Robert D. Joseph

On May 1, 1982, the National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA), at its annual convention, elected a Pittsburgh industrialist, Robert Joseph, 47, to fill the traditionally part-time office of president of NAAA. The convention delegates must have known something.

Only five weeks later, Israel invaded Lebanon, and NAAA was faced with the greatest challenge in the ten years of its existence. What it needed was a dynamic leader who could work full-time at the job of organizing and coordinating a major lobbying effort with Congress and the Administration. Fortunately, it had just elected one.

Mr. Joseph turned out to be not only a hard-driving bundle of energy but was also in a position from the beginning of the crisis to give NAAA one hundred percent of his working time. "What I've done essentially is to take a year off from my business," Mr. Joseph told The Washington Report recently. "At one of my plants"—he owns two factories in Pennsylvania which produce industrial machinery—"they have a new name for me now. They call me stranger."

Taking Charge Fast

When the Lebanon crisis erupted, Mr. Joseph was on a fact-finding tour of the Middle East—and immediately went winging back to Washington to take charge of NAAA's response: sending letters to the President and other Administration officials urging a cut-off of aid to Israel; seeking Congressional investigative hearings on possible Israeli violations of the Arms Export Control Act; suggesting the wording for a "sense of Congress" resolution that would call for the withdrawal of Israeli troops. But this was just the immediate response: Mr. Joseph then went on to beef up NAAA's staff, lead a lobbying campaign the likes of which NAAA had not as yet seen, and create NAAA's first source of self-financing.

"I felt we had reached a crossroads," Mr. Joseph says. "Either we would continue to be a group of people who were dedicated but only partially effective—with chronic financial problems—or, by doing the right things, we could become a powerful political voice on the political scene." His answer to at least part of the financing problem was to create a subsidiary, the Middle East Policy and Research Corporation, which was opened formally last September to sell data and analysis on the Middle East to corporate and individual clients-and which, he says, is already generating additional financial resources for NAAA.

The new resources have been of help in nearly doubling the size of NAAA's staff, and in completely restructuring it. This has included recruiting an experienced lobbyist to head NAAA's operations on Capitol Hill, and, as Mr. Joseph put it, "restructuring the job of our executive director, David Sadd, who was working much, much too hard by doing what amounted to four different jobs."

With its new impetus, NAAA moved quickly after the invasion, and on a larger scale than in the past: within just a few weeks it had sent out 100,000 pieces of mail of various kinds, from petitions to requests for donations. "We also moved quickly after the Beirut massacre," Mr. Joseph says, "getting material into the office of every single U.S. Congressman in less than four days." NAAA has also begun using more sophisticated techniques. It has established a new Congressional District Coordinator Network, which aims to create a grass roots committee within every single Congressional district in the country. It hired one of the U.S.'s biggest and best public relations firms to launch a media blitz of billboard, radio and newspaper advertising in four selected American cities as a test to help determine the most effective advertising mediums and the most receptive ethnic and income groups. In addition, it has made extensive use of a lobbying committee composed of part-time volunteers, whom it has trained in the techniques of approaching and dealing with Congressmen.

Background in Lobbying

Mr. Joseph was a long way from being a neophyte in lobbying activities when he took over his present job. A first-generation American of Lebanese parentage, he began to absorb himself in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict for the first time a decade ago. "I couldn't sleep after I found out what had been done to the Palestinians," he says, "and I felt even worse after I discovered the extent to which the U.S. was responsible." Among his early successes as a lobbyist was a campaign to obtain the dismissal of a pro-Israel call-in-show host on a Pittsburgh radio station who had been screening his calls to weed out pro-Arab commentators. He also founded two organizations in western Pennsylvania "devoted to peace and justice in the Middle East." In 1973, one of them, the West Pennsylvania Association of Arab Americans, became a chapter of NAAA, of which Mr. Joseph has been a board member for half a dozen years.

Mr. Joseph holds a B.S. in engineering from Carnegie Institute of Technology and a masters in business administration from Duquesne University.