Seth P. Tillman

When Seth Tillman was helping Senator William Fulbright put together a speech on the Middle East back in the summer of 1970, it never occurred to either of them that the delivery of the speech would provoke angry and indignant reactions from Israel and the Israeli lobby in the United States.

Essentially, the speech proposed that the United States provide formal guarantees of Israel's borders, on the condition that Israel withdraw from the territories it captured during the 1967 war.

"We thought it was a fair and reasonable proposal," recalls Dr. Tillman, who was then a professional staff member of the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired by Senator Fulbright. "It really shook us when the Israeli Ambassador actually described it as 'vicious.' It shows how little we knew about the area in those days!"

Both the Senator, now in private law practice, and Dr. Tillman have learned a great deal about the Middle East and its political passions in the days since. In the case of Dr. Tillman, who is now Research Professor of Diplomacy at Georgetown and has become a recognized expert on the region, the speech marked a turning point in his career. His curiosity was so piqued by the unexpected vehemence of the reactions that he arranged to take his first trip to the Middle East. The trip, which included visits to Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and the West Bank, got him hooked on Middle East affairs for good.

A New Perspective

"For the first time," he says, "I realized how hung up the people of the area were on issues which drew only marginal attention in the United States. I could hardly believe it, when Tel Aviv University students beat up on me for several hours, complaining because they felt our Senate committee was doing so little to help Jews emigrate from the Soviet Union. I was spending 85 to 90 percent of my time on Vietnam in those days, and I was hardly even aware of the Jewish emigration problem."

Dr. Tillman quickly began making up for lost time in educating himself on the Middle East. He read voluminously and traveled at every opportunity—not only making repeated visits to the "confrontation" countries, but touring the Gulf states as well. "I kept asking the committee to let me go to the area," he says. One year he even combined a business trip out there with his honeymoon—visiting Egypt, Libya and Greece with his bride, Baldwin Reid, before heading out to some other countries on his own.

In 1973, Dr. Tillman was appointed staff director of the subcommittee on the Middle East. The following year his friend and mentor, Senator Fulbright, lost his bid for re-election. Dr. Tillman had two more "good years" on the committee, he says, and then under an emerging new leadership found himself increasingly unable to make an effective contribution. Since he had already been on the Senate staff for 16 years"—it was really quite enough," he says—he decided it was time to move on.

His first move was to the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think-tank, as a resident fellow—and he spent most of the next two years writing The U. S. in theMiddle East: Interests and Obstacles, which received excellent reviews when it was published earlier this year.

In 1981, Dr. Tillman joined the Georgetown faculty. Among the courses which he teaches is one called, appropriately enough, "The U.S. in the Middle East"—and he takes ironic amusement in the fact that when he was a student himself he "never took a single course on a Middle East subject."

Academic on the Hill

He came to Georgetown with a solid academic background, however. "While on the Senate staff I always considered myself an academic," he says, "but an academic who was doing something else." Before joining the Foreign Relations Committee he had spent four years teaching political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and during most of his time on the Hill had lectured regularly, on European diplomacy, at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has four degrees: a B.A. in history and political science and an M.A. in social studies and education from Syracuse University; as well as another M.A. and a Ph.D.—both in international relations—from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His doctoral dissertation became a book—Anglo-American Relations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

The experience Dr. Tillman gained on the Hill beginning in 1961 equipped him better than most academics to assess what Congress can and cannot do. In his view, Congress is unlikely to take initiatives that would significantly change its present approach to Middle East problems, but responds to strong presidential leadership.

And just what should the strong president's policy be? "The U.S. should cease to be a mediator and become an arbitrator," he says. "The real question is not whether a settlement is to be imposed, but who is going to impose it. Right now, Israel is imposing it, and we have given Israel the means to do so. I'd rather see the U.S. impose it, on the basis of U.S. interests."