The real peacemaker

...Heikal is not at all flip...

...No one ever seems to have asked if it were worth the candle, or why the cause of the Palestinians had to be tacked onto the goal of regaining the lost territories...

...Walking through the streets of Cairo, it is hard to see why Egypt should be spending millions on all-weather jet fighters, self-propelled artillery and ground- to-air missile systems...

...It would be a mistake to write off the PLO too quickly, just as it would be a mistake to neglect the palace intrigues which Sadat probably triggered by his decision to settle at Camp David...

...An unusually lifelike portrait of these men can be found in Mohammed Heikal's memoir, The Road to Ramadan, an intimate history of life at the top of Egypt between the wars of 1967 and 1973...

...Experience has shown that the Sinai offers a decisive military advantage all right, so long as it's in front of you, and stretching out the supply lines behind your enemy's back...

...It is a branch of advertising which uses a kind of show biz simulacrum much the way other branches of advertising have used simulacra of science, art and high society...

...He was not quick to show his hand...

...Heikal is not sentimental about the Palestinians...

...The West Bank was something else again, not merely the sentimental heart of the ancient kingdoms of David and Solomon, but squeezed in close to the side of Israel like a gun against a kidney...

...It just was...

...He might have let the pot go on simmering forever, as Nasser had done before him, absorbing his life in the great game, rather than admit his incapacity to alter the fact of Israel...

...There can be few such convincing portraits of men accustomed to the Commonweal: 681 practice of power...

...The hardliners appear to prefer almost anything to abandoning the dream of victory and the drama of the strug- gle...

...Small barefoot boys in overalls and engineer caps deliver huge burlap bags of charcoal at a jogtrot...

...All the same, like Sadat's trip to Jerusalem a year ago, the agreements have about them a note of the irrevocable...

...For our purposes here, the point to note is that as each of these forms gets drearier and drearier, more and more removed from any pretense of either art or legitimate entertain- ment, the producing orgalnzation gets more and more corporate in form...

...THOMAS POWERS...

...Even a day or two in Cairo tells the story...

...Certainly Arafat, Assad and Ghadaffi would have honored him for prolonging the old stalemate, in which the Arabs demanded too much for peace, and were too weak for war...

...In his book he has not cho- sen to be coy, or magisterial, in the manner of statesmen between offices, but candidly de- scribes things as they were, like Nasser's sly plan to sneak in a couple of extra SAM mis- siles before a ceasefire went into effect, Ghadaffi's attempt to buy an atomic bomb from China (politely declined by Chou En Lai), Saudi Arabia's insistence on an im-mediateJihad to regain Jerusalem as its price for attending an Arab summit...

...The astonishing thing is that apparently Anwar el-Sadat feels the Same way...

...Penny dreadfuls have become three- and four-dollar dreadfuls, but the dreadfulness remains...

...He is a man of shrewd intelligence and cos-mopolitan charm, a confidant of Nasser who moved easily in official circles, knew everyone who counted, and always had ac- cess to the inside story of whatever he hadn't seen for himself...

...Nowhere does he men- tion what the struggle with Israel is about...

...Sadat's strategy for ending the war began with war...

...But Sadat decided to let their good opin- ion go in return for what mattered to Egypt...

...It is apparent that Syria, Jordan and Egypt alike anticipated nothing but trouble from a PLO state, but the hazy Arab honor Heikal does not think to parse included the PLO all the same...

...In October, 1973, Egypt assaulted the Israeli fortifications across the Suez canal, armed with surprise, hydraulic mining equipment (used to hose away Israeli earth- works) and Soviet handheld anti-tank mis- siles...

...By giving up the Sinai Begin was freed of what he didn't need...

...The answer is that their pride had been offended, initially by the very fact of Israel, then decisively by the humiliation of 1967...

...In network television, of course, there is no struggle at all between talent and accounting...

...Inertia in diplomatic and military circles is the next thing to an iron law of nature...

...Like the division of Germany, after all, Israel is simplythere...

...The city is liter- ally falling apart from sheer neglect...

...Even after Jordan pub- licly renounced its claim to the West Bank and Jerusalem, Heikal never doubted that Egypt's goal had to be more than return of the Sinai alone...

...If the meeting had been a 15-round title fight, the judges probably would have given one round to Sadat (surrender of the Israeli settlements in the Sinai), one round tied ("autonomy" for the West Bank and Gaza strip), and all the rest to Begin, including the all-important matter of Jerusalem...

...FRANK GETLEIN Of several minds: Thomas Powers J [] THE REAL PEACEMAKER WHAT SADAT FACED N O NATION ever needed peace more than Egypt...

...The windows of government offices do not appear to have been washed since the British left, and clerks use carbon paper twenty and thirty times in their antique machines...

...From the moment of defeat forward, nothing took precedence over the drive to regain the Arab world's lost honor...

...Businessmen think noth- ing of devoting an entire evening to the sale of five dollars' worth of perfume...

...Reading Heikal's intelligent but half-blind book, one begins to see just how remarkable it was that Sadat should finally bite the bullet, free himself from history, and negotiate for Egypt alone...

...Sometimes an iron tip has been nailed in the wooden blade, and sometimes not...

...Before the shooting stopped the long Israeli complacency of 1967 was over, un- counted (and unacknowledged) thousands of Egyptians were dead, and Sadat was Well on his way to the agreement which his former Arab allies would attack as surrender...

...He did not have to do this...

...But at the same time it never strikes him as odd that Egypt should condemn itself to perpetual war as a virtual hostage to the PLO's demand for a state it never had...

...The very haziness of the word seemed to give the struggle a passionate, all-inclusive, eternal quality...

...There is something to be saiOfor this...

...For thirty years Egypt had beggared itself in the struggle over Palestine, aterritory unclaimed by Egypt since the last of the Ptolemies, until Sadat finally asked himself if there were any point in it, and decided there was not...

...Begin, it appears, held out for what he needed--peace with Egypt--and Sadat gave it to him in re- turn for the great waste of the Sinai (which makes the Utah salt fiats lo0k fecund), and for an honorable exit from the state of war de- clared in 1947...

...After such a lopsided victory, Begin's former "intransigence'' has been automatically elevated into something like wise and patient firmness...

...it is a miracle that Sadat's colleagues were willing to abandon the tested pleasures of a 30-year habit of struggle, when they might have got rid of Sadat instead...

...Buses belch out thick clouds of grainy black smoke, careen wildly on dead springs, sometimes threaten to tip over from the sheer weight of riders clinging to windows and doors...

...From Nasserhe inher- ited a policy of no war and no peace, which meant in practice all the sacrifice of the former, with none of the blessings of the lat- ter...

...After the basic decision to seek an exit, the most difficult part of Sadat's undertaking must have been persuading the rest of the Egyptian government to go along with him...

...The Goshen indictment is a welcome contrast to the accepted attitude perhaps best expressed by Attorney-General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach in the case of the electrical giant firms, General Electric, Westinghouse, et al., conspiring to cheat the government by collu- sion on what should have been secret bids...

...This makes Heikars one great omission all the more surprising...

...If Goshen puts an end to that, good gosh...

...It is half a day's work to phone outside the country...

...Heikal was an editor of the influential Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram until he ran afoul of Sadat following the October war...

...Should Ford be found guilty--and this is one case clearly destined for final judgment by the Nixon Supreme Court--it will be an interesting question as to who goes to jail...

...he gives the PLO only a walk-on role, as a kind of Egypto-Syrian pawn in the contest with Israel...

...In a century or two, if we should live so long, the postwar period may appear as a time of general tidying up...

...he takes his story seriously, describes his characters sensitively and intelligently, never loses his emotional footing or neglects international realities...

...This would not have taken so long if it had not been genuinely hard to do, and the secret of its difficulty can be found in the nearly universal conclusion it was Begin who "won" the bargaining battle of Camp David, Sadat who made all the concessions and "lost...

...The crass is always greener and, despite the employment of actors and directors, the enter- tainment section ads and reviews, and the look of the thing, television is not a branch of show biz at all...

...erably less than sure-fire--current hits in- clude Gin Game, which consists wholly of two inmates playing cards in an old folks' home and Dancin', a musical with no story at all, no sketches, either, few lyrics, and noth- ing you really walk out of the theater humming--in short, the accountants are kept in their proper, ancillary, place...

...Assessed triple damages against its ill-gotten gains, GE paid up and promptly entered the criminal fines as deductible expenses, part of the cost of doing business...

...The Broadway producer, in fact, is one of the last honest- to-God free entrepreneurs in the economy, whereas the broadcast networks are clearly one of the great cartels...

...In short, Sadat surren- dered the psychic satisfactions of a role on the world stage...

...On the outskirts of the city farmers can be seen tilling tiny fields with oxen and wooden plows...

...The defendants were found guilty, of course, there was no real way around that...

...If they stick we shall eventually see general acceptance of another of those awkward facts left at the end of the Second World War...

...That was interesting enough, the more so since Cordiner was the Simple Simon of his time in his childish belief in the free enterprise GE did everything it could to strangle, but the bit got even better...

...If the separate peace is signed, and sticks, Sadat's self-reduction will soon be apparent...

...What Sadat surrendered was not any- thing which mattered to Egypt, but what might have been supposed to matter to him, his prestige in the Arab world, his pre- eminence in the struggle against Israel, and his aura as a man courted by both of the world's great powers...

...Artisans and craftsmen work in one-room shops opening onto narrow streets, with a forty-watt bulb hanging over a pre-war drill press, or Brown and Sharpe screw machine, or metal lathe...

...The overall effect is almost Victorian in its teem- ing grey dinginess...

...To understand the true difficulties which Sadat faced in his search for an exit one has only to ask who won the better bargain in the 27 October 1978:680 negotiations convened and then nursed along by Jimmy Carter...

...The elevators are ancient and erratic when they work at all...

...In the meantime it is only fair that we recognize it was not Begin or Carter who made peace at Camp David, but Sadat...

...Granted all this, it is nothing short of amazing that it has taken this long for an American apparatus of justice to act on the assumption that a corporation, like an individual, is capable of criminal deeds, namely, in the Goshen case, knowingly selling automobiles unnecessarily likely to incinerate their purchasers...

...The nearly unanimous answer has been Menachem Begin, a hardminded, unforgiving man who sometimes gives the impression of looking out at the world from beneath the carapace of a beetle...

...The leaders of the Arab world, and Heikal himself, took nothing more seriously, but it never occurs to him to say why...

...Who can name or recognize the President of Mexico, a far richer and more populous coun- try than Egypt...

...Mexico enjoys the obscurity of countries which do not go to war, and so will Egypt, once the tour buses start to run back and forth across the Sinai...

...Attorney-General Katzenbach immediately ruled that, yes, in- deed, the costs of corporate crime certainly were legitimate expenses and went on to be- come a rich corporate lawyer himself...

...The economy of the West Bank could no longer be unhooked from Israel's without wrecking it, and giving a state to the Palestine Liberation Organization (as .9opposed to"autonomy" for the Palestinians) was arguably a step towards prolonging, rather than ending, the struggle...

...In big-time American movies today, an awful lot of directing, acting and scientific talent is lavished on material right out of Street & Smith's Western, the oldArgosy and True Detective, along with an endless series of larger scale natural and unnatural disasters: Accounting and the individual talent, in which the talent is relatively free to work its artistic will upon whatever rubbish the ac-countants believe will catch the buck...

...When that mo- ment occurred it is hard to say...

...GE Chairman Ralph Cordiner, on the other hand, who had to be either a crook himself or a hopeless incompetent not to know what the boys on the bids were doing, was officially stamped Not-A-Crook on the one hand and on the other given a hero's welcome by the GE shareholders and management who had prof- ited from the cheating...