There was something about Morris that was Jewish royalty.
The morning of December 6, 1987, could have been any typical Sunday on the National Mall in Washington DC, the sun burning through the freezing chill of an early winter day. But as the busloads of people began to arrive by the tens of thousands, it was clear that this day would be different, for it marked the climax of an international struggle that had begun two and a half decades earlier.
Morris Abram looked out over the crowd of nearly a quarter of a million people who had come from every region of the country to rally on behalf of those Elie Wiesel had famously called the “Jews of Silence” when he visited with them in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Abram had been skeptical when the idea of a mass rally was proposed to him by Natan Sharansky that summer. Believing that a large crowd could not be guaranteed, Abram had recommended instead the idea of bringing one hundred senators to the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building to greet Soviet leader Gorbachev with the declaration, “Let our people go!”1
As chairman of the principal organizing group of the Freedom Sunday rally, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), as well as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Abram opened the proceedings by reading a welcoming letter from President Reagan, whose highly anticipated meeting with Soviet leader Gorbachev the following day had been the impetus for organizing the demonstration. Speakers included Vice President Bush, civil rights hero John Lewis, and Wiesel himself, who contrasted the lively rally with that tragic period during the 1930s when the cries of Jews in peril went virtually unheeded.
And then it was time for the day’s real celebrities: the refuseniks on whose behalf many in the crowd had devoted years of activism to get released: Sharansky, Nudel, Begun, Slepak, and Mendelevich. The latter had disrupted a Solidarity Day rally in New York earlier that year, voicing his anger at Abram for what he regarded as his and other American leaders’ naivete in dealing with the Russians. But today, Mendelevich was willing to lock arms not only with his fellow refuseniks but also with Abram himself and join in the singing of Hatikvah, the national anthem of the Jewish state of Israel.2
For Morris Abram, the March for Soviet Jewry and its successful aftermath marked the culmination of a personal odyssey that began in a rural southern town and brought him to the pinnacle of the American Jewish community. The previous year he had been elevated to chair the Conference of Presidents, the principal umbrella group of the largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel.
When Abram left Fitzgerald, Georgia, for the University of Georgia at age sixteen, he had entertained thoughts of becoming a rabbi, despite his lack of the most rudimentary Jewish education. And though he was quickly disabused of the idea, the experience a little over a decade later of spending a summer during his Rhodes Scholarship working with the American prosecuting team on the Nuremberg Trials had marked a major turning point in his life. “I would never be the same after Nuremburg,” he wrote, “for I now understood that the veneer of civilization is thin, and that when it cracks, even in the twentieth century, the Jew is a first victim.” As his involvement in the Jewish community grew, he recalled, “I found the essence of what it meant to me to be Jewish. That essence lies in the collective unconscious of the people from whom I spring; the linkage of ourselves one to another; the ties that we all feel, to a greater or lesser extent, to Zion; and the determination to survive as Jews, free men and women wherever we may live.”3
Abram was delighted with the demonstration, describing it as “the largest gathering in Jewish history since Moses led the Jews out of Egypt” and remarking at a press conference afterward that the rally would enable the president to offer it as evidence in his meeting with Gorbachev of the deep commitment of the American people to human rights.4 Still, he was not optimistic about the long-term outlook for Jewish emigration, regarding the release of the most well-known refuseniks as a ploy to improve the atmosphere of the meeting between the two presidents. On the eve of the meeting, he told a reporter that “we will feel the summit has failed if it does not make significant headway on human rights.”5
Richard Schifter, who was the Reagan administration’s point person on human rights, recalled what happened the next day, as told to him by one of the interpreters in the room where the summit took place:
As soon as the meeting started the niceties had been taken care of, Reagan immediately said, “You know, there was this gathering in Washington on the issue of the refuseniks.” And Gorbachev said, “Yes, I heard about it.” And Reagan continued to talk about the emigration issue. Gorbachev wanted to move on to arms control. For about five minutes, I was told, Reagan stayed with the emigration question, told the Soviet leader how important it was to the American people, how important it was to the relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and how it needed to be resolved. And from then on emigration numbers really started moving.6
By the end of the 1980s, the large majority of Soviet Jews applying to emigrate were being permitted to do so.
When he was tapped to chair the National Conference three years earlier, Abram was no Johnny-come-lately to the cause of Soviet Jewry. After exposing Soviet antisemitism at the United Nations in February 1962, Abram, in his capacity as president of the American Jewish Committee, chaired the first major gathering of Jewish organizations to develop a public campaign on behalf of the Jews of the Soviet Union. Over two days in early April 1964, a packed crowd of over six hundred representatives from twenty-five sponsoring organizations at the famed Willard Hotel in Washington DC heard addresses by Associate Supreme Court Justice Goldberg and Senators Ribicoff and Javits before getting down to the business of establishing the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry (AJCSJ). The conference would serve as a coordinating body of national and local Jewish agencies, whose purpose was to mobilize public opinion into a worldwide force to expose “the deprivations, denials, and oppressions to which the Jews of Russia are subjected” and to save the Jewish community from “spiritual annihilation.”7
The following year Abram shared a platform at one of the first U.S. rallies for Soviet Jewry with a star-studded cast that included Senator Robert Kennedy and labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. He roused the crowd of twenty thousand at New York’s Madison Square Garden by telling them that until the Kremlin stopped discriminating against Soviet Jews or allowed them to emigrate, “we shall protest, we shall march, we shall overcome.”8
Less than a month after the establishment of the AJCSJ, a massive demonstration was held in front of the Soviet UN Mission in New York, heralding the creation of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ). By the early 1970s, The SSSJ had been joined by two national organizations, the grassroots Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry (UCSJ) and the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), both of whose sole mission was to advocate on behalf of Soviet Jews. The National Conference was a successor to the AJCSJ, consisting of a coalition of local community relations councils and national Jewish agencies.
From the beginning of the Soviet Jewry movement, the Israeli government had been a key influence in the development of the American Jewish community’s organized effort. Israel regarded the rescue of Jews behind the Iron Curtain not only as part of its sacred mission as a Jewish state but also a potential demographic prize in maintaining its democratic majority. During the 1950s it had established a secret operation known internally as the “Lishkat HaKeshar,” or Liaison Bureau, that included a presence based in New York.9
During most of the 1970s, Shulamit Bahat, a former Captain in the Israeli Defense Force and later an AJC official, headed the efforts on American and Canadian university campuses on behalf of the Israeli Students Organization, which became deeply involved in the Soviet Jewry movement. (The group’s representative at MIT was a graduate student named Ben Nitay, who now calls himself Benjamin Netanyahu.) Bahat remembered an important demonstration the group organized at the UN on behalf of the cause in 1970: “Morris was there and of course he spoke. I saw him not as Morris, but as Moses. He had that aura about him. One of the most articulate speakers I have ever heard, in the same league as Abba Eban. When people hear a Southern accent, the speaker isn’t usually considered intellectual, but when Morris opened his mouth, you knew you were standing next to a real orator.”10
In New York, the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, under the leadership of Malcolm Hoenlein, a former student struggle activist from Philadelphia, became an important bridge between the young activists and the more established Jewish organizations.11 Hoenlein said it was during that period that he first met Morris Abram. Given Abram’s background on issues related to international human rights advocacy, it was only logical to turn to him for advice. “I know I looked at him with awe during that period,” recalled Hoenlein, who became the longtime executive director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in September 1986, the same month Abram became its chairman. “I would call on him if we had a legal forum, if we had anything where we needed that voice, with the recollections of the Nuremburg trials, the lessons of war crimes charges.”12
Another Jewish leader who looked up to Abram was Jerry Goodman. Goodman, who became a leading spokesman on Soviet Jewry issues while serving as the NCSJ’s executive director from its formative period in the early 1970s through most of the following decade, had met Abram after joining the staff of the American Jewish Committee out of graduate school in 1963, the year Abram was named its youngest ever national president.
When he approached Abram to serve as the NCSJ chairman two decades later, he knew he didn’t have a significant position at that time in the Jewish world. And when he proposed his name to the board, they were quite aware of his track record on these issues and unanimously agreed.13 According to Goodman, “Morris was very articulate and effective. He worked very closely with the Israeli operation that supervised Soviet Jewry. He developed a close tie with the Reagan administration. If we had to give testimony before a congressional committee, it was certainly better to have Morris B. Abram than Jerry Goodman testify. Clearly, his name was much more significant.”14
But it was not only his name that mattered. Mark Talisman, who was the chief Washington lobbyist for the Council of Jewish Federations during that period, noted that “Morris was a much sought-after witness on the Hill. To have the head of a major organization who didn’t need his staff sitting next to him whispering answers was a real find [for committee staff]. They knew he would be fully prepared and could handle questions on his own.”15
The Soviet Jewry movement was notoriously split during those years. In addition to NCSJ, there was the Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry, composed of local organizations deeply committed to the cause; the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC), a coalition of local Jewish federations dealing with issues across the board, including Soviet Jewry; and the pioneers of the movement, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, some of whose members would turn to militant tactics to make their case.
Some of the fractures were over tactics, with the Union of Councils taking the position that the freeing of Soviet Jews could be achieved only by the application of relentless pressure from grassroots activists. By contrast, the more establishment National Conference led by Abram preferred diplomatic efforts to enlist the support of the Reagan administration and the State Department.16
Mark Levin, who later ascended to the leadership of both the NCSJ and, after the demise of the Soviet Union, its successor organization, saw Abram as a consensus builder who could effectively bring together the disparate elements that comprised the National Conference. He strongly believes the five years of Abram’s chairmanship of the NCSJ were the most important for both the movement and the organization. “I’ve always believed that had Morris not been chairman during those years, it’s not certain what type of organization we would have become, or even whether there would have been an organization at all.” According to Levin, “because of the ways he could identify and articulate the mission of the organization, our credibility was so much greater when he became the chairman. Through those five years we became the voice in the U.S. and beyond on issues related to Soviet Jewry.”17
Abram’s chairmanship of the National Conference coincided with his selection to serve as vice-chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission by President Reagan, and he was able to parlay his increasingly friendly relations with the Republican administration in Washington with his work on Soviet Jewry and eventually the whole range of issues he faced as chairman of the Conference of Presidents. According to Levin, “The fact that Morris could pick up the phone and speak to the secretary of state, could arrange to meet the president, and almost anyone else in the federal government provided us more avenues to pursue our mission.”
Levin recalls the first time Abram met as NCSJ chairman with Secretary of State George Shultz, who listened to him outline the challenges and what was needed from the U.S. government. “You could see there was an immediate connection.” For his part, Shultz talked about leverage, what the U.S. government could leverage to try to get the Soviets to move.18 In an interview with the former secretary of state, Shultz recounted how the Soviet Jewry issue was very much on the minds of the Jewish groups he met with both in the Unired States and abroad during his period as secretary of state. He struck up a personal friendship with Abram, with whom he exchanged ideas and to whom he would report following each trip to Moscow.19
Abram credited Shultz with placing the Soviet Jewry issue high on the list of administration priorities in his numerous meetings with Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, putting it even ahead of arms control. For his part, Shultz considered Abram his “rabbi,” adding, “You might say he has taken me by the hand and led me around. . . . He is very gentle, and sort of suggests you do this and that.”20
The agenda for the series of summits held between Reagan and Gorbachev in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow encompassed the broad areas of détente, disarmament, and human rights. Included among the latter were issues related to emigration and the granting of cultural and religious rights for Soviet Jews.
Prior to the first meeting, which took place in 1985, the White House held a briefing for individuals and groups with interests in the Soviet Union. During a brief presentation, Abram raised the question of trust. As Abram saw it, many Americans wondered how they could trust a Soviet signature on a document related to nuclear disarmament when it had disregarded the provisions of the Helsinki accords it had signed guaranteeing emigration rights to its citizens. The president responded that he would convey that message to his summit partner. But the administration did not stop there. As Fred Lazin notes, the issue of emigration became a consistent agenda item not only at subsequent summit meetings but also in exchanges between U.S. officials and their Soviet counterparts.21
Herbert Teitelbaum, Abram’s son-in-law who had assisted him during the Ford Hall crisis at Brandeis, became involved in the Soviet Jewry movement at the time he was involved in litigation against the Soviet travel agency Intourist. Now a New York–based civil rights lawyer, he believes that Abram’s most lasting contribution to the movement was the credibility he brought to his work with the administration in Washington. This included his role in getting President Reagan to deliver a list of refuseniks to Soviet Chairman Gorbachev during their 1986 summit in Reykjavik. This was significant, since considerable progress was made behind the scenes of that meeting on how the two countries would deal with human rights issues.22
As Jerry Goodman put it, “We knew that in the end, to protect the status of Soviet Jews, the U.S. government had to be involved. And [Abram] was quite effective in helping us do that. Without the U.S. government, we could never have done it. We could stand there and protest all we liked, but it had to have some action quotient. And that quotient came in part with Morris.”23
Abram said, in the early part of 1987, “I want to say this as strongly as I can, Soviet Jewry is not going to be freed by some internal Massada uprising among Soviet Jews to break their chains. It is not going to be freed by a sudden change of heart and change of direction of the Soviet state, a kind of disruption or coup.” Only by the pressure of a great power, namely, the United States, he argued, would the desired result be achieved.24
Prior to the Reykjavik Summit in October 1986, Abram went to see President Reagan along with the refusenik Yuri Orlov. After the meeting, Reagan’s national security advisor, John Poindexter, took him aside and asked for the names of the eleven thousand refuseniks he told the president he had. At a subsequent meeting Secretary of State Shultz told a large group of Jewish leaders that the administration was prepared to link its policies to this issue. Shultz asked Abram to prepare a graph substantiating his organization’s assertion that there were three hundred and seventy thousand Jews who had not had their exit applications processed.25
In March 1987, ignoring his own assertion just months earlier that the liberation of Soviet Jewry depended upon the actions of the U.S. government alone, Abram was persuaded by Edgar Bronfman, the billionaire tycoon who headed the World Jewish Congress, to fly with him to Moscow to negotiate directly with the Soviets, an effort many in the movement thought ill-advised. Bronfman, whose business interests in Russia gave him access to the Kremlin, believed the time was right for direct negotiations at a time when emigration numbers were beginning to rise under the Gorbachev regime. Bronfman needed the legitimacy Abram’s presence would give his mission.26
When they returned from three days of talks with Soviet officials, Abram told a New York Times reporter that authorities would soon permit a major increase in Jewish emigration in the form of direct flights through Romania, along with an improvement in religious education and practice. While he and Bronfman expressed caution, saying that they would await actual performance before declaring the glasnost policy real and inclusive of Jews, Abram said he had told Soviet officials that if Jewish emigration increased substantially, he and his colleagues would advocate a repeal of the two congressional amendments linking trade benefits to emigration.27 Abram clarified his remarks about the amendments the next day, saying he had only suggested considering waivers for the time being based on a very substantial and sustained level of emigration.28
In the end, the mission accomplished very little beyond igniting controversy inside the movement, with both refuseniks and grassroots activists who had not been consulted in advance joining in the criticism, regarding the effort as both arrogant and naïve.29 Moreover, the deals Abram and Bronfman were discussing on direct flights to Israel would violate the principle that émigrés should have freedom of choice on where to settle after gaining permission to leave, an issue that had been the source of tension between the Israeli government and U.S. grassroots advocates. By the summer, Abram came to regret the trip, doubting that Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost would provide any significant benefit to Soviet Jews.
In October 1987 President Reagan announced that the Soviet leader would be arriving in Washington for talks with him in early December. According to David Harris, who organized the December rally, “we had only 36 or 37 days to plan the entire march because we had only that much notice that President Gorbachev would be coming to Washington and meeting with President Reagan on December 7. Where Morris was particularly helpful was his amazing network of relationships at the highest levels. Where we had to reach someone as a speaker or a resource and had to go through a battery of secretaries, we could turn to Morris Abram and he could go right to the top pretty quickly.”30
Abram’s close relationship with the Reagan administration had not developed overnight. On the day after seeing the president at a gathering of Jewish leaders at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1984, Abram had written to him praising his denunciation of the UN’s “Zionism is Racism” resolution to the group. He encouraged the president to use his bully pulpit to make a forceful public statement on this matter “which would meet with resounding public approval and put to shame those who will not respond to your moral affirmation.” He added that as far as he knew, no Democratic presidential candidate in this election year had addressed the issue.31
When a controversy erupted the following year over the president’s plan to make a ceremonial visit to a military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, Abram went to the opinion pages of the New York Times to defend the administration against charges that it was indifferent to the feelings of the Jewish community. While the president should have asked himself whether it was right to pay respects at the venue of the graves of nearly two thousand Nazi soldiers, including forty-nine SS troops, Abram wrote, he asked fellow Jews to consider the administration’s overall record, including military cooperation with Israel that placed it in the front ranks of America’s allies, its use of the U.S. Air Force to rescue Ethiopian Jews, and its demands at every high-level summit that Soviet Jews be allowed to emigrate. “Bitburg,” he contended, “was the mistake of a friend, not the sin of an enemy.”32
Abram’s increasingly close relationship with the Reagan administration could not have been far from the minds of those advocating his chairmanship of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations when a vacancy occurred in 1986. The Conference, composed of a cross-section of American-Jewish organizations, seeks to build consensus on issues of concern to the Jewish community that facilitates communications between the community and U.S. ambassadors. According to Abraham Foxman, the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, “We were looking for leadership. I mean the community was starving.”33 The problem for those promoting Abram for chairmanship of the conference was that the organization he chaired was not a member. Thus, the only way that Abram could qualify to become its chairman was to admit the organization he chaired into it as a full member. “And we did,” Foxman says, “and it was done quickly.”
According to Foxman, “I know it was important for us because he provided a dimension of leadership and respect. He had to work his way in. I believe he was the first one the community recruited. He was a towering figure, respected, articulate, and he took us beyond Jewish issues. I think that made a big difference. He gave respect to the community being known so well outside it.”34 According to Billy Keyserling, who served as the Washington director of NCSJ during Abram’s chairmanship before building a successful career in South Carolina politics, “I didn’t know many people who didn’t respect him from a substance point of view. . . . The Jewish community thought that with Morris Abram doing their bidding in Washington they were in pretty good shape.”35
The beginning of Abram’s chairmanship of the Conference of Presidents in the fall of 1986 coincided with the beginning of the tenure of Malcolm Hoenlein as its executive vice-chairman. Hoenlein had met Abram during his graduate school days and later, as noted, during the early days of the Soviet Jewry movement. Over the next three years, working closely on issues of major concern to the American Jewish community, they developed a particularly close relationship. As Hoenlein said, “I really loved him very much. I learned a lot from him. He had tremendous humility despite the status he enjoyed. There wasn’t an issue that he didn’t go into a meeting and you knew you were going to come out all right. Even if we didn’t win our points, everyone gave him a fair hearing and I learned a lot about how you present and how you do certain things.”
According to Hoenlein, “He would never brook any criticism of me without standing up for me. He would tell U.S. presidents, this is the guy you must deal with. We went together to see presidents and others. And having Morris there you knew you had your back stop for sure.” Hoenlein noted that he was blessed with highly talented chairmen during his lengthy tenure. “And I say that all of them would agree that there was something about Morris that was Jewish royalty.”36
Hoenlein recalled that his early tenure as executive director marked the formative years of the conference. His plan was, working closely with Abram, to refocus it to make it more activist in scope. What Abram could give the conference was what it most needed: credibility and stature.
As Hoenlein recalled, “He wasn’t a billionaire. He didn’t come in with a flashy presence. He wasn’t a guy who showed off who he was. His quiet and powerful dignity, the respect that he earned from across the spectrum, I think he enabled us to start off this new phase of the conference.”37 Hoenlein continued, “His role was uniquely important, and we had a lot of support. Other past chairmen of the conference and current presidents [of constituent organizations] really rallied and helped, but all Morris had to do was ask. He could always make the case.” Despite broad ideological differences among member organizations, “you could see that Morris was always able to sway them.”38 Mark Talisman called Abram “one of the most natural mediators I have ever known.” His southern manner, lawyerly ability, and economical use of language enabled him to consistently win over the other side.39
According to Hoenlein, Abram’s skill as an advocate and his long involvement in civil rights issues gave him credibility in many different communities with which the conference dealt. Hoenlein remembered occasional black-Jewish tensions that were addressed quietly. “Morris’s record was clear. The majority of our chairmen have been lawyers. It does help in terms of advocacy, but I think Morris with that quiet southern drawl, he wasn’t an aggressive advocate, he was much more laid back. But that didn’t make him less effective and if he got angry, you saw a fire there, a spitfire that was very strong.”40
Talisman, a veteran of Capitol Hill, noted how effectively he operated in that environment. “When I’d take him with a group of Jewish leaders to the Rayburn [House Office] Building,” he recalled, “he could win over the congressman in a matter of minutes. He would get right to the point. He was the kind of guy who in his own quiet way would end up dominating the conversation.” Talisman said that Abram would be the one person who could elicit a conversation about the next steps that needed to be taken. “In a room full of people, many of whom had something to say, he was the one the member or staffer would turn to at the end and ask for his card. That’s when you knew it was a done deal.”41
Not all who worked with Abram during that period were awed by his talents or reluctant to criticize his missteps. Alan Dershowitz recalls his clash with Abram over the latter’s defense of the American Bar Association (ABA) in its efforts to develop a relationship with its Soviet counterpart. “I was very critical of the American Bar Association for having very friendly dealings with the Soviet Union at a time when the Soviet Union was discriminating against Jews. Morris attacked me for attacking the American Bar Association because he was an American Bar Association type.” Dershowitz says that Abram was angered when the Harvard professor walked out of an ABA meeting over the issue of Soviet Jewry, adding, “I took a very different approach.”42
In May 1985 the ABA entered into a cooperative agreement with the Association of Soviet Lawyers (ASL). The debate over the pact intensified the following June when the agreement was strengthened to include exchanges, joint seminars, and statements that both organizations respected the rule of law.43 Dershowitz was alerted to the ABA’s growing outreach to the Association of Soviet lawyers by his refusenik client Natan Sharansky, who had been released from the Soviet Union earlier that year. To Sharansky, the ASL was no more than “a front for the Soviet system of repression” and such an effort to legitimize this official body would create problems for the few independent lawyers with the courage to operate in that environment.44
Shortly after the ABA’s policy making body rejected a resolution to terminate the agreement in August 1986, Abram, writing as chairman of NCSJ and the Conference of Presidents, defended its action in an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times. While acknowledging the ASL’s lack of independence and its spreading of “vicious libels” against human rights advocates, including Jews, Abram thought it was important to develop ties to the only Soviet lawyers group “to whom American lawyers could protest the denial of adequate legal procedures for dissidents, refuseniks, and human rights advocates in the Soviet Union and press the Soviet Union on that denial.”45
Abram believed the relationship offered the potential to educate prominent Americans about Soviet realities and to be effective monitors of Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords. But early the following year, in an exchange with Dershowitz over the issue organized by Moment magazine, he acknowledged the failure of the exchanges with Soviets—not just with the ASL, but more broadly in the numerous ones that had been agreed to at the summit in Geneva. He blamed these failures on the unwillingness of American participants to challenge their interlocutors.46
In his support for the ABA agreement with the Soviet lawyers, Abram was by no means alone. While the American Jewish community was split, the government of Israel was supportive of engaging with the ASL. The head of the Israel Bar Association met with his ASL counterpart on four separate occasions, deeming them “the only chance we have to influence the Soviets.”47
Abram’s ties to Israel had begun to develop during his presidency of the American Jewish Committee in the mid- to late-1960s, highlighted by the rally he addressed in Lafayette Park during the Six-Day War. Those ties only strengthened over time. In 1978 Abram debated the Lebanese-born academic Fouad Ajami on the PBS program “The Advocates” on the question of self-determination for the Palestinians in the context of a Middle East peace settlement. To Abram, the term self-determination, one with a “superficial moralistic appeal,” in this case meant nothing less than “a Soviet armed, PLO radical state in the heart of the Middle East.” In addition to being unjust, Abram opposed the granting of self-determination to the Palestinians on the grounds that it would be dangerous not only to Israel but also to America and to the peace of the world itself “for which we all pray.”48
To former Undersecretary of State George Ball, an expert witness supporting self-determination who advocated a UN force to be deployed during an interim period while full self-determination was being implemented, Abram reminded the audience of the disastrous failures of such forces in the region in the past. And to Ball’s assertion that terrorism is simply a response to military occupation, Abram pointed out that PLO-sponsored terrorism had taken place within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. As Robert W. Tucker of Johns Hopkins remarked under questioning from Abram, terrorism would not stop under a Palestinian state, since states can be their own directors of terrorist acts.49
In 1982 the PLO was set to collect on a $30,000 bequest from an eccentric American journalist named Fred Sparks who had died the previous year. Representing the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and the World Jewish Congress, Abram sought to block the bequest, claiming that compensating a terrorist organization was a violation of public policy. The New York Civil Liberties Organization filed an amicus brief in which it argued that a denial would chill the rights of political organizations, to which Abram replied, “It is farcical to describe this band of gangsters as a ‘political organization.’” A settlement was reached two years later when the parties signed off on an agreement to donate the money to the International Red Cross to improve the living conditions of the Palestinian people. The three organizations expressed their gratitude that the funds would be used for humanitarian purposes rather than to support terrorist activities.50
Wearing his Conference of Presidents and Soviet Jewry hats during the 1980s, Abram’s direct contacts with Israel’s leadership increased, and both Malcolm Hoenlein and the NCSJ’s Jerry Goodman were impressed with his ability to deal with Israel’s leaders on an equal footing. According to Hoenlein, “We met with prime ministers and Morris was the only guy I knew who could communicate criticism and everyone would listen and take it seriously, not be resentful. And he loved Israel.”51 To Goodman, Abram’s strength was in his extraordinary self-confidence. “He never felt inferior to a Shimon Peres or a Yitzhak Rabin. He dealt with them as equals.”52
Abram’s ability to find the right balance between unequivocal public support for Israel and tough talk to its leadership when called for was tested following the sentencing of American Jonathan Pollard for spying on behalf of the Jewish state in March 1987. Fearing a U.S. backlash against Israel in the aftermath of the incident, American Jewish organizations were harsh in their condemnation of Pollard, with many, including Abram, even supporting his unprecedented life sentence for passing military secrets to an ally.
Jewish leadership was particularly alarmed when the Israeli government promoted two individuals who had been implicated in the incident. A Conference of Presidents delegation led by Abram, Hoenlein, and AIPAC president Robert Asher traveled to Israel in March 1987 to meet with the country’s leaders in a trip that had been planned prior to the Pollard episode. In a press conference held in Jerusalem, Abram remarked that Israel had made a serious error in promoting one of Pollard’s handlers to a top military position and the other to head a state-run company. Abram called these appointments “a grievous matter” and “a very deep wound that needs to be addressed.”53
Still, Abram voiced strong confidence in Israel’s ability to investigate the matter effectively. He predicted that in the end the episode would amount to no more than a “bump on the road” in the history of strong relations between the United States. and Israel.54 To Abram, the highlight of the mission was witnessing the flyby of the Lavi, the highly sophisticated Israel-produced, U.S.-funded fighter jet. The delegation was then flown to an airbase in the northern part of the country and witnessed the arrival of six advanced American F-16s, the first batch of seventy-five such planes the United States sent to Israel as part of the strategic cooperation between the two countries.
For Abram, this was “an unforgettable example of friendship between America and Israel and between the air forces of the two countries. When our American airmen flew over the base in these jets, landed one by one and turned over the planes to their Israeli counterparts,” he reported, “these were moments that will long remain with me, and I believe with all those who witnessed this spectacular and living example of U.S.-Israel cooperation.”55
Chairmen of the Conference of Presidents traditionally serve a two-year term. In Abram’s case, the term was extended for an additional half year as the date for selecting his successor was moved forward. Although this was done for technical reasons, “everyone,” according to Malcolm Hoenlein, “wanted to have him as long as possible.”56
To one of his former law partners at Paul, Weiss, Abram was “one of my true heroes.” Why? Was it his courtroom abilities, his dedication to clients, his oratorical skills? Max Gitter said, “There’s a phrase in Yiddish; it’s actually in English as well. It’s really a term of art; the term is ‘a good Jew.’ And a good Jew doesn’t mean an observant Jew. It’s a person who is an advocate for Jews. And a good person. And a good person for Jews and for everybody else. If I had to write a book about Morris Abram I would describe him simply as a good Jew.”57
By the time his term at the Conference of Presidents had expired, a new administration had taken over in Washington, and it wasn’t long before President George H. W. Bush was calling on Abram to resume his public service. It had been over two decades since he had been appointed by President Johnson to represent the United States at the United Nation’s Human Rights Commission. The new assignment, as the Permanent U.S. Representative to the European Office of the UN, would require him to move to Geneva, Switzerland. It was there that Morris Abram entered the final chapter of his life.