Power Game (41 page)

The pro-Israeli coalition, a narrow majority of fifty-four, was wobbly. One by one, senators were stolen away; the coalition lacked strong popular underpinnings in many states. Utah’s Orrin Hatch used the assassination of Anwar Sadat to assert the need for helping other moderate Arab states. Other senators, especially freshmen Republicans, were cleverly peeled away by White House strategists Jim Baker and his deputy, Richard Darman. They crafted a letter offering Reagan’s assurances that AWACS planes would be used only by American and Saudi personnel—not by other Arabs; that AWACS intelligence could not be shared with any other nation unless Washington approved; and that AWACS would be protected against falling into hostile hands. For wavering senators, said Jim Baker, “the letter gave ’em a legitimate out, an excuse” to go along with the deal.

Reagan personally talked with forty-four senators; quite a few succumbed, among them Iowa Republican Roger Jepsen. His loss was a hard blow to AIPAC because Jepsen had been in the core of original AWACS foes. Jepsen, racked by conflicting pressures, literally broke
down crying as he told other Republicans that “highly classified” White House information and his desire not to hurt Reagan’s prestige had switched his vote. That broke loose others. Reagan ultimately prevailed 52–48, and the AWACS sale to Saudi Arabia went through.

The underlying message to AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby was that its ties to many senators were too weak.

And so begins the “after” half of the story: modernization and reshaping of AIPAC. As if there were some Newtonian law of politics, the AWACS triumph triggered a powerful reaction that came back to haunt Reagan four years later.

AIPAC had suffered a severe jolt. It had nearly stopped the president, but ultimately it had failed. And failure galvanized it into a more national strategy, targeted at the grass roots. For years AIPAC had ridden on an outspoken, committed, activist constituency based mainly in the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest. That constituency had always given it commanding strength in the House. But AIPAC was now compelled to go after the more conservative Senate in new ways, in order to marshal unassailable majorities in Reagan’s second term.

In 1985, for example, after President Reagan had personally promised modern arms to King Hussein as inducement to negotiate with Israel, AIPAC and its allies lined up seventy-four senators to cosponsor a resolution to block a $1.5 billion arms package to Jordan. The number of Senators was critical: a jump of twenty senators above the high point against AWACS in 1981. The White House could not peel off a few wavering senators and win. By early 1986, Reagan had to renege on his promise to Hussein; he withdrew the Jordanian arms package without a vote, demonstrating AIPAC’s power to deter presidential initiatives. “The best vote is a vote avoided,” Doug Bloomfield, AIPAC’s legislative director, commented to me. “If you can win and avoid a confrontation, everyone is better off. In a political community, you have to live for another day, so it doesn’t pay to rub anybody’s nose in defeat.”
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Again in 1985, after the Saudis had submitted a new $3 billion arms request, President Reagan promised King Fahd more F-15 fighter aircraft. The congressional climate was so hostile that Reagan had to withdraw the offer; instead, the Saudis spent their billions on British jets. Gradually, the administration whittled down the Saudi shopping list, dropping M-1 tanks and Black Hawk helicopters, looking for a package that Congress—and AIPAC—would accept.

Finally, on February 28, 1986, Secretary of State George Shultz called in Tom Dine, AIPAC’s executive director, to find out what the
administration could get through Congress. Normally, in the Jewish community’s lobbying, AIPAC lobbies Congress, while the executive branch is handled by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Shultz’s meeting with Dine was a measure of AIPAC’s increased clout.

Over the years, AIPAC had developed from a pro-Israel public affairs forum in the 1950s to a fifty-five-thousand-member lobby to which scores of senators and congressmen turn for authoritative guidance. AIPAC is an American lobby, not a registered foreign agent, but it has close ties with the Israeli government. Its political tally sheets and strategy reports wind up in the Israeli prime minister’s office, I was told. Some Israeli journalists jokingly refer to AIPAC as “our embassy.” And Tom Dine, a Kennedy Democrat with ten years of staff experience in Congress, is not above pulling a card from his wallet to show that he carries the Israeli prime minister’s twenty-four-hour phone number. Other American Jewish lobbyists, such as Dave Brody of B’nai B’rith and Hyman Bookbinder of the American Jewish Committee, have proclaimed their independence from AIPAC. But many Jewish political activists get their cues from AIPAC.

In October 1985, for example, Senator Howard Metzenbaum, an Ohio Democrat and spokesman for a pro-Israel coalition, was negotiating with Majority Leader Robert Dole on terms of a legislative compromise postponing the Jordan arms sale. At times, Metzenbaum would shuttle down the hall to a Capitol hideaway to talk to Tom Dine. Republican Senate staffers intimately involved told me AIPAC was literally writing the resolution for Metzenbaum. AIPAC officials confirmed that Metzenbaum wanted their “sign-off” before striking a deal with Dole. Then, the AIPAC-approved bargain was circulated to other key senators.

So in February 1986, Shultz was acknowledging AIPAC’s central role when he invited Dine to discuss the Saudi arms deal, which AIPAC was then vigorously opposing. For a couple of hours the two men sat by a roaring fire in Shultz’s spacious office on the seventh floor of the State Department.

As Shultz talked, his own change of heart became clear to Dine. When Shultz had entered the administration in 1982, the Israelis feared he would be pro-Arab because he had been president of the Bechtel Corporation, a firm with big construction projects in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, Shultz drafted a framework for Middle East peace in September 1982 that angered Prime Minister Begin because it called for Palestinian autonomy and West Bank affiliation with Jordan. But
Shultz had become disillusioned with the Arabs after seeing Lebanon—under Syrian pressure—wriggle out of the Lebanon-Israel agreement that Shultz had mediated in May 1983. Since then, Shultz had worked to increase aid to Israel, and he had come to bank on the Israeli relationship—so much so that he told Dine he wanted to insulate American-Israeli relations from political ups and downs.

But on that February afternoon, Shultz also wanted to protect American influence with moderate Arabs. He argued that the Saudi arms deal was necessary. He wanted to send a message that would “reverberate” in Tehran. Moreover, Shultz reasoned, President Reagan had been snubbed by Congress on the Jordanian arms package and badly needed some show of support to bolster his standing in the Middle East. Shultz proposed to sell the Saudis a modest $354 million package of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, Harpoon naval missiles, and Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Although Dine told me that Shultz did not offer any direct quid pro quo, a deal seemed implicit. Shultz said that if this package passed, there would not be any more important arms sales to the Saudis in 1986.
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Dine was interested, but he cautioned Shultz that to get it through Congress, “You’re going to have to eliminate the Stingers.” They were an explosive item because of Israeli and American congressional fears that Saudi Stingers would get into the hands of Arab terrorists and be used against American airlines. Shultz did not heed the advice.

Dine went off to consult important senators and Jewish leaders such as Bob Asher, the Chicago businessman who is AIPAC’s president, and Kenneth Bialkin, then president of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. A senior AIPAC official told me that Shimon Peres, the Israeli Prime Minister, signaled through private channels that he did not oppose a modest Saudi arms package. This gave AIPAC a chance to have things both ways. Its opposition to the Saudi arms package was already on record; AIPAC could now afford to accommodate Shultz. On March 20, Dine called on Shultz. “I’ve got good news for you,” he said. “We won’t fight the Saudi missile deal.”

But momentum against the deal had developed beyond AIPAC’s control. Prominent pro-Israel politicians such as Senator Alan Cranston and Representative Mel Levine, both California Democrats, kept Congress whipped up against the deal. The House trounced the missile package, and the Senate voted 73–22 against it. Both votes occurred while President Reagan was away in Tokyo. When Reagan came home, he vetoed the resolution of disapproval. It took his all-out effort to get
his veto sustained in the Senate—
but only after
he dropped the eight hundred Stinger missiles. The final package was worth about $250 million, less than one tenth of the original Saudi request.

This outcome was a measure of how dramatically the climate had shifted since the 1981 AWACS deal. It pointed up stunning changes in the Middle East. In the intervening five years, Congress had become deeply disillusioned with the peace process. With the TWA airliner hijacking, the
Achille Lauro
hijacking, and European airport bombings, Congress and the country were obsessed with Arab terrorism. Some Senators and House members put blame on Saudi Arabia, for they suspected the Saudis of bankrolling Palestinian and Syrian-backed terrorism. Moreover, the Saudi “oil weapon” had lost its sting with the steep drop in oil prices from thirty-six dollars a barrel in 1981 to fifteen dollars a barrel in 1986. Finally, Prime Minister Shimon Peres was a much smoother salesman for Israel than Menachem Begin had been.

AIPAC Organizing the Sunbelt

But AIPAC was not merely riding a favorable tide; it had undergone a transformation. It was not only capable of blocking major Arab arms deals, but it had promoted a quantum jump in aid to the ailing Israeli economy, from $2.1 billion in 1980, mostly loans, to $3.8 billion in 1986, all outright grants.

AIPAC was not omnipotent, of course. In early 1986, for example, its leaders contemplated trying to block actual delivery of the AWACS planes approved in 1981; they found that politically impossible. But AIPAC’s increased political leverage was undeniable. It had adapted to the new power game: to the dispersal of power in Congress, to the increasing importance of grass-roots lobbying, to the conservative mood of the country, and to six years of Republican control of the Senate. Those changes, coupled with migration of voters from the Snowbelt to the Sunbelt, dictated a new, nationally oriented AIPAC strategy. The old cozy relationships no longer sufficed.

“In the old days,” Tom Dine recalled, “Sy Kenen [who founded AIPAC] used to work with a couple of recognized leaders—Hubert Humphrey on the Democratic side and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania on the Republican side. At the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War [in 1967], we drafted a resolution for Sy to take to Humphrey and Scott, and that’s all he had to do. You couldn’t do that today. You initiate an idea. You go to somebody to hopefully persuade them of it. I don’t care if he’s got a title, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, minority leader, majority leader, he has to sell it to everybody else. There are now 535 potential secretaries of State.”
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That power dispersion has forced AIPAC to spread its power base. For two decades, it banked on the political and financial muscle of large Jewish communities in the big states: New York, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Florida, New Jersey, Massachusetts. What the 1981 AWACS vote drove home was the weakness of the pro-Israel lobby in twenty-five states of the Southeast, Southwest, Prairie, and Rocky Mountain regions, especially among conservative Republicans.

“Where were we outlobbied by the administration in ’81, and why?” Dine asked aloud, his brown eyes intent. “We were thin. You can’t win with just the big-state senators. We have worked on the premise that votes are won or lost at the grass roots. We have to go not where the
Jews
are, but where the
votes
are.”

At first glance, Dine seems an odd choice to revamp a traditionally Democratic lobby in a conservative Republican era. He is a tall foreign-policy intellectual in his mid-forties who would be at home teaching political science. All his political mentors were liberal Democrats. As a scared twenty-six-year-old, he was the congressional liaison for the Peace Corps in the Johnson administration, then went to India as special assistant to Ambassador Chester Bowles. He returned in 1969 to work five years for Senator Frank Church, then under Senator Edmund Muskie on the budget committee, and finally as a defense issues specialist for Ted Kennedy’s abortive 1980 presidential campaign. After the 1981 AWACS defeat, some conservative Senate Republicans urged AIPAC board members to put a Republican superior over Dine and more Republicans on AIPAC’s board. The board was broadened, but Dine was kept in charge.

What fit Dine for the task of reorienting AIPAC’s strategy was his new creed of lobbying and his instinct for grass-roots work. Two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines had given Dine a zest for community action. That was his prescription for the pro-Israel lobby: Spread the power base. Go to the grass roots. Get involved in the political process.

Some Jewish migration to the Sunbelt helped. As Doug Bloomfield, AIPAC’s legislative director, put it, Jewish leaders feared that “as Jews go from the Rust Belt to the Sunbelt, they would leave their Jewishness in New York because it was easy to be a Jew there.” Instead, Bloomfield said AIPAC found that under-forty “jumpies” (Jewish upwardly mobile professionals) “are taking their political activism with them into the Sunbelt. I found in Sarasota, Florida, there were two Jewish communities.
There’s one over fifty, and they have a synagogue there and a Jewish community. Along comes the under-forty generation. They’re not intimidated. They’re a much more self-confident generation. They start Jewish PACs and community-relations councils and day schools and country clubs. There’s no fear that, Gosh, if people know I’m Jewish, it’s going to hurt business, or I won’t get a job.”
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