routine, explaining that while he ‘liked Fortas, some senators were ... jealous of their prerogatives, especially Southern senators.’ But for the first time he faced directly the charge that his policy of silence was fu - eling anti-Semitism. So, like a good politician, Nixon agreed to change his policy. He told the Jewish leaders that if the nomination became entangled in a Senate debate he would personally ‘let it be known that he does not favor filibuster on the nomination.’”

***

Fisher believed that simply raising money for a presidential candidate was too shortsighted an assignment, too narrow a corridor of influence. Then the president would only require the assistance of the Jewish com- munity every few years. Naturally, there was, Fisher realized, a syner- gy between support at every socioeconomic level of Jewish America and his facility for soliciting large givers; after all, everyone, rich or poor, was sensitive to the opinions of his neighbor. But, if Nixon were to win the election and Fisher and the Jewish community hoped to be heard at the White House, the community would have to become a fac- tor in the ongoing mechanisms of day-to-day government, not merely the hugging-and handshaking hoopla that accompanied a presidential campaign. To be included, the community would need to function as a cohesive bloc on an assortment of issues, never a strong suit when Israel was not directly involved. Thus, seeking grass-roots support for the programs Nixon would initiate as president, Fisher traveled the country, speaking to groups from New York to Los Angeles.

“I never used my titles [in Jewish organizations] when I campaigned for Nixon,” Fisher says. “Of course, I couldn’t help that every time I got up to speak, they used all my titles to introduce me.” The nation- al Anglo-Jewish and secular press included his titles in the coverage of his speeches and the list was impressive: president of the United Jewish Appeal, chairman of the United Israel Appeal (the major bene- ficiary of the UJA), chairman of the Executive Board of the American Jewish Committee and vice president of the Council of Jewish Feder- ations and Welfare Funds.

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As Rabbi Schacter says, “The message was clear. This wasn’t just some wealthy Jew speaking. This was a recognized leader of the com- munity. Your leader.”

“It meant something to Jews all over the country,” adds Irving Ber- nstein, “that a man of Max’s caliber and integrity trusted Nixon. It also made political activity more kosher. And it gave people more hope that you could achieve something. [Yet] Max was never a parochial mili- tant in politics. He has always taken the position that it is important for Americans —particularly Jewish Americans —to be involved in the process, whether you are a Democrat or Republican. His view would be, ‘I wish you were a Republican, but if you’re a Democrat, that’s fine.’ Max has always been a political animal.”

“This type of politicking wouldn’t happen again,” Fisher says. “The Jewish organizations are a lot more careful about leaders taking polit- ical stands now. But then, in ’68, what were they going to say to me? Resign from the UJA? Resign from the UIA and CJF? Nobody tells you to resign when you’re doing the job.”

On October 18, with Humphrey gaining on Nixon, Fisher was at the New York Hilton Hotel, addressing the publishers of Anglo-Jew- ish newspapers from across the country. He referred to the Gallup Poll showing Jewish support for Nixon and promised that 1968 would be “a precedent-shattering election.” After citing Nixon’s pledge to tip the balance of power in the Middle East toward Israel and reviewing the reasons for Jewish dissatisfaction with the Johnson administration’s performance at home and abroad, Fisher threw a roundhouse right at Humphrey’s campaign team. He said: “The fact that George W. Ball has become Vice President Humphrey’s chief political adviser has not reas- sured American Jews with regard to Mr. Humphrey’s Middle East posi- tion. Mr. Ball, as United States ambassador to the United Nations, joined with the United Nations Security Council in censoring Israel. And now that he is out of government, he offers pious words about trying to bring about arms control in the Middle East, while the Soviet Union continues to provide massive arms, including jets, to the Arab states.”

Yet what may well stand as Fisher’s greatest single coup during the 1968 campaign harked back to what he had told Nixon in August: that

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the candidate had to make himself known to American Jews. Fisher had helped fill in this void, bringing Nixon before B’nai B’rith and then crisscrossing the country to proselytize for him. Now, he wanted Nixon to face a more intimate and influential circle of the communi - ty, the segment that held sway over the breadth of Jewish communal operations. So Fisher courted the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The Presidents Conference, as it has come to be known, was founded in 1955 by the World Zionist Or- ganization’s Dr. Nahum Goldmann and comprised the leadership of nearly every significant Jewish communal group, twenty-four in all. (Like most Jewish communal assemblies, the Presidents Conference had a professional leader, Yehuda Hellman, who served as its execu- tive director until his death in 1986, and a rotating volunteer chairman, drawn from the heads of its member organizations.) The concerns of the Presidents Conference extended beyond internal organizational is- sues. It had evolved into the recognized voice of organized American Jewry in international affairs. Fisher felt that if Nixon could persuade these leaders of his commitment to Israel, they in turn would carry his message to their constituencies.

For almost two months, Fisher tried to arrange a meeting between Nixon and the Presidents Conference. Fisher was not well acquainted with Hellman, but knew the chairman, Rabbi Herschel Schacter. How- ever, by design, the Presidents Conference was a nonpartisan assem- bly. The members were resistant to being politicized in the name of any party. They had, in fact, never met with a presidential candidate. But the Six-Day War sensitized American Jews as never before to the stake Israel had in who sat in the Oval Office, and with Fisher, among others, influencing him, Nixon was speaking the language the commu - nity longed to hear.

Obviously, the Presidents Conference was listening, because soon after Nixon’s speech to B’nai B’rith, Fisher received a letter from Rab- bi Schacter. “We have noted with satisfaction the recent statements by Mr. Nixon on the serious threats to Israel’s security,” Schacter wrote. “We would therefore appreciate an opportunity to meet with Mr. Nixon for an off-the-record discussion of the various vital issues currently

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of paramount concern to us. We feel that such a meeting, where Mr. Nixon could hear and exchange views with the authentic leaders of the American Jewish community, would be of inestimable value to him and to us.”

The meeting took place on October 21 in the Presidents Conference headquarters at 515 Park Avenue in New York City.

Yehuda Hellman recalls: “It was my first exposure to Max Fisher. I had heard of him. I knew he was a wealthy Jew, a respected leader. But what struck me so strongly that day was that here was this powerful figure and yet no detail was too small for his personal attention. Where should the chairs be? Where should the pencils be? Who should sit here? Who should sit there? How should questions be addressed? Who would introduce? He literally arranged the chairs himself. He was ner - vous. But who wouldn’t be? This was a historic meeting in terms of the Jewish community, and he had set it up. Who knew how it would go?” Fisher admits he was nervous. “I was worried that they might be cruel to Nixon. There was a lot of opposition to him in parts of the [Jewish] community. It was emotional. I caught some of it when I was out speaking for him. The Alger Hiss hearings; the Checkers speech; the way he lost his cool with the press after he lost in ‘62 for governor of California.”

At the meeting, Fisher introduced Nixon and the candidate went to work. It was a perfect match: Nixon, the anti-Soviet hard-liner, and Jewish leaders who were frightened of how Russian support would encourage the Arab states to renew their attacks on Israel.

Nixon told the Presidents Conference that it was necessary for the Soviets to understand that the United States will not tolerate any Rus- sian takeover of the Middle East or the destruction of Israel. “That,” he said, “was ‘preventative diplomacy.’ The Soviet Union must not believe that we will remain idle if one of the Soviet client states in the Middle East made a move toward Israel.” He reiterated his belief that it was in the vital interest of the United States and the cause of world peace that Israel possess military superiority to deter Arab aggression. “The Arabs,” he said, “are seeking vengeance against the Israelis, while Israel is only seeking to defend its own independence.”

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Nixon was asked about the religious-cultural repression of Jews in the Soviet Union. He replied that the concern of Americans for the freedom of Soviet Jews must be adequately communicated on many levels to Russian leaders. When questioned about the urban crisis, Nix- on voiced appreciation for the role of Jewish voluntary associations in advancing human rights and in the war on poverty. He said the time had come to involve private citizens, as well as the government, in the problems of the cities, and said he hoped to establish machinery for Jewish voluntary organizations —as well as those of other faiths, and civic bodies —to play a more direct part in solving the problem. Nixon had been saying these things throughout his campaign; Jew- ish leaders could have read them in the newspaper over coffee at their breakfast tables. What made Nixon’s talk with the Presidents Confer- ence so triumphant was the intimacy of it, a give-and-take intimacy in which grand pronouncements that had echoed along the campaign trail were reduced to the trustworthy size of personal vows. It was also a sign of access; if the candidate would meet with Jewish leaders, wouldn’t that suggest that he would do the same as president? Word spread in the Jewish community; the meeting was regarded so favor- ably that Humphrey’s campaign strategists promptly requested one for their candidate and got it. But Nixon had been there first and it was his triumph that was reported in the national and Jewish press, under banner headlines proclaiming, “Nixon Says Soviets Must Understand USAWill Not Permit Takeover in Mideast.”

In spite of Fisher’s efforts in the Jewish community, the choice of a president appeared to be turning on the war in Vietnam. On Octo- ber 31, with the election five days away, President Johnson announced a bombing halt and maintained that North Vietnam had assented to expanded peace talks and to desist from attacking South Vietnamese cities. Polls taken the next day showed that Americans favored this course of action by a 2-to-1 margin. On November 2, the Louis Harris Survey had Humphrey surging past Nixon, 43 percent to 40 percent, with Wallace at 13 percent, and 4 percent undecided. That same day, however, President Thieu of South Vietnam weakened Johnson’s claim when he said that his government would not sit down with their ene-

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mies. Now, peace seemed improbable and the election was shaping up as a dead heat.

***

Election Day fell on November 5, which happened to be Marjorie Fisher’s forty-fifth birthday. That evening, her friends Bea and Sidney Solomon hosted a lavish black-tie dinner in her honor at their house. During the party Max made brief appearances to eat and to socialize. But he spent most of the evening closeted in the Solomons’ library staring nervously at the television set. The presidential race was too close to call. The returns rocked back and forth and, Max thought, ap- peared to be repeating the pattern of 1960 —not a good sign. He had the same uncomfortable feeling he had experienced eight years ago, the same edginess, a vague sense of foreboding. At nine o’clock, Nix- on had 41 percent of the vote; Humphrey had 38 percent. By ten, the two were running even, and at midnight, as the guests said their good- byes outside in the wintry Michigan wind, Humphrey had shouldered ahead by 600,000 votes.

The Fishers returned to their house. Max tossed and turned and then quit trying to sleep. He got out of bed, put on his robe and slippers, and went downstairs. He sat in the library watching the early news programs until it was announced that Nixon had won by less than 1 percent of the vote, out-polling Humphrey 31,770,237 to 31,270,533. Fisher stared at the TV for an instant, then went upstairs to shower and dress. By 11:30 a.m., when Humphrey phoned Nixon to concede the election, Fisher had boarded a plane and was en route to Nixon head- quarters in New York.

***

In assessing the scope of Fisher’s contribution to the 1968 campaign, one could point to the money he gave —$150,000 —which qualified him for what Maurice Stans called Nixon’s honorary “Century Club,” twenty-six people who donated $100,000 and over. (Fisher spent close

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to another $60,000 in expenses that he incurred for his own traveling and to fund activity in the Jewish community.) You could also point to the money Fisher raised: $3.5 million out of the $36.5 Nixon spent for his nomination and election. The Jewish vote, however, the focus of such optimistic speculation by Fisher and others, tallied a disap- pointing 16 percent for Nixon. Humphrey had remained attractive to Jews. Compassionate, liberal, strongly on the side of Israel, any vote Nixon won from him would have to be counted as a victory. Fisher’s investment in turning the Jewish community away from the Demo- crats would not pay dividends until 1972. The most evident result of Fisher’s work was the forging of his own national identity as the Jew- ish Republican leader. As if to confirm this perception, Nixon would affectionately call Fisher the “Republican Bernard Baruch — without the park bench.”

Nixon’s intention was to flatter. Baruch was a Wall Street inves - tor and philanthropist who was a power in the Democratic Party. He served, often unofficially, nine presidents, from Wilson to Johnson, as an adviser and troubleshooter. Yet there was a glaring distinction between the way Baruch and Fisher operated. And it is here, in this distinction, that one ascertains the range of Fisher’s achievement. It is perhaps his tightest claim on history, and lay the foundation for much that he accomplished in Washington, in Jerusalem, and between the leaders of both capitals.

Yehuda Hellman states: “Fisher’s philosophy is diametrically opposed to Baruch’s. Baruch saw himself as a great individual. He wanted to shape events and insisted that the [American Jewish] com- munity be behind him. Baruch never wanted to take anyone with him. Fisher insists on it. Historically, American Jews have had a series of strong personalities, but they acted as individuals. Fisher has a com- munity consciousness. He is a master of the art of inclusiveness.” The net result, according to Hellman, was that “starting in 1968, Max Fisher politicized Jewish America as it had never been done. He de- fined the new parameters of the Jewish community’s relation to the presidency and politics.”

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Chapter 9

LEARNING HIS PART: 1969-1970 THE NIXON WHITE HOUSE, PART I

SHORTLYAFTER THE election, Fisher spoke privately with Nix- on. The newly elected president thanked Fisher for his assistance in the campaign and said that Fisher was welcome to an appointment as an ambassador. The offer, Nixon explains, was pro forma, because he never expected Fisher to accept anything.

“And he never did,” says Nixon. “Max is a very successful, self- made man. He likes associations with important people, but he didn’t need status, and some major business people do need it. That’s all an ambassador has —status. Maybe if you’re ambassador to China when there’s trouble, then you might play a part. But usually a person doesn’t make that much difference as an ambassador —as long as he doesn’t make an ass of himself. I should add that Max’s wife, Marjorie, didn’t need it either. Sometimes, the wives push these people. They think it’s a big deal to get an honored place at every state dinner and be referred to as ‘Madame Ambassador.’”

Fisher told Nixon that he was flattered by his offer, but he declined it on the grounds that an ambassadorship was incompatible with his interests. The president inquired if Fisher might be interested in a Cab- inet post. No, Fisher said, but he had hoped that there would be room in Nixon’s Cabinet for George Romney. There was, Nixon said. Romney was going to resign as governor of Michigan to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Fisher characterizes his unwillingness to accept a spot in the admin-

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istration as “keeping his eye on the ball,” meaning that he wanted to remain fixed on his goal — becoming the sort of adviser that former President Eisenhower had mentioned in 1965. Since Fisher shared Nix- on’s opinion that an ambassador’s function was chiefly ceremonial, an ambassadorship would be of no use to him. Nor would a position in the Cabinet, even though it was closer to the seat of power than a foreign embassy. But Fisher believed that to sign on with an administration in any official capacity was to be indebted to the president who bestowed the distinction on him, and you paid off that debt by relinquishing your influence. Now influence is the currency of politics, hoarded in the treasuries of government. Therefore, to owe a favor is the antithesis of influence, an unacceptable state to Fisher, who planned to spend the rest of his life perfecting his own personal fulcrum and studying the responsible uses of its leverage.

What then, Nixon asked, did Fisher want?

Fisher repeated what he had told Nixon during the campaign; he just wanted to have access to him.

Nixon agreed, and they shook hands. And with that handshake Fish- er’s influence at the White House began, an influence that was both celebrated and attacked and, as a rule, mistaken for a power that he did not possess.

Power and influence are frequently used as synonyms. Yet though these two terms are political siblings, they are not identical twins. Power is defined as the control or authority over situations or people; influence is the ability to affect or alter by indirect or intangible means. To confuse the words in casual conversation is a petty error, say, on the order of eating your steak with your salad fork — not altogether proper, but entirely functional.

However, to confuse the difference between power and influence when trying to understand Max Fisher’s association with the Nixon (and Ford and Reagan and Bush) White House is to miss his genuine function. Because Fisher was outside the government, he had no sanc- tioned power; he was not a prime mover. The events in which he was invited to participate were not of his own making, nor were the poli- cies that gave rise to the events. Of course, Fisher’s influence — his

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restricted and indirect capability to alter the outcome of events — was based on his positioning as a supporter of Nixon. But the most pivotal factor in creating Fisher’s diplomatic chance evolved from Nixon’s method of conducting foreign policy and his consequent relations with his State Department.

In RN, Nixon admits that well before his inauguration on January 20, 1969, he “planned to direct foreign policy from the White House.” This plan led him to appoint his old friend, William P. Rogers, as secre- tary of state. Rogers, according to Nixon, was “a strong administrator,” with demonstrated ability, as attorney general under Eisenhower, to “get along with Congress.” During the Nixon administration, Rogers’s primary purpose would be “managing the recalcitrant bureaucracy of the State Department.” Nixon naturally does not write of Rogers’s ex- perience in foreign affairs, since Rogers did not have any.

Nixon appointed a Harvard University professor, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, his assistant for national security affairs. Kissinger’s global view of the U.S.-Soviet conflict matched Nixon’s; he and his staff op - erated out of the White House; and his appointment furthered Nixon’s aim of directing foreign affairs from the Oval Office. Finally, once Nixon had the machinery in place to circumvent the bureaucracy, he realized that he required lines of diplomatic communication outside of official channels.

Nixon explains: “It is important for a president to have input beyond what he gets from State and Defense and the National Security Coun- cil, because while they are all very good, they are also very parochial. The communications you get from them tend to be terribly formalized. The same is true of leaders of other countries. They do not speak can- didly; they talk to their constituencies and to history. So a president oc- casionally finds it useful to reach out to someone who can give you an understanding of the players, of what they really feel. You can throw out ideas that foreign leaders would have to deny publicly, but that they can consider privately. You could run foreign policy without these people, but you wouldn’t run it as well.

“You read The Washington Post and The New York Times, and you’ll see all these experts burbling about the need to do things

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through official channels. Let me tell you: if we had done things through channels, we wouldn’t have had the opening to China; we wouldn’t have had SALT I; we wouldn’t have had negotiations to end the war in Vietnam. Generally, you should try to get it through channels so that you have an orderly procedure. But when you have controversial and complex issues, like the Middle East, it is neces- sary to use private communication.”

As the Nixon administration got under way, the president did arrive at a quasi-official designation for Fisher: he named him his liaison to the American Jewish community. His duties, however, were unclear — even to White House staffers. One assistant, John R. Brown III, sent Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman a memorandum asking. “Since the president has charged Max Fisher with responsibility for liaison for the Jewish community on a nationwide basis, does this mean that pres- idential correspondence concerning the affairs of the Jewish commu- nity should be forwarded to him for response?”

Haldeman’s reply did little to clarify Fisher’s assignment. After ini- tialing the no-line on the memo, Haldeman wrote: “But he should be informed on general activities relating to the Jewish community.”

The first of these activities was ceremonial. On February 26, 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died suddenly of a heart attack. Nixon asked Fisher to be part of a four-man delegation representing the United States at the funeral. The delegation was headed by Secre- tary of Health, Education and Welfare Robert N. Finch, and included U.S. Ambassador to Israel Walworth Barbour, and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Joseph J. Sisco. Es- hkol had been the first Israeli leader that Fisher had met, back in 1954, and the leader that Fisher credited with teaching him the raison d’être of Israel. Yet, as Fisher stood before Eshkol’s grave on Mount Herzl, his sadness was compounded by the sense that his potential for aiding Israel at the White House was at the moment as dim as the chilly gray light obscuring the hills of Jerusalem.

***

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However undefined his role between Washington and Jerusalem, Fish - er was clearer on his domestic goals. As a special presidential consul- tant on voluntary participation, Fisher had an office in the Executive Office Building and at HUD, where since January he had been spend - ing three days a week working with Secretary Romney to found a na- tional center that would coordinate volunteer urban-renewal and social welfare programs across the country. During the campaign, Nixon had pledged to provide “a new measure of reliance on voluntary efforts.” Fisher and Romney were anxious to set private industry to work on the inner cities. They hoped that their program would partially mirror what Fisher was doing at New Detroit, Inc.

In part, Fisher was pushing for a national center on volunteerism be- cause of his experience at NDI. But while he felt that the lessons of phil- anthropic organizations could be applied to the U.S. social agenda, he was even more troubled by the expanding polarization between blacks and whites, and he believed that uniting leaders from both communities could ameliorate this trend. His belief hardened into conviction in late March, when violence erupted at the New Bethel Baptist Church in De- troit, and the city was again seized by tragedy and racial rhetoric. Historian Sydney Fine, author of Violence in the Model City, char- acterizes the Bethel incident as “the most serious of the postriot con- frontations between the police and the black community.” It occurred on the evening of March 29, 1969, when approximately 250 members of a black militant separatist group, the Republic of New Africa, were meeting inside the New Bethel Church on Linwood and Philadelphia, an area that had been hard hit by the 1967 riot. At around midnight, two patrolmen, Michael Czapski and Richard Worobec, were cruising past the church when they saw about a dozen RNAmembers on a street comer, some of them carrying firearms. The patrolmen left their cruis - er, and as they approached the men, shots were fired at them. Czapski was killed; Worobec, hit in the thigh, dragged himself to the patrol car and radioed for assistance.

Fifty police officers were soon storming the church. The police later claimed that riflemen in the church shot at them, which led the police to return fire. However, a church janitor said that the police were ly -

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ing and that the women and children in the church were “screaming and completely hysterical trying to get away from the [policemen’s] shots.” The police arrested the 142 people inside the church, confiscat - ing nine rifles, three pistols and some ammunition.

The prisoners were taken to the First Precinct downtown, and by 6 a.m., Recorder’s Court Judge George W. Crockett Jr. (who was black) was holding hearings in the police station. He heard the cases of thir- ty-nine prisoners, releasing sixteen of them on personal bonds of $100 with instructions to reappear at noon in court, discharging one with the consent of the assistant prosecutor and remanding the other twen- ty-two to police custody until the noon hearing. When Prosecutor Wil- liam Calahan (who was white) arrived, he protested Crockett’s actions, contending that the police lacked sufficient time to process their pris - oners and that Crockett had released some prime suspects. Crockett retorted that the police had already had several hours to process their prisoners — most of whom had no benefit of counsel, a violation of their constitutional rights. Crockett warned Calahan not to interfere with the prisoners’ release, but Calahan ignored the warning. Crockett charged that Calahan’s behavior was “not only a personal affront, but it also had racial overtones.” The violence was shortly overshadowed by the racial malice loose in the city. The media portrayed Crockett as the villain, but their portrayal paled beside the criticism from the Detroit Police Officers Association, who called for Crockett’s dismissal in a full-page ad in The Detroit News.

In defending himself, Crockett stoked the fires of racial resentment. Stating that “a black judge’s views in Detroit will be obeyed as long as he has the power to act,” Crockett posed a rhetorical —and loaded — question at a press conference: “Can any of you imagine,” he asked, “the Detroit Police invading an all-white church and rounding up ev- eryone in sight to be bussed to a wholesale lockup in a police garage?” Crockett’s actions had almost universal support in the black com- munity. More than 500 blacks of every political stripe formed the Black United Front and picketed the Recorder’s Court until halted by an injunction. The attitude of young black militants was succinct: “If Crockett goes, Detroit goes.”

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Fisher and New Detroit, Inc. had long been concerned about the relationship of the police to the black community, regarding it as the most critical barrier to progress in race relations in the city. Because of their concern, eighteen days before the New Bethel incident, Fisher disclosed that NDI was initiating a police-community relations study and a police-management study. Then came New Bethel, and what- ever Fisher and NDI might have learned from the studies would have to wait. By April 2, when New Detroit held its monthly board meet- ing, Fisher felt that the city was about to erupt. At the board meeting, during a discussion of Judge Crockett’s decision, Novell Harrington, a twenty-year-old black board member, stalked angrily out of the closed session. Harrington told reporters he walked out because he wanted NDI to convene a committee to meet on police-community relations and Harrington wanted to be on it.

“We have to have [that committee] today,” Harrington heatedly told reporters. “If not, you don’t know what kind of hell I can raise.” When Harrington was asked if that could include a riot, he answered, “It could.”

Minutes after Harrington spoke to the press, Fisher took Harrington aside for a private conversation. According to reporters, Harrington seemed “partly mollified.” Fisher had promised to look into the rela - tions between the police and the community and to get in touch with him within a day.

Then Fisher addressed a news conference, asking Detroit’s black and white citizens to examine events since the slaying of patrolman Michael Czapski “on the basis of facts, not rumors or nitpicking. We as a community are at a crucial time. Let us examine what is happening in a calm atmosphere. We cannot afford to go back to 1967. There has been a tendency to polarize, which I consider unfortunate. [We should not] choose up sides.”

Breaking with his usual procedure as the chairman of New Detroit and hoping to use his personal credibility to stem the white backlash, Fisher said that he was going to comment as a private citizen. He told reporters that he believed that Judge Crockett used “honest judgment” when he ordered the release of a number of blacks who had been ar-

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rested after the incident. “Judge Crockett,” said Fisher, “is an honest man who is trying to do what is right.”

The white backlash persisted. Upon hearing Fisher’s comments, a high-ranking police officer remarked that “the big guys are on the niggers’ side.”

Fisher was struggling to keep his own anger in check. He had been incensed by the roundup in the church because the police had grabbed dozens of children and kept them in jail overnight. But he confronted the imbroglio with his standard combination of pragmatism and con- sensus building. NDI solicited funds to repair the New Bethel Church and offered a $7,500 reward for information leading to the arrest of Czapski’s killer. (No one was ever convicted of the shootings.) Then Fisher met with the media, and with black and white civic leaders, en- listing them in his vision of harmony. It was a modest vision and a por- table one, for Fisher carted it with him into each of his endeavors. In the case of New Bethel, he gathered representatives of opposed view- points and asked them to solve the same dilemma, thereby reducing their volatile disputes to friendly differences of opinion on solutions to practical problems. To Fisher, this was the craftsmanship of the possi- ble. He knew it would not heal the racial scars in Detroit, but it would ease the city past the crisis.

At a press conference on May 2, Fisher announced that New De- troit’s Law Committee had completed a thirty-six-page document, The New Bethel Report: The Law on Trial. Fisher stated that the report vindicated Crockett, showing this his actions were just. When Carl Parsell, president of the Detroit Police Officers Association, read the report, he said that members of New Detroit would be “cowards or fools” if they approved it. Fisher replied: “Mr. Parsell is entitled to his opinion,” and the report was adopted unanimously by NDI following what The Detroit News described as “an unusually short meeting.” The Bethel incident may have been behind the city, but Fisher was well aware that the germ of the conflict was present. He felt that the police would never get cooperation from the community if the people believed that they could not expect fair treatment from the police. By November 21, 1969, Fisher was demanding that he be given a copy of

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the study made of the Detroit Police Department management by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. It was the first section of the two-part study that NDI had put into motion less than three weeks before Czapski and Worobec were shot.

“[NDI was] asked to pay for it,” Fisher told reporters, “but we ha- ven’t seen it. I don’t know if the report is critical or not critical of the department. I won’t know until I see it.”

Fisher had personally requested a copy and been rebuffed. The study cost somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000, and Fisher said that NDI wasn’t “going to pay for the study if we don’t get a copy of it.”

Both studies were eventually released, and according to Sydney Fine: “Of seventy-three administrative changes recommended by the Police-Community Relations Committee, the Police Department had implemented sixty-eight within two years.... It had recruited more blacks, who made up 14 percent of the department ... and the depart- ment had resolved ambiguities regarding the use of deadly force.... Al- though New Detroit judged what had occurred to be only ‘a qualified success,’ police-community relations were in a far less troubled state as of July 1972 than they had been during the final seventeen months of the Cavanagh administration that followed the July 1967 riot.” Fisher’s experience with NDI was one of the compelling reasons he pressed executives to enlist in his volunteer program in Washing- ton. On April 15, Fisher, Romney and a dozen executives from life insurance companies around the nation came to the White House to meet with Nixon. The companies, urged on by Fisher and Romney, had committed $1 billion to core city areas in housing, health care and jobs.

Four days later, Fisher and Romney spent an hour with Nixon and his domestic adviser, John D. Ehrlichman. Romney said that their pro- gram, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group, would be known as the National Center for Voluntary Action (NCVA), and it was almost ready to go. The center, headquartered in Washington, would be a depository of information on successful volunteer programs throughout the United States, and would dispatch task forces to help communities tailor vol- unteer projects to local needs. Nixon asked Fisher to be the chairman.

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Fisher accepted and suggested that Clem Stone, a Chicago insurance executive and a Nixon friend, serve as the center’s finance-committee chairman. It was, Fisher said, important to involve as many leaders of big business as possible; therefore, a board of directors would be established with the eighty or ninety members drawn from industry, volunteer organizations and civic groups. Fisher and Romney were in the process of selecting a nominating committee for the board.

In closing, Romney said that he thought they could have the center operational by Thanksgiving.

***

In 1969, Fisher was elected president of the Council of Jewish Fed- erations and Welfare Funds, an association of 200 local federations throughout 800 communities in the United States and Canada. At the General Assembly in Boston where Fisher was elected, he was imme- diately confronted by hundreds of college students protesting at the entrance of the hotel, in the halls and conference rooms. The students felt that the CJF wasted time, energy and resources by just meeting mundane local needs — for example, building community centers or supporting day camps —and not promoting the loftier ideals of Jewish culture through increased funding to Hillel Foundations on campus- es or sponsoring intellectual journals. The students planned to disrupt the plenary session —chain themselves to microphones and picket in the aisles. Though one can scarcely categorize the student protest as a grave crisis, Fisher’s reaction to it is one of the most lucid illustrations of his technique for handling conflict.

Philip Bernstein, who served as chief executive officer of the CJF from 1955 until 1979, recalls: “Max invited about twenty of those young people to his suite. He sat around on the floor with them and said, ‘All right, tell us what you want.’ And they did. Max replied: ‘We’re not going to just hand out money. We have to be responsible. We’re trustees of funds. But in terms of suggesting programs and help- ing to implement them, you have an open door. I promise: you will be involved in our committees and our ongoing work.’And that’s what he

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did. He put them on committees. Fifteen years later, some of those kids were deeply involved in the Jewish community. Hillel Levin —he was the students’ spokesman —became head of Judaic studies at Yale.” In 1971, the CJF General Assembly was again targeted by col- lege-age protesters. They represented Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League (JDL) and wanted the CJF to adopt a more militant stance toward the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Jewish citizens. The JDL members locked arms and snake-danced through the audience, singing Hebrew songs loud enough to drown out the business that Fisher was trying to conduct from the podium. Fisher considered the JDLdestructive, and since they had been threatening to disrupt the CJF Assembly for weeks, he was prepared.

Philip Bernstein remembers: “Max arranged to finish the import - ant business at the beginning of the meeting to make sure that we got through as much as we could before the JDL showed up. When they arrived, Max kept his cool. He would not call the police, nor would he have them thrown out. He just let them sing and dance while he ran through his agenda. The JDL protesters wanted to be arrested; they wanted publicity. The next day the newspapers carried maybe one line about them. Max acted as if they weren’t even there. He was just that smart.”

***

Despite the progress at New Detroit, the CJF and with Romney, Fisher was at a loss for where he fit in between Washington and Jerusalem. Ironically, Nixon already had a spot in mind for him — a historical paradigm that the president adjusted to match his concept of how to proceed with the pragmatic chores of foreign affairs.

“The most famous example in American history of a private citi- zen becoming involved in diplomacy is that of Colonel Edward M. House,” says Nixon. “House was a close friend of President Woodrow Wilson and was a quasi-government official by the time they started to negotiate the Versailles Treaty. Prior to that time, House was an inter- mediary whom Wilson often used because Wilson trusted him. Wilson

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was not that close to his secretaries of state. He didn’t like William Jen- nings Bryan. Nor did Wilson get along with his other secretary of state, Robert Lansing. So House became the president’s closest adviser. Now that’s an extreme position. And it wasn’t Max’s position with me.”

In his book, Leaders, Nixon writes that Woodrow Wilson was the “ideal” man to be president, and judges him “a great creative thinker” and “a decisive man of action.” So an affiliation modeled on the one Wilson enjoyed with House appealed to him. And like Wilson — albeit for different reasons — Nixon was bypassing his secretary of state. While Fisher’s friendship with Nixon did not duplicate the inordinate Wilson-House closeness, it did provide the president with other ad- vantages. Fisher, unlike House, returned a political dividend to Nixon besides the money he contributed and raised —namely access within the organized American Jewish community and the use of his friend- ships with Israeli officials.

“Max,” says Nixon, “had excellent credentials with the Israelis. He had excellent credentials with me. I trusted him as someone who would honestly report to me what he thought and who had unusually good po- litical judgment. Max also suggested ideas that would not come from the bureaucracy. I knew that if we relied solely on the bureaucracy we would just continue along the same lines. We needed to be bold. And boldness is not something that bureaucrats get involved in: bureaucrats protect their butts. It’s true in the business world as well. Max knew that. Your average CEO isn’t just going to rely on his bureaucrats — he’s going to go out and break a little china.”

With regard to domestic politics, Nixon knew that by granting Fish- er access to him, he was strengthening Fisher’s hand in the American Jewish community, while Fisher, by having the access, was increasing the value of Nixon’s stock in that community.

“I was happy to do it,” says Nixon. “After all, I am a politician, and I hope, at times, a statesman. But by building up Max, I was building up a responsible person. Apresident has to realize that there are some irresponsibly partisan people in the Jewish community. Max believed in a balanced approach. He was not what I would consider —and this is not said in derogation —a professional Jew. There are professional

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Jews. There are professional Quakers: I happen to be one. There are professional Irish; some of the worst, in my opinion. And the Greek lobby is the toughest. [They] take an attitude toward the Turks that would get rid of NATO’s southern hinge if you didn’t support them on Cyprus.

“Now, what we call ‘the Lobby for the Cause of Israel,’” Nixon continues, “has a deeper connotation for reasons that [a number of] people do not understand. [Because of] what happened to the Jewish community during World War II, and then [their establishing a new nation], there [exists] a support for Israel in the United States that goes far beyond any written piece of paper. It is often said that Israel is our best ally in the Middle East. [Yet] we have no alliance on paper with Israel. But we have something much stronger: we have interests — maybe emotional interests, but also strategic interests.

“Which brings us to Max Fisher. Max is very proud of his Ameri- can heritage and he is also passionately for Israel. He makes no bones about it. If you talk to Max you always have the feeling that he’s trying to weigh Israel’s interests with American interests. But his loyalty is not divided. [Besides], there is nothing wrong with being for Israel. Max believes that Israel’s interests and American interests [coincide]. And usually, they do. That’s the fortunate thing about it.”

In the spring of 1969, however, the dovetailing of U.S and Israeli interests was not immediately apparent. Seventy-year-old Golda Meir had left retirement to replace Eshkol as Israel’s prime minister. Meir was deeply distressed about the War of Attrition that Egyptian Presi- dent Nasser had launched against Israel along the Suez Canal. Russian ships would bring SA-3 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to Egypt, along with an imposing array of other military equipment. Israel would re- taliate by bombarding Egyptian positions, but the fighting would drag on for eighteen months — at a terrible cost in lives and an alarming quantity of downed Israeli aircraft. Meir wanted America to resupply Israel with Phantom fighter jets and Skyhawk bombers to offset Israeli losses and the arms that the Soviet Union was shipping to Egypt.

The reluctance of the United States to furnish Israel with aircraft had recently become a serious bone of contention between the two nations.

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In October 1968, in what numerous observers deemed a pre-election gambit, President Johnson finally promised to sell fifty Phantoms to Israel, but the deal was not signed until three months later, just days be- fore Johnson left office, and the planes would be slow to arrive. Nixon appeared no more eager to sell Israel planes than Johnson had been. At the outset of the Nixon administration, Secretary of State Rogers, and his capable assistant secretary, Joseph Sisco, were overseeing policy in the Middle East. Nixon, believing that there was a slim probability for success in the region, distanced the White House from it. The pres- ident had restricted Kissinger from becoming involved because he felt that the national security adviser would be busy enough with Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Europe and Japan, and that Kissinger’s Jewishness would be a liability when approaching Arab leaders.

The framework for an Arab-Israeli peace agreement had been for- malized by the United Nations in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. On November 22, 1967, the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved Resolution 242. As political scientist Steven L. Spiegel points out, the resolution “affirmed positions valued by each side.” Attractive to the Arabs was that the resolution called for Israeli withdrawals “from ter- ritories occupied in the recent conflict,” and for a “just solution to the refugee problem.” Of interest to the Israelis was that the resolution insisted on freedom of navigation through international waterways, for an end to the state of belligerency and the right of every state in the region to “live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” Secretary of State Rogers (and U.N. special representative Gunnar V. Jarring, who was trying to bring peace to the area) saw Resolution 242 as a straight swap. Rogers was inclined to force the Israelis back to their pre-June 5, 1967, borders in exchange for a pledge of peace from her Arab neighbors. In retrospect, Rogers’s perception of 242 was a formula for deadlock, since Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s response to his view was that Rogers (and by extension, Ambassador Jarring) did not appreciate that “the verbal reliability of the Arab lead- ers was not, in any way, similar to his own.”

Frustrated with Washington (and the United Nations), Meir contact- ed Fisher. In June, Fisher visited her in Israel.

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Fisher had become acquainted with Meir through his work at the United Jewish Appeal. His opinion of her was summed up in 1983 when a reporter asked Fisher to describe her via a word-association game. When the reporter said, “Golda Meir,” Fisher quickly replied, “Oak tree. No, two oak trees.”

Says Fisher: “Golda’s resolve was unbelievable, and her commit- ment to her vision of Israel’s safety was unshakable. When we talked in June 1969, she was clearly upset about Nasser’s intentions along the Suez Canal. She also wanted the Phantoms that had been promised during the Johnson administration. We spoke for three or four hours. I told her that she could trust Nixon. The Russians were obviously behind the Egyptians, and the president would stand up to the Soviets. She was worried about Rogers, and I agreed that his opinions on the Mideast were wide of the mark. I suggested that a private meeting with Nixon would be worthwhile. She said that she had been considering it, but given the charged political atmosphere, would it be possible? I told her that I would pass her wish along to the White House.”

Upon his return, Fisher phoned Leonard Garment, who was now working in the White House as a consultant to the president, and told him that Meir thought that an official visit to Washington would be beneficial. Garment passed along the message. Meir, at a White House dinner in 1973, credited Fisher with prevailing on her to go see Nixon. She was, by all accounts, extremely fond of Fisher, but it is likely that she would have gone to meet with Nixon on her own. Yet in terms of the role that Fisher would come to play between Washington and Je- rusalem, his June 1969 meeting with Meir marked his initial foray as an intermediary between the two governments and taught him his first small lessons on the use of private diplomacy.

“Max and I,” says Nixon. “set up our communications so that mes- sages could go back and forth without putting anything on the record. Max knew that I would hold everything he passed along from Israel in confidence, and I knew that everything I told him would be treat - ed the same way. And Max never spoke to the press. A president has many good friends who love to come in and talk, and then they go blurt out the details to reporters. That destroys their usefulness. Part

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of the justification for personal diplomacy is that a president can get a foreign leader to say things to his representative that he wouldn’t say to the ambassador or to the secretary of state. If the emissary talks to the press, the president and the foreign leader [lose their options]. That wasn’t how Max did business. He was discreet.”

As time would prove, Fisher’s variety of back-channeling was an effective method for keeping negotiations private. It was particularly effective because Fisher was so closed-mouthed with the media — re- porters were rarely even cognizant of the fact that he was involved. In general, the media is frustrated by back-channel diplomacy, and, ac- cording to one distinguished journalist, actually assists the government in carrying it out.

“Rather than examining the process of government, reporters are hung up reporting the government’s official line,” says Bill Kovach, who covered the Nixon and Ford administrations for The New York Times and presently serves as the curator of Harvard University’s Nie- man Foundation, a mid-career fellowship program for journalists. “Re- porters become quasi-government officials, laying down the smoke screen behind which the maneuvering occurs. This is not by choice. It’s because the conventions of journalism that we’ve adopted — the notion of objective reporting — has led us to become dependent on official statements. Most of the good news stories, if you read deeply enough into them, have a sense of the process —of what’s really going on. But it’s two-thirds of the way down and there is not enough [space and time] to develop it. The headline and the thrust of the story, and what winds up on television and radio, are just the official position.” It was this narrow strip of territory between the outer and inner workings of government that Fisher traveled. The meeting with Meir had been fruitful, but one question nagged at him: How much ground would the White House permit him to cover? The answer, Fisher would soon ascertain, would depend as much on his own initiative as on the needs of the administration.

***

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On Friday, August 8, Mollie Fisher, who had been ill on and off since the 1950s, died at St. Francis Hospital in Miami Beach. She was eighty-two years old. Funeral services were held on Sunday in South- field, Michigan.

Despite the arc of Mollie Fisher’s life from shtetl to Fontainebleau penthouse — she had clung to the values she brought with her from Russia in 1907. She cooked, cleaned, raised her children, doted on her six grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren, and accepted the dips and swells of her fate as a matter of course. Her life, she had sur- mised, was unfolding as designed, and it was this calm certainty about things working out for the best that she bequeathed to her son. Max’s ‘doggedness in pursuing his objectives may have come from William, but his faith that his pursuit would be successful came from Mollie. His apparent willingness to accept things as they were —which others commonly misinterpreted as equanimity or pragmatism —was actual- ly Max’s unwavering inner conviction that regardless of obstacles his efforts would be rewarded.

Max was sixty-one when Mollie died, and he had remained her “sonny boy,” right up until then, but he says that his mother never re- ally comprehended the scale of his success at Aurora or his work with Romney and Nixon or what it meant that he had become a national leader in Jewish philanthropic organizations. Charity, however, was something Mollie understood. She belonged to Hadassah, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Order of the Eastern Star, the Jewish Old Folks’ HomeAssociation, the Women’s European Welfare Organi- zation; and she was active in the Mt. Sinai Hospital Association, which, together with other organizations, founded a Jewish hospital in Detroit. If Mollie had been certain that she would find good fortune in America, then once she found it she believed that she owed something in return. This belief was also something that she bequeathed to her son.

When the service for Mollie was over, the funeral procession wend- ed through the Sunday afternoon traffic and turned past the gates of the Clover Hill Park Cemetery. As Max read the Mourner’s Prayer, the Kaddish, over his mother’s grave, tears rolled down his cheeks. It was the first time that his wife and children had seen him cry.

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***

Almost immediately, Fisher’s connection to the White House, coupled with his prominence in Jewish communal life and the instability in the Middle East, had an unsettling effect on his business interests.

In September 1969, a military coup deposed the pro-American monarchy of Libya’s King Idris I. Shortly thereafter, twenty-seven- year-old Colonel Muamar el-Qaddafi assumed power. His regime was Islamic and pan-Arab. Qaddafi challenged Western oil interests in Lib - ya, singing out the Marathon Oil Company on Libyan television be- cause of Fisher’s seat on the company’s board of directors.

Fisher loved the oil business. Throughout his life, decades af- ter merging Aurora with The Ohio (Marathon since 1962) and re- linquishing the daily tasks of running an oil company, Fisher still thought of himself as an oil man and spoke wistfully of the years spent studying the technology of the industry and putting together oil deals around the country. But when Qaddafi threatened Mara - thon with nationalizing their holdings, Fisher believed that he had to choose. No one on the board demanded his resignation, but Fisher says, “Being so active in Jewish affairs and with Israel, I didn’t want it on my conscience that I was hurting Marathon’s stockholders.” He passed one long night discussing the situation with John Bugas, and in the morning he flew to Marathon headquarters in Findlay, Ohio, and addressed the board of directors.

Fisher said: “I am identified on Libyan TV as an enemy of the peo - ple. They say that I take millions of dollars out of their country and donate it to Israel. They’re right. I am their enemy. And so, I formally tender my resignation to this board.”

Expressing their regret, the board accepted his resignation.

Though Fisher lamented his decision to resign from Marathon, his deepening involvement between Washington and Jerusalem was ample compensation. At the end of September, Golda Meir made a triumphant visit to the United States. In private talks with Nixon, her rapport with the president was instantaneous and extraordinary. At a state dinner in

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her honor, which Fisher and numerous leaders from theAmerican Jewish community attended, the president and prime minister exchanged mu- nificent toasts. Meir departed in a wash of warm feeling and confident that Israel would receive more shipments of Phantoms and Skyhawks. On October 9, Fisher sent Nixon a memo telling him that his open- ness toward the prime minister and his empathy for Israel’s circum- stances “had a tremendous impact on the Jewish community.” More important, said Fisher, was that “in visits of the prime minister with [Jewish] leadership throughout the country, she referred to the warmth of your reception and said, ‘I am much happier now than before my visit.’ In my own private conversations with her, she indicated reac- tions to the visit which were very favorable. I believe we can build upon this reservoir of good will for the future.”

The optimism of Meir and the Jewish community was short-lived. On December 9, Secretary of State Rogers unveiled his plan for Mid- dle East peace. Known as the Rogers Plan, the proposal recommended that Israel withdraw to the pre-June 1967 borders with Jordan; hinted at a united Jerusalem with Jordanian participation in the city’s civic, economic and religious life; called for a settlement of the refugee prob- lem and a cease-fire between Israel and Egypt.

The next day, the Israeli Cabinet rejected the plan, claiming that the major powers could not impose a peace on the region. Meir, though, was shaken by Rogers’s proposal, and, as she recalled in My Life, by the fact that “the number of Soviet military personnel in Egypt was increasing by leaps and bounds, including combat pilots and crews of the ground-to-air missiles.” On December 29, Meir wrote Fisher: “I am writing to you as one of Israel’s proven friends. I am sure you understand that we are passing through difficult days, attempting to carry on in face of the enmity which surrounds us. If it were possible for you to come to Jerusalem, I would be delighted to receive you in person and tell you in detail the problems facing our people. Since that might not be feasible and time is urgent, I am sending to you, within the next few weeks, my personal emissaries to explain in depth, with new confidential material, some of these problems. I want you to listen to them as though you were listening to me.”

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The confidential information that Fisher saw offered evidence of the Kremlin’s generosity in supplying the Egyptians with arms. Meir hoped that Fisher would share the information with the White House, and that Nixon, as a hard-liner against Soviet designs throughout the world, would speed up the delivery of combat aircraft to Israel.

Fisher passed on the information, but at the beginning of 1970, he was immersed in his own controversy. The leaders of the American Jew- ish community had been outraged by the Rogers Plan, feeling that the administration, which had extolled its firm backing of Israel during the campaign, was now reneging on its promise. Fisher, as the Jewish Re- publican most closely identified with Nixon, was in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why the administration had allowed Rogers to announce his plan —a plan to which Fisher vehemently objected. Fisher phoned Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco. He had met Sisco during their trip to Eshkol’s funeral, and once they returned he frequently called him to discuss the Middle East. Fisher was im- pressed by Sisco’s intellectual grasp of the region’s complexities; his shrewd perceptions of all the players; and his steady, measured tem- perament — the sign of a first-rate negotiator. Sisco says that he and Fisher became “fast and close friends,” aided by the fact that Sisco’s wife, Jean, had lived in Louisville and knew Marjorie Fisher.

“Max’s forte,” says Sisco, “was a pragmatism not unduly con- strained by emotional ideology. He saw that Israel had a fundamental interest in the United States being the global leader, and he continually tried to see whether Israeli and American interests could be pointed in the same direction. Yet Max understood that while the interests of both countries were parallel, they were not one in the same. That made leading the Jewish community difficult. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a monolith, but very individualistic. Max managed to lead the community because he was a consummate diplomat. He was also a sensitive indicator, to me, of difficulties that could arise from certain policy decisions. He was an excellent lightning rod.”

When Fisher contacted Sisco about the Rogers Plan, the assistant secretary told him that the administration had no intention of pressur- ing Israel to accept the secretary of state’s proposals. (Nixon passed the

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same message to Fisher through Leonard Garment.) Sisco added that he was personally in favor of providing Israel, at the earliest possible date, with increased economic and military aid, an idea that Nixon seemed to endorse.

In a series of meetings in New York City, Fisher reiterated the ad- ministration’s assurances to American Jewish leaders, but they were irate, and several members of the Presidents Conference began to refer snidely to Fisher as the Republican’s “court Jew,” a charge that would be leveled at Fisher, on occasion, for the next twenty-three years.

The term “court Jew” dates to sixteenth-century Europe, when rul- ers permitted favored members of the Jewish minority to participate in the life of the state. As a rule, court Jews were wealthy and assimilated. Their responsibilities varied, but in the main they functioned as media- tors between the rulers and the ruled, elevating their own social station by assisting the monarchies in conserving their exploitative position in society.

Fisher was frustrated by the appellation —the community was be- ing unrealistic. The White House had a broader agenda than the Mid- dle East. Nixon had entered the Oval Office committed to the princi - ple of detente, which held that since the interests of the United States and the Soviet Union were hopelessly entwined, then a relaxing of tensions between the superpowers would lead to a lessening of ten- sions throughout the world. The United States was already fighting Soviet-backed clients in Vietnam. Although the Rogers Plan may have been unrealistic —as Nixon later admitted in RN —the administration had to leave the door open to Arab states who, because of America’s unstinting support of Israel, were being driven into the Soviet camp. Attempting to stave off a collision between the Jewish community and the Nixon administration, Fisher arranged for Jewish leaders, Re- publican and Democrat alike, to meet with Secretary of State Rogers in Washington to voice their objections. On January 8, forty-three leaders met with Rogers for two hours of questions and answers. Many of those who attended were later quoted in the national Jewish press as saying that they were satisfied with Rogers’s contention that his recommen - dations signaled no change in the administration’s policy toward Israel

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and that his plan was merely an effort to kindle cease-fire negotiations between the Arabs and Israelis. Even playwright Dore Schary, a promi- nent liberal Democrat who was acting chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, appeared pleased with the results. Schary told a reporter that the group had come out of the meeting “reassured that there is no basic change in U.S. policy on the sovereignty of Israel. Secretary of State Rogers was warm, candid and forthright.”

Fisher was thankful that no one had blasted Rogers in the press, but he knew that the meeting was a failure. Rogers had been unable to persuade anyone that American policy toward Israel had not veered off course. As for the secretary of state, Fisher felt that Rogers was an honorable man who suffered from his lack of knowledge and diplomatic experience, and who, in the final analysis, did not belong in foreign affairs.

The announcement of the Rogers Plan had also weakened Fisher’s credibility within the American Jewish community, and Fisher was up- set about it for two reasons. One, the administration was going to need the support of the Jewish community to get any type of Middle East settlement through Congress, and the Rogers Plan engendered nothing but acrimony. Secondly, Fisher had worked assiduously to shore up Nixon’s image among Jews, and now the administration was under- mining his labors by not sticking to the Middle East approach that had been promised in the 1968 campaign that of keeping the military balance tipped in favor of Israel.

Worst of all, Fisher thought, with a bit more attention to detail the fallout could have been avoided — or at least contained. Fisher decided to inform the president about it. On January 12, he wrote Nixon: “It was unfortunate that I did not have the opportunity to be briefed on the [content of the Rogers Plan]. I have been overwhelmed with mail and telephone calls [protesting his proposals]. I have tried to reassure the community that there is no basic change in U.S. pol- icy toward Israel. [At our January 8 meeting], Secretary Rogers was most gracious and displayed great patience by going into the posi- tion of the State Department. However, I would be less than candid if I did not say that there are great concerns still being expressed throughout the Jewish community.

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“I’m afraid this concern will now be increased tremendously by the French sale of arms to Libya, which most people feel will finally be delivered to Egypt. I am disturbed that there will be quite a storm of protest over the visit of [French] President [Georges] Pompidou to the United States, over what looks like his very pro-Arab policy. He could have hardly timed his sale of Mirage [fighter jets] at a more disadvan - tageous period. The fact that he holds back delivery of arms to Israel at the same time he makes a sale to Libya, creates a problem, [since France hopes to be involved in Middle East peace talks]. The feeling now will certainly develop that such peace talks are based on the main- ly pro-Arab positions [of France, Britain and the Soviet Union], while leaving the United States isolated.

“I believe some review of the situation may be necessary. I have some suggestions that might be helpful in solving these problems — as to keeping the Jewish community cool and on how some political benefits may be derived.”

The president was not unaware of the comer into which he had backed Fisher. Nixon says that “Max took risks supporting me. He took a lot of heat from his friends and family. And I knew that many of the people in the Jewish organizations were attacking him — they called him ‘court Jew.’ It was hard on him having to be balanced — not always taking the Israeli line without regard for American interests. But that’s why I trusted Max —because of his balance.”

Fisher advised Nixon to reaffirm his support for Israel to Jewish leaders. He told the president that it could be accomplished without publicly contradicting the secretary of state. Nixon consented, but wondered how it should be done. Fisher already had an approach and a forum in mind.

Two weeks later, on January 26, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations convened an emergency ses- sion of 1,000 Jewish community and organization leaders at the Stat- ler-Hilton Hotel in Washington to express their disapproval of the Rog- ers Plan. (Protestant, Roman Catholic and black leaders also attended the session and spoke in support of Israel.) Nixon had a letter delivered to the session. It was addressed to Dr. William A. Wexler, chairman of

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the Presidents Conference, and Fisher read it aloud to the audience. The letter professed that the United States believed peace in the Middle East could come only after a negotiated agreement between Israel and the Arab states. The president stated that he knew that Amer- ican Jews feared “that Israel might become increasingly isolated,” but added that this was “not true as far as the United States is concerned.” Responding to the community’s consternation that the sale of French jets to Libya would tilt the balance of power in the region, Nixon said that while he would prefer “restraint” in the shipment of arms to the area, the United States was “maintaining careful watch on the relative strength of the forces there, and we will not hesitate to provide arms to friendly states as the need arises.” In a statement of blanket reassur- ance, the president wrote: “The United States stands by its friends,” and “Israel is one of its friends.”

After the session, Dr. William Wexler, speaking for the conference, told The New York Times that the letter “shows that the president un- derstands and shares our concerns. It indicates that he wants no further erosion in American policy.”

For the moment, then, the protest within the organized American Jewish community abated. And Israel started turning the tide in the War of Attrition by embarking on air strikes deep inside Egyptian ter- ritory. Nixon had not filled Golda Meir’s request for a new shipment of planes, claiming that he was still weighing it. But there were the fighter jets that the United States had agreed to sell Israel during the John- son administration —most of which were bogged down in a political and bureaucratic swamp. With the increased raids into Egypt, Israel sorely needed them. Fisher believed that even if the administration chose to hold off on new Phantom shipments in order not to induce the Soviets to expand their military aid to Egypt, then the administration could speed up the delivery of the remainder of the fifty Phantom jets by claiming that the United States was simply honoring a previous commitment. So Fisher approached Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and in the process, uncovered another facet of his role between Washington and Jerusalem.

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***

Fisher had met Henry Kissinger on a few occasions, but all he knew about him was what he had read in the newspapers. Kissinger was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany with impeccable intellectual cre- dentials —a Harvard professor who, in 1957, had published the influ - ential Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, and who had also served as a foreign-affairs adviser to Nelson Rockefeller. Fisher, however, was about to discover that Kissinger possessed other skills crucial to diplomacy — a sapient understanding of bureaucracies and a genius for surmounting them.

In his conversation with Fisher, Kissinger came right to the point. While he was sympathetic to Israel’s predicament, Nixon had directed him to leave the Middle East to Secretary of State Rogers. But the Phantoms had been approved in 1968, said Fisher, and Israel needed the rest of them. Who could make this case to the president?

“Go see John Mitchell,” said Kissinger.

Fisher was astounded. The attorney general could shake the Phan- toms loose?

As Kissinger later revealed in White House Years (and Nixon con- firmed in his memoirs), the president had included Mitchell in discus - sions of foreign policy as early as the summer of 1969, because “Nixon valued his political judgment.”

So Kissinger told Fisher that Mitchell could help. And with that suggestion, the security adviser taught Fisher a type of lesson that Kissinger himself would humorously describe as the “dimensions of political science not taught at universities.” The lesson was important to Fisher, but years later, during the Ford administration, it turned out not to be nearly as important as the fact that Kissinger had been the one to teach it to him.

***

For Fisher, it was a source of great sadness that John Mitchell, who died of a heart attack on November 9, 1988, would invariably be iden-

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tified with the Watergate scandal and remembered as the big, gruff, pipe-smoking ex-attorney general who glared at prosecutors and never revealed a thing. Fully 75 percent of Mitchell’s lengthy obituary in The New York Times was devoted to Watergate, the impact it had on his family and the nineteen months that Mitchell spent in prison.

“What’s tragic,” says Fisher, “is that John never wanted to come to Washington. He was Nixon’s campaign manager in ’68, did a great job and helped him win, and thought that afterward he’d go back to being what he’d been —a terrific bond lawyer. He never wanted to be attorney general. But Nixon asked him to join the Cabinet, and John said he’d do it.”

The most enduring memory Fisher has of Mitchell is the afternoon in 1971 when they traveled to Philadelphia to watch a group of Russian Jews file off a plane, free for the first time in their lives. The immigrants had undergone colossal hardships to leave the Soviet Union; they had lost their jobs, been harassed by their government and charged an ex- orbitant exit tax. Mitchell had made their journey possible by clearing several obstacles through the Justice Department. Fisher watched as the Russian Jews walked toward the terminal, and a lump rose in his throat. He glanced at Mitchell. The attorney general was crying openly, not bothering to wipe the tears from his face.

And so Fisher spoke with Mitchell about the slowness of the Phan- tom delivery and Nixon’s delay in agreeing to additional shipments. Recalls Mitchell: “Max wasn’t in the position of making the deci- sions. Rather, he was inducing other people to make them. Under those conditions, he was a cool operator. He didn’t come into my office and shoot from the hip. He was well prepared and knew what was going on. He was extremely low-key, very warm, very congenial. But Max was persistent. Persistency was one of his prime virtues and it enabled him to carry the day.”

Mitchell was inclined to aid Israel. He admired the Israelis, rel- ished the success of their bombing raids against the Russian-backed Egyptians, and thought that supporting them was a wise political move for Nixon.

“We had a situation,” says Mitchell, “where Henry Kissinger, who

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was Jewish, was on the National Security Council, and the secretary of state, Bill Rogers, was a little mixed up in his perception of the Middle East. And so we handled things like the Phantoms outside of the State Department and the NSC. I saw to it that the Phantom deal received proper consideration. I worked on it with [General Alexander M. Haig Jr.], who was on Kissinger’s staff. We met with Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yitzhak Rabin. Of course, Max followed the progress of it, assuring the Israelis and [the American Jewish community] that it would be taken care of.”

Fisher departed from Mitchell’s office believing that the attorney general would see to it that Israel got her Phantoms. In fact, not long after the Fisher-Mitchell meeting, Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin noticed an abrupt shift in the attorney general and the administration. In The Rabin Memoirs, Rabin recalled that in late January 1970 “the American public’s sympathy for Israel was growing stronger every day. I now observed a similar trend within the administration itself, especially on the part of ... John Mitchell.”

Mitchell spoke to Nixon, but six weeks later the administration col- lided again with the American Jewish community. Fisher’s prediction to Nixon back on January 12 about the demonstrations during the visit of Georges Pompidou to the United States proved accurate. In early March, Jewish War Veterans in Chicago, protesting the French arms sale to Libya, harassed Pompidou. Madame Pompidou was so upset that she threatened to go home. In New York City, Governor Rocke- feller and Mayor Lindsay snubbed the French leader. Nixon was en- raged and one-upped the governor and mayor by going to Manhattan to substitute for Vice President Agnew at a dinner honoring Pompidou. Leonard Garment phoned Fisher to see if he could assist in modulating the reaction to Pompidou, but the damage had been done. In Before the Fall, William Safire records that Nixon, in a show of pique, put “a hold on all routine messages to Jewish dinners, yearbooks and bar mitz- vahs.” However, when John Mitchell heard of the embargo, he “picked up the phone to the White House and started the flow of congratulatory messages moving again.”

What appeared to be of greater consequence to the Israelis was that

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Nixon announced he was postponing delivery of the Phantoms to Isra- el. In his memoirs, Nixon explains that he made this decision because he was attempting to “slow down the arms race without tipping the fragile military balance in the region. I also believed that American influence in the Middle East increasingly depended on our renewing relationships with Egypt and Syria, and this decision would help pro- mote that goal.”

Nixon’s explanation, though, is misleading. Obviously, Mitchell (and Kissinger, whose fight over foreign policy with Rogers was es - calating from skirmish to war) had helped to persuade the president to send more Phantoms. According to Yitzhak Rabin, less than two weeks after Nixon’s announcement, he was summoned to the White House for a secret meeting with the president. Nixon informed him that while he would supply Israel with arms, he would no longer expose this com- mitment to public debate. The president told Rabin: “The moment Is- rael needs arms, approach me, by way of Kissinger, and I’ll find a way of overcoming bureaucracy.”

“And that’s how Israel got her Phantoms,” Mitchell adds. “[The Is- raelis] never sent me the Order of the Court. But I understand they appreciated it.”

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan certainly appreciated it. When Fisher was in Israel, the defense minister saw him admiring a beer jug that dated back to 1200 B.C. Dayan presented the jug to Fisher as a thank-you gift for his assistance in securing the Phantoms.

“The jets had already been promised,” says Fisher. “It was only a matter of getting them through the bureaucracy. I just helped move things along faster. That’s it.”

For the moment, Fisher thought, it was enough.

***

In late March 1970, Fisher resigned as chairman of the National Center for Volunteer Action. Speculation arose in the press that Fisher’s res- ignation was due to Nixon’s postponing the delivery of the Phantoms to Israel. Of course, since John Mitchell was keeping Fisher apprised

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of the delivery’s progress, Fisher was aware that the Phantoms had not been truly postponed, but rerouted through the Oval Office. Still, news - papers cited reports that Fisher was unhappy with the administration’s policy in the Middle East. Fisher tried to dispel the confusion by tell- ing Jerald F. terHorst, Washington bureau chief of The Detroit News, that he was leaving the NCVA chairmanship because “the job ought to be given to somebody else every year.” Fisher also told terHorst that “the president is 100 percent right on Israel.” The speculation, however, was especially pointed in Israel, where Haaretz reported that Fisher had resigned from the NCVAto protest Nixon’s Mideast policy. The Jerusalem Post ran a similar report, but they did phone Detroit to check the story with Fisher, who said that his resignation “meant no such thing,” and that Nixon was “a real friend of Israel.”

Given the political balancing act the White House was performing with the Phantoms, the administration was anxious about the politi- cal repercussions of Fisher’s resignation in the American Jewish com- munity. Murray M. Chotiner, special counsel to the president, wrote a memorandum to Peter M. Flanigan, one of John Ehrlichman’s as- sistants, saying that although Fisher had resigned because he felt the chairmanship should be a twelve-month position, “the timing turned out to be bad. Many people in favor of the jet transaction with Israel construed Max’s resignation as a protest against the president’s deci- sion. It was not that. As a possible effort to show Max is still working with the president it is suggested that he be named chairman of some committee, or what have you, of substance.”

Fisher already had something else on the back burner, but first he wanted to find someone to replace him at the NCVA. His choice was Henry Ford II, who was not only eminently qualified to be chairman, but was someone whom Fisher had been trying to recruit to work for Nixon since the beginning of the 1968 campaign. According to Peter Collier and David Horowitz, authors of The Fords: An American Epic, Henry II was “an LBJ man down the line.” When Johnson withdrew from the ’68 race, Ford’s support for Nixon was, at best, halfhearted. Fisher told Ford that he was wrong about Nixon, and thought that get- ting Henry involved at the NCVA would change his thinking. Once

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Ford accepted the chairmanship, Fisher was free to tackle another un- official role —this time as a consultant on the economy.

Nixon approved of the idea. “When Max and I talked,” says Nix- on, “we didn’t just talk about Israel. Max is a fine businessman — his understanding of the business cycle is better than most economists. I listened to his advice on everything from wage-and-price controls to taxes and energy. Max and I discussed the whole field.”

Fisher contacted Dr. Paul W. McCracken, a conservative economist from the University of Michigan, who was serving as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He asked McCracken if he could be of assistance. McCracken replied that he would be glad to have his input, and from then on the two men spoke regularly about the economy — a practice that continued through McCracken’s three-year tenure as chairman.

“All through Nixon’s first term,” says McCracken, “Max was very helpful to me. Being prominent in business, he had a feeling for the pulse of that world. We have to remember that the president lives in a cocoon. He needs to hear from business leaders. Max could get ideas in front of the president. He had access, and Nixon trusted him.”

On May 27, at a White House dinner honoring businessmen, Fisher and Nixon conferred about the economy, which appeared to be heading toward recession. Inflation and unemployment were up, and both would have to be addressed soon. The president was contemplating asking business and labor to support his conception of moderated demands for price-and-wage increases, an unheard of move for Nixon, a longstanding economic conservative with an abiding faith in the free market. Fisher told the president that while he understood the political imperatives, he felt that economic controls would eventually exacerbate the downslide. Nixon answered that “his mind was still open on the matter of guide- lines.” Fisher thought it unwise to rush —perhaps the recession was not going to be as severe as anticipated by economists.

Their discussion was interrupted by the evening’s ceremonies, but on June 13 Fisher sent the president a long letter telling him that he was growing “increasingly concerned about the negative attitudes of busi- ness leaders toward the economic policies of the administration.” The

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thrust of the letter was that the administration was relying on economists to the exclusion of industry decision makers. Both were vital, Fisher said, but it was “essential that business leaders have the feeling of being involved. By having their involvement, the programs that you will adopt to control inflation will ultimately be much more successful.”

Fisher was reluctant for the government to tinker with the free mar- ket, but his suggestions centered around his trust in the efficacy of consensus building. According to Paul McCracken, Fisher had been talking to the administration about instituting a forum for industry leaders and government since the fall of 1969. Fisher spoke to John Mitchell about it, who, along with McCracken, agreed that it would be prudent to give Fisher’s recommendation a try.

On June 17, in a nationwide telecast, Nixon addressed the declining economic situation, asking business and labor “to raise their sights by lowering their [price and wage] demands,” and thereby “helping to hold down everybody’s cost of living,” and reducing inflation. The president also announced that he was establishing a National Com- mission of Productivity, which would include business leaders, and instructed the Council of Economic Advisers “to prepare a periodic Inflation Alert.”

Nixon wrote to Fisher the next day, saying how pleased he was that their thinking on the economy was “so close.” McCracken, however, was eager to meet with business leaders before the productivity com- mission was up and running. Fisher arranged it for him.

“Max brought in five or six CEOs from around the country,” says McCracken, “and we talked. The economy was in a dip, and, in or- der to gauge how aggressive the administration’s reaction should be, I wanted to know if they thought that it looked like we were entering a monumental downturn. They said no, it wouldn’t be too severe, and that’s exactly the way it happened.”

***

Despite Fisher’s delving into other subjects on the national agenda, his most intensive involvement was between the American Jewish commu-

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nity and the administration; and between Washington and Jerusalem. Fisher’s high visibility in Israel stretched back to December 1964, when he was elected chairman of the United Jewish Appeal. After all, the UJA had raised billions of dollars for Israel, and as head of the organization, Fisher received a fair amount of attention from the Israeli government and the press. Thus, in 1968, as Fisher emerged on the American polit- ical scene, it was only natural that when he landed in Tel Aviv, Israeli leaders and reporters shifted their emphasis from questions about philan- thropy and sought his opinion on election-year politics, Congress, the propensities of the president and secretary of state.

However, what neither the government ministers nor the press no- ticed was that while Fisher was gaining political access in the United States, he was also on the verge of expanding the role he and other fund-raisers would play within Israel, a role that extended well beyond that of a man whose UJA chairmanship symbolized the beneficence of American Jews.

In September 1968, Fisher succeeded Dewey D. Stone as the chair- man of the United Israel Appeal. Stone, a businessman from Brock- ton, Massachusetts, had chaired the UIA for nearly two decades and was ready to step down. (He was elected honorary chairman.) On the surface, Fisher’s replacing Stone was not extraordinary. By the fall of 1968, Fisher was the president of the UJA, vice president of the Coun- cil of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, chairman of the board of governors of the American Jewish Committee and on the board of the Joint Distribution Committee. Apparently, in ascending to the top of the UIA, Fisher had predictably won himself another honor.

Yet titanic changes between the American Jewish fundraising com- munity and Israel would transpire during Fisher’s tenure at the UIA, changes so profound that, in varying degrees, those involved would be embroiled in them twenty years later. Examined from an historical per- spective, these changes are entirely logical —perhaps unavoidable is the more precise word —when reflecting on the mandate of the UIA, and Fisher’s relationship to money and power.

In his study, The Smoke Screen: Israel, Philanthropy and Ameri- can Jews, Israeli journalist Charles Hoffman refers to the UIA as “the

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gilded funnel.” It is, he writes, “the least known part of the American Jewish fund-raising establishment,” but the one with potentially the most clout vis-à-vis Israel. The UIA is the organization through which the money raised by American Jews is transferred to the Jewish Agen- cy for Israel (JAFI). The Jewish Agency, originally the brainchild of the World Zionist Organization’s Chaim Weizmann, was founded in 1929 with the goal of uniting world Jewry to assist in the founding of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. Once Israel was born, Agen- cy leaders migrated to the official government, but the scaffolding of Weizmann’s dream remained. Although its definition grew blurred, the Agency carried on, providing services or grants in Israel for rural settlement, immigration and absorption, youth education and training, urban rehabilitation, housing and other activities.

By the late 1960s, the Jewish Agency was in disarray. Political sci- entist Daniel J. Elazar states that it had “become little more than anoth- er branch of the government of Israel.” And Zelig Chinitz, in his his- tory of the reconstituted Agency, A Common Agenda, writes that after 1948 “the Agency was criticized for its inability to attract settlers from the West, for its dependence on the Israeli government for the funding of Zionist activities, and for becoming a ‘second line’ institution for the placement of party officials for whom there were no positions in the government.... These conditions generated a rising tide of criticism in Israel and elsewhere, to the point of questioning the raison d’être of the Jewish Agency.”

These conditions coincided with Fisher’s rise to the chairmanship of the UIA. Suddenly, Fisher was standing in the path of a financial stream. And as Romney’s campaign team learned, Fisher never liked relinquishing control over funds that he was responsible for without having some say on the allocation of those funds. Fisher had few peers as a fundraiser, but the price for having him in your camp was that he would not permit money to pour through his hands without influenc - ing its course. Still, in 1968, the notion of fashioning a power base for American philanthropists within Israel within the Jewish Agency — seemed far-fetched to representatives from both countries.

By the spring of 1971, all of that would change.

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Chapter 10

THE STRONGEST SINGLE LINK: RECONSTITUTING THE JEWISH AGENCYFOR ISRAEL

WHEN IT CAME to the Jewish Agency, Fisher thought, history was the key. History and culture.

Both had been on a collision course from the start. In 1897, journal- ist and playwright Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland and formally transformed the religious vision of Jews returning to live in the Holy Land into the practical movement of Zion- ism. Herzl thought that his World Zionist Organization would provide the political framework for establishing a Jewish homeland. Funding would come from institutions sustained by world Jewry. However, WZO membership was largely drawn from Eastern Europe, where Jews were subjected to the harsher vicissitudes of anti-Semitism. Jews in Western Europe and the United States did not suffer the same fate. Moreover, they identified themselves as citizens of the countries in which they lived, and Zionism raised the specter of dual allegiance. Therefore, for most of world Jewry, joining the WZOwas unthinkable. Herzl died in 1904. Thirteen years later, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour issued a proclamation declaring that his government favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” In 1922, the League of Nations went further, stating that a “Jewish agency shall be recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising ... the Administration of Palestine in ... matters [that] may affect the establishment of the Jewish National Home.” Chaim Weizmann, leader of the Zionists, recognized that because the WZO was the symbol of world Jewish nationalism, it alienated

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large numbers of Jews whose backing would be integral to the found- ing of a Jewish homeland. In the United States, Weizmann met Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, which was the citadel of non-Zionism. Marshall, like many in the AJC, championed a Jewish national home, but did not endorse the establishment of an independent political state. In August 1929, Weizmann and Marshall set up the Jewish Agency, which would represent world Jewry in its efforts not to found a state in Palestine, but to build a homeland. Tragedy intruded. Soon after the inaugural meeting of the Agency, Marshall died. Practically all of the formalized support from non-Zion- ists died with him. Adecade later, the Agency and WZO became virtu- ally synonymous in the eyes of Britain, the mandatory power. In 1945, with hundreds of thousands of concentration-camp survivors trapped behind the barbed wire of displaced persons’ compounds, the call for a Jewish state intensified.

After Israel was founded in 1948, the WZO-Jewish Agency stayed tied to the nation’s political parties. The Agency’s chairman was par- allel to Israel’s prime minister and its Executive (comprised of the chairman and the department heads] was analogous to the Israeli Cab- inet. As defined by the Knesset, the Agency’s role was to ingather the “exiles” and to absorb them into Israel. WZO-Agency leaders in Israel also clung to the tenets of classical Zionism, which holds that Jewish Diaspora life is unhealthy, untenable and incomplete. But the WZO-Jewish Agency, unable to encourage aliyah from the West, had become an institution in search of a purpose. Still, writes Zelig Chinitz in A Common Agenda, “the [earlier] efforts of Weizmann and Marshall provided the inspiration for the second attempt at enlarging the Agency which was initiated on behalf of the Zionists by Louis A. Pincus [and] Max Fisher, the recognized leader of the ‘latter day non-Zionists.’”

***

At first sight, Fisher and Pincus appeared to be an odd pair. Fisher was tall, broad-shouldered, informal in conversation, with a muffled voice that sometimes trailed off before a sentence was complete. He was a

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private man who, because of his interests and circumstances, discov- ered himself in the center of a public arena. Like Marshall, Fisher was passionately concerned about the quality of life in what was now Isra- el, and he always regarded himself as an American Jew at home in the United States. Nor did Fisher have any interest in participating in the political inner workings of the Jewish state, which was part and parcel of becoming a leader of the WZO.

Pincus was four years younger than Fisher and nearly a foot shorter. A South African by birth and a lawyer by training, he was an elo- quent advocate of classical Zionism. At the age of thirty-six, Pincus walked away from a lucrative legal career and emigrated to Palestine just months before the state was born. From 1949 until 1956, he head- ed El Al Airlines, steering the company from its modest beginnings to its position as a respected international carrier. At heart a politician, Pincus remained active in Israel’s Labor Party and the WZO-Jewish Agency. At the 1961 WZO Congress, he was elected to the Executive. Seven years later, he became its chairman.

Fisher and Pincus grew close in the mid-1960s. Fisher would later credit Pincus with having “had a great impact on my life. It was from Louis that I began to understand what Zionism means. I looked up to him.” Despite their divergences in background and temperament, the connection between the two men was clear. They shared a true believ- er’s certitude in the importance of Israel to world Jewry, and in the inflexible demands of the bottom line. They were unapologetic prag - matists whose practicality was leavened with vision and faith.

By the late 1960s, Pincus saw that the “non-Zionist” philanthropists —the people who raised the bulk of the WZO-Jewish Agency budget —would have to be given a role in running the Agency. A number of Israel’s leaders and some American Zionists objected to granting Dias- pora Jews a significant say in an Israeli institution. Pincus argued that if the philanthropists were not included, then they might prefer dis- persing their donations to Israel through an American-controlled group such as the Joint Distribution Committee. Then the Jewish Agency, and indirectly the WZO, would lose their primary source of income. Pincus’s fiscal logic was irrefutable, but the resentment of some Zion -

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ists over being compelled to open their doors to non-Zionists would linger for more than two decades.

Fisher sensed that the American Jewish fund-raising bodies were interested in retaining more control of the money they raised for Israel. Melvin Dubinsky, Fisher’s friend who would succeed him as chairman of the United Israel Appeal in 1971, elucidates: “Max had been the chairman of the UJA, CJF and UIA. He knew that there was a consen- sus in Jewish fundraising circles that although we were happy that the state of Israel had been brought into being, if we were going to spend our resources to further the good of the Jewish people in Israel, then at least we should have the right to have some say about what was done with the money.”

Fisher had been watching the WZO-Jewish Agency since the mid- 1960s. He saw its decline and discussed it with Pincus, telling him “not to be discouraged by what was happening at the moment,” and assur- ing him that “there were wellsprings of support for Israel that have yet to be discovered in the Jewish communities of the free world.”

The vanguard of this support, Fisher believed, was in the American Jewish community, which, by and large, was rapidly growing secular- ized. The result was that for most American Jews, Israel was now the cornerstone of Jewish identity. Fisher was a prime model of the secu- lar Jew whose sturdiest bond to Judaism is Israel. In practice, he was nonobservant. He belonged to two synagogues in suburban Detroit: the Conservative Shaarey Zedek, and the Reform Temple Beth El. He attended each one once a year —on the High Holy Days of Rosh Ha- shana and Yom Kippur.

One afternoon, following the Yom Kippur memorial service, Rab- bi Morris Adler of Shaarey Zedek walked over to Fisher and said: “I missed you at services last week on Rosh Hashana. Where were you?” “I was at Beth El,” answered Fisher. “I have to divide my business up.”

“Well,” said Adler, “I had lunch with Rabbi [Richard C.] Hertz at Beth El the other day and we decided that —in this case —you don’t have enough stock to split it.”

Fisher laughed, but he still only attended services twice a year.

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Yet Fisher was convinced that living in the wake of the Holocaust foisted a singular responsibility on world Jewry —that of assuring the existence of Israel. In 1965, when he was elected chairman of the UJA, his speeches were laced with this conviction. By the summer of 1967, after the Six-Day War, American Jewry seemed to concur with this conclusion. Charitable giving to —and political support for — Israel reached record proportions.

Fisher hoped that Israel would not have to depend on the exigencies of war for assistance from the Diaspora. Most American Jewish orga- nizations, though, were not rooted enough in Israel to guarantee long- term interest. And philanthropists would want to avoid the labyrinth of Zionist politics.

“Most philanthropists,” says Fisher, “are successful business peo- ple. They aren’t interested in sitting around and talking about philoso- phy. You’ve got to give them something to do.”

He required a formalized instrument — an organization — that could represent the partnership between Jews in Israel and the Dias- pora. In talks with Pincus, Israeli government officials, representatives of the Agency, and American philanthropists, Fisher saw that the time was ripe to institute such a forum. Nevertheless, he knew that leaders from North America would refuse to join the WZO, since its ideo- logical goal was to bring all of world Jewry to live in Israel. Yet, to create another instrument would take too long, engender mistrust in the WZO and add another layer of bureaucracy. So Fisher and Pincus concurred that the existing WZO-Jewish Agency would have to be re- shaped. Fisher told Pincus that their main intention had to be to make this reconstituted Jewish Agency “the strongest single link between Israel and the Diaspora.”

The Zionists and the non-Zionists differed on numerous details, but their pre-eminent differences were over governance and structure. The Zionist Congress, which is convened every four or five years, fixes policy for the WZO. There are approximately 650 delegates to the congress: 29 percent come from the United States; 33 percent come from all other countries in the Diaspora; and 38 percent are from Israel. The Israeli delegates are chosen in proportion to their party’s represen-

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tation in the Knesset. From the day Israel was founded, handing out jobs at the Agency was considered a perk of the patronage system.

In contrast, the lay and professional leadership of American-Jew- ish philanthropic organizations, while not being free from infighting, are selected on the basis of ability and involvement as demonstrated over a considerable period of time. Fisher and Pincus ascertained that the only way to bring together in one body two disparate systems and operational styles was through a separation of powers and functions between the WZO and the “reconstituted” Jewish Agency. Heightening the tensions over these elements was the ideological gulf between the Zionist and the non-Zionist. Jacques Torczyner, a WZO member, felt that the fundraisers had no right to be involved in the Agency. “They are not real Zionists like us,” says Torczyner. “We are Jews first, and they are Americans first and Jews second.”

For Fisher and Pincus, these ideological distinctions held little weight. Pincus had serious misgivings about the non-Zionist tag that was attached to the fund-raisers. In the summer of 1970, Pincus told a reporter from The National Jewish Post: “I doubt very much whether I can regard Max as a non-Zionist. I am confident, however, that the day will come when I can say with certainty that he is a Zionist.”

Fisher’s response to Pincus was not only based on the realities of the War of Attrition that Israel was fighting against Egypt in 1969 and 1970, but also on the fact that Libyan leader Muamar Qaddafi had threatened to nationalize Marathon’s oil fields in Libya because Fisher, the Jewish philanthropist, sat on the Marathon board.

Fisher told Pincus: “It is really quite unnecessary for you to exercise yourself over this question: all of the Arab propagandists have already determined that I am indeed a Zionist.”

Understandably, the WZO was reluctant to relinquish their control over the Agency departments and to allow the philanthropists to in- vade their kingdom. Harry Rosen, a former secretary-general, the key professional position between the Agency and the Diaspora philan- thropists, believes that Fisher’s refusal to get bogged down in the his- torical debate about Zionism and over operational details was crucial to the eventual agreement.

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“Better than anyone,” says Rosen, “Max understood the organiza- tional and cultural differences between Israel and the Diaspora. There- fore, he became the ideal bridge. He understood the parliamentary nature of the Israeli political system; that the head is not a boss of bosses. Decisions are made by consensus. It is something that many Americans in the Agency have trouble understanding. Max made it possible to develop an ideological framework for this partnership. He didn’t get lost in theoretical considerations. His attitude was, ‘If there’s a problem, let’s solve it.’ For Max, function is equivalent to ideology.” Moshe Rivlin, who served as the Agency’s director general, the chief operating officer of the WZO and the Jewish Agency, states that without Fisher the reconstitution of the Jewish Agency would not have been possible. Says Rivlin: “Max has a unique standing — with Re- publican administrations in Washington and with the prime minister in Israel. And he was the unchallenged leader of the fund-raisers. Yet with all this power in his hands, he was a mobilizer of people. His art was finding the common denominator among groups and creating an atmosphere of consensus. He never dictated what had to be done. You could be sure that if four people were scheduled to be at a 9 a.m. meet- ing, Max spoke to one of them at seven. He ate breakfast with another at eight. He phoned the other one at 8:30, and if he didn’t speak to the fourth person, then that was only because he wasn’t in. This is how Max operates.”

Fisher’s sedulous consensus building sprang from his perspective on the responsible uses of power. He says: “When you start thinking about power, that’s when you don’t have it. When I chair a meeting, I don’t just shut people down. I allow everyone to express their views or vent their frustration. But I always have an agenda. I know what I’m shooting for. At the end of the meeting, when everything is summed up, I make sure that it’s not a summation of everything they wanted accomplished, it’s a summation of what I wanted to accomplish. I find people are more agreeable if they have already expressed themselves. Then they often go along.”

Some in the WZO and in the American Jewish community object- ed to Fisher’s manner. Nonetheless, declares Morton L. Mandel, an

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ex-president of the Council of Jewish Federations who would be elect- ed to the Agency Board of Governors, Fisher’s tactics were startling- ly efficacious. “Sometimes,” says Mandel, “Max moves more slow - ly toward objectives than some people would like. When he captures ground, though, he holds it. In other cases, people make lightninglike moves and two years later they’re five yards behind where they were. Max is a consensus builder —the single most able consensus builder I have ever seen in any form of activity. He’s a genius at it. He has the fewest number of enemies of anybody I’ve ever met. He manages to retain credibility with people whom he does not support on a given cause at a given moment. That’s a rare quality. It’s what virtually sep- arates him from the world.”

Every inch of Fisher’s consensus-building talent was indispensable to him as negotiations dragged on through 1969 and 1970. Finally, it was determined that the reconstituted Jewish Agency for Israel would be divided into an Assembly, Board of Governors and an Executive. Fifty percent of the Assembly would be from the WZO; the other half from among the fundraising leadership in the Diaspora. The Assem- bly would elect a Board of Governors — the policy arm — whose members would be 50 percent from the WZO and 50 percent from the Diaspora community leaders; its chairman would be from the Di- aspora. In turn, the BOG would elect the Agency Executive — the implementation group. The chairman of the Executive would be from the WZOand most of its members would be Israeli, since these people were responsible for the operations of the departments — Immigration and Absorption, Youth Care and Training, and Agricultural Settlement. The Agency would retain its political shadings. The chairman of the WZO Executive would also be the chairman of the Agency Executive. Furthermore, candidates to head the departments would emerge from the World Zionist Congress. But there was a new twist —although the nominees to lead departments were intertwined in Israeli politics, each one would be subject to the principle of “advise and consent.” This rule stated that the non-Zionists on the Board of Governors must be consulted about the selection of department heads and that the BOG retained a veto over the candidates.

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Numerous American philanthropists objected to this compromise, but Fisher told them “that the main thing was to create the instrument. Once we start working together, people will realize that aims and ob- jectives are more important than structure and organization.”

The “Agreement for the Reconstitution of the Jewish Agency for Israel” was signed in August 1970. Less than one year later, in June 1971, the four-day Founding Assembly was held in Jerusalem with David Ben-Gurion and Prime Minister Golda Meir on the podium. Pincus was elected chairman of the Executive; Fisher was elected to chair the Board of Governors.

In his closing address at the Binyanai Haooma —the Jewish Peo- ple’s Convention Center — Fisher told the members of the reconsti- tuted Jewish Agency for Israel that they had come “to correct history,” meaning that the charge of up-building the Jewish state was now going to be a responsibility of every Jew —regardless of where he resided. “The test for admittance to this Assembly was simple enough,” said Fisher. “Does one carry the welfare of Israel in his heart? And there is no one here who does not bear this badge of admission.” He spoke of the traditional responsibilities of the Agency —the social welfare pro- grams and immigration, which Fisher referred to as “the sacred work of aliyah.” But again he emphasized that “these must be done by us — by the world Jewish community —through the Agency.”

Reinforcing this point —that the Jewish Agency was now the insti- tution that represented the partnership between Jews in the Diaspora and in Israel —was a task that, in great measure, Fisher labored at for the next twelve years as chairman of the Board of Governors.

***

Among the foremost critics of the reconstituted Agency is Professor Eliezer D. Jaffe, an American-born sociologist who has lived in Israel since 1960 and teaches at The Hebrew University’s school of social work. Having written widely on the subject, Jaffe concludes that the presence of Israeli politics in the Agency has led to “sloppy, wasteful philanthropy,” and that “more time is spent at [a Zionist Congress]

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haggling over the spoils of office and setting up political coalitions than in debating and evaluating Zionist programs and welfare proj- ects.” Jaffe says that “Fisher should have demanded a bigger say for the philanthropists. It was their money. They give over $400 million dollars a year. He could have depoliticized the Agency when it was re- constituted and made it purely a philanthropic organization. He chose not to. He made a lousy deal.”

Fisher felt that attempting to extend the reach of the philanthro- pists would have scuttled the reconstitution. Gradualism, after all, is the guiding principle of a pragmatist. As Fisher explained to another energetic critic of the reconstituted Agency, Israeli journalist Charles Hoffman: “Our first big problem was to bring people together from two different cultures. We had to learn what the Jewish Agency had been doing, and to create rapport with our partners. As we got involved we discovered a lot of inefficiency and ‘bureaucracy.’ You know, the Israelis saw our role at first as an infringement of their turf. People don’t like to give up power and turf. It took a lot of time to change their basic philosophy. People asked why we didn’t move faster. I told them that change had to be evolutionary and it had to be by consensus, not by hitting people over the head. If we had acted differently, this would have destroyed the partnership.”

Internal and external critics of the Agency found this hard to accept, which was indicative of their impatience with the overlapping imple- mentation systems. For instance, the man who replaced Fisher in 1983 as chairman of the BOG was Jerold C. Hoffberger of Maryland, erst- while owner of the Baltimore Orioles and Baltimore Colts. Hoffberger was impatient with the Agency bureaucracy. Yet Hoffberger believes that in 1971, Fisher had no choice but to live with the imperfections. “Max’s most valuable service,” says Hoffberger, “has been as the bridge between the various communities in the Jewish Agency. The problem has not been an easy one, bringing together the ideologues of the Zionist organization and the practical people in the Diaspora who provide most of the funds. He balanced all of the different factions. Had he not done it, [the reconstitution of the] Jewish Agency would have not been possible.”

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