Carter and the Jews XVI. Principles or Pandering; Hope and Doubt

...Suppose one is willing to take the spurning of the assassin at face value The time of the "bad mistake" is behind us If it once seemed-as an ex-Southern Baptist wag put it some months ago-that "Billy is Jimmy's conscience," then the Billy in Jimmy has long since been silenced or smothered Perhaps the perilous Bzrezinski model has been put away Various fusses have faded off-Andrew Young, the Mississippi, the PLO as a civil rights movement-all the old blunders and bungles...

...What can one make of this...

...Hope grapples with the reminding angel, Doubt It is no wonder that Doubt is in the ascendancy In the long haul toward the election, the arc of opinion alters, and then alters again Excitement over Camp David has begun to sound hollow What was optimism earlier now sends out the brassy bang of naivete The Republican candidate was once a movie-star pinup in my high school locker The aroma of disillusionment hangs in the diplomatic breeches and pouches of our allies In the United Nations, Ambassador McHenry serves his President, his hand is the hand of Jacob, and goes up when he abstains The Saudis demand the range and firepower of devastation in equipment they had pledged never to demand, and the White House is cowed Doubt says Put not thy trust in this prince Don't forget all those zigzags, that volatility, the bitterness of those silences, the disavowals that fail to disavow...

...In the last few weeks Carter has taken certain steps to keep the assassin out of the saddle, or at least from riding unbridled Through Secretary of State Muskie, he has been urging Europe not to push for a PLO state He has managed to persuade Sadat to resume the West Bank autonomy talks And then there are all those carefully self-conscious abstentions in the United Nations...

...Does it mean that Brzezinski, though secure in the possession of his office furniture, is nevertheless being muzzled...

...What the President's Jewish constituency has been signaling again and again is that, except for the most fractional demurral in its ranks, Jews view the PLO, with utter conviction and conscience, as no more than (in Howard Squadron's phrase) "a band of assassins " And assassins cannot be approached as a vehicle of peace-even if they have purloined an internationally respectable vocabulary, even if they have succeeded in blackmailing their sponsors, who in turn blackmail their oil customers...

...Has there been a turning in the Presidential soul, a thrice-born sense of what is paramount, of what is just...

...One wants to trust, one longs to be invaded by good will Hope takes over the fragile heart The assassin will be spurned-it is inconceivable that an American President will ever invite the assassin in for tea, whatever Lord Carrington and Valery Giscard D'Estaing and Bruno Kreisky and all the rest of that oil-crazed crew may do, let alone the wily Kremlin...

...That the pupil has outgrown or even repudiated the mentor...

...Or is this new and steady-seeming Presidential spurning of the assassin no more than pre-election pandering -a steadiness that will dissolve the moment Carter finds himself safely locked into his second and final-and therefore impregnable-term...

...Hope and Doubt Since The Administration's extraordinary posture during the period of the "bad mistake"-The March 1 UN vote and its aftermath-There has been a regular geyser of PLO-inspired anti-Israel resolutions in the United Nations The United States has abstained from all of them No one can claim the Carter Administration doesn't learn The President's learning powers are particularly sharp in the present period before the national election, having already been reinforced by the lesson of the New York primary-and that is not said with ironic intent It is democracy's powerful virtue that it can instruct its leaders...

...But it not Carter, who...

...Doubt says He doesn't do any of it on principle...

...Doubt says He wants your vote...

...Our vote...

...And that, in the end, is the chiet, and most perplexing, Jewish question of the 19S0 election...