On the Scene In the Middle East

It was tough being a soldier on the Arab side of the lines, and it was just as tough being a war correspondent. New York Times Reporter Tom Brady managed to slip past Damascus airport officials, who did not know that he had been blacklisted in Syria. But when he phoned his first story to Lebanon, three plainclothesmen showed up at his hotel and dragged him off to jail. In Amman, NBC Correspondent Robert Conley was picked up by Jordanian troops, who accused him of taking pictures --even though he had no camera. Stranded at airports around Europe, many correspondents never even got near the Arab countries. Those who did were kept virtual prisoners in their hotels; what little they sent out was rigorously censored. After Egypt severed relations with the U.S., all 22 American correspondents were ordered out of the country. Awaiting transportation, they were forbidden to file stories. Only the New York Times's Eric Pace managed to continue sending dispatches.

On the Israeli side, coverage was far less fettered. Few of the 300 foreign correspondents who flooded into the country had trouble getting to one of the fronts in some military vehicle-- helicopter, half-track or torpedo boat. Oth ers were shuttled to battle sites in a pair of tourist buses, which had a habit of getting lost in the desert. Israeli information officers joked with reporters, censored their copy perfunctorily, and often leaked news before it was officially released.

Wishful Trickle. The Israelis, of course, were winning, and the Arabs were losing. If the roles had been reversed, so might have been the treatment of reporters. As it was, all the legitimate news was coming out of Israel, and little more than wishful thinking was trickling out of the Arab states; most newspapers decided early to distrust Arab victory claims. The New York Times displayed a hardly necessary impartiality by publishing Arab and Israeli accounts side by side, with little indication of which was the more credible. The paper did get unusually excited, though; for four days straight it used three-deck, eight-column headlines --something that it seldom does.

On the scene, few correspondents performed more creditably than Timesman James Reston. In Cairo before the war began, he visualized the outcome. "An alarming fatalism seems to be settling on this city," he cabled. "There is very little relationship here between word and action. The government seems to be provoking trouble without preparing for the consequences." The Cairo airport, he noted, was more open to attack than La Guardia airport in New York. The men around Nasser, he reported, were more preoccupied with past humiliations than present dangers.

The war ended too quickly for other reporters to display much individual enterprise. Yet here and there, a correspondent came up with some arresting insight or detail. Covering the war for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cartoonist Bill Mauldin reported that at least some Arabs living in Israel were content with their lot and even fearful of Nasser. Los Angeles Times Correspondent Joe Alex Morris Jr. reported from Jerusalem that the Palestinians blamed King Hussein or the Arabs in general for not fighting harder. "But at the same time, there were greetings of 'shalom' to Israeli patrols as they crept up the narrow, sun-baked streets."

Unpleasant Fact. Like everybody else, columnists were taken by surprise. Nevertheless, New York Post Theater Critic Richard Watts Jr. found the wit to quip that "it is safe to predict that someone will soon be blaming Lyndon Johnson for the whole ugly Middle Eastern crisis." Sure enough, someone soon was. The very next day, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Columnist Marquis Childs declared that the "real significance" of the war is that the "Johnson brand of consensus diplomacy has disastrously failed"--an interpretation that, had they read it, would have certainly startled the Arabs and Israelis--not to mention the Russians.

Few commentators had kind words for the United Nations. What the war shows, wrote Washington Post Columnist David Broder, is that "once the U.S. enters an arena of international politics, it cannot opt out. Nor can it shift the responsibilities it has assumed to the U.N. The deterioration of the U.N. as a moral and political force in world affairs has been revealed more clearly by the Mideast crisis than by any other event in recent years. That is an unpleasant fact, but it can no longer be evaded, even by those in our country who have found in Secretary-General U Thant's statements on Viet Nam a comforting endorsement of their own views."

Consensus on Caution. In general, editorial opinion stood foursquare behind Israel. Minor irritation was expressed by some newspapers at the lack of U.S. preparedness for the crisis, but few editorials took issue with President Johnson's policy of cautious watchfulness. The commitment to Israel had to be upheld, said the editorials, but it would be better for the U.S. to rally allies to its side and not try to go it alone. All newspapers agreed that the great powers must now get together and try to keep the peace permanently in the area. "The Arabs and Israelis alone cannot solve this problem," said a Newsday editorial. "The big powers, preferably through the U.N., must enforce in fact what up to now has been enunciated in principle, peaceful coexistence between ancient rivals and the hope of eventual reconciliation."

Peering dimly into the future of the Middle East, CBS News Analyst Eric Sevareid seemed to see a mirror image of what was actually happening. "Many years of diplomacy and spending," he mourned, "were going down the drain," since Russia would replace the U.S. as the dominant influence in the Middle East. NBC's David Brinkley doubted that Russia would do so well. "The U.S.," he said, "gave Israel no help, which it did not need, and the Russians gave the Arab countries no help, which they did need."

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