The Middle East

“ I don’t want to say Larry King has a lot of experience in the Middle East,” a guy once said, needling me at a roast, “but his first interview was with Moses.”

Not exactly the kind of compliment you look forward to in life. But the guy had a point. I’ve seen a lot. As a kid I dropped pennies into a little blue cardboard box to support Israel. As a young radio broadcaster in Miami I got into arguments when I opened the microphone to the Young Egyptian League. Jews picketed the station. When it came to Israel, they didn’t believe an Egyptian point of view had a right to exist.


I got very emotional when I visited Israel. Standing in front of the Wailing Wall, I felt connected to the past. I scribbled my thoughts on a scrap of paper and placed it into a crack between the great stones that had been set in place long, long ago. I don’t believe in God, but as a Jew, I had a sense of belonging to something that was far bigger than myself. I felt at home.

On that same trip I also felt a closeness to the Palestinians. All my life I’ve tried to walk in someone else’s shoes. The strange thing is, when I visited the legislator Hanan Ashrawi on the West Bank, the shoes looked very familiar. She welcomed me into her home as if she were my Aunt Dora. You’re not staying for dinner? We cooked all day! There’s no question you’re staying!
So many memories . . .
I followed Yitzhak Rabin during his campaign for prime minister—the warrior who turned toward peace. I can remember the night I had to broadcast the news of his assassination. I didn’t wear suspenders. I wore a coat and tie.

I argued with the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about the Holocaust. I’ve been atop an Israeli tank overlooking the Golan Heights.

I once got a message while I was eating dinner at Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills: “Excuse me, the king of Jordan is on the phone . . .”

The Mossad once nearly killed me by accident. It’s turned into a funny story now, but I can just imagine getting to heaven and running into my mother. Larry, what happened?“Mom, the Israelis gunned me down.” Bottom line is, you don’t want to show up on a street in Washington to attend a party for the Israeli prime minister after the Secret Service has assured the Mossad there won’t be any traffic.

I’ve interviewed all the American presidents since Nixon about the Middle East. Jimmy Carter told me how difficult it was to work with Menachem Begin on the Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt. Begin dotted every i and crossed every t. It was always: “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! What exactly does this mean?” Every time Carter got frustrated, he asked himself, Was my family killed in the Holocaust? I’m supposed to tell him he shouldn’t be so methodical? I’m telling him to trust?

I’ve gotten to know all the Israeli leaders since David Ben Gurion. I can still see Golda Meir: “I’m just a simple school-teacher.” Moshe Dayan, the war hero, was the same way: “I’m just a simple farmer.” I interviewed Yasser Arafat when it looked like he might sign the agreement to bring peace. When he wouldn’t, the Israeli prime minister at the time, Ehud Barak, looked despondent. Barak told me that the agreement was a great deal for Arafat— but that Arafat probably feared that he’d be assassinated if he signed it.

I looked on once as Muammar Gaddafi entered a hotel suite for an interview. He got the most bizarre introduction I’ve ever heard: “And now, Brother Leader . . .” I ran into Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon after I announced that I was leaving Larry King Live. “Don’t move to Israel,” he told me. “You’ll get my job.”

It turned out that there were other leaders in the Middle East who had to worry about their positions. Less than two months after my show ended, revolutions toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and unrest spread through the entire region. People ask me where these changes are headed. Everything I’ve seen in the past puts me in a unique position to tell you: I have absolutely no idea. For a long time I’ve felt that no matter what else happens in the Middle East it will always come back to Israel and Palestine. I once knew a guy, a Jewish theatrical producer born in Israel. When he was a kid, his next-door neighbor and best friend was Palestinian. One of the early wars started, and his neighbor’s family feared that the Israeli military would harm them. Messages came from the Arab world. Leave now, be safe. The might of the Arab world will come and take your land back for you. So the neighbors decided to pack up and leave of their own accord. The Israeli kid could remember the car pulling away with the Palestinian kid’s bicycle tied down in an open trunk. He could remember the expression on the face of his friend looking back.

Then they were enemies. The violence is wrong. But when I listen to the arguments between the Israelis and the Palestinians it sounds like they’re both right.
“Look at the archaeology. This land was ordained to us by God.”
“But we live here.”
There are very few debates where you say, “Good point.
. . . Yes, that’s another good point.” This is one of them. It goes on and on, and it always reminds me of a joke the Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer passed on. It’s about a judge who hears a final argument.
“You’re right,” he says.
The other lawyer says, “Wait a minute, judge, you didn’t hear from me.”
“What do you have to say?”
The other lawyer says his piece.
The judge says, “Well, you’re right.”
The first lawyer says, “How can we both be right?”
The judge says, “You’re right!”

Bill Clinton told me the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were the toughest he ever worked on. I have to give credit to George Bush 43. He was the first American president to support a two-state solution. But just as he said it, the Palestinians splintered into two states—turning to Fatah on the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. And as someone told me, the two sides seem to hate each other more than they do the Jews. So how can the Palestinians find common ground with Israel when they can’t find it among themselves? And it’s not as if the Israelis are all on the same page. We used to have a saying: Ten Jews, eleven opinions. Now you’ve got a fractured government and a deep divide between left and right. Trust will never come easy as long as candles are lit for the millions who perished in the Holocaust. The Jews will always feel like nobody’s going to help them—and perhaps they’re right. Supposing that Israel were militarily attacked and endangered. With all the shared values, common interests, and relationships between leaders, would the United States send troops to help? Nobody can know for sure. It sometimes seems to me that Americans have become weary of it all. Ratings for shows about the Middle East have declined over the years. It’s as if viewers are saying, “Enough of the killing already!” But after everything I’d witnessed, it seemed appropriate to look at the Middle East through one last show in the final week. We set it up through the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. The Center is part of a think tank that generates ideas to help bring about peace. It was created by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American who’s one of the brightest people I know. He has a pro-Israel stance—he’s one of the country’s largest contributors—but I’ve always believed him to be balanced. He sees the full picture.

That last show on the Middle East could not have discouraged anyone. Tony Blair, England’s former prime minister, was the first guest. He’d worked through the agreement between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Many thought they’d never see peace there. “One of the things you learn in this business,” Blair said, “is that you can have failure after failure and hit obstacle after obstacle, but you’ve just got to keep going, because in the end, it can be done.” Anyone listening to the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak and the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister, Salam Fayyad, go back and forth during the hour had to come away with the feeling that if the two were left in a room to work out the problems, they could do it. But they were only two men, and the ground in the region was about to shift. Nobody who came on the show that day could have known that a few weeks later, a fruit vendor in Tunisia would be slapped in the face by a policewoman and, after his complaints were dismissed, would set himself on fire in protest. Or that this act would set off millions of tweets and Facebook messages. Or that those messages would ignite democratic protests that are ongoing. When I have any questions about where things are headed in the Middle East, I call Haim Saban. We had a conversation during the recent turbulence. The surprising thing about it was that most of our discussion wasn’t about Israel and Palestine. It wasn’t about Tunisia and Egypt. It wasn’t about Gaddafi’s use of foreign mercenaries to gun down his own people in Libya. It was about Iran. Maybe that shouldn’t have been surprising.

After all, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had said that Israel should be wiped off the map. Of all the shows I’ve done over the last few years, the three interviews I did with Ahmadinejad seemed to prompt the biggest reaction in my day-to-day life. I live in an area that’s home to a lot of Iranians. As a matter of fact, the mayor of Beverly Hills is Iranian—a good guy. Jews, Iranians, and Iranian Jews have not been shy about approaching me at Nate ’n Al’s to vent.

After the first interview with Ahmadinejad, during which I asked about his children, a driver of a car passing me on the street screamed at me for treating the Iranian leader like a human being instead of calling him out as a wannabe Hitler. Be- fore my final interview with Ahmadinejad, in New York, an Iranian woman came over to my table at a restaurant and pleaded with me not to get the American people riled up over Iran. Ahmadinejad, she said, was not the face of her country. The people are good, she said, and they don’t deserve to be attacked because of a delusional man who seized power. Israel’s current president, Shimon Peres, told me that he thought Ahmadinejad and Iran had large ambitions in the region. “I don’t trust a word he says,” Peres said, “but I pay careful attention to what he does.” People have asked me: Do you see Ahmadinejad in the same light as Hitler? That’s impossible for me to answer. It may seem like I go back as far as Moses, but I never interviewed Hitler. The closest I ever got was when I interviewed an American newswoman who did during the time that Hitler was a candidate for president. She thought he was passionate, erratic, and nationalistic. Through an interpreter, he warned her to beware of the rise of Communism. He told her that Communism had been fomented by the Jews. But he didn’t yell or scream.

I also heard a story about a Jewish photographer who was assigned to photograph Hitler when he first came to power. The photographer saw Hitler in the street and focused the camera just as Hitler turned to look straight at him. The look in Hitler’s eyes made the photographer flinch and he was unable to snap the photo. A second later he recovered and he took the picture as Hitler turned away. The photographer never forgot the feeling. I didn’t feel anything like that with Ahmadinejad. I had no fear. He was in America. There was no goose-stepping. He’s a short guy with an open collar. It felt like there’s some whimsy in him. But looks can fool you. He’s a puzzling figure. I could never get him to respond directly to questions dealing with Israel—or anything else for that matter. Some people stereotype him as a hard-line mullah. He’s not a mullah. Ahmadinejad is an academic and he liked to answer my questions with questions. If he’s not going to answer the questions, you wonder, why do the interview?

But the analyst Fareed Zakaria pointed out that Ahmadinejad was probably not speaking to the American public. He might have done the interviews to speak to the Arab world. His points were well prepared. The United States has nuclear weapons. Why can you have them and we can’t? Why can Israel have them and we can’t? Why don’t you get rid of yours? It’s hard to argue with that. And you know how that’s going to play on the Arab street. He said that Iran was a peaceful nation that never attacked anybody. Then he pointed out that many of the weapons used against his country when it fought a war against Iraq under Saddam Hussein had come from America. There’s no denying that. Ronald Reagan told me that Saddam looked like a good balance against the Iranian regime after it took Americans hostage in 1979. Ahmadinejad was clever. He sidestepped questions about the brutal measures used to suppress the Green Revolution by comparing it to a recent protest in the United States that had gotten out of hand and was squelched with fire hoses. He’d take a fact that was unrepresentative of a larger truth and use it to make a convenient point. It was like interviewing a cagey lawyer.

What viewers didn’t understand is that my show’s format was terrible for this sort of interview. We were constantly being interrupted by commercial breaks. So there was no flow. I wanted to get into his mind—not listen to his talking points. But the human aspect becomes very hard to explore when you’re being held up by the translations of both question and answer, and then stopped every four minutes for commercials. It’s very frustrating. I felt I was doing a good job when I got him to talk about his children. But some viewers didn’t care. They didn’t want to see him as a person. Those same people congratulated me after I got into an argument with him in the second interview over the existence of the Holocaust. I didn’t feel good about that. Getting into arguments is just not my style. If I’m saying there was a Holocaust, and he’s saying there was no Holocaust then nobody is really learning anything. Plus, it’s easy to lose yourself in a situation like that. I didn’t want to let my buttons get pushed. The host has to stay in control. The only good thing about a moment like that is that it allows the world to see him as he is. He called Netanyahu a killer of Palestinians. Netanyahu has accused him of killing Israelis by arming Hezbollah to the north of Israel and Hamas to the south. Where might this lead? Would Ahmadinejad use nuclear weapons if he had them? Would he risk an Israeli attack or the world moving in on him?

One reason you can’t put Ahmadinejad in a category with Hitler is that he’s not in charge. He has a voice, but the mullahs are in charge. And though the Green Revolution was suppressed, you have to wonder how much support the mullahs and Ahmadinejad actually have. So he might have simply been playing to his base when he came on my show. His movement came to power in 1979 after the Shah was overthrown. It came to power with chants of “Death to America!” Maybe coming on Larry King Live with an olive branch would have hurt him among his supporters. It ultimately comes down to statements and actions. When he says there was no Holocaust, you can ignore him. When he says there are no gay people in Iran, you can shake your head and turn away. But if he says that Israel should be eliminated, then it’s irresponsible to turn away—and the Israelis have a right to figure out how they’re going to protect themselves. I always want to be optimistic. But sometimes that can be a fault. The problem for the Israelis is that if Iran were to get nuclear weapons there wouldn’t be a second-strike option. If Israel was hit with an atomic bomb, it really wouldn’t matter if they fired one back at Tehran. Israel is too small. It will go, along with all the Palestinians who now live there. The Israeli-Palestinian problem may be almost impossible to solve. Yet it may be easier in comparison to the one now being posed by Iran. I don’t want to leave the Middle East on that note. The Saban Center is all about ideas, and I have a few. They’re out-of-the- box suggestions that come from everyday experiences and could be applied to any long-standing conflict.

They’re quite simple. One came to me while I was sitting in a movie theater. One of the things that everybody knows about the movie business is that people who make movies root against movies made by others. They’re always hoping the movie they’re up against will tank. But here’s the crazy thing. Even though they’re hoping that not one seat will fill for their competitor, they make sure to show their own movie’s trailer before the other one comes on—just in case there’s a packed house. What if the people of the Middle East could see that working together is to everybody’s benefit? I remember a guy from Sweden telling me he feared the prospect of the Middle East coming together. Its power, he said, would be enormous: all the oil, the Jewish mind for business, the Palestinians’ great gift for poetry. What if all the assets in the region could be combined as a single force? If all these people could just join together and help one another, they’d be a world power.

In order to make that happen, millions of people would have to learn how to see others in a completely different way. When I think of this, I think of a snowstorm. A snowstorm and Ted Kennedy. At the age of thirty-seven, Ted Kennedy had an accident that changed his life. He drove off a bridge around midnight into a pond at Chappaquiddick. The female passenger in the car, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. Kennedy said that after he escaped the car, which was overturned on the bottom of the pond, he made several dives to try to rescue Mary Jo, but he didn’t report the accident to the police until the next morning. The whole incident was shrouded in mystery. Kennedy received a suspended sentence for leaving the scene of the fatal accident. But the scandal tarnished his image and followed him like a second shadow. I always had the feeling that it was going to be in the first paragraph of his obituary.

Years later, I interviewed a guy who told me a story about Kennedy that only he knew. He was driving on a parkway at night in a snowstorm when he was forced to pull over with a flat tire. A car pulled in behind him. A guy stepped toward him with a jack. It was Ted Kennedy. Ted helped him put on his spare tire. I’ll bet that’s the first thing that guy thought of when Ted Kennedy passed away. Ted did something that not many people are able to do. He changed the way a lot of people perceived him. He did it through hard work and earning respect in the Senate. I wonder if there is some way in the Middle East for people to put aside the terrible feelings from the past and focus on a positive future. We’re multilayered. We can grow. The Middle East is not so much a region as it is a mass of people. They don’t have to see themselves through a cycle of violence. They can believe in change. If not, why sit down and have negotiations in the first place?

Innovative thinking reminds me of the guy who started FedEx. Fred Smith came up with the idea for the company while he was writing a paper at Yale. His professor must have thought he was crazy. You’re telling me that if I want to send a package from Newark to Chicago it’s going to fly through Memphis? Legend has it Smith got a C. But there was a reason he chose Memphis as a hub. It’s never fogged in. Success comes from thinking brazenly. Why don’t we have people like Fred Smith and Steve Jobs try to unknot problems like the Middle East? Why don’t we take our great thinkers in one area and have them focus on other areas? As the great heart surgeon Michael DeBakey told me: We have guys who design pinpoint bombers. They work with satellites. They figure out ways to bomb one house on a street without touching its neighbor. Don’t you think they can pinpoint disease? Don’t you think they can make a chemotherapy that knocks out just the right cells without damaging others? What if you used the same intelligence that creates weapons to improve medicine?

Don’t you think these people can make an artificial heart? DeBakey said that if the money we spent on the Vietnam War had gone into the development of an artificial heart, we’d be able to buy one today for about twenty dollars. Amazing things could be done if we had bright fresh minds look at the Middle East in a new way. And it’s not just the CEOs and engineers—it’s time to open the possibilities to everybody. I can remember a time just prior to the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. I was doing my all- night Mutual Broadcasting radio show and President Jimmy Carter came on to explain his decision to boycott the games in protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. A cabdriver called in from somewhere like Des Moines. “I’m not one to dis- agree with a president,” he told Carter. “But you could have had it both ways. You could have let the athletes go, only, when they won, they would refuse to step up to the victory stand. We will compete. We will win. But we will not accept a medal on Soviet soil. We want our medals sent home to America. That way, the athletes wouldn’t be punished. And America would be making a stand every time a winning athlete refused to accept a medal.

If you don’t go, you don’t matter anymore. The event starts and you’re history—it’s just two weeks of the world watching the Olympics without you being there.” I asked Carter, “Did anyone in the government ever bring up that idea?”
“No,” he said, “but it’s a very good point.”
I’ll never forget the look on his face. All those advisers, all those high-level discussions—and it never came up. Leaders can enlist the aid of ordinary citizens simply by listening to them. It’s time. Revolutions have been started with Twitter and Facebook. Maybe we need everyone to sit down as ordinary men and women and think of what kind of world we’d like to leave behind for our grandchildren. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Here’s a question that can certainly be passed along in less than 140 characters: Why should any child have to grow up wondering if he or she is going to get bombed?