George Ball's Mideast Views Were Muffled by U.S. Media

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Mr Ball ... also continued to write articles and books, occasionally stirring controversy with his views on Israel, the Middle East and other subjects."

—New York Times obituary, May 28, 1994

Former Deputy Secretary of State George Ball, who once remarked that "I've become a champion of lost causes," had a disconcerting habit of being right. This longtime adviser to Democratic presidents, who died of abdominal cancer on May 26, one day after checking himself into a New York City hospital for tests, had another habit that was even more disconcerting to the presidents he served. When he believed they were wrong, he told them so.

When he warned President John F. Kennedy in November 1961 that if he committed U.S. troops to Vietnam, "within five years we'll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them," the young president responded: "You're just crazier than hell. That isn't going to happen."

But it did, and as Kennedy's successor took the U.S. deeper into the quagmire, Ball became known as President Lyndon Johnson's "devil's advocate" on Vietnam. His opposition prompted Ball to resign in 1966, but he left on good terms with Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, an advocate of the Vietnam war.

This was because Ball kept his opposition within government channels, and did not speak out publicly so long as Democrats were in power. In fact, he later wrote, he found it "stupid and unattractive" that the ever-increasing numbers of American anti-war protesters engaged in "self-flagellation, declaring in sanctimonious tones that American policy is thoroughly in the wrong and that we as a nation are as brutal and viciously ambitious as the other side."

Ball's objection to U.S. involvement in an Asian war was based on his own vision of the United States, a unified Europe and the Soviet Union finally reaching a rapprochement that would bring their extraordinarily wasteful military competition to a halt. That, Ball believed, would set in motion a new era of cooperation among northern, industrialized countries to help the poorer nations, ultimately establishing an era of peace and prosperity throughout the world.

Ball had not reached these conclusions, and his role as second man in the State Department during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, from an ivory tower. Born in Iowa in 1909 and raised and educated in Illinois, he first went to Washington, DC in the early days of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. He returned to Chicago in 1935 to join a tax law firm, one of whose partners was Adlai E. Stevenson.

During World War II, Stevenson went to Washington and Ball followed him, becoming a lawyer with the Lend-Lease administration in 1942 and serving in London in 1944 and 1945 as director of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. In Europe, he met and became a disciple of Jean Monnet, the French statesman who later became known as "the architect of European Unity."

When Ball returned to Washington, DC after World War II he founded a law firm which represented the European Common Market and the European Coal and Steel Community. When Stevenson, by then governor of Illinois, twice ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and again in 1956, Ball was chief of Democratic volunteers in both campaigns. He also served in the successful Kennedy campaign in 1960, which led to his appointment first as number three and then as number two in the State Department.

When he left the State Department, he joined the Lehman Brothers investment banking firm, from which he generally was available to take trouble-shooting assignments for Democratic presidents. He served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1968 to 1969 during the final months of the Johnson administration. Eight years later he served President Jimmy Carter in several short-term advisory positions, including drafting a longrange U.S. policy for the Arab/Persian Gulf. Outspoken as ever, Ball criticized unlimited U.S. arms sales to the Shah of Iran and called instead for formation of a broad coalition government in that increasingly troubled country.

After each period of government service, George Ball would return to Lehman Brothers, from which he continued to write cogent articles on foreign affairs. Although he frequently took original or unpopular positions, he could not be ignored because, as time passed, history was proving not merely right, but invariably right.

Extraordinary Persuasiveness

I became aware of the extraordinary persuasiveness of his writing in 1979 during the hysteria that swept the United States after armed student supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini invaded the American Embassy in Tehran for the second time. This time they refused to leave, but instead held hostage the entire staff, plus Americans who happened into the Embassy that day. Americans who had rushed to Iran's Foreign Ministry that day to complain were held hostage there by Iranian government officials.

Many Americans called for military intervention in Tehran, where the scene was increasingly chaotic, with Khomeini supporters gradually edging out of power all other elements in the broad popular coalition that had forced the shah to flee the country. George Ball, undoubtedly with the help of his historian son, Douglas, wrote a scathing yet calming article in The New York Times. It described an incident two and a half millennia earlier when Greeks killed emissaries from the Persian emperor.

Urged by his courtiers to retaliate against some Greeks who happened to be within his boundaries, the Persian emperor instead freed them, declaring that barbarians seized and murdered hostages, but Persians did not. Ball's point was that Muslim Iran had fallen into the hands of barbarians whose conduct was not condoned by either Islamic law or Persian traditions. Therefore it was senseless to make war on a people who would eventually get their own house in order. He helped Americans regain their perspective and generally support the patience that extracted the American hostages alive, and left Iran isolated in world opinion.

With his retirement in 1982 from Lehman Brothers, where he had become senior managing director, George Ball had more time to write and speak out on Middle East matters, including the extraordinary cost to U.S. interests in the Middle East and the world of what he described as America's "passionate attachment" to Israel. The phrase was taken from George Washington's warning in his farewell address in 1796 against such emotional attachments between any group of Americans and any foreign power.

At that time, because French support for the American revolution against Britain had made them so popular, French diplomats were boasting that they had more power in the United States than the American government itself. The dénouement, Ball pointed out, was that French-backed candidates lost disastrously in the U.S. elections of 1798, and U.S.-French relations rapidly degenerated into a state of undeclared war.

Ball's Mideast views were anathema to Israel's powerful U.S. lobby, and its many allies in the mainstream U.S. media. They attracted a great deal of support, however, among Arab Americans, and the so-called "Arabists" among serving and retired U.S. foreign affairs specialists, including the writer. They made pilgrimages to his charming New Jersey retirement home and attached office only blocks from the Princeton University campus. All were received courteously, but cautiously. Although Ball accepted many speaking engagements to discuss his Middle East views, and continued to write articles commissioned by the media (usually on topics not directly related to the Middle East), he did not accept formal advisory and policy-making positions with advocacy organizations.

His explanation was simple. He and his son were engaged in writing a book on the entire U.S.-Israeli relationship and its unfortunate consequences for U.S. policy. Diversions would only postpone work on the book, which his visitors desperately wanted to see completed.

I sensed, however, that there was another aspect to his independence. He was cognizant of and freely discussed the obstacles faced by advocates of evenhanded U.S. policies in the Middle East in airing their views in the mainstream U.S. media. But in his heart he believed that if he avoided premature identification with advocacy groups, his completed book would succeed, where others had not, in breaching the wall of media silence surrounding the disastrous consequences of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Fearful Consequences

So certain was he that he was given to worrying, in the company of those of us who shared his views, of the consequences to American Jews when the American public finally learned the true moral, geopolitical and financial cost of the "passionate attachment' 'to the Jewish state over the past two generations. Instead of merely cutting the financial ties that have made Israeli excesses possible, and belatedly seeking to compensate the Palestinians for the unspeakable injustices they have suffered, he feared Americans would experience a wave of anti-Semitism comparable to that manifested in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, and which remains, barely visible but hardly abated there, half a century later

I worried that the book would never be completed. On my arrival for a visit to his home, he was preparing introductory remarks for his role as moderator at a Mideast-related seminar, and he had accepted that morning a request from The New York Times for an "op-ed" piece on an unrelated subject by the end of the day. His secretary and his son and collaborator, Douglas, were available to help with those and other projects, but George Ball personally wrote all drafts published under his name. When, I wondered, did he and his son find time to work on the book?

Clearly, he worried about this too. After Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, he called to say he was considering publishing as a separate book a long chapter on Lebanon from the uncompleted manuscript of The Passionate Attachment. He wanted to get that chapter into print in time to influence further U.S. decisions on Lebanon. He assumed, correctly, that since the American Educational Trust, with which I am affiliated, publishes a monthly magazine as well as books, we could produce the book in a matter of days or weeks rather than the months a commercial publisher would require. The chapter already was in Washington, he explained, because he had sent a copy to the late Merle Thorpe, a lawyer who had founded a non-profit group supporting Middle East peace efforts. Assuming that Thorpe was vetting the manuscript for potential libel or other legal problems, I called him to ask if he would send it to me when he had finished with it. After a pause, he said he would send it right away.

An hour or two later, however, he called back. He said he was surprised at my request because he had been planning to publish the manuscript as a book himself, but had not yet informed George Ball. I assured him that in that case there would be no need for me to read the manuscript, but we would be happy to help him market the book after it was published. The book came out a month or two later and we purchased and sold hundreds of copies. After the first heavy run of sales, however, Thorpe made a point of keeping us supplied with copies, many of them at no charge, so long as the book remained in print.

The whole affair left me awed at the smooth way in which George Ball had forced a quick decision from a publisher, without threatening or alienating anyone. It helped me understand how the Johnson administration's "devil's advocate" had been able to leave Vietnam hawk Dean Rusk's State Department without making enemies of those whose policies he could no longer support. For me it was a preview of the diplomatic skills which Ball planned to wield to get his book through or around the media roadblocks that had kept other critical examinations of America's relationship with Israel out of the public eye.

The Passionate Attachment was published in late 1992 by W.W. Norton & Company. By the spring of 1993, among major U.S. daily newspapers only The Washington Post had deigned to acknowledge its existence. To review it, however, the Post selected Walter Laqueur, an historian who has made a career of defending Israel and denigrating the Palestinians Laqueur's brief review was devoted to criticizing George and Douglas Ball, implying that the sheer number of their complaints about Israel somehow discredited the motives or the judgment of the authors. No hint of the nature of those complaints found its way into the review.

When a lengthy review by Ambassador Andrew Killgore appeared in the February 1993 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, George Ball ruefully noted that it was hardly a compliment to say it was the "best" review he had read, since up to then it was almost the only one. Nevertheless, the book remained the best seller for the magazine's affiliated book club for the following 12 months, illustrating how many tens of thousands of Americans would buy the book if the mainstream media stopped obscuring its existence.

There is no doubt that George Ball was stunned a this curtain of silence. He or his son have spoken at dozens of conventions, banquet and seminars sponsored by Arab-American, Muslim-American and Middle East peace groups. But there has been little press coverage, and virtually no mention of the book or its views in such coverage.

To date, therefore, too few Americans have read the Balls' shocking exposure of the racist nature of Israeli "democracy," the crippling influence of Israel's bigoted religious fundamentalists on every aspect of its national life, and the pervasive corruption in Israel that now has infected the Jewish state's vast international fund-raising apparatus.

Nor will most Americans read the Balls' prescient depiction of the hopelessness of the Israeli "colonialist adventure" to absorb the occupied territories, the tragic consequences of the cycle of Arab-Israeli terror and reprisal that only Israel, as the militarily stronger party, could have ended, and the alarming and ultimately self-defeating rise of the Israel lobby as perhaps the most prominent special interest group corrupting the Congress and American political life.

The Balls estimate that 85 percent of Israel's support in Congress is based upon fear and political expedience rather than conviction. That support, the Balls charge, provided $62 billion in direct U.S. taxpayer support for Israel between 1948 and 1991. Indirect costs, such as losses to the U.S. economy from the Arab oil embargo in 1973 and 1974 and Arab purchases shifted from U.S. to European and Japanese manufacturers for political reasons, added another $107 billion, the Balls believe. Less conservative estimates, they note, would surely add another $100 billion to the total.

The end result, they wrote, is that Israel has cost the U.S. $250 billion. That's $1,000 for every American living today, or $50,000 for every Jewish man, woman and child living in Israel today. Geopolitical losses such as additional deployments of U.S. military forces in areas where Israel, not the United States, is threatened, not to mention the outright theft by Israelis of U.S. strategic secrets and military technology and the sale of both to other countries, are additional but impossible to quantify costs to the U.S. of its "passionate attachment" to Israel.

At the time of George Ball's death, studied mainstream media indifference had kept these facts, and the very existence of the book recounting them, largely unknown to the American public. That curtain of silence has been maintained even in his obituaries. Though lengthy in most U.S. dailies, they have left the public in total ignorance of his Middle East views.

In a New York Times obituary filling 50 column inches, the only reference to Ball's Middle East views was the single sentence quoted at the beginning of this article. In its 29-inch obituary, The Washington Post made no mention of them at all, other than listing the titles of the two Middle East-related books among the five he had written. The Washington Times and Baltimore Sun, like many other newspapers across the U.S., published parts of an Associated Press obituary which included one relevant paragraph:

"Long a critic of Israeli policies toward its Arab neighbors, Mr. Ball co-authored The Passionate Attachment with his son, Douglas. The 1992 book argued that American support for Israel has been morally, politically and financially costly."

That's all that readers in the national capital, and most other parts of the United States, learned about his Middle East views on the day after this statesman's death was announced. However, the record demonstrates that George Ball's views are ignored at America's peril, because history inexorably proves him right. Instead of gloating over the suppression of his Middle East views, Israel's American apologists might better recall that George Ball was convinced that the American public, sooner or later, would learn the truth about the disastrous consequences of their country's "passionate attachment' ' in the Middle East.

He hoped that when that happens the U.S. will simply change its Mideast policies and move on. He feared, however, that if the change is too long delayed, the consequences for American civic comity, and its Jewish community, could be fearful indeed. In seeking to ameliorate the consequences by speeding the change, he was a far better defender of America's pro-Israel community than its own self-appointed leaders and media apologists, who worked so assiduously to muffle his views.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.