jesse Jackson during his campaign, but wooed Black voters directly, he may only be putting some visible space between himself and the AIPAC leaders who are claiming public credit for 60 percent of his campaign funding.

That does not preclude Clinton from working through more moderate and dovish American Jews, however. Or he may deal directly with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to give Israel whatever it wants, and thus woo mainstream U.S. Jewish journalists, donors and voters.

If the latter is Clinton's strategy, Warren Christopher may find he is just a hired hand. His job would be to satisfy a constituency that boasts it played the key role in the early funding and staffing of Clinton's come-from-behind presidential campaign, and that it can do the same thing again, for Clinton or for a rival, in 1996.