Man Of The Year: Anwar Sadat: Architect of a New Mideast

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détente. To coax some movement toward peace, Sadat made one of his swift, dramatic decisions. He chose to attack Israel. His goal was to score a limited victory along the Suez Canal. This, he reasoned, would shore up Arab morale, demonstrate that ultimately no military solution was possible in the Arab-Israeli struggle, and get the peace process started. By the end of the 18-day war the Egyptian army had taken a battering from the Israelis, whose forces west of the Suez were within 45 miles of Cairo, and allied Syrian forces to the north had been utterly routed. But in the first week of fighting, Israeli forces had been caught by surprise and staggered; Sadat felt he had made his point.

He followed with a series of quick, pacific gestures. He accepted a cease-fire with Israel and asked for a Geneva conference. Less than three weeks after ordering his armor into the Suez Canal area, he called in a building contractor, his friend Osman Ahmed Osman. Sadat's instructions: prepare a plan for reconstructing the war-ruined cities along the Suez Canal. Sadat told Osman: "I want to rebuild those towns right within range of Israeli guns. I want to show the Israelis that I don't intend to make war against them again."

Sadat in those days was optimistic, and thought that peace could come quickly with the backing of the U.S. When Henry Kissinger began his shuttle diplomacy to negotiate a Sinai disengagement, Sadat wrapped him in the full Arab embrace and called him "my dear friend Henry." But the momentum died. A Geneva conference was delayed. The Syrians postponed a disengagement on the Golan Heights for months while they quibbled over details. Then U.S. policy became paralyzed by Watergate and the collapse of Richard Nixon's authority. When Gerald Ford became President, Sadat tried again for a peace agreement. But a poisonous war atmosphere started spreading once more. Sadat next risked what he called a "diplomatic pre-emptive strike" by announcing unilaterally that he was reopening the Suez Canal, which had been closed since the 1967 war. That same week he met with Ford in Salzburg; in September 1975 came the second Egyptian-Israeli Interim Agreement, which restored the western edge of the Sinai, including the Abu Rudeis oilfields, to Cairo's control.

For a man seemingly addicted to surprise, Sadat has a talent for patience. He waited for the 1976 U.S. presidential election, and then Carter's inauguration. Meanwhile, the savage Lebanese civil war split the Arab world into quarreling camps and reduced all peace talk once more to diplomatic abstraction.

Sadat said, again and again, "In the game of Middle Eastern peace, the U.S. holds 99% of the cards." He switched from the old Arab policy of trying to force the U.S. to abandon Israel in favor of the Arabs. He knew that only as a friend of Israel could the U.S. influence it. "You have a special relationship with Israel," he told a group of American businessmen on a TlME-sponsored tour of the Middle East, "and I want you to keep that relationship." While Sadat encouraged American leaders to believe that a Middle East peace was in their interest, he also forged a tight alliance with Saudi Arabia—not only his bankroller but also a vital source of U.S. energy supplies.

Sadat began 1977 at his lowest political ebb since taking office