Going All the Way
Randal, Jonathan C.
Inside Lebanon GOING ALL THE WAY by Jonathan C. Randal The Viking Press. 275 pp. $16.75. The last time I saw Jon Randal was in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel, Beirut, in early June 1981. We had...
...William Steif...
...The anecdote illustrates the American propensity for misunderstanding the Middle East: Lebanese Maronites, like their Arab neighbors, consider dogs disgusting...
...The basic reasons are that he was on the scene, working, and he has superb reportorial instincts...
...In addition, Randal writes well: It is difficult to put his book down...
...Jon greeted me with the words: "Where have you been...
...His chapter on the persistence of the Ma-ronite Christians is packed with information...
...During reporting trips to the Middle East, I have encountered some of the characters who appear in Randal's book, including Bashir Gemayel, Saeb Salam, Walid Jum-blatt, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, and Ariel Sharon...
...He had already mopped it up and gone on to other things...
...Shortly before I was dispatched to Lebanon and Israel last August (late again), I noticed an article in The New Republic attacking Randal for what publisher-writer Martin Peretz described as Randal's anti-Israeli bias...
...The story had been the Russian ground-to-air missiles the Syrians had openly deployed near Chtaura on the Beirut-Damascus highway...
...He was met by Federal "narcs" who used dogs to sniff for hashish in the presidential party's baggage...
...Randal modestly says the book "is not meant as a definitive history of what has happened in Lebanon...
...He separates the strands of pre-Christian, Christian, and Moslem history and displays each facet so that the reader can understand the riddle that is modern Lebanon...
...It will outlast most other journalists' works, and it is a model of insight...
...Jon was correct...
...In his chapter on "The Offhand Americans," Randal begins with an anecdote concerning the arrival of the Lebanese president at Kennedy Airport in 1974 "to introduce the Palestinian cause and Yasser Arafat" to the United Nations...
...Indeed, I would guess that some State Department specialists on the Middle East could learn from it...
...I was late for the story...
...We had met in Paris in the mid-1970s, and I liked him then...
...But I never stayed long enough to develop the "feel" for the region that Randal acquired...
...I knew him to be feisty, hyper, smart, sensitive, and one of the finest reporters ever employed by The Washington Post...
...The story's practically over...
...He also shows how the Israelis let themselves be sucked into the Lebanese mire, just as the Syrians had been sucked in years earlier...
...His book has a texture that lifts it far above ordinary reporting...
...He has melded his personal experiences with the period's history in a fascinating way...
...Randal covers Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Bashir Ge-mayel's assassination, the Shatila massacre, and the awful mess that the Israelis, Syrians, Americans, and Lebanese have made of their various Middle East policies...
...Randal describes the off-and-on nature of American interest in Lebanon and the simplistic approach of a superpower buffaloed by its regional ally, Israel...
...My employer had waited too long to dispatch me from Washington, and I had spent a few days at the Hotel Alexandre in Christian East Beirut watching Syrian shellings before crossing to Moslem West Beirut and the shelter of the Commodore, then and now a kind of press headquarters...
...If I have any criticism of Going All the Way, it is that Randal doesn't devote sufficient time and space to the Palestinians, although that is probably a separate book...
...As a working journalist, I can think of no higher praise than to say: I wish I had written Going All the Way...
...But the fact is that he has come as close to writing a definitive history, at least of the crucial period between 1974 and 1983, as is possible...
...Randal, who has covered wars and mini-wars in Southeast Asia and Africa as well as in the Middle East, was telling his Washington Post readers that a lot of people were dying in Lebanon for what at best could be called murky reasons, or perhaps no reason at all...
...Peretz at the time was telling his readers what a lovely, humane invasion Menachem Begin had staged in Lebanon...
...But Going All the Way is more than just the story of the last tragic decade in Lebanon...
...The "other things" are detailed marvel-ously in his new book, Going All the Way, the subtitle of which, "Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and the War in Lebanon," is a good deal more descriptive...
...Most journalists knew and know little of what Randal writes in Going All the Way...
...In Going All the Way, Randal is justly critical of some of the exceedingly superficial American reporting of events in Lebanon, but he shows no bias that I can ascertain...
...His book is a well-informed' and deeply felt account of Lebanon's tragedy...
...Randal has taken the time and trouble to give the reader the necessary background to understand contemporary events in Lebanon...
Vol. 47 • July 1977 • No. 7
