White House Mum on Ford Interview

The White House today refused to either amplify or clarify President Ford’s comments in a Time magazine interview that appeared to warn Israel against expecting American support to guarantee Israel’s existence.

Deputy Presidential Press Secretary John Hushen turned aside a barrage of questions that sought to elicit information on why the President chose to make such comments at a time of high tension in the Middle East and when the President himself and the Secretary of State were stressing “quiet diplomacy” on the Middle East, and also what the President meant by “some real progress” by Israel towards a peace settlement.

Has Israel been notified to make “some real progress” and does Israel know what the President means by “real progress?” Hushen was asked. He replied that he would not go beyond what the President said and that his words speak for themselves. “They are clear enough to me,” Hushen said. He declared there “is no change” in the U.S. position toward Israel.

Hushen said he did not know whether the President or Kissinger had reviewed the interview before it was published or had discussed it before the President gave it. Kissinger had reviewed his interviews with Business Week and Newsweek before they were published. The Ford interview with Time was his second with one media element within three weeks. He was also interviewed by United Press International last month in Vail, Colo. All the interviews contained elements with important bearing on Israel’s future.

INTERVIEW IN LIGHT OF RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

The President’s latest remarks came when Israel-American relations appeared to be at their coolest since the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, backed by the Soviet Union, warned Britain, France and Israel to withdraw from Egypt in 1956.

They took place when it appeared to some that Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev’s cancellation of his Cairo visit was caused less by reasons of health and more for the purpose of intrigue against Israel, with Washington in a key role. The intrigue was seen as involving Washington and Moscow or Washington with Cairo or possibly all three governments to give Kissinger another opportunity to bring about Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai.

Some believe that Brezhnev and Ford agreed at Vladivostok in November to give Kissinger the chance after Brezhnev warned he and his Arab allies would launch an all-out campaign for a Geneva conference. Another version with the same purpose was that Washington and Cairo agreed for President Anwar Sadat to make impossible demands upon Brezhnev to cause a cancellation in return for a Ford-Kissinger pledge to pressure Israel out of the Sinai and possibly the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem this year.

In Arab and Soviet reckoning, 1975 is a vital year since, if an impasse continued into the year, the Arab-Israeli conflict would coincide with the 1976 Presidential campaign and no major candidate would seek to put pressure on Israel.