The Netanyahu who comes in from the Cold--and should slip on ice!

If I were Obama, the day Netanyahu visits Washington, I would be swimming 'somewhere in the Caribbean' (preferably by the beach of the Caribe Hilton Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico).  Vice President Biden might be sent on another mercy mission in Haiti and Hillary could be in Cuernavaca to mend fences with Calderon.

What might pass for a cold shoulder would be a well-deserved retribution for the unmitigated chutzpah the right-wing Israeli leader displayed when he inaugurated some stately new settlements in the disputed Golan Heights the very day Hillary visited Israel for the purpose of  cautioning moderation in preparation of another diplomatic effort to bring peace to the region.

There is an antecedent, albeit a misguided one, to such an official 'cold shoulder'.  It happened in 1959 when Fidel Castro came to the US just weeks after taking power.  He had been invited by McGeorge Bundy to speak at Harvard--in the football field.  On his way he was scheduled to stop over in Washington.  So Eisenhower left town to play golf.  Dulles was ill and Christian Herter, the Acting Secretary of State, a gentle man, was somewhere in New England giving a commencement address.  That, alas, left VP Richard M. Nixon.

I had been covering Latin America at UP's Washington bureau for almost a decade and, 'knew my way around town'.  So I went to see my friend Wayne Morse, chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to apprise him  of the prospects of a major political/diplomatic gaffe:  no major US official would be around to receive Castro.

I had recently returned from a very extended trip covering Nixon's tour of Cuba (still under Batista), Mexico and the Caribbean.  I had known Nixon from several interviews, supplemented by our Saturday morning shopping sprees at Wagshall's Delicatessen in Spring Valley.  We called Nixon's office and got an appointment almost immediately.  For good measure, we brought along Luis Munoz Marin, the governor of Puerto Rico who was visiting Washington at the time, and who had been corresponding with Castro in the hope of being able to exercise a 'moderating' influence.  Little did he know at the time that 'liberating' Pueerto Rico from the US yoke was high on Castro's agenda.

So the three of us marched into Nixon's Senate office, sat down, and argued before him the need for someone high up in the Eisenhower Administration ought to receive Castro and that nobody else seemed to be available.  It did not take much to persuade him.  The deed was done and we left quite pleased with ourselves for having struck a point for US-Latin American relations.  What we didn't know was that we had just struck out.

The meeting took place and it was an unmitigated disaster.  Castro disliked the beady-eyed pol from the minute he walked in; the mutual dislike was instantaneous.  As Nixon wrote in his 'Seven Crises', he 'knew' he was in the presence of a Communist the moment Castro walked into his office.

Lesson for reporters:  Stay out of politics and stick to your typewriters.