The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

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Mideast. Gorton shared Jackson’s view that the sale could compromise a
major U.S. defense system and threaten Israel. On the other hand, the
AWACS deal would keep 1,500 Boeing workers in Seattle busy for the next
six years. The Boeing lobbyists knew it was hopeless to woo Scoop. They
kept making runs at Slade. A week before the AWACS vote, employees at
the Renton plant were told over the PA system that if they wanted to let
their new senator know how they felt they could dial his local office. Hundreds
of calls poured in to Gorton’s offices. 6
Reagan and his congressional allies asserted that the assassination
emphasized the importance of reaching out to all moderate governments
to help secure a peace in the Mideast tinderbox. Four months earlier,
Prime Minister Menachem Begin had the Israeli Air Force take out Saddam
Hussein’s nearly completed nuclear reactor in Iraq. Now Begin’s
partner in the Camp David peace accords was dead, and Reagan was
pushing ahead with the largest single arms sale in U.S. history. It was
“Reagan or Begin.” The Israelis were outraged. The Saudis, with their
own army of lobbyists, had agreed to many of the U.S. conditions. Gorton
noted, however, that they had their own eight-point peace plan and were
showing little willingness to cooperate in the Camp David accords to
phase in a settlement that offered any hope of lasting peace.
Gorton, Kasten, Quayle, Frank Murkowski of Alaska and Mack Mattingly
of Georgia were summoned to the Oval Office for persuasion. A vote
against the AWACS sale would be perceived as giving Israel too great a say
in U.S. affairs, the wavering and recalcitrant were told during a tense meeting
with the president. Gorton bristled: “Prime Minister Begin doesn’t control
my vote.” With one of his trademark head shakes, Reagan replied, “You
may not think Israel is controlling your vote, but the world will.” During a
meeting with another group of opponents, the president had warned,
“You’re going to cut me off at the knees. I won’t be effective in conducting
foreign policy.” 7
William Safire, the influential New York Times columnist, admired
Gorton for showing spine but was outraged by the tenor of the debate.
“Missing from the reaction to the assassination of Anwar el-Sadat is the
element of outrage,” Safire wrote after the White House arm-twisting
session. “In radical Arab headquarters in Beirut and Tripoli, the reaction
is glee; in Moscow, the party line is a smug he-brought-it-on-himself;
in Israel, there is concern for its treaty with an Egypt without Sadat, and in
Washington there is sadness, resignation and calculation about how the
tragedy can be exploited to rally support for the sale of AWACS to the
Saudis. It is as if the world were taking for granted this triumph of terror-