Matina and the Jets

DISPATCHED FROM Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the three page telex arrived in the officers of two dozen senators the morning of October 28, 1981. Signed the night before by 22 corporate executives on a tour of the Middle East and Eastern Europe sponsored by Time, Inc., the telegram strongly urged the wavering legislators to vote that afternoon for the sale of AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia. Senate rejection of the electronic reconnaissance planers, it argued, would "severely damage U.S. credibility in [the] Arab world."

In fact, the dispatch said, a negative vote would "substantially diminish U.S. ability to play a critical role" in Arab-Israeli peace talks it would also "permit the [Soviet] Union to increase its influence in the Arab World." Hours later, a sharply divided Senate approved the sale by a 52-48 margin, making official President Reagan's pledge several months earlier to sell the aircraft. Later, sensors confirmed that last-minute lobbying efforts--like that of the Time group--had tipped the scales in favor of the Saudis.

The 23rd signer of the confidential telex was Matina S. Horner, president of Radcliffe and another member of the Time party.

IT'S EASY, very easy to feel a sense of betrayal, of anger at Horner for lobbying for the AWACS deal. It's much harder to explain why. Thus University has never discouraged its administrators from speaking their minds, Dean Rosovsky, most notably, has been vocal in his support of Israel during his nine years as dean Indeed. Rosovsky says that "while I strongly disagree" with Horner's AWACS stance. "I very much would defend her night to speak out on the issue." If anything, Horner went out of her way to disassociate the University from her lobbying effort. She was the only signer who did not include her institutional affiliation on the telex.

"It was clearly an individual statement and in no way should reflect on the institution." Horner says "I told the co-signers that I would not sign it if they felt it necessary to put people's affiliation" on the message. Time did not invite Horner to join the executives on the two week "fact-finding" trip solely because of her Radcliffe post. A member of Time's board like other signers. Horner first became affiliated with the publication years earlier. When it used to talk to her about her academic work as a psychologist.

But to excuse Horner's action because it avoided besmirching the name of fair Radclife is to miss the ethical boat entirely. Her lobbying is questionable precisely because it was an individual effort, compelled by no institutional imperatives. As The New Republic reported last week, the Riyadh telex was but one element in a massive Saudi lobbying effort for the AWACS sale--an effort targeted and American corporations anxious to secure lucrative contracts with the Saudis. The corporate leaders accompanying Horner clearly felt a need to advance their corporate interests; that does not make their lobbying excusable, but it does make it understandable.

By most accounts, the executive who first presented the telex idea on the evening of October 27--Theodore Brophy, Chief executive officer of General Telephone and Electronics--acted in an effort to prove to the Saudis that they had acted wisely in dropping GTE from their boycott list. No such institutional pressures worked upon Radcliffe's president; "I can't even imagine how my signing could affect the institution," she says.

Only one other member of the Time tour--Vernon Jordan, then head of the National Urban League--acted without institutional constraints. Jordan refused to sign the telex. Horner says she does not know why Jordan, now a law partner in a Washington, D.C. law firm, tells a different story.

He says be told his tour colleagues on the evening of the 27th (at a group meeting that Horner says she does not recall) that "I would not sign it--I made a speech about it. "The reason, according to Jordan; "I did not go on the tour to send telegrams. I went on it to learn something." Lobbying for the AWACS sale "was not appropriate," Jordan stresses, that's why I voted against it" at the group meeting.

THE PROPRIETY of Horner's individual decision, then, hinges not on any conflict of interest but on the merits of the AWACS issue itself. And given that no other pressures worked upon Horner, she had a special responsibility to make a cogent case for the sale. That responsibility, to understand the complexities and likely impact of the sale, seems particularly great given the less-than-wholesome aura of its origin a corporate conclave in Riyadh apparently teeming with Saudi influence-peddlers.

But Horner's justifications for the AWACS sale are dubious, indeed. She argues that U.S. prestige in the Mid-East rested on the Senate's keeping the President's promise to the Saudi ruling family to sell the reconnaissance aircraft. Taken to its logical extreme, that philosophy would strip the Senate of all responsibility for foreign agreements, leaving it at the mercy of Presidents who strike deals first and consult Congress later. It would also effectively nullify any post-Vietnam limits on executive foreign policy making privileges.

That her meeting with Saudi and other leaders taught her the need for the U.S. to reestablish its trustworthiness seems a dubious rationale, too, but Horner clings to it. If the last several months have shown anything about the Saudis, it is their intractability on the Israel issue. The Saudi ruling family recently reaffirmed that its principal enemy remains Israel--not the Soviet Union, as the Reagan Administration with its dream of a "strategic consensus" would wish, and as the State Department thought it had settled. The U.S. acted as an arms salesman, the Saudis as a cash-carrying customer. "Credibility" was of no concern.

Horner also argues the sale was justifiable because the planes are "a defensive piece of equipment; you can't do anything offensive with an AWACS." Tell that to Carter Administration officials who denied the Saudis' 1978 request for the aircraft precisely because of their offensive capability--because their reconnaisance ability could facilitate Saudi air raids on Israel. Horner, though contends otherwise. "You can't say knowing about someone else is offensive'--to me, 'offensive' is dropping bombs on somebody." Horner says, "Every single person who signed that telex is an extremely strong supporter of Israel." With supporters like that, you've got to wonder if Israel needs enemies.

UNIVERSITY OFFICIALS have a heavy responsibility to speak out--not only on education issues, but also other concerns. They carry, however, an equally weighty duty to speak as informed educators, to avoid appearing to have succumbed to crass lobbying efforts or to have acted before thinking. Matina Horner correctly dissociated her stance from Radcliffe. But given the inevitable connection between an institution and its leader in the public eye, she bore a heavy responsibility to appear thoughtful.

Matina Horner's willingness to speak out on the AWACS sale also raises questions about her priorities. Under her guidance, Radcliffe has become a crew team, a theater, a fund drive, and a press office. That decline is not her fault; it is the largely inevitable result of the "merger non-merger."

But it puts added responsibility on Horner, as titular head of the institution, to speak out for Radcliffe and the women's issues it largely represents-to lobby for Radcliffe's interests. When the Radcliffe Forum was eliminated two springs ago. Horner's voice was conspicuously quiet. As long as she has chosen to express herself on the foreign policy questions of U.S. arms sales, more aggressive advocacy on the home front does not seem unreasonable.

The Sunday of every Freshman Week, President Horner advises incoming Yardlings to take Hellman's advice and "keep cool but do not freeze." The AWACS telex incident suggests that she might do well to add "Look before you leap" to her repertoire of useful maxims. Advocacy in the interests of raising the level of public debate befits a University president well But posturing in the absence of expertise does no one any good.