“When Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat came together, the banal was suddenly breathtaking, and the ordinary was suddenly historic: one person touching another, one person sitting next to another, one person applauding another; President Clinton introducing Mr. Arafat to his daughter, Chelsea; the President, Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat holding up their “Seeds of Peace” T-Shirts, like teenagers at a rock concert; Mr. Rabin shaking hands with Arab ambassadors.”
BY MAUREEN DOWD | WASHINGTON The President who loves to stay up late told his aides that he went to bed at 10 P.M. on Sunday, so he could be rested for the historic day.
They did not believe him, of course.
“No way,” said Dee Dee Myers, the White House press secretary. “He got the big hand and the little hand mixed up.”
“It was Jerusalem time,” suggested Mark Gearan, the White House communications director.
But what happened next is not in the contention: The President said he woke up at 3 A.M. and could not go back to sleep. He was worrying about the speech he would make to mark what was sure to be one of the most remarkable events of his Presidency: the moment when the two men who had been bitter enemies for so long, the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasir Arafat, would recognize each other’s existence on the South Lawn of the White House.
With his wife and daughter still asleep, Mr. Clinton put on a blue jogging suit and went into the study in the White House residence. He picked up a Bible. He read the entire Book of Joshua, wanting to review the part about the trumpets in Jericho that toppled walls and making sure he put a reference in his speech contrasting the victory of war and the victory of peace.
In another part of the White House, a team led by Jeremy Rosner, a National Security Council speechwriter, was scrambling to fulfill the President’s last request: Mr. Clinton wanted a passage from the Koran to balance his Biblical allusions. The desperate White House staffers finally called Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Arabian ambassador, who helped them pick out an appropriately soothing passage: “If the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace?”
At some point, Mr. Clinton moved from the study to the kitchen to read and drink coffee. He wanted to sit near the window, where he could keep track of when the dawn arrived and what the sky looked like.
The White House staff had worked over three days to compile a 26-page step-by-step log choreographing every movement that the leaders would make, and yet Mr. Clinton knew as well as anyone that, with this most delicate of all diplomatic meetings, a million things could go wrong—a look, a word, a handshake, the weather.
At dawn, as he later told aides, who provided this account, he looked at the sky and reckoned it could be cloudy. So he decided to do something that he could control. He chose a tie, a blue and yellow one with little trumpets on it, to celebrate the crack in the walls everyone thought would never come down.
The Silencing of the Cynics
If it was not the day the Earth stood still, it was close: It was the day Washington was not cynical.
When Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat came together, the banal was suddenly breathtaking, and the ordinary was suddenly historic: one person touching another, one person sitting next to another, one person applauding another; President Clinton introducing Mr. Arafat to his daughter, Chelsea; the President, Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat holding up their “Seeds of Peace” T-Shirts, like teenagers at a rock concert; Mr. Rabin shaking hands with Arab ambassadors.
The jaded were awed. Even for a New Age Presidency, there were a lot of men in the audience crying. George Stephanopoulos, the Clinton aide, and Rahm Emanuel, the White House adviser who had helped arrange the logistics, were crying.
The Hollywood contingent—Ron Silver and Richard Dreyfuss—were crying, along with Leon Wieseltier, the cultural editor of “The New Republic.”
“Do you believe this?” Mr. Dreyfuss asked Mr. Wieseltier, after the handshake.
“And you’re the guy who saw those aliens land in that movie,” Mr. Wieseltier replied, referring to the actor’s role in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
There were strange undercurrents on the South Lawn, of course. The audience was made up of people who had worked their entire lives to ensure that this day did not happen and people who had never quite managed to make it happen.
People who had been sworn enemies until 72 hours before were now sitting side by side. Keffiyahs mingled with yarmulkas. Arab worry beads mingled with Jewish worriers.
Former Presidents and Secretaries of State who tried desperately to make Middle East peace happen on their watch suddenly found themselves relegated to the audience as President Clinton and Warren Christopher stood triumphantly on stage while that magical, unthinkable handshake happened.
For anyone who knew the history of the Byzantine Middle East politics, the mere fact of the event, the play within the play, was more amazing than anything that was said at it or about it.
It was no wonder that the chain smoking Mr. Rabin was fidgeting on stage and acting like he needed a cigarette—bad. He had his lifelong political rival, Shimon Peres, to his right and lifelong military foe, Mr. Arafat, to his left.
In the audience were lawmakers and American Jewish leaders who had built political careers on making sure that Mr. Arafat would never come to the United States. There were Arab-Americans and Arab diplomats who years ago would never be caught dead rubbing elbows in such mixed company. Yet once Mr. Arafat and Mr. Rabin spoke and shook hands, suddenly it all flowed together, leaving the wonder of why it took so long and what it was all about in the first place.
George Bush, who prided himself on being the foreign policy President and who once dismissed Bill Clinton as an ingénue whose expertise was limited to the International House of Pancakes, found himself a spectator as Mr. Clinton reaped the fruits of 25 years of American diplomacy in the Middle East. Joining him in the gallery of wistful would-be peacemakers were James Baker, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and William Rogers.
Mr. Bush looked in glowing good health, but there was a poignancy to his presence.
“Make a little hole—it’s the President coming through,” ordered an advance man in the White House, trying to push a group of reporters to the side.
As he slid through the crowd, Mr. Bush offered his lopsided grin and corrected: “Ex, Ex, Ex, Ex.”
Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind
Not since Queen Elizabeth II disappeared behind the lectern set up for the much taller President Bush during a May 1991 visit—the British papers dubbed her “The Talking Hat”—has a leader so thoroughly been hidden on a podium as Mr. Arafat was today.
All that could be seen of Mr. Arafat, from straight ahead in the audience, was his black and white keffiyah peeking over the lectern to the right of Mr. Clinton’s shoulder. (The spot usually occupied by Vice President Al Gore.)
Mr. Arafat’s hands could be seen occasionally fiddling with his headdress to get its point photogenically straight—a habit of his.
White House officials had left a riser for the short Palestinian leader, but they were surprised when the taller Mr. Rabin stepped up on it as well, when it was his turn to speak.
Quiet on the Set
The security for the White House ceremony today may have been the tightest in Washington history.
But it was even tighter than the Secret Service knew.
On Sunday, Thomas Donilon, a top State Department official, was heading across Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House when a security man stopped him and told him the street was blocked off.
Mr. Donilon waited for a while and then got impatient.
Who are you with, he asked the guard.
“The Pelican Brief,” the guard replied, adding that the movie company making the John Grisham novel into a film, starring Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts, had secured to area to film a scene. As far as Hollywood was concerned, history could wait.