Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2019, pp. 21-24
From Our Archives
By Richard H. Curtiss
Editors’ Note: Among the many articles in the mainstream media on the late President George Herbert Walker Bush following his death on Nov. 30, 2018, we saw none on his challenging Israel and its American lobby by threatening to withhold U.S. loan guarantees (not even actual aid!) until Israel ceased its illegal settlement building in the occupied West Bank. For this important piece of history we turned to our own archives for articles by the Washington Report’s late executive editor, Richard H. Curtiss, written during Bush’s unsuccessful 1992 re-election campaign, when the media went all-out against President Bush, citing not his position on the Middle East but supposedly plummeting “consumer confidence” here at home.
FROM “A WAR ON FOUR FRONTS: THE BUSH-BAKER BATTLE FOR MIDDLE EAST PEACE
(Dec. 1991/Jan. 1992 Washington Report, p. 9)
“To get Israel’s Likud government to make any kind of meaningful concession in regard to the West Bank and Gaza, the Bush administration eventually is going to have to go to the mat with Shamir. The president and the secretary of state wouldn’t dream of admitting this, but they know it very well. A few months or even a few weeks ago, when the president was still riding high in the polls, a tussle with Israel’s American backers must not have seemed such a daunting prospect…But with a weak U.S. economy threatening to send his popularity plummeting, things are different.”
—David Kornformer, State Department director for Israel and Arab-Israeli affairs, in The Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 14, 1991
President George Bush’s decision last August not to wait for a second term to begin applying economic pressure on Israel to secure a Middle East land-for-peace settlement put him on a collision course with…the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel’s powerful U.S. lobby. The latter, while operating visibly within Congress and invisibly within previous administrations, has always enjoyed remarkably effective and widespread media support.…
An uncertain element was the American Jewish community, made up of individuals who, according to polls, are almost as fed up with [Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Shamir’s intransigence as is much of the Israeli electorate, but who time and again have come down publicly on the side of Israel’s American lobbyists when they have confronted any U.S. president and his congressional supporters.
This was the starting lineup when Bush threw down the gauntlet in early September by asking Israel to defer its request for $10 billion in loan guarantees, payable in annual $2 billion installments, in addition to Israel’s annual $3 billion to $5.6 billion in U.S. foreign aid grants. Israel said it needed the extra funding to absorb Soviet Jews. In fact it already had inserted the anticipated extra $2 billion in a budget that included further rapid expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, and increased military power to intimidate its Arab neighbors.
Shamir correctly concluded that this was the Bush administration’s first step in linking U.S. economic aid to Israel’s performance in the peace process. Shamir declined to defer Israel’s request and ordered its lobby into action to support the request in Congress. Bush, meanwhile, asked congressional leaders to defer consideration of the request for 120 days. When AIPAC brought Jewish activists from all over the United States for a two-day Washington lobbying blitzkrieg, Bush went public. In a televised news conference he complained that as “one little guy” trying to postpone consideration of Israel’s financial demands, he was up against “a thousand lobbyists” on Capitol Hill.
Consideration of the loan guarantees was deferred for 120 days. Needing the money, a reluctant Yitzhak Shamir had no choice but to come to the Madrid peace conference. There, his unwillingness, in his own words, to trade “one inch of territory for peace” was put on public view. Under even heavier pressure, his government accepted an invitation to participate in bilateral Washington talks with the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors, which promised only more erosion of public opinion support for Israel.…
Observers might have concluded that nothing could stop the Bush administration timetable. Defined at Madrid by Baker, it called for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement within one year on the transitional stage that the Israelis call “autonomy” and the Palestinians call “stages of implementation.” The transition itself would last five years, with the final form of Palestinian self-determination to be agreed by the end of the first three years.
There are other obstacles Bush and Secretary of State James Baker must overcome, however, and the biggest by far is in the United States. That obstacle is barely concealed support for any government of Israel, even Shamir’s, in the U.S. media. Much harder to define than AIPAC’s clout in Congress, it also has much greater potential to upset the Bush administration’s plans. A demonstration of its power seemingly already is underway.…
The difference between the reality of current American economic problems and their handling by the media provides an instructive example of the media’s power to set the public opinion agenda.…
What about all those charts on the financial pages? Few have anything to do with economic statistics. They’re charts of consumer confidence as measured by media polls. They tell readers that Americans expect bad times. They also proclaim that President Bush’s overall approval ratings have dropped from the 70 or 80 percent range he achieved at the end of the Gulf war to a 50 percent level (in the three months since he challenged the Israel lobby).…
The index of consumer confidence compiled by the Conference Board, a business research group, had dropped to 50.6 in November. Its 1990 low was 60. In the 1982 recession it dropped to 54.3 and in 1980 its low was 50.1.
But in a Nov. 27 New York Times article presenting those statistics, journalist Roger Cohen’s lead proclaimed: “American consumer confidence in the economy has fallen beneath the lowest level recorded during the 1982 recession.”…Manufacturers Hanover economist Irwin L. Kellner was quoted as saying, “We’re not as depressed statistically as in the 1930s, but we’re as depressed mentally, and you need pump priming to break that vicious cycle.”
All that is quite a contrast to the remark by Sam Donaldson, a journalist frequently criticized in the weekly Jewish press, on ABC’s David Brinkley program Dec. 1: “You can find any set of statistics that show the economy is not in such bad shape.” Or the comment of Brit Hume on the same program that “there is a case to be made that says the best thing to do right now is to do nothing.”
Most economists agree. “The fundamentals are okay,” Bear Stearns chief economist Lawrence Kudlow told Sylvia Nasar of The New York Times. “Low inflation and low interest rates provide the foundations for economic recovery.”
Journalist Nasar quotes Roger Grinner of DRI/McGraw Hill, Geoffrey H. Moor of the Center for International Business Research at Columbia University, and Blue Chip Economic Indicators of Sedona, AZ as all supporting “the president’s conviction that an anemic recovery has been underway since April or May and will continue at least through the end of next year.”
As for the political implications of the present polls, on Nov. 29 Washington Post staff writer Dan Balz quoted Republican pollster Bill McInturff as saying:
“Despite a rough couple of weeks, when you pit Bush against Cuomo or any other Democrat, he’s up 20 points. When you make people choose between candidates, George Bush still looks fairly strong.”
With 1992 elections still 11 months away, none of this will affect results if, as the statistics indicate, a slow recovery really is underway. The problem is that irresponsible or biased journalists actually can talk the United States back into a recession, or a real depression, by convincing entrepreneurs and the public to withhold investments and purchases just when they are needed.…
SHAMIR’S TACTICS
In seeking to avoid substantive discussions in Madrid, Washington or anywhere else that would spotlight his unwillingness to trade land for peace, Shamir hopes to avoid giving George Bush and James Baker an opportunity to link U.S. loan guarantees publicly to a freeze on Jewish settlement activity in Israeli-occupied territories.…
Peace Now co-founder Peter Edelman complains that American Jewish leaders who privately deplore the settlements “worry that if they break ranks and speak out, they could hurt Israel.” By not speaking out, however, they strengthen Shamir against peace activists at home.…
During the Gulf War, Bush indicated to King Fahd that, when it was over, he would expend the same zeal on ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese lands as he was expending on ending the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. Bush is keeping his promise, and U.S. prestige throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds is soaring.…
Yitzhak Shamir is betting on the dismal history of U.S. presidents caving in to Israeli prime ministers, especially during election years. Israel’s lobby is betting on its own hidden power in the American press to make that history repeat itself. If the American people and the rest of the world bet on George Bush defeating Shamir, however, that soon could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
FROM “THE MIDDLE EAST FACTOR IN NEGATIVE MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE BUSH CAMPAIGN”
(November 1992 Washington Report, p. 17)
“Annoy the media, re-elect Bush! They wouldn’t know good news if it hit them in the face. Have you heard this on television at night: That unemployment claims have gone down to the lowest in two years? Have you heard that inflation is down, that interest rates are down, that total employment is 93 percent, inflation 2.5 to 3 percent, home mortgages are 8 percent?”
—President George Bush at Montgomery, AL election rally, Oct. 24, 1992
Never in the 15 presidential campaigns I’ve watched closely has there been such an extraordinary media gang-up on a major party candidate as that against George Bush in 1992.
In the final two weeks of the campaign, when it was unlikely to make a difference, some of the media offenders expressed qualms about their performance. Host Ted Koppel on an Oct. 20 ABC “Nightline” program entitled “The Media: Reporting or Predicting?” noted: “You can understand why supporters of President Bush would be dismayed. The networks are continually citing polls suggesting, if not an unsurmountable, then certainly a daunting Clinton lead…Are the media reflecting reality or creating it?”
Ombudsman Joann Byrd, in an Oct. 25 response to a reader complaint that The Washington Post consistently selected photos that made Gov. William Clinton look presidential and President George Bush look like the village idiot…
The Post editorially endorsed the Clinton-Gore ticket on Oct. 11. America’s other “newspaper of record,” The New York Times, also endorsed Clinton. In fact, no New York newspaper endorsed the Bush-Quayle ticket.…
The president went public…in his Sept. 12, 1991 press conference, asking Congress to delay consideration of U.S. loan guarantees for 120 days until after the beginning of Middle East peace negotiations.
Bush added, quite accurately, that on that very day there were “a thousand lobbyists” on Capitol Hill supporting the bill and only “one lonely little guy down here” opposing it. A poll right afterward showed he wasn’t as lonely as he feared. An unprecedented 86 percent of the American public supported his request.
Within days, however, he was called “anti-Semitic” by a member of Yitzhak Shamir’s Israeli cabinet, and there was virtually no protest against that viciously unfair remark from the highly organized and normally articulate “American Jewish community.” In fact, it had American echoes. Both President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker were called “enemies of the Jews” on radio call-in shows. And from then right up to election day there were predictions in the political columns of America’s Jewish weeklies that Bush would get no more than 10 to 20 percent of the “Jewish vote.”…
…[F]ew would deny that in 1992 the media was glaringly unfair and that most of those picking on the president concentrated on what they called his “failed economic policies.”…
As described by Washington Post television columnist John Carmody on Oct. 20, the media-watching group [the Center for Media and Public Affairs] reported that the economy had been the number one domestic news story on U.S. television networks over the previous two years. There were 2,531 stories and 63 hours and 36 minutes of air time on ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts alone devoted to the economy between October 1990 and September 1992. Since July 1992, 96 percent of the economic evaluations and 83 percent of the predictions about the economy had been negative.…
Yet, in an Oct. 16, 1992 New York Times article entitled “Economic Scare Stories,” Stanford University economists Robert E. Hall and John B. Taylor pointed out that while the U.S. economy was growing by 2 percent in the first half of 1992, “press reporting about the economy has become so pessimistic that it has completely lost touch with reality.”…
Israel’s U.S. lobbyists say 80 percent of the “Jewish vote” went to Clinton because of Israel. Below are statements that lead to similar conclusions about the motives of pro-Israel journalists, and those who follow their lead.…
[B]ear in mind that it is de rigueur in pro-Israel circles to depict George Bush and James Baker as small-minded critics of Israel…On the Democratic side, Bill and Hillary Clinton are considered “under control,” and Sen. Al Gore is so well-disposed to Israel that, as Gore Vidal recently wrote in the magazine GQ, if Al Gore became vice president, Israel would be able to move its American “command post” from the Senate to Gore’s office.
So keeping that media guide to the honestly perplexed in mind, read on:
Columnist for Jewish weeklies and former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) legislative director Douglas M. Bloomfield:
“The Israeli guarantees have been approved, but the man responsible for that and the turnaround in administration policy toward Israel is not George Bush or even Yitzhak Rabin. It is Bill Clinton. Were it not for the Arkansas governor’s support for Israel, his wide lead in the polls and George Bush’s desperate need for every vote, notwithstanding Jim Baker’s dismissal of Jewish voters, it is doubtful Bush ever would have signed the loan guarantee legislation.”…
—Washington Jewish Week, Oct. 22, 1992
Columnist William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter and long-time personal friend of George Bush:
“…Here am I, a lifelong Republican, a card-carrying conservative, a right-wing pundit with four-square opinions on anything you can name…not yet sure about which hole in the card to punch for president…We’re having a hard time this fall because this campaign centers on a decision about George Bush.…I wanted to know if he [Bush] planned to reappoint James Baker as secretary of state—which would be a sure sign of no change to come…An alert Larry King popped that question to Bush, who said yes. The prospect of Baker and his crew at Foggy Bottom again was a real downer.”
—The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 18, 1992
Vanity Fair writer Marjorie Williams:
“Baker seems to feel no innate sympathy toward Israel…and it is possible that this coolness may be to some degree a function of his insular WASP background.”
Quoted in Detroit Jewish News, Sept. 25, 1992
RESTING THE CASE
The arrant racism in the final attack above demonstrates that you don’t have to be Jewish to play this game. Nor do you have to be bothered by the facts. Confonted on Oct. 25 by “McLaughlin Group” moderator John McLaughlin with a perceptible uptick in virtually all U.S. economic indicators, three of the panelists on the NBC television show responded as follows:
New Republic Editor Fred Barnes:
“The economy is going up a little, but not enough to help George Bush.”
Newsweek Editor Eleanor Clift:
“It’s a faltering recovery.”
Roll Call Editor Morton Kondracke:
“Next year we will have a recovering economy…But it’s too late to help George Bush.”…
Richard H. Curtiss (1927-2013) was founding executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
