Ernest Graves
Howard Fish, my predecessor, was a very shrewd guy. Because he knew the business
as well as he did, he was quite effective in fixing it so that, notwithstanding the policy,
the country was able to do what it had to do.
The truth of the matter is that the Pentagon saw the thing two ways. The
Pentagon--McGiffert, Harold Brown, those guys--did not want to be viewed by the
administration as not supportive of the President's policy. But they also had been
around a while. After all, Brown had been in the Pentagon back with McNamara. They
knew a few things. And they knew that before all was said and done, arms transfers
were going to be needed.
So they wanted to prevent the Carter White House from painting itself into a corner.
They didn't want to do for arms transfers the kind of thing that had been done back in
the water project review.
It wasn't as high on the agenda, so it didn't get the same mistreatment. There was this
whole business about the ceiling on arms transfers. It turned out that the ceiling never
limited anything because they had been very shrewd in the way they had set up the
ceiling.
Except for 1978, the first year I was there, we didn't have to hold transfers down to
keep from violating the ceiling. In 1978 I went to extraordinary lengths to make sure
that we transferred as many arms as the ceiling allowed. We had to time everything so
that we reached the ceiling.
You may say that was antithetical to the Carter policy. It really wasn't because
everybody saw that we were trying to save Carter from himself. The next year we had
Camp David. The truth of the matter is that once Carter got going, he transferred as
many arms as anybody because he found, like his predecessors, that they were an
essential tool of policy. In connection with the Camp David accords, Israel got .2
billion in credits, plus 0 million for the airfields, and Egypt got
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.5 billion in credits.
These were the biggest arms transfers we'd made except for the Yom Kippur War.
Q:
There's a certain irony in that, of course.
A:
Yes, and you know, nobody was up there telling Carter at Camp David, "Now, now,
now--don't transfer any arms." So his administration went through a complete
transformation on this point.
Q:
You know, critics of military aid policies hit from a lot of directions, but one of the
things they tend to emphasize is the willingness to help dictators, as long as they are
anti-Communist.
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