Saunders, Harold H. (Harold Henry), 1930-2016

Harold H. Saunders, a diplomat who helped draft the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978 and helped negotiate the release of American hostages from the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1981, died on Sunday in McLean, Va. He was 85.

The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Carol.

Mr. Saunders served under six presidents, including Richard M. Nixon, for whom he shuttled among Middle East capitals with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger in the 1970s.

Mr. Saunders was “an indispensable member of the Middle East team” who was “especially important in emphasizing the psychological and moral dimensions of problems,” Dr. Kissinger said on Wednesday.

“Hal was imperturbable,” Gary G. Sick, a former colleague, wrote in “All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter With Iran,” published in 1985.

“He had looked disaster in the face in one negotiation after another over more than two decades and had concluded that despair was an emotion the negotiator could ill afford,” Mr. Sick wrote. “As he told his staff on many occasions, ‘Our job is to take a 10 percent chance of success, try to turn it into a 20 percent chance, and hope for a break.’ ”

Mr. Saunders was credited as one of the architects of the Camp David accords, which President Jimmy Carter had midwived and which led to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Mr. Saunders had reportedly hoped to extract more concessions from Israel.

He was also the leading adviser to Deputy Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher, the Carter administration’s chief negotiator during the Iran hostage crisis, in which revolutionaries seized the embassy and held 52 people hostage for 444 days to try to force the United States to return the deposed shah from New York, where he was being treated for cancer.

Harold Henry Saunders was born on Dec. 27, 1930, in Philadelphia to Harold M. Saunders, an architect, and the former Marian Weihenmayer, a jewelry designer.

He graduated from Princeton University in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in English and received a doctorate in American studies from Yale University. After serving in the Air Force as a lieutenant and as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, he joined the National Security Council staff in 1961.

Mr. Saunders was named a deputy assistant secretary of state in 1974, then director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and served as assistant secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs from 1978 to 1981.

After leaving government, he wrote several books about diplomacy, was associated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, and was director of international affairs at the Kettering Foundation, a research group dedicated to furthering democracy.

His first wife, the former Barbara McGarrigle, died in 1973. In addition to his wife, the former Carol Jones Cruse, he is survived by a son, Mark; a daughter, Catherine; a stepdaughter, Caryn Hoadley; three grandchildren; and two step-grandsons.

In 1980, after the United States voted to support a United Nations resolution condemning the establishment of Israeli settlements on the West Bank of the Jordan River, Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York branded Mr. Saunders and four other American diplomats members of an Arabist “gang of five” who, Mr. Koch said, were “in a position to do great damage to Israel.”

Mr. Carter immediately repudiated the vote. (He said it had resulted from a miscommunication.)

Mr. Saunders later said that he had come to realize how difficult it would be for Israel to withdraw from the occupied West Bank. But while deploring violence, he often argued, as he did in an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, that the Palestine Liberation Organization belonged at the negotiating table and that “the U.S. remains committed to a Jewish state — but to one sharing Palestine with its Arab neighbors, not dominating all of it.”

Mr. Saunders was credited by a number of colleagues with adopting (many say originating) the phrase “peace process” for Mr. Kissinger’s efforts in the Middle East. He defined the term for William Safire, the On Language columnist for The New York Times Magazine, as encompassing “a full range of political, psychological, economic, diplomatic and military actions woven together into a comprehensive effort to establish peace between Israel and its neighbors.”

He later came to the conclusion, though, that not every comprehensive solution could be imposed by government. Asked by The Times as the millennium approached to name the new era, he suggested “The Citizens’ Century.”

“An era has begun in which governments face more and more problems they cannot deal with,” he explained. “Citizens outside government increasingly have an opportunity to fill that void.”

Harold Henry Saunders (December 27, 1930 – March 6, 2016) served as the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research between 1975 and 1978 and United States Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs between 1978 and 1981.[1] Saunders was a key participant in the Camp David Accords, helped negotiate the Iran Hostage Crisis, and developed the sustained dialogue model for resolving conflicts[2] He later launched the Sustained Dialogue Institute, which uses the sustained dialogue model to address racial and other issues in the United States and abroad.[3]

Additionally, Saunders was director of international affairs at the Kettering Foundation[4] and co-chaired the Dartmouth Conference Task Force.[5] He authored several works, including The Other Walls: The Arab-Israeli Peace Process in a Global Perspective (1985), A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflict (1999), Politics Is about Relationship: A Blueprint for the Citizens’ Century (2005), and Sustained Dialogue in Conflicts: Transformation and Change (2011).[6]
Background
Education and Service
Saunders graduated from Princeton University in 1952 with an A.B. and Yale University in 1955 with a Ph.D, prior to joining the United States Air Force to fulfill the mandatory service requirement, which led to a liaison role with the Central Intelligence Agency.[7] Saunders joined the National Security Council staff in 1961, serving through the Johnson administration as the NSC's Mideast expert during June 1967 Six-Day War.[7] He died of prostate cancer in 2016.[8]

Diplomatic career
Kissinger Shuttles
Saunders joined the Kissinger shuttles in October 1973 as an integral part of the small team of American diplomats led by Kissinger, with whom Saunders worked for the next eight years.[9] During this period from 1973 to 1975, the Kissinger team helped negotiate a number of key disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel. In 1974, Saunders was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East and North Africa.[7]

In a 2010 article for Foreign Policy magazine, long-term Middle East analyst and negotiator Aaron David Miller credited the "brilliant" Saunders with coining the term "peace process," in connection with negotiations over conflict in the Middle East.[10]

Camp David
As assistant secretary of state for the Near East and South Asia under President Carter, Saunders played a critical behind-the-scenes role during the 1978 negotiations at Camp David, culminating in the two framework agreements comprising the Camp David Accords, leading directly to the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in the following year, which Saunders helped draft.[7]

Iran Hostage Crisis
In 1979, following the revolution in Iran, Saunders coordinated efforts to secure the release of the U.S. embassy staff held during the Iran hostage crisis.[7]

Sustained Dialogue
Dartmouth Conference
In October 2010, the Dartmouth Conference celebrated its 50th anniversary of a dialogue between Russian and American citizens,[11] which began as a critically needed back-channel at the behest of President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Khrushchev in 1960. Although program takes its name from Dartmouth College, where the first meeting was held, it has no affiliation with the American educational institution. James Voorhees's 2002 book published by the United States Institute of Peace, Dialogue Sustained, chronicles the first four decades of the dialogue.[12] For the Dartmouth Conference's 50th anniversary, the Kettering Foundation published an additional volume to commemorate and chronicle all five decades.[13]

Inter-Tajik Dialogue
The Inter-Tajik Dialogue developed out of Saunders's work with the Dartmouth Conference Regional Conflicts Task Force as a series of unofficial, Track II dialogues between warring factions in the Tajik civil war.[14] The dialogues took place in Moscow, beginning in 1993 and lasting until 2003, during which 35 meetings took place.[14]

Sustained Dialogue Institute
The Sustained Dialogue Institute is an independent tax-exempt 501 (c)(3) organization formed in collaboration with the Kettering Foundation. Saunders served as president of the institute from its founding in 2002 until June 2013 and remained Board Chair until his passing in 2016.[15] The Institute helps citizens around the world to transform their conflictual or destructive relationships and to design and implement sustainable change processes.

Domestic and Global Influence
In 1991, Saunders facilitated Israeli and Palestinian citizen-leaders who forged and signed the historic document, "Framework for a Public Peace Process" .[16] This inspired the 1992 birth of the Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue in California, a model of Saunders' citizen-to-citizen Sustained Dialogue with domestic and global impact. The Sustained Dialogue process itself is now used on college campuses throughout the world to facilitate better community relations, under the work of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network. His legacy endures for negotiators and citizens equally: "There are some things only governments can do, such as negotiating binding agreements. But there are some things that only citizens outside government can do, such as changing human relationships."[17] Saunders' legacy was reflected in the 2017 Commencement Address of Notre Dame de Namur University,[18][circular reference]"STORIES OF CHANGE: Creating a Culture of Connection in The Citizens’ Century."[19]