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Douglas
Dillon Award In 1995, the Academy began to award an annual prize for a book of distinction on the practice of American diplomacy. The Academy hopes that this prize will stimulate further academic research on the way American diplomacy is exercised and will also deepen public understanding of the critical need for excellence in our diplomacy.
In
2002, this prize was presented to John Boykin for his book
Cursed is the Peacemaker: The American Diplomat vs. the Israeli
General, Beirut, 1982, published by Applegate Press and
ADST-DACOR as part of their Diplomats
in Diplomacy series. The award recipient
is selected by a committee of Academy members, headed by Leonard
Marks, former Director of USIA. His remarks
are reprinted below.
Joseph J. Sisco: We now present the Douglas Dillon Award for a book of distinction on US Diplomacy. A record of 35 books were received for review by a committee under the able chair of Leonard Marks, former Director of USIA. Leonard Marks: This year's book award, as in the past, is presented to recognize distinguished writing in the field of American diplomacy. We particularly highlight books on diplomatic practice rather than on policies. The program is in its eighth year. Books were entered from interested writers, scholars, practitioners in foreign policy roles. The selection committee has had the arduous, yet rewarding task of reading and reviewing 35 books published this year. The high quality of the books submitted, heavily researched and in many instances based on fresh archival information, are for the practitioner, the general reader, and the history buff. The Douglas Dillon Award for a Book of Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy will go to the author John Boykin, for a book published by the Applegate Press of California, titled Cursed is the Peacemaker: The American Diplomat vs. the Israeli General; Beirut, 1982. The book chronicles the life of the late Philip Habib, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, with a particular focus on his role as Special Negotiator in the Middle East during the crisis confronting the US following the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. Habib was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Reagan in September of 1982. The book is the result of seven years of writing and research from over 150 hours of interviews and 10,000 pages of declassified documents. I would like to ask Mr. Boykin now to come up to the podium and receive the award. John Boykin: In all the years I've watched the Oscars, I never thought I'd get the chance to say this, but here goes: I'd like to thank the Academy… [laughter] particularly Douglas Dillon and Bruce Laingen. I'm honored to have my wife, Laura, my parents, John and Frances Boykin, and my friend Bill Riley with me today. How many of you knew Philip Habib? Fascinating character, wasn't he? I don't have to tell you why I wanted to write a book about him. Those of you who knew him may know that he did not originally set out to be a diplomat. He set out to be a forester. He was a lousy forester, because he hated physical labor. The one exception was that he loved fighting forest fires. He once had to put out a lightning fire all by himself-at 10,000 feet elevation, equipped with nothing but an ax and a shovel. Good training for a diplomat. A few years later, during his first assignment in the Foreign Service, he and his wife and another couple were having a picnic on the Gatineau River in Canada. The woman waded out into the water, then suddenly yelped and sank under the waves. Phil and the woman's husband dove in over and over and over, trying desperately to find her, but couldn't. Eventually, the police came, dragged the bottom, and pulled her up. At that point Phil started working and working and working on her, giving her artificial respiration-until the paramedics finally arrived and told him it was no use. Now, a lot of people have tried and failed to save a drowning victim. What makes this story telling is that, by the time Phil started giving her artificial respiration, she had been under water for almost an hour and a half. There was zero chance he could revive her. But he would not give up! That's the kind of man, the kind of diplomat, that he was. He eventually became known as the master of lost causes: When there was no hope and you didn't know what to do, you sent Phil Habib, the forest fire fighter who would not give up. Things looked particularly hopeless in the summer of 1982. He was then President Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East. As you may recall, Israel's defense minister Ariel Sharon decided the time had come to destroy the PLO once and for all. So Sharon invaded Lebanon and laid siege to the PLO's stronghold, West Beirut. The siege failed. It quickly turned into an aimless, flailing fiasco. While Sharon bombed and shelled and bombed and shelled the city to kill the PLO fighters, they were generally safe in underground bomb shelters. The people doing most of the suffering and dying were the civilians of Beirut. Habib screamed about that to Sharon time and again, but to no effect. The relation between Habib and Sharon was fascinating. Representing the United States and Israel, Phil Habib and Ariel Sharon were of course allies. But they were also rivals in a race to determine how this siege was going to end. The two men represented the only two plausible outcomes: a bloodbath or a bargain. Phil Habib's singular purpose was to stop him. But Sharon was every bit as tenacious as Habib was. The Israelis and the PLO had gotten themselves into this unholy mess, and neither was willing to risk losing face to get themselves out of it. That was Phil Habib's job. To end the siege diplomatically, he would have to safely evacuate the PLO out of Beirut. But Sharon had not gone to Beirut to chase the PLO away: He had gone there to kill them. The last thing he wanted was for some American diplomat to interfere and rob him of his military victory. So he did everything he could think of to prevent a diplomatic settlement. Unable to bomb the PLO out, unable to starve them out, Sharon threatened to send his soldiers in on the ground to dig them out-in unspeakably bloody hand-to-hand combat. The PLO, in turn, threatened to go down in a blaze of glorious martyrdom-taking as many Israelis as possible with them. So this is the prospect Philip Habib faced: If the Israelis did go in on the ground and the PLO fought to the death defending its home turf, countless Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese civilians (caught in the crossfire) would die. The one thing most people remember about the Israeli siege of Beirut is the subsequent massacre of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. As horrible as that massacre was, it was just a microcosm of the bloodbath that would have happened if Philip Habib had failed. Well, against all odds, he succeeded. "Cursed Is the Peacemaker" is the behind-closed-doors tale of how he did it. The book will never make me rich and famous. It will keep me securely poor and obscure, thank you. But in the nine years that this project took, I learned something from Phil Habib: You do what you do because it needs to be done, and because it ought to be done. Phil Habib was the kind of man that books ought to be written about. None ever was though, because his story was too hard to piece together. I'm proud to be the writer who finally took the trouble to do it. The Foreign Service was Phil Habib's religion. This building was his magnetic north. His greatest pride was that he was allowed to do the same kind of work that you as diplomats have all done. Learning about this one episode in high-stakes crisis diplomacy-as a case in point-has given me a profound admiration for the work that diplomats do. So I can't imagine a higher honor than having the likes of you all sit still for five minutes and listen to me. I thank you for that, and I thank you for this award. |
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AMERICAN ACADEMY
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