International Gamesman

Pick any aspect of the Middle East crisis, Harvard Law School's "conflict resolution" seminar was told, and write a paper about it. It may have seemed to the students as though they had been knocking out that sort of thing since freshman year in college, but there was a difference. "Don't spend time explaining how big the problem is or how difficult it is to solve," said Professor Roger Fisher. "Instead, identify who is in a good position to do something about it and set out a specific, detailed proposal of what he ought to do next." To emphasize that this was not a mere academic exercise, Fisher added that he would see that any paper that was any good would go to the man for whom it was written. Indeed, high officials in the Department of State, the U.N. and the Egyptian government were duly sent some of the students' suggestions.

Fisher, one of the nation's ranking experts in international law, was only preaching what he practices. More than once he has seen a possible solution to a specific problem in foreign affairs and hied himself off to put the proposition to the appropriate authorities. In 1968, before the Paris Viet Nam talks, Fisher, acting as a private citizen, tried to persuade Sweden to get negotiations started. He had half talked former U.N. Secretary-General U Thant into backing the Swedish initiative when that government took a dovish turn that undercut its neutrality. Fisher has also written various letters to Middle Eastern leaders. Recently published as Dear Israelis, Dear Arabs (Harper & Row; $6.95), the letters make many specific proposals, for example, that Israel make a sample withdrawal in part of the Sinai to demonstrate how general rapprochement might work. Fisher's undertakings have caused his name to crop up so often in cable traffic that the U.S. State Department once asked him to lie low temporarily to avoid confusion with some suggestions of its own.

Fidel Calling. While Fisher can point to no major triumphs resulting solely from his personal interventionism, he is nonetheless unbowed. His first concern is to teach his letter recipients, as well as his students and readers, to think clearly about problem solving. And thinking clearly, in his view, begins with thinking small. "All the prizes in academia and journalism are for making the biggest statement about any problem you can," he says. Fisher believes instead in "fractionating:" breaking the problem down into individual steps, then deciding at each stage what is wanted from the adversary and determining what he can reasonably be expected to give. Otherwise, governments often confuse taking a stance with seeking a solution. As illustration, Fisher cites the economic blockade of Cuba. "Suppose Fidel Castro called up the President and said, 'You win; send down your terms. Anything within the realm of reason, I will sign.' How many weeks would it require to figure out what the U.S. would like to have happen that it could reasonably expect to have happen? The failure to identify, at least to ourselves, some realistic objectives makes it less likely that we will be able to achieve any objective at all."

Fisher thinks the chances of attaining one's objectives are more enhanced by making offers than inflicting punishments. Thus he is opposed to the bombing of North Viet Nam since it only amounts to "asking them to change their mind because of a little more pain." Instead of asking for reversal of an old decision, as the bombing does, the U.S. should be making new proposals that require new decisions. "The formulation and reformulation of the decision we seek is, I believe, the single most important element in the successful conduct of foreign affairs." Though a U.S. offer of $1 billion in aid failed to bring results, Fisher points out that the offer might be more acceptable if the money were actually turned over to the Asian Development Bank for use after peace was agreed to. Further efforts at reformulation should be put in terms of what he calls a "yesable proposition," that is, a proposal made in enough detail to make a yes or no answer possible. "The more work we do, the less work there is for them to do, and the more likely they are to do it," he wrote in his highly read able 1969 book International Conflict for Beginners.

Fisher, now 50, has also been testing his theories of conflict resolution on domestic problems through the medium of TV. He devised The Advocates in 1969, a Peabody Award-winning educational-network series that presents a courtroom-like debate on a specific proposal (his old friend, the yesable proposition) and invites viewers to vote it up or down.

Dabbling. For one show, he wangled an interview in Egypt with Gamal Abdel Nasser. "Hi, I'm Roger Fisher," he began. The Egyptian President snapped, "I know who you are, or you wouldn't be here." Despite that inauspicious start, Fisher got Nasser to agree on-camera to a cease-fire with Israel under certain conditions. Partly inspired by Nasser's admission, Secretary of State William Rogers shortly thereafter launched his own successful cease-fire initiative. "It was the high point of my dabbling," recalls Fisher.

Now Fisher wants to develop new shows, perhaps with sponsors, for clients such as the federal antidrug program or nutritionists; the idea is to treat serious social questions in an entertaining package. Last week the Academy for Contemporary Problems in Columbus, Ohio, announced that it would give him seed money.

Fisher will divide his time between duties at Harvard and his new TV series. The two jobs are connected, he maintains, because in both, ideally, "you are teaching people to do something about a problem rather than just talk about it."

That is his concept of good lawyering. The son of a Chicago attorney, Fisher followed Harvard College and Law School in 1948 with a stint in Paris helping to administer the Marshall Plan.

He spent six years in international practice with the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling, and in 1956 he became an assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General, arguing Government positions before the U.S. Supreme Court. The experience crystallized much of his later thinking. As he puts it, "You had a short time to convince the court not that the question was too big to decide, not to tell them what the history of the question was, but to sell them a solution to a very specific question."

Lank (at 6 ft. 3 in.) and frank (in a compulsive flow of words) Fisher has gone his resolutely pragmatic path since joining the Harvard law faculty in 1958. He is considered something of a maverick by his colleagues in the field of international law. "Some of them think I'm a little effervescent," he says. "I don't use enough footnotes." Yale's Myres McDougal, an eminence in international law, sees it differently, even though Fisher has sometimes criticized the Yale professor's work. "His is a very imaginative, creative and innovative type of mind," says McDougal. "There are the Utopians in international law, and then there are the naked-power boys who say there is no law. Fisher is in neither group." This is not surprising. For in all Fisher's work he has been less interested in taking sides than in "bridging the gap between theory and practice." His credo, as he puts it, is that whatever the issues involved, "the next step is a more important question than the important questions."

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