Harold H. Saunders

Here's a non-trivia question: how many Americans have ever spent 20 years in Washington while serving throughout that time in the top echelons of those who make policy for the Middle East? Most Washington-watchers would not have to scratch their heads for very long before coming up with the right answer: just one, and his name is Hal Saunders.

Mr. Saunders, who is now a Senior Fellow at Washington's American Enterprise Institute (AEI), carried out his unprecedented stint under five presidents, from the time he joined the National Security Council in 1961 up to his resignation from the State Department as President Carter's term came to an end in January, 1981.

Yet he will demur politely but firmly if anyone should call him an expert on the Arab world. "No way," he says. "My background has given me some expertise on U.S. relationships with Arab and other Middle East countries, but that's a different thing." Asked what he would do if he were asked to give a speech on, say, tribal factionalism in Yemen, he laughs and says, "I'd tell them to call Hermann Eilts!"—a former top-ranking diplomat and a recognized "Arabist" of the first rank.

Decades of Crisis

When it comes to the U.S. policy connection, however, it would be hard to find anyone in or out of government who knows more about what the U.S. faced during the crisis-ridden 60s and 70s. Listing his job titles only gives you a whiff of what he must know: senior staff member of the National Security Council, responsible for the Near East, South Asia and North Africa; Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East and North Africa; Director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs.

What the titles don't spell out are such things as these: Mr. Saunders played a central role in formulating U.S. policy during the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, the 1973-74 oil embargo, the Lebanese civil war, and the Iranian revolution; he was a key member of the small negotiating team which helped produce the Camp David accords and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty; he headed the so-called Iranian Working Group during the hostage crisis, participating in the negotiations that led to the hostages release; he traveled with Presidents Nixon and Carter during their visits to the Middle East; and accompanied Secretary Kissinger during all of his famous "shuttles."

Things are obviously less frenetic for Mr. Saunders now that he is in the shelter of a Washington think-tank. But he is still doggedly pursuing the study of U.S. policy towards Middle East affairs—this time focusing not so much on the present as on the challenges to U.S. interests during the years ahead. Out of his research has already come a small book—"The Middle East Problem in the 1980s"—which is a forward look not just at the Arab-Israeli problem but at the "full range of U.S. interests," as he puts it. He is also working on what he expects will be a large book on presidential policies towards the "Arab-Israeli-Palestinian" conflict.

Mr. Saunders says he enjoys what he is doing under his new hat and that one of the reasons is that "it's an opportunity for personal growth." Amid his labors at the institute he still allots himself time to make speeches, write articles, appear on TV panel shows and testify before Congress. And he still keeps an observant eye on what is happening now.

Common Purpose Lacking

Among the urgent problems which he believes need to be addressed is what he refers to as the "restoration of the sense of common purpose" in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. "At one time," he says, "both Israel and the U.S. agreed that a peace should be negotiated, not imposed. We agreed that U.N. Resolution 242 meant peace in return for withdrawal from territory. But the Israelis are not working from this premise today." In the view of Mr. Saunders, the Camp David framework is still the best one for implementing the principles of 242—"even if we call it something else."

Recently, Mr. Saunders became a director of the Institute for East-West Security, a newly-established body which brings together scholars from the West and the Soviet bloc to discuss the definitions of security. He has also become involved in other scholarly conferences on U.S.-Soviet relations in areas of world conflict—which include, of course, the Middle East.

These and his other activities at AEI have a more academic flavor than what he was doing while in government—but Mr. Saunders is by no means a stranger to academia. After getting a B.A. in English from Princeton in 1952, along with admission to Phi Beta Kappa, he went on to take a Ph.D. from Yale, for which he wrote a dissertation on U.S. intellectual history. For six years, while already in government service, he lectured in U.S. history and U.S. diplomatic history at George Washington University.

Before joining NSC, Mr. Saunders spent three years at the CIA and was a first lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. He holds the highest Presidential and State Department awards given for federal service by civilians. He is a widower with two children.