August 2004 Newsletter

Part of a New Direction: The State Department's Office of the Historian and its Conference on the 1967 Arab-Israeli War

By Steven Galpern and Laurie West Van Hook

The Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, has embarked on many new and unprecedented paths in the twenty-first century under the leadership of Marc J. Susser, the department's historian since January 2001. Along with Ted Keefer, general editor of the Foreign Relations of the United States series, and David Herschler, deputy historian, Susser has rejuvenated and expanded the work of the Office of the Historian in three short years. With its second annual conference at the Department of State, entitled "The United States, the Middle East, and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War," held on January 12-13, 2004, the Office of the Historian moved closer to its goal of becoming a center for the study of foreign policy and diplomacy in the United States.

For more than a generation, the Office of the Historian focused primarily on preparing the Foreign Relations series and providing policy-supportive historical studies for department principals. But the 1991 Foreign Relations statute required the entire staff to redouble its efforts in the production of the series at the expense of other endeavors. During the late 1990s, the Office was severely understaffed as a result of department-wide personnel and budget cuts, as well as attrition. By 2000 there were a mere twelve historians in the Office. They worked primarily on Foreign Relations, while policy studies were reduced to sporadic high-priority projects. Since Susser's arrival in 2001, the leadership of the department and the Bureau of Public Affairs - which includes the Office of the Historian - has committed extensive resources to the Office in order to meet its legislatively mandated mission to produce Foreign Relations volumes thirty years after events occur. As a result, the Office has undergone extraordinary growth and revitalization. Of the thirty-eight historians currently on staff, twenty-six have joined since February 2001. The Office of the Historian has become one of the biggest recruiters for the profession in the last three years and is now the largest employer of diplomatic historians in the country. These historians research, compile, declassify, and edit Foreign Relations volumes, conduct policy-supportive research, and initiate and implement historical outreach programs while pursuing their own scholarly goals, participating in conferences, and teaching part-time at universities in the Washington, DC, area.

Today the Office is working to fulfill three programmatic goals: to publish Foreign Relations volumes within the thirty-year time period required by law; to respond quickly and effectively to requests from department principals for policy-related research studies; and to play an appropriate role in the efforts of the Bureau of Public Affairs to reach a "broader, deeper, and younger" audience.

To expedite the publication of Foreign Relations, the department has reached an agreement with the Central Intelligence Agency on the unique position of Joint Historian, whose task is to promote the interagency cooperation essential to the production of the series. The number of people working on the series has increased significantly, but it will take several years to compensate for past staff shortages and catch up to the statutory deadline. The staff is currently researching and publishing fifty-six volumes for the Nixon-Ford administrations (forty-one print and fifteen electronic-only volumes, all of which will be placed on the Internet). Although the focus is now on the Nixon-Ford years, planning has already begun for the Carter administration, and a team of historians has gone to Atlanta to explore the records at the Carter Library.

During the first three years of the current administration, which coincided with the revival of the Office of the Historian, the Office has responded to many more short- and long-term requests to provide policy-related research for department principals, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, as well as for the White House and the National Security Council. From the end of World War II through the early 1990s, the staff of the Office's Policy Studies and Outreach Division was as large as the Foreign Relations series staff and often produced over a hundred research studies and projects a year. During the remainder of the 1990s, however, the dwindling size of the staff and the statutory mandate imposed by the 1991 Foreign Relations statute led to a decline in the Office's ability to produce policy-related studies. Fortunately, in the last three years, this important facet of the Office of the Historian's work has been revived as staff numbers have returned to the levels needed to provide proper historical support for the department's leadership. The secretary and other department principals have taken a personal interest in special historical studies on such subjects as the coalition against terrorism, NATO, U.S.-Russian relations, the Iraq and Afghan wars, and the history of the department and its components. In the past year the Office has responded to various requests dealing with issues the United States has faced in the rebuilding of Iraq.

Research studies on significant foreign policy problems and current issues have proven useful and highly cost-effective for the department. They provide an accurate, authoritative, and comprehensive record of major events, policies, positions, commitments, and assurances. They can support complex negotiations, provide a basis for "lessons learned" analyses, and help explain and defend policies to Congress, the media, and the public. The staff of the Office of the Historian brings two special forms of expertise to this type of analysis: knowledge of and experience in dealing substantively with Department of State files and records, including classified records, and a specialized knowledge of diplomatic history, institutional practice, and geographic areas across the globe. In short, staff historians have the ability to provide department principals with history "in the service of current policy." The staff of the Policy Studies and Outreach Division is not yet up to full strength, so all historians work on policy-related research as needed. The growing diversity of expertise among the new staff, combined with the increasing number of requests by the department's leadership, has made this an increasingly important aspect of the Office's work.

Finally, the Office of the Historian fulfills the department's goal of reaching a "broader, deeper, and younger" audience in a variety of ways. The Office now handles more than a thousand inquiries annually and responds on a daily basis to requests by department offices and overseas posts, other agencies, and the public for information about the official historical record of U.S. foreign policy. The Office has also created educational materials for college, high school, and middle school. In 2002, working with a group of teachers from the National Council for the Social Studies, the Office initiated a series of historical educational videos, along with accompanying curriculum materials, for teachers of social studies in secondary schools. So far, the Office has completed one video on terrorism, and a second, on the history of diplomacy, is nearing completion. These videos are part of a developing series entitled "Doors to Diplomacy." Future videos may cover topics such as cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, sports diplomacy, the media and diplomacy, and diplomatic crises case studies. In a related effort, the Office has been involved with the department's youth website, which includes a historical timeline and two prototype learning packages with accompanying curriculum materials on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Americanization of the Vietnam War. Members of the Office also participate as judges in National History Day, evaluating projects by students from all over the nation, and staff historians speak not only at professional academic conferences, but also at middle and secondary schools, universities, and teacher conventions.

The Office also initiated a new type of outreach program that is truly an exercise in cultural diplomacy. In conjunction with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Office is preparing to publish a joint documentary volume on the era of détente. The volume focuses mainly on backchannel exchanges between then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin from 1969 to 1972 and will show both the American and the Russian records of individual discussions. Publishing these documents side by side will provide new insights into and shed new light on a critical period in diplomatic history. During the past two years a working group from the Office made two trips to Moscow to meet their Russian Foreign Ministry Historical Office counterparts and also hosted a Russian visit to Washington, DC. A conference highlighting the volume's publication is planned for late 2005.

Another of the Office's key initiatives has been to bring together academic scholars with government historians and public policy specialists and to link Foreign Relations to the latest in scholarly research. Over the past two years the Office has hosted scholarly conferences on major issues in the history of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy. The first such undertaking was a conference on the 1954 coup in Guatemala, which was held in May 2003 to mark the publication of a long-anticipated retrospective Foreign Relations volume and the simultaneous release by the CIA of a major body of documentation on the 1954 coup. For that conference, approximately twenty scholars from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Guatemala gathered to discuss the latest historiography of the coup and its implications. A Guatemalan scholar who participated in the conference at the department subsequently invited members of the Office of the Historian to participate in a conference that he and the Guatemalan Foreign Ministry arranged in October 2003 at the University of San Carlos, in Guatemala City, on the subject of the coup and the broader issues of the Guatemalan revolution.

A second and larger conference, on "The United States, the Middle East, and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War," was held on January 12-13, 2004, at the Department of State in conjunction with the release of Foreign Relations Volume XIX: Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967. Ambassador David Satterfield, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, opened the conference with a speech detailing the current state of relations and negotiations in the Middle East. The role of history resonated within the context of the current climate. The conference brought together over forty scholars from the United States, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Canada, Britain, and Austria--some from academia, some from government agencies (including the State Department, the CIA, and the National Security Agency) and think tanks. Both junior and senior scholars, many meeting for the first time after years of reading each other's work, presented papers and participated in discussions on the latest work being done on the 1967 war. Interest in the conference exceeded expectations. At times there were more than two hundred people in the audience, among them academics, representatives from several government agencies and public policy foundations, members of the public (some of whom who traveled great distances to attend), and embassy officials from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.

In hosting the conference the Office had the enthusiastic support not only of its own leadership in the Bureau of Public Affairs, but that of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and embassy personnel in the Middle East. In view of the threat currently posed by terrorism, a liaison with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security was required, and strict security precautions were maintained at all times. The logistics of planning and hosting a conference that attracts widespread interest are infinitely more complex when it is held in the Department of State. Everyone attending the conference who was not affiliated with the State Department had to forward identifying information in order to register, check in through the security gates, and be escorted at all times during the conference. Running a conference on schedule is difficult under the best of circumstances, but it is harder when people must check in and out during the day, wear badges at all times, and be escorted everywhere-even to the restroom.

The high level of media interest in the conference also meant that special accommodations were necessary for print and television journalists, among whom were representatives from ABC/Nightline, NBC, CBS, CNN, BBC, Al-Jazeera, AP, UPI, Knight-Ridder, USA Today, the Financial Times, and various press agencies in Israel, Lebanon, Germany, and France. The Office could not determine many of their needs until hours before the conference began. Not surprisingly, press interest was greatest at the start of the conference for the speech of Ambassador Satterfield, the presentation of the new Foreign Relations volume, and the first panel on the issues of intelligence and the USS Liberty. On the first day of the conference, six cameras recorded the proceedings, and C-Span broadcast live. During breaks between panels, the press often interviewed conference participants in the conference room.

The Foreign Relations volume that occasioned the conference was compiled by Harriet Schwar, who retired recently from the Office of the Historian. It begins in May 1967, when Egyptian troops began moving into the Sinai, Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser requested the withdrawal of U.N. forces from the border with Israel, and the U.S. government began to move into crisis mode. It concludes with the passage of U.N. Resolution 242 in November 1967. Schwar used the records of President Johnson, the Departments of State and Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Naval Security Group and included a wide variety of documents reflecting the kind of intelligence that reached Johnson and his advisers, especially before and during the war. While some documents were denied or censored, she believes that the most important documents were released and that the withheld material would have added very little of substance.

The volume focuses on the view from the White House and makes it clear that Johnson and his advisers saw the Middle East crisis very much in the context of the Cold War. For example, although Schwar was not able to find the National Security Agency instructions to the U.S. signals intelligence ship Liberty, she believes that the Soviets' intentions were uppermost on Johnson's mind as the ship headed toward the eastern Mediterranean during the prewar crisis. Piecing together fragmentary intelligence from the hours surrounding the attack with follow-up reports written in the weeks after it, Schwar shows that when the Israelis attacked the ship with aircraft and torpedo boats on June 8, causing severe damage and many casualties, Washington was not sure at first who was responsible, but when word came through several hours later that the Israelis had done it, the White House sent a message to Moscow via the hot line to ensure that the incident did not touch off a broader conflict.

The significance of the Cold War context emerged as one of the most fascinating threads of the conference. The conference committee received numerous compelling proposals from historians trained not only in Middle Eastern history, but also in European and Russian history. Access to newly opened records from Soviet and former Communist bloc archives fostered the development of new insights into historical issues surrounding the 1967 crisis that emphasized the global impact of the war. Of course, as many scholars at the conference pointed out, both the Russian and Middle Eastern governments - especially the latter - must provide greater access to their archives before scholars can give a fuller account of the 1967 crisis. Nevertheless, in the course of the conference various scholars gave nuanced accounts of issues related to the Cold War, such as whether the Soviets wanted an Arab-Israeli war or how the Jordan River and water scarcity played into the Cold War dynamic.

Conference participants also examined the larger impact of the1967 Arab-Israeli war. Scholars agreed that the catalyst for the chain of events leading up to the war was the Soviet warning to Egypt that Israeli troops were gathering on the Syrian border, which was not true. Yet disagreements arose over what the Soviet Union intended when it gave Egypt this false information. Based on his conversations with high-level Egyptian officials from the period, Ambassador Richard Parker, who was political officer in Cairo at the time, concluded that Soviet officials did not deliberately provide Egypt with misinformation to advance their own agenda in the region. In stark contrast, Israeli scholar Isabella Ginor characterized the Soviet warning as "deliberate misinformation," part of a plan "approved at the highest level of Soviet leadership to elicit Egyptian action that would provoke an Israeli strike." Israeli action, she argued, would justify Soviet intervention against Israel. She based her assertions on evidence from Soviet and other Warsaw Pact documents, as well as on the memoirs of contemporary actors. On the other hand, Galia Golan stated that it was difficult to make the case that Brezhnev intended to provoke Nasser into a full-scale war: he would have considered that too risky. Rather, she said, the Soviet leadership wanted to bolster the Syrian regime and hoped that Egypt, which had a mutual defense pact with Syria, would offer Syria greater support. On a related issue, both Egyptian scholar Mostafa Elwi Saif and British scholar Laura James considered the impact of the decisions made by President Nasser on the escalating political crisis leading up to war with Israel. Despite their contrasting methodologies, they agreed that before the war, Nasser viewed the United States as Egypt's primary enemy and considered it a much greater threat than Israel.

Scholars trained in European history also took advantage of archival material in Europe and Russia to examine the 1967 war. Austrian scholar Rolf Steininger used Brezhnev's address "On the Soviet Policy Following the Israeli Aggression in the Middle East," presented to the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party on June 20, 1967, to show that the events transpiring in June 1967 resulted from "grave miscalculations" on the part of the Soviet Union about its ability to manage its Arab clients. He argued, however, that the Soviets hoped that the conflict would last longer so that they could assume the role of peacemaker and help the United States broker an Arab-Israeli agreement. Will Gray of Texas Tech and Carole Fink of Ohio State used East and West Germany, respectively, to analyze the Cold War dynamic. Gray stated that scholars too often view the Cold War in rigidly bipolar terms, thereby obscuring its complex, multilateral nature. He cited the case of East Germany, which acted independently of the Soviet Union during the war. Although East Germany played a pivotal role in "coordinating European socialist support for the Arab states before, during and after" the conflict in hopes of receiving diplomatic recognition from some Arab states, no recognition was forthcoming, and the Soviets curtailed its diplomatic freedom. In contrast, Fink demonstrated how the war expanded the diplomatic freedom of West Germany and bolstered its policy of Ostpolitik. The inability of the United States and the Soviet Union to manage the crisis, in conjunction with the fracturing of the Western alliance, allowed West Germany to release itself from the bipolar framework that had shackled its foreign policy for two decades and enabled it to pursue more adventurous diplomatic initiatives.

Panelists also showed how the effects of the war circled across the English Channel and the Atlantic and back to the Persian Gulf. British scholar James Vaughan argued that the British preference for "non-intervention" had to give way because of Britain's role as the "chief Western partner" of the United States in the Middle East. Pressure to maintain the Anglo-American relationship precluded any effort to remain uninvolved, especially once U.S. officials made it clear that they would need British support to help manage the crisis. Nevertheless, the consequences of an Arab oil embargo and the closure of the Suez Canal reminded British officials that disengagement from the region was necessary. U.S. Department of State historian, Steven Galpern, filled in the details of this last point, demonstrating that Britain's inability to obtain Middle East oil via pipelines and the Suez Canal--in addition to a politically-driven run on the pound sterling by Arab states--spurred the currency's devaluation in 1967. The upshot, he explained, was Britain's retrenchment not only of sterling as an international trading and reserve currency but also of its forces East of Suez, which created great financial and strategic problems for the United States. John Ciorciari, an American scholar studying at Oxford, kept the focus on oil but shifted the lens back to the Persian Gulf by demonstrating how the war affected the balance of power on the Arabian Peninsula and relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Broadly speaking, he argued that while it seemed that the war caused a shift in power from the Soviet Union and its radical Arab clients to Israel and to the United States and its conservative Arab allies, the shift was in fact ephemeral. The conflict radicalized the Palestinian movement and other Arab nationalist groups and threatened to destabilize the conservative Arab states. These developments forced Britain to withdraw from the Gulf and paved the way for deeper Soviet penetration into the Middle East. As for U.S.-Saudi relations, political and economic interests compelled Saudi Arabia to bring its oil embargo to a quick end despite U.S. ties with Israel, because of Saudi King Faisal's belief in a Communist-Zionist conspiracy.

All of the scholars who examined the effect of the war on Johnson's Middle East policy agreed that his administration developed a closer relationship with Israel than those of his predecessors, Kennedy and Eisenhower. Arlene Lazarowitz of California State-Long Beach commented that domestic political constraints influenced Johnson's thinking. David Lesch of Trinity University described the president as "sympathetic and even empathetic" toward the Jewish state. Both Lesch and Peter Hahn of Ohio State argued that the administration was preoccupied with anti-Soviet containment in its policy toward the Middle East, and that concern led it to seek a strategic balance of power between Israel and the front-line Arab states. The effect of the Israeli victory on U.S.- Israeli relations remained unresolved. Lazarowitz asserted that the victory solidified the American-Israeli partnership on the Johnson administration's terms, but Hahn described the victory as a "major setback" for Johnson, since it demonstrated the "limit of his power to control international events." Lesch contended that the Johnson administration lost interest in the region after the United Nations passed Resolution 242 (which provided the basis for the "land-for-peace" framework that still exists today) and that Johnson was satisfied that the measure had put the Arab-Israeli issue "back in the icebox" where it had been before the war. Jordanian scholar Hisham Khatib argued that the war produced no victors - only "losers and bigger losers," among them the Arab states, the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians. He pointed to the crucial role that a statesman can play in crisis management and asserted that less confused decision-making by the Egyptian leadership and a stronger United Nations secretary general would have prevented the crisis.

Khatib's paper was part of the final panel, which focused on the lasting regional and international impact of the war. Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev and Americans Kristin Tassin and Sean Foley addressed the Palestinian question. In earlier remarks, Israeli scholar Lily Polliack had asserted that Johnson's foreign policy had neglected the Palestinian issue. Segev focused on a series of meetings between Israeli and Palestinian leaders soon after the war, basing his comments on the personal records of Ambassador Moshe Sasson of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. He characterized these discussions as a missed opportunity for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, which was scuttled by internal disputes on both sides, and noted that Israel failed to offer "real independence" or "meaningful self-rule" to the Palestinians. He also argued that for two decades the Israelis had viewed the Palestinians as a "diplomatic nuisance" to be discussed annually at the United Nations, but the 1967 war moved them "back into the center of the conflict." Kristin Tassin described how Palestinian armed resistance grew exponentially in the wake of the war and how the Arab defeat revived Palestinian nationalism, which in turn helped fuel the burgeoning guerilla movement. Sean Foley focused on Lebanon, asserting that the shift in Palestinian guerilla activities to Israel's northern neighbor from the defeated Arab states destabilized a border that had been quiet for roughly twenty years. Many observers had once believed that Lebanon would be one of the first Arab countries to sign a peace treaty with Israel, but he concluded that Fedayeen attacks on Israel from Lebanese bases - and Israeli retaliation - precluded any such agreement.

Overall, the conference highlighted new and exciting research being done in the history of the region and the international order. Yet it also showed how ripe the time period is for further study. The Office of the Historian plans to publish the conference proceedings later this year and will post a tape and transcript of the proceedings on the Department of State's website at www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/. The Office staff has enjoyed hosting conferences and connecting with the profession in a new way. The next few years hold yet more growth and new initiatives, and staff members look forward both to continuing the production of Foreign Relations and to breaking new ground in other areas.